library, to which he had willingly agreed. The House now had one of the finest collections of books in London. As a child she had become almost a talisman among the booksellers, the men vying with each other to attract her to their stalls. They knew her as the foundling of the fabulously wealthy and strangely reclusive Henry Gresham, and latterly his 'niece'. Yet when she made her purchase solemnly every Friday, always from a different stall, she got the best price in London, as well as the best gossip.
'Those who talk of books are full of Jonson's Sejanus, of course it was played some two years ago at the Globe. It's not very good, actually, very loud and long. Martha and I went. Thorp first took it on and entered it in November last, but refused to print it, and Blount's now taken it over. Jonson's friends say it's good to his face but damn it behind his back, and he's very vexed indeed with the world!'
Jane's face lit up as she relayed the tittle-tattle of the booksellers.
'When has Ben Jonson not been vexed with the world?' asked Gresham with a laugh, trying to imagine a world where his friend Jonson would be at peace with anything. 'Who wouldn't be vexed, with the ghost of Kit Marlowe grinning up at you from Hell and that clever brat Shakespeare taking the crowds at the Globe? But there must be other gossip?'
'There's always gossip in the places I visit, though none concerning Bacon. Except the normal, that is,' she replied, her brow furrowed in thought.
'So what is the normal?' asked Gresham gently.
'The normal is that he's a man of great ambition, a man of law and a man of Parliament, who'll sell his soul to the King for preferment. His fiancйe's a shrew, and he prefers the company of young men.' She giggled. 'As, so it's said, does his intended. There's no noise abroad that any of the young men are unwilling.' She looked him straight in the eye. 'It's become fashionable these days to try what's new. A courtier who wishes to be in the light of fashion will say that he needs his women, but that he loves only his young man or his boy.'
'Will they now? How very daring,' mused Gresham. 'Does this gossip talk of sedition, of treason, of plotting?'
'It talks of the King,' said Jane. 'They say the new King screams if he sights cold steel.'
It was rumoured that James's mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had witnessed her Italian lover Rizzio murdered in front of her, in some Godforsaken frozen Scottish palace, while the child that was to become James I was live in her belly. A drawn sword or dagger had ever since sent him into a fit either of madness or of swooning.
'They still talk of Raleigh, of course. Aren't people strange and fickle? The mob used to hate him when Essex was alive, but now they say Raleigh was the first Englishman to be tried and sentenced before the charge was heard.' Raleigh's trial, conducted by the irascible and lickspittle Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, had been a farce.
Gresham growled his response. 'Do they talk of how Raleigh was betrayed by the man who protested to be his deepest friend? By the man whose son Raleigh helped to bring up? Do they talk of Cecil so?'
'They talk more of the numbers in the King's service at Whitehall,' said Jane truthfully, 'and how they grow by the day. It's the talk of town that soon every gentleman in the country will be paid a pension to be in His Majesty's Chamber, and every working man in the whole country employed in the King's palaces. The
Scots Lords offend everyone. It's said that they stink, that to sit next to them is to get their fleas, that they've no breeding and that they rut like stags when they're not too drunk to know what they're doing.'
Gresham knew that over a thousand men worked to serve the King in his palace at Whitehall. It was a far cry from the days of Old Bess, for whom each coin she parted with was like a drop of blood.
'The merchants see what the King spends, and worry about their profits and yet more taxes.'
'There's more, though — talk of a Popish plot, now the treaty with Spain is signed. The Catholics are angry. They had high words of promise from the King, and had great hopes of his Catholic wife. It all seems to have turned sour, and the fines are bleeding some of the great families to death, they say.'
'It's not just talk, the first bit,' said Mannion. 'It's true.' He spoke with an air of total finality. 'The girls in the stews hear the pillow talk. The young merchants are full of the Government costing too much and doing too little. And they say the Papists are restless.'
'Well,' said Gresham with heavy irony, 'that has to be it, then. If the girls in the stews say it's true who can deny it?'
