A small tear formed in Everard Digby's right eye, and rolled gently down his cheek. The wind whittled away at it, making it tremble as it hung on his flesh.
'Must I join, Robin? Must I do this?'
'If you're a Christian, you must. If you're a coward, do nothing, except remain secret. Let the men risk all for justice and for their faith, while the children stay at home.'
If the barbs hit home there was no reaction on Digby's face, as round, as innocent and as woebegone as a boy who has been told that Christmas will not happen after all. It was a face that would have melted the heart of a devil, but not the devil sent to accompany Sir Everard Digby on his lonely road to damnation, the devil who went by the name of Catesby.
'I'm no coward, nor no boy. If I must join, I will join your hellish plan, God help me and my loved ones.' There was a pathetic dignity in his tone.
But you have not yet said that you will join, Catesby thought. And I need you. I need your wealth, I need your horses, and I need your chivalry and your access to the Court so that the Princess
Elizabeth will come sweetly and there will be no second blood bath. They rode on in silence. Catesby's skill lay in knowing when to talk, but also in when to stay silent.
'What of our friends, Robin? What of the Catholic Lords? Are they to be blown to perdition, as well as our enemies? How could God forgive such a crime?'
'Rest assured, it's taken care of. Those who're worth saving will be preserved, without knowing how or why they were saved. We've thought long on this, and we need you.'
'What of the priests? What do they say? How can a priest sane-tify murder?'
'The priests know. They've approved the matter,' Catesby lied. Perhaps a priest knew under the secret of the confessional, but that was not to approve the act, merely to recognise that nothing could break that secret and the bond it established between a man, his priest and his God. How could he head off the young fool going to Father Garnet to confess? Garnet would not reveal the confession directly, but he could take steps in Europe to deny Catesby the help on which his rebellion would depend.
'When we reach your home, I'll show you the texts that make what we do a necessary evil. The Scriptures have always allowed acts of violence against the heathen — were the innocents on the walls of Jericho to be spared before the anger of the Lord? Were the Philistines to be allowed to triumph over God's people and his armies? Didn't the Pope sanctify the death of that whore Elizabeth when she declared herself against God's people?'
Catesby leant over again, and reined in his friend's horse. Gayhurst was visible in the distance, a wisp of smoke and nestling buildings.
'You know what threats we face. Do you want your children to inherit from their father? Do you wish our cause to be ruined, our people cast into penury, our faith trampled into the dust and mud? Then do nothing. Or rise up against the tide of fortune, and fight. Fight like a man.'
Sir Everard Digby gazed out on to the home of his wife and his children, the scene of his idyllic marriage and a life as near perfect, in his opinion, as the age could offer. There in the brick and stone of Gayhurst was a future to bring redemption to Hell, a smile on the face of the universe. Was he to risk it all in one fateful throw? Was it his duty? Was it his lot to suffer now, having been blessed so much in his early life?
He turned to his friend.
'You say the priests know of this? They've agreed to it? You'll show me these passages?'
I have you now, exulted Catesby. I have you, and your fine horses, your money and your manners. I have you.
'I will, Everard. Upon my life and upon my soul, I will.'
He set his face into a hard frown, as befitted a man set on serious business, hiding his exultation. Was there a particular pleasure in wrenching a man away from his beautiful wife and fine sons, in placing that wife and her brood in the way of risk and total loss? Digby had been too happy, thought Catesby. No mortal deserved that happiness, it was not the way of the world. Pain, suffering and sacrifice, those were the way of the world. Pain, suffering and sacrifice that all the world had to experience before they could gain entrance to God's kingdom. He was doing Everard Digby a favour by plunging him into Hell on earth. It would guarantee him his place in Heaven.
Ben Jonson's Court was The Mermaid tavern, his Presence Chamber its tap room and his courtiers a huge and adoring crowd of actors and writers, and an equal crowd of would-be actors and writers. However, The Mermaid was far too public a place for a man to be seen who was not meant to be in London at all. The next best bet was Jonson's lodgings.
