They had ridden the first part of the journey as if the Devil was on their tail, for no other reason than Gresham's love of speed and danger. He had fresh horses waiting every twenty miles, at the various staging posts between Cambridge and London.
'It was easier in the meadows’ Gresham had muttered when the messenger delivered the summons to attend the Queen's Court. It was a week since he had killed his man. 'At least there I knew who the enemy was.'
The hard riding had driven some of the devils out of Gresham, yet he was still looking glum as he and Mannion rode companionably side by side, some four or five miles before London.
'There's thousands who'd die for a summons from the Queen to attend her at Court,' said Mannion, who hated Cambridge. There's no pleasing some people.'
'There's more men who've died through obeying the summons,' said Gresham glumly. 'I go to Court, amid all the fawning and the sycophancy, and it's like I'm walking through a forest I don't know, at night, and maybe there's an enemy behind every tree. Yet I don't know and I can't see, and the first I'll know is when a knife or an arrow lands in my back.'
'Bit like Cambridge, then,' said Mannion.
At the best of times the Court of Queen Elizabeth was a vicious, competitive and back-biting arena. It was increasingly decadent, a shifting maelstrom of new broken loyalties and bitter feuding laid on top of the long- standing clashes. The loyalty was lessening and the hatred increasing by the second as the news of a possible Spanish invasion became more and more threatening. It was clear that the Queen was past child-bearing age, even had she begun to find a husband she could tolerate. Who would be the next King of England? Or even, God help the country, its next Queen? The old order was soon to die. There were factions fighting for power within the Court, factions outside of it. To talk of who would succeed the Queen was to risk an ear lopped off or worse, yet those who formed the Court talked of little else. And recently there had been something else. Something personal against Gresham, an animosity, people turning away as he walked near. Or was it just an overactive imagination?
'That's part of why you go,' said Mannion. ‘You like the smell of danger. And you like the sense of power. And the girls,' he added finally.
'I could do without the attention of the oldest girl of the lot’ said Gresham. As the Queen visibly aged her desire to surround herself with well-formed young men increased. To his great alarm, Gresham had found himself one of her new menagerie.
They smelled and saw London long before they entered it. The sea coal that Londoners were addicted to had a deeper, heavier smell than the woodsmoke of Cambridge and seemed to leave an oily, cloying after-taste. Then there was the rotting stench of waste from hundreds of thousands of living creatures, man and beast, their only common denominator ownership of bowels and a bladder dominated by the need to empty themselves. The great city was built on filth, not just the manure of its living creatures but the mangled bones of beef and fish and chicken, the filthy water from washing and cooking. The river took as much as it could, of course, and it had its own smell: dank, rotten yet strangely sweet. And for all of that, in the middle of London, a sudden change of wind could replace the stench of massed humanity with the clear and sweet breath of countryside from the fields of Highbury and Islington, from where the milk was brought in every morning. At night the blazing lights of torches, of lanterns and of candles challenged the darkness with a frail gesture of protest from humanity. In daylight, it was the pall of smoke hanging over the city that first drew attention, with the silver ribbon of the Thames seeming to stand out in stark clarity, however obscured the sky. And then the noise, the deafening, crucifying noise! All the world had something to sell in London and was bellowing the news to anyone who cared to listen and to all those who did not. The traffic in the streets was like a river in torrent suddenly forced into a narrow gorge, men, women, boys, oxen, sheep, horses, clumsy farm carts and lumbering carriages moving, fighting, squabbling, all at full volume.
Coming from Cambridge, Gresham and Mannion had to enter by Eastgate and cross all of London to reach The House, the palatial and neglected mansion on the Strand that Gresham had inherited from his father. It would have been easier to leave the horses by the Tower, and get one of The House's boats to row them upstream. Yet Gresham felt the need to let London and its madness soak back into his spirit, remind him of the days when, as a child, he was penniless and free to wander these wild, narrow streets as he wished, remind him of the days when friendless and alone he had learned to rate survival as the only virtue, and learned how to survive.
