morning. Gresham called away 'On His Majesty's business', again. Some would snigger, nod knowingly, and gaze down in their tankards as he strode past to his place at table in the morning.
The Porter ushered the courier into Gresham's rooms. They were on the first stairway, built in the fourteenth century. He was Cecil's man, of course, and exuded a sense of menace. Silently he handed a package to Gresham. The Porter hovered over his shoulder, drunk, inquisitive.
'Time you kept your watch, old Walter,' said Gresham to the grizzled old man. 'Who knows how many fresh young virgins are queuing by your gate to test if men are like wine, better when they're old?'
Old Walter grinned, and clumped down the stairs. Gresham could just as easily have kicked him down the stairs, or snarled at him to mind his own damned business. As it was, Gresham saw nothing but an accident of birth in their different station in life. He treated Walter as he treated all people. God persistently refused to treat all people as equal until they proved otherwise, but that was no reason for Gresham to follow suit. As a by-product, old Walter would continue to tell Gresham everything that went on in the College. As far as most of the Fellows and the students were concerned, old Walter, the drunken sot, was invisible. Gresham had been using his sharp eyes and ears for years.
Gresham did not need to ask who the letter was from. There were only a small number of men in England who had couriers willing to ride through the night. The seal on the letter was far more ornate than the content.
Come to London. Immediately.
No formal greeting, no 'To that most beloved servant, Sir Henry Gresham…' Merely a blunt message. Come. Come now.
Gresham sighed. He sighed again as he turned to his purse, took out a small coin, remembered the courier, and chose a larger one. It was accepted. Without thanks, but with the merest nod of the head.
'Tell him yes. Soon.'
The courier nodded again. It was all that was necessary.
Cambridge was a haven. Its conflicts were explicable, its double-and triple-dealing following a strange local logic. True, its townspeople were low and squat, hating the University that gave them their living. A riot was never far away, which was why the Colleges were built like domestic castles, facing inwards into their courts and quadrangles and with a towered Lodge as their entrance. Yet the sense of power those buildings gave was illusory. The power in London was the power of life and, more frequently, death. The power in England was very simple, for all the puffed-out vainglory of the Cambridge Fellows. England's power was the power of the Court, nowadays the Court of King James I of England, erstwhile King James VI of Scotland.
So now Henry Gresham would have to drag himself out of the parochial world of Cambridge, back to the dark, brutal and blasphemous underworld of London, a world only recently rid of yet another outbreak of the plague.
He was rather looking forward to it.
Jack Wright sat in the darkest corner of the room, pushing the remnants of his meal idly around the edge of the wooden platter. The air in the room was greasy, stale. There were eight of them in all, in a room that would have more easily coped with four or five. The Catherine Wheel in Oxford had been chosen for recruiting the newest conspirators. It was safer than London, and Oxford was less full of Government spies than Cambridge. It was as safe as anywhere for a group of men for whom life would never be safe again. Jack could not stop himself looking nervously at the door every minute or so. He saw in his mind the soldiers bursting through it, the yelled commands, the kiss of iron round his wrists as he was led away. He shook his head, as if to clear it of the image. His nervous glance returned to the door. Part of him was trying to listen to his friend, but he had learnt at times to let the impassioned words of Robert Catesby flow over him, as unmarked as a stone in the river with the clear water washing over it.
John Wright, or Jack as he had been known since his early childhood, had taken his usual seat at the back of the room. He was a stocky figure, his apparent heaviness deceptive. His sword arm was lightning fast, his agility with a blade in his hand legendary. It was a skill he had tried to use much less since God had called to him and he had answered. Would that his mouth had the same skill as his arm. It was not that he lacked thoughts or ideas, but somehow the link between brain and mouth had eluded him all his life. For years he had felt the frustration of hearing the nonsense others talked, seen the strike of wit that won the applause and the adulation, felt the ideas seething in his head but stumbled at the final hurdle of their expression. As a child he had been laughed at and mocked when the few words he could muster had tumbled out and dried up, like an empty barrel with a hole knocked in it. That was where he had learnt his agility, turning to his fists in those days to make sure that his school fellows paid his body the respect they would not give his words.
