the young girl's face. Yet she spoke from despair. He felt shocked. Damn! He had not realised she spoke Italian. 'How dare you! To offer me as a whore to that foul man. Is this the way you treat those placed in your protection?'
'It's the way I treat those who ask to come with me when I'm acting as a spy. The way I treat silly, empty headed girls who think what I do is simply exciting with an ever-so-slight risk. Just enough to arouse them! The way I treat people who think what I do is about amusement. The way I show them that it's about slime, and dirt, and filth. And about killing people who don't want to die. You had to justify your coming along tonight. That was how you paid for your passage.' The image of the Spaniard in the meadows swam before his eyes. Was this what Henry Gresham was reduced to?
The two young people looked at each other in mutual hatred.
'And will you give me to that diseased man?'
'Of course not! It was a ruse! I won't return here. It was all a lie. A way of diverting his mind. I had to inflame him, stop him realising the stupidity of taking an English bribe.'
'And you were kind enough to tell me of this, before you offered me to him.'
No. He had not been kind enough. Because he had used her, as people had used him, and because he had become accustomed to seeing people as mere bargaining points. And the more he hated himself for doing it, the more he refused to admit that he was wrong, and the more he hated her.
'In this spying,' said Anna, with sarcasm that would have cut through granite, 'is it always so that the women have to stay silent and flutter their eyelashes while the men do all the talking?' *No,' said Mannion, from somewhere beneath a tangled robe that he was having trouble getting over his head, 'sometimes they have to lie on their backs and flutter their…'
'Enough!' said Gresham. 'You forget your place!' he hissed in embarrassment. Mannion's head emerged at long last, grinning.
She directed a look of cold superiority towards Mannion, who was too busy laughing at his own joke to notice. Yet his laughter did more to reassure her than anything Henry Gresham had done. Mannion made it clear that it was all a game. A hurtful, ludicrous and even shameful game, but a game nevertheless. But was it a game for Henry Gresham? Or had he allowed it to become his life? At the back of her mind was a nagging question. If his 'mission' had depended on it, would he have given her to this foul man?
'I'm not happy with this,' George mumbled to Gresham, confused and with his sense of decency on high alert. Gresham ignored him.
They doused the candles in silence, waited five minutes for their eyes to acclimatise, listened for the padding sound of feet outside that would tell them of men gathering. Going to the back of the room, Mannion kicked sand and dust aside off the floor to reveal a wooden trapdoor. Lifting it, careful to make no noise, they could just about make out wooden steps leading down into darkness.
'Five steps down, missy,' whispered Mannion, close to her ear. She jumped, startled. Then, her anger still filling her veins, she decided that to show weakness would be to give in to the farce that her life appeared to have become. She stood up, straight. 'Six steps straight ahead,' said Mannion, 'bending low like. By then you'll see the stars.'
They descended, and before she had time to start fearing the rats there was a gentle scuffling and another trapdoor was being lifted up from the inside revealing, as Mannion had promised, the stars. They were in another courtyard, also weeded over, leading from the back of the room they had just been in. Noises still came from the tavern, but less so now, muffled. There was no sign of any welcoming party. Gresham and Anna were just feet apart, yet it could have been miles. The cold tension between them crackled invisibly. George stood between them, frantically trying to understand what was beyond his comprehension.
They were nearly back at the house, in ample time before the servants rose to build the fires in the kitchen, skulking through alleyways, when they heard the sound of footsteps coming up the hill towards them. It was one of the servants of the Governor General, off-duty but still resplendent in his livery and clearly very drunk. He was weaving from side to side, singing gently to himself, a child's lullaby, a bottle clutched in his hand. He did not seem to realise that the bottle was empty, nor care very much, raising it every now and again to his lips and smiling happily at the night sky. Drink makes some men quarrelsome. Others it sends to sleep. It had made this man simply happy, an overwhelming sense of being at peace with the world radiating from him.
