and cooling as it found release and trekked down his cheek. It would kill the cause of Catholicism in England for years, perhaps for ever, uniting the country in a frenzy of hatred against the Popish impostors. It was the most awful, the most terrible thing that any young madcap rebel could conceive and carry out. And he, Father Garnet, was bound by the most awful vow of all not to reveal his knowledge. He had to persuade Catesby to give it all up. An emissary to the Pope had to be the answer. Surely if the Pope condemned the plot, even so overweening a vanity as Catesby's would have to recognise its folly?
A sharp cramp cut across his stomach. Too much food and wine, and not nearly enough exercise, he knew. Or an omen of the executioner's knife cutting into his most sensitive flesh in front of the howling crowd… He stumbled to his feet, and vomited up most of his day's food into the flames of the fire.
Gresham stood bolt-upright in the rough iron tub, as naked as the day he was born, scrubbing with satisfaction at the few suspicions of dirt left on his reddened flesh. It was before dawn, two guttering candles piercing the gloom, and Mannion stood silent in a corner as the early morning ritual took its course. He held a huge towel over his arm, with the rest of his master's clothing waiting draped over two stools.
It was still a good body, Mannion thought with quiet satisfaction, though God knows why Gresham insisted on spoiling it with water. He knew every one of the wounds that criss-crossed his master's body, could probably name and date the cause of each one. Yet they were superficial, healed. The hips were narrow and muscled, the shoulders broad and strong and the dusting of hair across the manly chest so much more satisfying than the blanket of dead seaweed so many sported there. There was no self-consciousness in Mannion's frank appraisal, any more than there would have been embarrassment in Gresham's receipt of it, had he even realised it was taking place. Mannion knew every inch of that body, had carried it on his shoulders as a child, whooping through the apple orchards. He had thrashed it once, and only once, when its seven-year-old owner had stood up imperiously and demanded that Mannion do its bidding as he was a mere servant. Years later he had washed it when its owner could only whimper, half-conscious, with the searing pain of wounds that seemed never to heal. He had fed it by hand for months, never speaking, holding the sustenance in front of the mouth for hours, sometimes forcing it down the throat when all else failed.
With no obvious signal Mannion stepped forward. Gresham held out his arms, back towards Mannion, to receive the towel he knew would be draped across his shoulders. Without turning, he spoke. 'God, man. Your breath stinks. What on God's earth were you up to last night?'
Gresham stepped out of the tub, turning to grasp the towel round his cold frame.
'My duty, young master,' replied an impassive Mannion.
'And what duty might that be?' enquired Gresham shortly, irritated that his own conversational gambit required him to speak at this time in the morning.
'Why, sir, I'm a man. And the world must be peopled.'
And that, thought Gresham, showed why one should not engage in conversation with the servants.
He allowed Mannion to dress him. He could not remember when Jane had first started to sleep the night with him, regardless of his carnal needs. He knew it was shortly after their first, frantic lovemaking. He had resented the presence in his bed, the last citadel of his private person, when instead of leaving after their coupling she had turned over and lain gently on the far side of the bed, back towards him. Her young and muscled body lay there, its curves as relaxed and bored as a seasoned choirboy's arm swinging the censor. He had willed it to move, and gone to sleep so doing, waking up to find it gone and about its business.
He did not understand how in entering her body he had let her enter his mind.
Jane had never interfered with his silent routine of early morning washing, and Mannion's attendance on it as his body-servant. The relationship between Mannion and Jane was one of life's great secrets as far as Gresham was concerned. After that first day, when she had screamed to be taken off Mannion's horse, he had not discerned so much as a-flicker of disagreement between them. In his presence they were formal, even brisk, in their conversations. At times Gresham thought they used a shorthand between each other, a language he could not understand. It never crossed Gresham's mind that what united them was their love of him.
His breakfast was milk warm from the cow, brought from the fields near Islington. The bread was fresh- baked in the House's own ovens, and smelt divine. There was cheese, and strips of bacon burnt to the black as if on a campaign fire, a taste he had never lost. There was a concoction of eggs beaten up with milk and then heated over the fire until it bubbled a gentle yellow, a half-eaten beef pie. Dr Perse in Cambridge had advised him to eat a hearty breakfast above all other meals, and it suited Gresham's constitution. There were many who ate no breakfast at all.