He had known Catesby casually for years, in the way that all the sons of the oppressed Catholic families banded together and knew each other. They had attended a Mass together, in the small hours of the night when the fewest servants would see and hear and the risk was reduced. The priest had been impassioned, the liturgy powerful beyond faith. Afterwards, Jack Wright had been moved to tears, and Catesby had turned to meet him.
'It's a thing to die for, isn't it, as Our Saviour was willing to die?' he had said, a fierce light in his eyes.
'It is…' Jack Wright had started to say, wanted to say that it was more than life, that it was the source of life, a faith and a beauty so poignant yet so tragic… but the words had dried up, as they always did, and the red flush of embarrassment crept up on nis face as his eyes dropped.
He felt Catesby's hand on his shoulder.
'We don't need words, do we? The words have been written for us. But we know the beauty. We of all people know the terrible beauty. To feel is enough, isn't it?'
Jack Wright looked up. Was it his imagination that a light pulsed from Robert Catesby's eyes? As if a tide of lovingly warm water had been released to sluice through his mind, the tears came to Jack's own eyes. Here was a man who knew, who understood. Here was a man who needed no words. From that moment in a cold chapel was the bond struck between Robert Catesby and Jack Wright.
Catesby's personality shone like a second sun, filling every corner of the tavern's room.
'Men have a right, a right given by God and by nature to defend their own lives and freedom, a right that no earthly power can take away,' he was arguing passionately, the light of martyrdom in his eyes, thumping the table for effect. 'We Catholics in England are mere slaves. 1 He dwelt on the word, drawing it out in all its shame. 'Lower even than slaves. We're free men, yet we allow our lives and our freedoms to be removed without law, without reason and without authority. Our very life, our vigour, is being sapped by this passive resistance, this feebleness, this palsy of fear and cowardice that's all we seem able to muster in the face of persecution. We're the laughing stock of Europe: despaired of by our friends, and despised by our enemies as God's lunatics!'
Despite the familiarity, the power of Catesby's personality tugged at Jack Wright's soul. When Catesby talked to you, you felt that you were, for him, the most important person in the world. Catesby could reach into men's souls. His audience stared in rapt silence, almost adoration, as he reviled the King, whipping them up into a frenzy of self-justifying anger against the monarch and Robert Cecil, his Chief Minister. It was a brilliant performance. Jack had seen it many times, yet still it held a measure of magic even for his cynical eyes and ears. For a moment, for all of them, the fear retreated, the gnawing, bitter fear that governed their every step, their every breath.
'And is there hope? No.'' Catesby spat out the negative, as if it were a red-hot pip from a sour cherry he had just eaten. 'With Robert Cecil pouring poison into the ear of the monarch, turning his eagerness into hate? There is no hope unless we ourselves create that hope!'
King James had seemed well-intentioned to the Catholic cause before his accession, and his wife was known to be Catholic. Cecil, the King's Chief Secretary, was widely credited with turning the mind of the King against English papists whilst at the same time toadying up to the Spaniards.
They needed some of Catesby's magic. At the mere thought of the tunnel Wright's flesh began to crawl and a spasm ran through his muscles. It had seemed easy enough. Hire the house, dig through until they were under the House of Lords, plant the powder. Yet before they were six feet into the tunnel they were gagging for air, their sweat turning the loose earth beneath them into greasy, salty mud. There was hardly room to move, the candle guttered and died in the rancid air and terror closed in with the darkness. The arm with the pick or shovel could only move back so far, the picking at the tunnel face tearing the same muscles time after time, reducing them to red-hot strings of pain. Their beards, hair and mouths became encrusted, unwashable, the dirt pitted into the skin. They felt the dust coat the inside of their lungs, their breath foul for hours afterwards, their racking coughs depositing a scummy yellow layer like vomit. They had reached the foundations after a lifetime of effort, half mad with the pain
