who sought to kill him. It was life and the nature of death. In terms of information, would preserving one have helped? Probably not, he mused. Of course one of them could have been persuaded to talk. Any man could be persuaded to talk, given time. Yet torture could easily make men talk not the truth, but what they thought their interrogator wanted to hear. Under torture truth became less important than the release from pain. Gresham doubted any of the men even knew who their employer was. The boat would have been picked up from an anonymous wharf, the leader of the men recruited by a nameless nonentity in a back room in some ordinary or cheap tavern, and the leader then left to recruit his crew. Whoever had planned this attack was no amateur.
The key was a series of names, the names provided by Moll: Thomas Percy had in some way to be the key, and his name led to the others: Tom Wintour, Robert Catesby, Kit and Jack Wright. They were all Catholics, all members of the ill-fated Essex rebellion. Something one of them knew had caused someone, possibly one of them, to mount one murder and try another. What was the cause on which they were meeting? What did they know that had to be kept at all costs from Henry Gresham?
He needed a way in to that group. He needed a lever, a way of prising open the door to this group and letting his ears and eyes into their dealings. He waited in silence, allowing the candle to gutter and die, until the first flush of dawn streaked the sky and he heard Mannion return.
'She's not a woman that likes to be woken up, master, that's for sure!' Mannion seemed undisturbed by being awakened in the small hours, and sent halfway across London with no breakfast.
'If she takes my warning she won't be going back to bed tonight. She's at the root of all this, or at least The Dagger is…' Gresham explained briefly his thinking and the conclusions it had led him to.
'This pack of Catholics is the key, the names she gave us. I must find out what they know. Every cutpurse and vagabond, every spy and traitor, every whoremonger we know -1 want them all on the trail of these names. I want to know when they launder their linen and where they throw the piss from their chamber pots… and work through those few we know we can trust. We mustn't be linked to these enquiries. And we must move fast!'
Mannion nodded. This vast trawling for information looked as if it might be the biggest they had undertaken, but its principles and its urgency were not new. Yet despite that urgency, he did not move immediately.
'Master?' Mannion was unusually hesitant. Gresham turned to him, expectantly. Mannion spoke slowly, as if he had given the matter much thought.
'She's young. She's strong. She's more than in love. She's given herself to you. She'll survive anything. Except your despair.'
Gresham thought for a moment.
Must I forever hide, he thought for a brief moment. Then the moment passed.
'Thank you,' he said, simply. The two men, divided by age and by breeding, locked eyes with each other. Words and thoughts for which no language had been invented passed between them in an instant. It was all that was needed.
Gresham became brisk, businesslike. He gazed at Mannion thoughtfully, and spoke with a light-heartedness he did not feel.
'I've no doubt you'll have been bragging about the twenty men you killed on the river?'
For once, Mannion did not respond with a grin. Too serious for that, master. I've been in fights enough, you know as well as I. But it was a close-run thing last night, too close. Someone wants us dead, and they don't mind who else they kill in doing it. It was different, seeing her involved.'
'Who wants us dead? Who is it this time?'
Mannion did let a grin light his face, then. 'Why, there's no shortage, is there? It's a fine job you've done of offending just about everybody, in this country and half of Europe, and you not halfway through your natural life as yet.'
'Be serious, old man. You must have your thoughts, as I've mine.'
'I don't think,' said Mannion firmly. 'I just do. That's what I'm best at. I leave the thinking to you.'
'But you have a nose on you, don't you? Who do you smell in all this? Percy and his Catholic brood? The King? Cecil? Spaniards?' Gresham issued the names as if he was punching the air with them.
'My nose tell me this one stinks to high heaven. And there's only one person I know who stinks that much. Cecil. He's in it somewhere, I'll warrant.'
'If Cecil's the one who wants me dead, he must think he can bear exposure from the papers I have lodged in Rome. Does that bring any of our recent visitors to mind?'
'Tom Barnes?' responded Mannion.
Tom Barnes was a devious, sideways-looking rat of a man, servant to one of the greatest villains in London, Tom Phelippes. Phelippes was a forger, code-breaker and general villain to the Government, who had tried one intrigue too far against his masters, and was now residing in less than comfort in the Tower of London. He had been betrayed by his servant Barnes, who had a disturbing habit of turning up on his master's business at midnight and banging on the downstairs shutters of the house he was visiting, instead of the door. Gresham had received just such a visit shortly before his departure to Cambridge, and shortly before Barnes had betrayed his master. Barnes had brought with him, and demanded a pretty price for, one letter in particular which he had stolen from his master's desk. That same letter was still under the boards in Gresham's Cambridge rooms. Gresham had been about to take the matter up with Phelippes himself when the man had suddenly been removed to the Tower.
'Well now,' mused Gresham, 'I think Mr Barnes and his papers are suddenly explained to me, in a way that was not clear before.'
'Are we going to the Tower?' asked Mannion.
'Yes,' said Gresham simply. 'We must.'
'Can we have breakfast first?' asked Mannion.
The Tower of London stood guard grimly over the eastern section of the City walls, where they joined with the Thames. They went by boat, the only sensible way to travel such a distance. Gresham had four armed men come with him. He had not won a pitched battle on the river to be wiped out in some street skirmish. Rather than using one of the House's own vessels, with no Harry fit to take command, Mannion stood by the House's jetty and cried, 'Eastward Ho!' Knowing Gresham's mind, he dismissed several boats, vying for the rich trade of the great houses on the Strand, until one with a young head came in sight.
'Do you land, or do you shoot the arches?' enquired the young man, grinning at his passengers. The hundreds, thousands of men who plied their trade on the river were as filthy with their mouths as they were with their clothes and bodies. This one looked almost healthy. Most people landed before the bridge, picking the boat up again if needs be after it had leapt through the narrow stone arches of London Bridge.
'We go the fast way,' said Gresham firmly. Young as he was, the boatman was both strong and skilled. There were feet on either side of them as they shot through one of the narrow arches of London Bridge, the speed and the danger as exhilarating to Gresham as it always was.
They smelt the Tower before they saw it. A permanent dispute existed between the Lord Mayor and the Lieutenant of the Tower over the City's draining of the town ditch into the Tower ditch. The dispute had been raised to a new level when the City had opened the sluices that let all the sewage from the Minories into the town ditch and so into the Tower ditch. The stink was vile, and even the hardened inhabitants of the Tower were gagging for sweet water. He left the four men to await his return by the postern gate, and took Mannion in with him.
He remembered the first time he had gone to see Raleigh after his farcical, trumped-up trial. Here was the man who had taken on the might of Spain and defeated it, a man with the mind of a scholar, the tongue of a poet and the heart of a lion. A lesser person would have been in tears, and Gresham knew that Raleigh had already tried to take his life. Yet there was no sign of that in the man sitting quietly at his writing desk in the Bloody Tower where he was lodged, still dressed in Court finery. He had raised an eyebrow as Gresham had entered the room.
'Well, my friend, how goes the world with you?'
'I'd thought rather to ask the question of you,' Gresham had replied.
'With me? Why, as you can see, all is well. The thickest walls in England protect me from my enemies…' he motioned to the environs of the Tower around them, 'and I have my wife and son at my side.'
He called out and Bess, the early cause of his troubles with Queen Elizabeth, came into the low-ceilinged room, wiping her hands. She was pale and hollow-eyed, but her face lit up as she saw and greeted Gresham. Bess Raleigh had mothered many more men than her own son, and saw Gresham as a favoured, albeit wayward, stepson.