He waited now in the Library, his favourite room in The House, dressed in all his finery for Court. Mannion sat with him. The high, mullioned windows looked out directly on the Thames, seemingly more crowded every visit he made. Would Spanish sails fill the view next time he came to London, thought Gresham, their cannons smashing to splinters the ludicrously expensive glass in the windows of his library? There was no hint of impending destruction in the soft, dark glow of the lovingly polished panelling, the even sorter gleam of the leather bindings on the books. Suddenly a commotion in the yard broke the peace, the clattering of hoofs, the sound of a loud, jovial man's voice. The Honourable George Willoughby, soon to become Lord Willoughby when his increasingly aged father died, was incapable of going anywhere incognito.
George Willoughby was the ugliest man on earth. A face that looked as if it had been slammed into a stone wall at a formative time in babyhood was further pock-marked by the deep, dark craters of smallpox. A mistake by the midwife had given George a slant to his face, the left side of his mouth pulled down in a permanent grimace, the lid on his left eye — a dark, muddy-brown eye — forever doomed to droop half-closed. He was also a big, burly man prone to knock over anything in his path.
'You're such an ugly bastard!' said Gresham, smiling affectionately at the only friend other than Mannion he had on earth.
A small table with a pewter mug on it went flying as George entered the Library.
'Oh, damn! So sorry!' said George. A lifetime of knocking things over had neither accustomed him to it, nor diminished the pain his clumsiness caused him Only two things were certain about George. He would barge into everything, and be torn apart by remorse when he did so. Then a smile lit the crags and valleys of his face. 'Wrong again, Mr Fellow of Granville College.' His gaze, impossibly frank and honest, met Gresham's. 'At least on one count. I'm ugly. You're the bastard!'
They advanced and hugged each other, Gresham's eyes dancing with fire and life. There were only two men alive who could call Gresham a bastard. And only one other who could call George Willoughby ugly.
'Ignore the servant,' said Gresham. 'He's getting ideas above his station again.'
George released Gresham, rather like a vast bear releasing its mate, and turned to Mannion. 'Been telling his Lordship the truth again, have you? Warned you about that,' said George, wagging a finger at Mannion. With both men in the room it seemed somehow shrunk, dominated by their bulk. 'I've known him even longer than you. I've told you often enough. Flatter him! Men with great fortunes can't take the truth. Particularly young men who think with their hips!'
George stuck out a vast paw, and Mannion grasped it in return. He looked approvingly at George. A person's appearance had never bothered Mannion. He judged a man by his heart. And George Willoughby's heart was as big as they came.
'There'll be flattery enough this evening,' said Gresham, as the three of them settled down to a bottle of rather fine Spanish wine brought cobwebbed from the cellars of The House. If there was anything odd about two gentlemen and a servant sharing a bottle, none of the three seemed to notice it.
'But of course!' said George. 'The Queen will be told she dances divinely and that she's the only paragon of human beauty, and several sonnets in her favour will be written on the spot. Despite the fact that she's self- evidently an old cow with a complexion like a distempered wall.'
'You'll be telling Her Majesty that tonight, will you?' said Gresham in a tone of innocence. 'Just imagine how you'd feel if she served up your head on a pewter salver and not a gold one…'
'My head's safer on my shoulders than yours is, Henry,' said George. There was a sudden sharpness in his tone that made Gresham look up. 'I tell you, you're playing with fire. There'll be no flattery of you tonight Only jealousy. Hatred, even. Are you wise to stay as one of Walsingham's men? These are dangerous times.'
Walsingham was Elizabeth's spy master. By now elderly and riven by serious illness, Walsingham had funded from his own income the greatest and the most malevolent network of informers in Europe. He had recruited Gresham as a spy in his first year at Cambridge, when Gresham was still an impoverished student. When Gresham's wholly unexpected inheritance turned his life from penury to fabulous wealth, he had stayed with Walsingham. Danger and risk were a drug to which young Henry Gresham had become addicted.
'Life's dangerous,' commented Gresham idly.
For all his foolish exterior, George Willoughby had a sharp brain. It was also one strangely acclimatised to the