Jonson had money, now that his liaison with Inigo Jones was producing a torrent of Court income. Gresham doubted that his friend's incomings would ever exceed his outgoings. His lodgings were in a back street a long way away from any fashionable area, but gratifyingly near Alsatia. It was not early in the morning when Gresham, in a workman's uniform, arrived at Jonson's chamber door. He had brought Mannion with him, feeling threat in the very air he breathed. Jane he had brought partly because of the feeling that she was only safe when with him, and partly through the realisation that it was folly to leave a young and beautiful woman on her own in Alsatia. She was also becoming very bored, a sulphurous cloud of tedium hanging over her in the tiny environs of their bolt hole.
The landlord knew Gresham, and let him in with a grin. Jonson had been too drunk to bolt the door when he had fallen into his bed. He lay fully clothed, his snores shaking dust off the ashes of the dead fire. Gresham crept up to him from behind, placed a dagger gently against his throat and hissed loudly in his ear, 'Pay me the money you owe me now, or die!'
Jonson leapt up as if a charge of powder had been set off beneath him, and landed back on the bed, feeling the steel against his throat, eyes as staring wide as a dead fish, unable to see his assailant. He started to gargle, white froth coming from his mouth.
Jane spoke. 'Or he might let you off if you give him a mention in your next play. Ugh! Do you ever wash a shirt?'
Jonson's whole body subsided back on to the bed, hearing the familiar voice, as if the life had drained out of it. Jane was wandering round the room, which looked as if an exceedingly dirty garrison of troops had been stationed in it for months. She picked up various bits of linen, wrinkling her nose as she threw them into a pile.
Jonson rolled over on the bed. 'You bastard!' he grunted at Gresham.
'True. But at least my poetry's good,' responded Gresham with a grin.
'"Calumnies are answered best with silence",' responded Jonson. When he quoted from his own works he always stuck his chest out.
'Please don't quote from your own work, Ben,' asked Gresham. 'Only someone of exceptional arrogance would even remember what they had written, never mind spout it to an unsuspecting public at every opportunity.'
'I am exceptional in everything I do,' grunted Jonson, rubbing his head and heaving himself upright.
'Exceptional as a sycophant, I believe. What were those lines you wrote to celebrate Robert Cecil's sudden uplifting to be Earl of Salisbury? Do I remember…
"What need hast thou of me, or of my Muse Whose actions do themselves so celebrate?"'
'Aye, well,' Jonson responded, pulling on a pair of boots, 'a man has to live.'
'"I do honour the very flea of his dog"?' asked Gresham, quoting from Every Man In His Humour.
'Please don't quote from my works, Sir Henry,' said Jonson solemnly. 'I find it degrades the beauty of my lines.'
Jane was an avid playgoer, and Gresham had become converted during his time with Kit Marlowe. They had known Jonson for years. He traced his roots back to Scotland, and had done so when it was not fashionable to be so linked, and was a Catholic, when it had never been fashionable. He was also an entirely self-taught classical scholar of awesome knowledge, a brawler who had killed a man, a poet of huge genius and a boor, a man of great intuition who at times showed the sensitivity of a stone privy in the Tower. Ben Jonson's body could be and had been caged. His spirit was uncontainable.
That at least he shared with Walter Raleigh.
Without expression, Jane picked up the overflowing yellow chamber pot from beside the bed, opened the shuttered window and hurled out the contents into the street below. A fierce yell and a squeal suggested it had found a target. Jonson stopped rubbing his head and feasted his eyes on Jane's trim figure, a beatific smile on his lips. He recovered quickly from shocks. His life had produced enough of them for him to have had to learn quickly.
'Avert your gaze, old lecher, and listen to me. You dine with Lord Mordaunt and Robert Catesby soon enough, I hear?'
Jonson struck a dramatic pose on the bed, the effect somewhat ruined by a button popping off as he raised both his arms. He launched into verse:
'" Come, my Celia, let us prove, While we can, the sport of love!"'
'My name's Jane,' replied the object of his attention, poking with her foot at the remnants of what could have been last week's meal on the floor. 'As for your kind proposition, " all the adulteries of art. They strike mine eyes, but not my heart".'