The four hooded figures froze into the side of a house, but it was too late. The man ground to a halt, his eyes rolling until they focussed. He giggled.
'Religious men bringing blessings to the taverns!' he chortled. 'Or is it to the ladies of the night?' he giggled, swaying gently. 'Or maybe such men using the taverns and the ladies of the night!' he said, chortling and hugely amused at his joke. 'Here!' he said, more loudly, 'bless me! Aren't I of the night? And one of God's children?' He meant to fling himself onto his knees, but instead cannoned into Anna. His outflung arm caught the hood of her cassock. She flung her own hand up just in time and held the hood in place. The man collided with the wall, slid down it with his back, ended squatting on the floor, gawping vacuously up at them. Then his whole body language changed, and he seemed to be trying to sink back into the stone. ‘I know who you are,' he said in a small, frightened voice. 'I know who you are.'
They were still hooded, still shadowed by the night, but it was entirely possible for the man to have caught enough of a sight of one or all of their faces. Mannion reached inside his sleeve for the dagger he carried there, but it was too late. Gresham had already folded his arms, and Mannion knew that meant he had a hand on his own dagger.
'I am Death,' said Gresham softly, in Latin, the language of the Mass, and for a moment the man seated drunkenly on the ground was as good as dead, the cold blue light of the killing frenzy settling behind Gresham's eyes, the hand tightening on the hilt of the dagger. The slightest of sobs came from the guard. He had to die. He had said the fatal words, ‘I know who you are.’ There was too much at stake for the life of one man to stand between Gresham and his mission. Then Gresham remembered the man a few minutes ago. A man singing gently to himself, a nursery song, a man happy within himself. Walking to his home, harming no man. He thought of the way death had come to the sailors in Cadiz harbour, the way death would come to the men whose cannons would explode in their faces. Was this to be just another casual death in a back alley, another death that showed how cheap life had become to Gresham?
The man looked up at them stupidly from the floor. 'The Four Horsemen,' he said pathetically. 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I knew it was you.'
Gresham's hand released the hilt of his dagger. He tried not to release his breath like an explosion.
'Do you repent of your sins?' he asked the man.
'I repent of my sins,' the man gabbled, pushing himself in fear now back against the wall.'
'Then go in peace. And tell no one.'
He raised himself up from the floor, still almost paralysed with fear, and made the sign of the Cross. The four figures gazed silently at him. Gulping, he turned and ran.
'I thought you were going to kill him,' said Anna, back in the safety of Gresham's room. They had slipped back through the kitchen, the servant dismissed back downstairs before Anna was allowed out of Gresham's room. This was not how she had imagined it to be. The excitement and sense of adventure had been soiled beyond recognition. Somehow she felt dirty, mired, revulsion replacing the excitement she had felt on setting out on her adventure.
'So did I,' said Gresham. Suddenly he wanted this girl more than he had wanted any woman in his life. Wanted to fling her on her back and take her, prove who was master. That was foul! He had never taken any woman against her will in his life! What was working within him, what in this girl was getting through his impregnable defences? Tomorrow we must see if your fiancй is in Lisbon. Any longer and we will cause questions to be asked.' He sensed the savagery in his mind and marvelled at the civility of his tone. Had she been hoping he would say more? She gave no sign.
'He will not be there. I know he will not be there.' Was she trying to persuade herself? She sounded flat, exhausted, as if drained of all emotion. 'I feel it inside me. It is not yet my time.'
'Where is Mannion?' asked Anna, as they gathered to visit the house of Jacques Henri.
'He's some business to do,' said Gresham. 'It's best you don't know.'
Gresham confided everything in Mannion. At the mention of Santa Cruz something had darkened in his eyes. 'Will you give me leave to work alone for a day or two, perhaps a week, in Lisbon? To settle an old score?' Mannion had asked. He had agreed, as he knew he had to. Yet he missed Mannion, desperately. One night, tossing and