Jane carried on, ignoring Gresham. 'Any Papists who heard my Lord Archbishop preach his sermon at St Paul's Cross on Tuesday last will be more than restless. They'll be scared. He damned all. Papists to Hell. He said the King would pour out the last drop of blood in his body to defend the Protestant faith.'
So, thought Gresham, there is anger in the country. Three angers, in fact. The anger of the Catholics, the anger of a disappointed people in their profligate King and the increasing anger of the King against the Pope's followers. Yet when had there not been anger in the country? And none of what he had heard explained Will Shadwell’s death, or his intuitive sense of unease.
Jane and Mannion were waiting expectantly. He looked at Jane, his expression unfathomable. She wondered what thoughts were hidden by those dark eyes. For all that she believed she knew Gresham better than anyone except Mannion, there were times when she was frightened by her inability to read his mind and his soul. Had she known the image in his mind she would have been saddened and horrified in equal measure.
Gresham was thinking of blood. Its smell and its look. There is no smell like fresh human blood, as there is no smell like rotting human flesh. The first is warm, salty yet strangely thin, the latter so vile as to make a man retch into his boots. Gresham had seen so much blood shed, smelt so much dead flesh. It was so bad at times that even as he looked at Jane, flushed with all the fires of youth and excitement at the joy of living, he saw the blood pumping beneath her fair skin, saw her raped and mutilated by a troop of soldiers as he had seen so many young girls, smelt the rank odour of her death. Gresham saw the skull beneath the skin.
Would there be rebellion so soon again? Had people learnt nothing from the waste, the torment and the agony of the Essex rebellion, so short past? Were fine young men to be butchered on the pikes of mercenaries, their reeking guts to be torn out and shown to their wives? Were the Catholics to launch yet another blood bath in the vain hope that the country would join their rising?
'May I speak?' It was Jane, reluctant to interrupt his reverie.
'Madam,' replied Gresham with a short bow, 'the Four Furies have left for their supper after a hard night riding people down and I am temporarily without my wand of power, or a standing army, so I fear I lack the means to stop you talking.'
Jane waved her hand dismissively, as she would to a rather silly child. 'My Lord, I'm worried that you should become involved between Bacon and Cecil. There's danger in going on to any ground where there's no map. How do we know what argument might exist between the two of them? How can we know that you're not simply being used in some way to gain advantage for Cecil, perhaps at great cost to you?'
'She's right,' said Mannion. 'I'm as good a swimmer as anyone, but even I wouldn't swim certain stretches of the river, where I don't know what the current's doing.'
Gresham thought for a moment. He stood suddenly. Something had sealed in his mind as he listened. He felt a fear and an uncertainty, but now he knew where it sprang from and what he intended to do about it.
'I agree, it almost certainly is dangerous. But I won't know how dangerous until I find out more. Cecil rarely tells the whole truth when he briefs one of his men. He likes to keep his spies in the dark, just as much as he likes to keep everyone else in the dark. Men like him distrust the light.'
He walked over to Jane, pulled her up gently by her wrists and stood gazing at her.
'I see my lawyers this morning.' The vast fortune left to Gresham by his father carried title to thousands of acres of land and numerous properties, and with it continual detail of tenancies and rents. When in London Gresham's lawyer was always desperate to see him, the pile of documents that needed signing stretching from St Paul's to the river.
'After that, I visit Moll Cutpurse this evening. If there's knowledge to be had, Moll will have it. And tomorrow, we see the King.'
Jane gave a squeal of excitement, clapping her hands together.
'Have you no shame, girl, to be so carried away from your wits by an evening of over-bred drunkards and whores cavorting at the expense of the nation?'
'But, sir — I've so little chance to meet either! My life here is quite matronly and respectable. And how can a girl resist drunkenness and envy and pride and greed and gluttony and lechery and sloth and all those other terrible things unless she can learn to recognise them? And this is not ordinary sin. This is royal sin. It's positively my duty