'Spoken beautifully!' exclaimed Jonson, gallantly. 'Almost as well as I could do it myself.'
'Lord Mordaunt? Catesby?' interjected Gresham.
'You're well informed, as ever. What of them?'
He got up clumsily from the bed and walked over to a low, rough-carved table with some bottles on it. Jane stood before it and glowered at him. He veered in mid-course, changing direction to the jug and ewer with something like fresh water in them. He bent over it, motioning to Gresham, who came and poured the contents slowly over his head. He stood up and shook his wet mane like a dog coming out of the river.
'I'm growing thin. I stand in need of a good dinner,' Gresham said, replacing the empty ewer. 'I will be your Scottish cousin who's arrived from the north, in the hope of rich pickings in this city which has newly learned to love a Scotsman so much. Under the circumstances, young Catesby will be delighted to add an extra place to the table, so your kinsman can taste the delights of life with the nobility.'
'Hmmph!' grunted Jonson. 'I trust you've a good Scots accent?'
He looked enquiringly at Jane, and when she stepped aside went to the table and poured two beakers of cheap sack. He offered one to Gresham, who declined it, sipped appreciatively at his own lifer saver and offered Gresham's to Mannion. 'You're invisible, I see…' It was the phrase he used when Gresham did not wish to be recognised. ‘Why this sudden interest in my friends?'
'Is Robert — Robin — Catesby a friend of yours?'
Jonson sat down heavily on a stool. He tossed some written sheets to Jane with an inquisitorial raised eyebrow. She caught them, nodded and settled in a corner to read the scribblings that were Jonson's next play.
'It's most unfair and unusual that someone so beautiful should have intelligence as well,' grumbled Jonson, changing the subject. ' " Blind Fortune still Bestows her gifts on such as cannot use them."'
'Is Catesby that beautiful?' asked Gresham, pretending not to notice.
‘Not him, you fool. Her. That angel who has mistakenly taken to living with an old satyr such as yourself. Perhaps she's hoping to reform you. Beautiful women like to reform lost men,' he added hopefully, watching her as she became instantly lost and totally absorbed in the manuscript.
'I thought it was her honesty you most liked?' There had been a massive row between Jonson and Jane when she had last criticised a piece of his writing. He had called her a lying slut and broken a perfectly good stool by hurling it against a wall, following which Gresham had broken his head. He had rewritten the piece though, Gresham had noticed. 'But you haven't answered my question. Is Catesby a friend of yours?'
'I know him. Everyone of my faith knows him. A friend? Hardly. I refuse to acknowledge the sun shines out of his arse, which is a prerequisite of anyone wanting friendship with him. Young Catesby sometimes has difficulty distinguishing between worshipping our Saviour, and his being our Saviour. He's not a good… influence, I think, on our younger people. But he has a good table. And I'm a good guest.' He gazed sadly down at the remnants of liquid in the now-empty beaker. 'They'll all be Catholics there. Are you after Catholics? Will your presence at our table bring harm to our faith?'
Gresham thought for a moment. If he was to expose a plot to kidnap the King, harm would come to the plotters. But to Catholicism? More harm would come if the plot were allowed to go ahead than if it were destroyed.
'To your faith, no. To some people of your faith, in all probability, yes. To you, too, Ben, if you plan to be in rebellion against the State, as well as against every person of culture and taste…'
The bantering tone did not hide the seriousness of Gresham's answer.
There was a bellow of laughter. 'Me? A rebel! God help me! Don't you think trouble enough comes looking for me, without me sending out invitations for more of it to come visiting?'
Ben Jonson had a mouth as big as his capacity for drink, and a wild reputation, but Gresham had never known him betray a secret. Or, at least, never betray one of Gresham's secrets. Gresham had rescued Jonson from the bailiffs and debtors' prison. The old secrets between them stood custodian over the new ones. Jane gave instructions for the bulging bag of washing to be sent off by servant to the laundress at the House. His manuscript she took away with her. The boredom of Alsatia was due to be lessened at least a little.