Gresham finished his breakfast. Mannion left the room briefly and returned with one of the kitchen maids, who cleared the wooden table. There was a rustle, and the briefest sense of a fine perfume. Without turning round he sensed that Jane had entered the room. He waved a hand, motioning both to be seated.
Gresham nodded to the small beer and Mannion poured himself a tankard. He drank like a sewer, with a vast, slurping contentment that only just stopped short of the belch he clearly needed to deliver after devouring the whole tankard.
'For God's sake, man, let it go before you explode.' Mannion let loose a torrent of wind that started at his feet and came out finally from his mouth like the blast of the trumpet on Judgement Day. Jane looked at him as he rocked with the force of the expulsion, the tiniest flicker visible at the corner of her mouth. Gresham looked on with distaste, his lip curling.
'You are disgusting!' he said.
'Aye, sir. Disgusting.' Mannion poured himself another tankard and placed it cheerfully in front of him. 'Truly disgusting. But no longer thirsty, for which I thank you.'
It did not occur to Gresham to ask how many other gentlemen of his wealth and standing discussed the most important matters of the day after breakfast with their body-servant and their mistress. As for how many gentlemen were blessed with a body-servant who won both the morning's opening conversational gambits, he preferred not to think. The girl had made it clear from early on that she had a brain to match her body, one source of her capacity to irritate him more than any other person on earth. It was so much simpler to have the body as one container, and the brain in another, and far more convenient for the latter to be contained in a man. He had said so to Jane once. She had considered the proposition thoughtfully, and then hit him with the bedpan.
The upper room in which they sat was one of Gresham's favourites. Dressed with dark oak panelling that had been young in the Wars of the Roses, it had a large window and balcony overlooking the street. Already the hubbub of London was audible despite the lavish expenditure on glass in the window. As with most houses, the introduction of glass had not caused Gresham to remove the old, unwieldy shutters, which were an excellent defence. They had been thrown back as he had entered the room, revealing a watery, smoke-stained dawn.
Gresham gave a brief resumй of where he thought things stood, speaking as if to himself but knowing his silent, attentive audience. He listed the death of Will Shadwell, the meeting with Cecil, the strange task of Bacon. For Jane's sake he went over the story of the informer, the lack of any incriminating evidence on Bacon. They knew his ways, knew that in some way this careful repetition of the facts, this thinking aloud, enabled him to order things in his mind, to speed up thought. The fingers of his left hand began to drum gently on the rough wood of the table. It was a rare gesture for a man who held himself always in fierce physical control.
‘I’m uneasy. There's something in the air. Unrest, trouble. I don't know. Yet the feeling is there. As it was before Essex, the same feeling. What gossip is there in the markets and the fine shops, Jane? What are they talking of in St Paul's?'
The old cathedral of St Paul's was the crumbling centre of London. Even though it had lost its steeple to lightning some years before, it still dominated London in its centre. Occupying over twelve acres at the western end of Cheapside, it would have taken Jesus two lifetimes to clear it of its moneylenders. It was here that those caught by the new plant tobacco came to buy, here where every servant in London looked for vacancies on the siquis door. It was here that the gallant casually threw back his fine cloak to reveal the satin lining, and the younger son skulked in the doorway to hide his ragged doublet. It was here that the scaffold would be erected, the men twitching their last moments in earshot of the sermon being preached from St Paul's Cross. Puritan and Papist, gentleman and cutthroat, fine lady and bawd met, mingled and, not infrequently, came to blows or copulated. The country bumpkins who increasingly flocked to London were drawn to St Paul's and drew with them the lowlife who preyed on their naivety. It was the best centre for gossip in London, exceeded only by the Court itself.
Jane went there nearly every day to visit the booksellers. She had more or less taught herself to read and had devoured the library built up by Gresham's father. The only time she had badgered him for money was to add to the
