would die for him. It surprised him how many he thought might die for her. Then again, he lived in a world where if the master or the mistress sinned, the servants received an equal or worse punishment. Dying for your master or your mistress was not a choice for the servants of the well-born. It was a condition of service.
Gresham still did not know how the irritating, obnoxious foundling, the by-blow of a hasty assault on a peasant common, had become his mistress.
He had come to the House late one night, obsessed with business. The thin-boned foundling had turned into a strikingly beautiful seventeen-year-old with an imperious will. She had strode about his chamber, showing real anger as she explained the various frauds upon his money that his servants had perpetuated.
'And furthermore, my Lord, there's one even greater crime to which you must answer!'
'And what's that?' said Gresham, wearied beyond belief by decisions that affected all Christendom, not to mention his supposedly immortal soul. How was it to him if a cook was ordering extra chickens?
She stood there, tall and straight as the bolt from an arrow, flashing radiance in the room. 'You, who have every right to claim me as your own, have never looked at me as a woman!'
Well, he had been taken by a fit and had done more than look upon her as a woman that night, to their apparent mutual satisfaction. Yet when he woke, he was more than a man with the edge taken off his carnal hunger by a fine night of lovemaking. More scared than he had been in the face of a Spanish cannon, he realised with an almost sickening fear that he was in love. He knew that he had signed his will away. He had not sought it. He had even tried positively to avoid it, or any other entanglement. It had done him no good.
Yet Jane had steadfastly refused to marry him. He had pleaded with her.
'You seem to have claimed ownership of my body, and doubtless wanted my soul since I first saw you by that cursed pond! I've said I love you, haven't I? Why won't you make a proper woman of yourself, and a proper man of me, by being my wife? Am I fat and stinking of grease? Am I not rich enough for you?'
She had turned away that night, after their lovemaking, peaceful and contented. She let his ranting pass over her, with the inner calm that drove him to even greater fury. She turned round to face him, letting cold air into the bed.
'I've said my thanks with my body. It's all I was gifted with from God. Everything else I have was somebody else's. You've had the only thing I have to give, as I now am. Anything else must wait.'
'Yet you've shown me your secret places. You've let me use those secret places, to my heart's content.'
He remembered the first showing to him of her wounds.
She smiled at him, a radiance that lit up the bed. 'I've shown you the secret places of my body, and willingly so.'
She turned over in the bed, her back towards him. As if from a far continent, her last words came. 'As for the secret places of my soul, for that you will have to wait.'
Gresham knew of no more final goodnight.
Arid now he was lying in his vast bed in 1605, years on from that first meeting and years on from the night when he had taken her virginity. He was satiated, yet as mystified by this woman he loved as he had been by the side of the pond in that filthy village all those years ago. Perched on the very edge of sleep, the knowable world of Cambridge, the dangerous world of Robert Cecil and the imponderable world of Jane raced round in his head until they blended into a wild half-dream. Cecil was screaming at him, blaming him that his mistress was soon to be elected as Master of King's College. He recoiled in the face of Cecil's spitting anger, yet thinking it would not be the first time a bastard had been involved in the governance of that College.
In his dreams, the bloated face of Will Shadwell rose up from the deep.
'Beware! Beware!' it moaned at him. 'You are in waters too deep for your soul!'
'My soul, poor tattered thing, was lost a long while ago,' whispered Gresham. 'And I have been in waters too deep all my life!'
At that the ghost of Will Shadwell vanished, and Henry Gresham slept in peace. Just before he did so, the name of the man stooped over his tankard in the tavern came to him.
'Wintour. Robert Wintour..;' What did he know about Robert Wintour? It would come to him. It always did.
Chapter 3
Father Garnet was in prison. As prisons went it was pleasant enough. The half-timbered house had been sheltering Jesuits safely for years, its walls peppered with hiding places. The fire burnt cheerfully in the grate, the oak panels mellowed in the evening sun and there was wine at hand. Yet it was still prison.
A curlew sounded in the meadows outside the house, its forlorn, mewing cry echoing the priest's mood. Father Garnet was tired, more tired than he had ever been in his whole life. It was no crisis of faith. When he summoned the image of Our Saviour into his mind the rushing well of tenderness, the biting pain of love were the same as ever, undiminished and unrelenting. Rather, it was simple exhaustion.
How long had he been in England, fighting for the faith that was his life? Fighting for it with his life?
He had forgotten how many years, years of being continually shunted from one secret house to another, years of disguise, of whispered Masses in shuttered rooms. The Jesuit priest was a hunted animal in England, yet at least the real animal was given a quick death by the hounds. If the priest was found he would be stripped and trussed to a wooden hurdle, dragged through the streets behind a horse, to be reviled and spat at by the worst sort of scum. Hauled on to a scaffold, he would be dropped and hung until the choking edge of suffocation had plunged him near into unconsciousness, and hurriedly cut down whilst still aware. Rough-handled over to the nearby block, the executioner would then hack off his testicles, to show that he should never have been born, and thrust them before the priest's agonised face. Then the crude blade would strike into the chest, and the heart be torn out, the bleeding, pathetic flesh held up for the baying crowd to see, to the cry, 'Here lies the heart of a traitor!'
Father Garnet's dreams were haunted by the first, coarse feel of that rope around his neck, the gasping panic of strangulation, the sharp, shrieking cut of the metal. Was it weakness to be so scared? Could he pray to be spared this pain, or should he pray to have it inflicted on him, thus becoming a glorious martyr for the Faith? A good man, he prayed for neither. The first was unfair and a coward's way, the second was untrue. He prayed instead simply for the wisdom to understand.
O my God. Why hast Thou forsaken me?
Garnet tensed. Horse's hooves sounded outside his window. He looked expectantly at the bell over the fireplace in his room. Were it to ring, tugged frantically by a loyal servant, Garnet would hastily grab his bottle and glass so as to hide his presence, run outside into the passageway and back into the adjoining room. The fireplace there was kept deliberately blackened, ash in the basket, as if used every day. Behind it lay a priest-hole, activated by a hidden lever. Within lay a rosary and a crucifix, scraps of dried-out food and a single, thin and emaciated turd. This was evidence enough that a priest had once lain, eaten and shat therein. The stench of urine, added to every three days by loyal Catholic servants ordered to piss, there, gave force to the message.
The real priest-hole lay behind. Two men might crouch in it, but not stand or sit. A thousand men might seek how to enter it, but never find the means of entry unless they were told. Even the fiercest fire built in the first fireplace would not singe the occupants of the second priest-hole, for all the damage it could have done to occupants of the first.
A cheerful call wafted up from the gatehouse, greeting the rider. Father Garnet relaxed again in his chair.
He felt a dread terror as he contemplated that young fool Catesby and his hellish plot. Catesby had told his servant what was planned, then sought to calm the servant's disquiet by sending him to confess to Father Tesimond. The servant, thought Garnet, had a deal more common sense than the master, but then that was usually the way. As for Tesimond, he had received the confession and run straight to Garnet, in turn confessing all to him.
It was a nightmare. Garnet could no more break the secrecy of the confessional than he could sell his soul to the Devil. He could not disclose what Father Tesimond had told him to any person upon earth on pain of the loss of his immortal soul.
It would not just kill the Lords and Government of England, Garnet realised, a single tear forming in his eye