'There's risk in this dinner,' said Mannion flatly on their return. He was right. For all its huge size, London was a small town where those at the top of its society were concerned. The other guests seemed unlikely enough on the surface to recognise Gresham for who he was, but disguise would be prudent, and Gresham worked on two principles. Either one altered the original hardly at all, or one went for something outrageously different. He opted for the latter.
'Hold still, will you!' said a cross Jane as she applied the last of the dye to his hair and beard. It had been turned from the darkest black to something reddish, if not verging on positive ginger. A salve applied to his face, neck and hands (and, on Jane's insistence and in the face of his firm opposition, to the whole of the rest of his body) turned his skin dark, almost like that of a Moor. He had not trimmed his beard since they moved out of the House, with the result that it now straggled and looked, as Mannion said, 'Like a badly blown cornfield.' From his extensive wardrobe Gresham had chosen a suit of clothes that a country bumpkin might have been offered by the worst country tailor as being the height of fashion in London. The whole dreadful mess was topped off by a vast bonnet that clashed with his hair and beard and his suit of clothes, and a large eyepatch.
'For the first time in my life, I fear death,' he said to Jane as she finished the last patting on of paste to his beard.
He saw her face fall, and immediately regretted his teasing of her.
'Why so? If you feel that way, you must…'
He raised his hand to stop her. 'Can you imagine what my tailor will say if I go to my coffin dressed like this?' he asked, aghast. The swinging blow to his head was arrested only just in time as she realised it might disturb the newly applied colour.
Dressed like a country bumpkin, and a Scots one at that, Gresham was near besieged by every criminal on duty in London, who saw him coming and could not believe their luck. After he had been pestered with offers of women, card games, bowling alleys and dice halls where only yesterday a fortune had been made to rival Lord Salisbury's, couplings of such power achieved to rival Samson's, and various places where both had been achieved simultaneously, it was a relief to arrive at William Patrick's ordinary. Jonson always arrived at dinner as early as possible, to maximise the amount of time spent troughing at someone else's expense. He met Gresham, held back a brief explosion of apoplexy with commendable restraint, and brought him in to the company.
It was a lively affair. The Irish Boy served excellent food, with wine that was certainly drinkable. Gresham, who had a nose for these things, noticed that Catesby did not stint himself either with the room he had taken or the food and wine ser
ved. The room was fresh-painted and had clean rushes strewn on the floor, with hangings of some expense on the walls. A large window let some of the noise of the Strand through, as the cracks in the floorboards and door let some of the noise of the thriving, bustling ordinary up to assail their ears, but not enough to impede conversation.
'It's guid tae meet yae al, guid, guid…' Gresham, who had decided to be called Alexander Selkirk, slurred his words and let them tail off incoherently, a man middlingly drunk but also bemused with new sights and sounds.
He need hardly have bothered. Catesby barely glanced at him before he was dismissed. Jonson was the man, the star brought in to show how well-connected Catesby was, and all eyes were on him. A major playwright, a talking point at Court who was also a Catholic: Ben Jonson was a superb social catch.
'Well met, sir, well met.' It was Tom Wintour, shaking hands with the company, clapping those he knew well on the back. So this was the man for whose sake a whore's bottom would be sore for weeks to come, thought Gresham.
'Here, this is Selkirk, Alex Selkirk, a cousin of mine from Scotland… Cousin Alex, meet Tom Wintour…' Jonson was barely remembering to introduce Gresham. There was a crowd of people, there was good food, there was wine, and Jonson was expanding with almost every minute that passed by. Tom Wintour had come with Catesby. He was a short, stocky figure, with a round face and a cannon-fire way of speech. He was quick, agile, keeping his wit under control but showing a pushy argumentativeness that Gresham imagined could be explosive in more confined or tense situations.
'Have you brought a lot of your friends with you down from the north?' asked Tom Wintour with outward innocence. The reference to King James's horde of hangers-on drawing a guffaw from another member of the company.
'No, no,' replied Gresham, 'but I may hope tae do so if the pickin's are reet guid enough!'
A man to be watched, thought Gresham, someone with the power of the hothead but also the determination and intelligence to be a dangerous enemy. He had the body of a fighter too, Gresham noted, for all that he lacked height.
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