There was time enough to get some extra supplies from The House and the two men — Gresham hoped they were still there and had not already gone off to some tavern — and still catch the tide. He had planned for everything to be ready two hours earlier than was strictly necessary, assuming Jane would be late by at least that much.
Jane appeared on deck.
'Lucky bugger!' an onlooker shouted, as Jane bowed politely to Gresham.
Lucky? The particular bugger who had cried out did not know half of it — the tears, the tantrums, the moral blackmail… well, at least she had agreed to come and not made his life difficult. He owed her something for that. If she kept to it, of course. Storms at sea could take on a new meaning over the next few days.
The age of chivalry could not be allowed to die entirely, and so the master's cabin had been given over to Jane, tiny as it was. She shared it with her maid, Mary, who was thankfully ugly enough to put off even Mannion's roving eye. Gresham had never doubted that Jane's maid had to come with her. It was not only that the girl would need help dressing, particularly if as part of their cover, she was to be paraded before a King as she had just been paraded before a Queen. Sarah had been persuaded to part with two more Court dresses, so there were now three packed carefully in a chest all their own, carefully sealed against damp and salt spray. It was also the more mundane matters. It would be wholly unseemly, for example, for a man to enter the cabin in the morning and ditch the contents of the chamber pot over the side. That was definitely another of the maid's jobs. Gresham took over the one other, even tinier cabin, knowing without asking that Mannion would sleep at the foot of his truckle bed. The master, pushed out by the need to house Jane, would make do with a hammock slung at the rear of the hold, an old sail slung across to mark out his space even though the hold was empty apart from Gresham's baggage.
Jane was excited by the prospect of the voyage. It was quite pathetic really, and if Gresham had had any spare emotional capacity he would have found it rather touching. He knew they could be in for weeks of damp boredom, a tiny deck their only exercise. Yet for Jane, who suddenly at the prospect of the voyage had turned from a sulky young woman into an excited young girl, this was clearly an adventure. She saw little outside the confines of The House, her visits to St Paul's to buy books and her occasional visits to Cambridge. She had invented a role for herself in The House, becoming in effect its steward; the old man who occupied that role had been only too willing to allow her to take over.
Jane had been little more than a foundling when she had first been entrusted to the care of The House. Unlike Gresham she worshipped it; its architecture and its grandeur staggered her. Its comfort seemed to her as if heaven had indeed arrived on earth. Its Library was proof that paradise did indeed exist. So much to find out! As a little girl rescued from the cruelty of being a bastard in a mud-soaked village, she was simply another whim of Henry Gresham, the man who had scorned one of the biggest fortunes in England to go and fight in the Low Country, risking death by bullet or pestilence with every step he took. To those he paid to work in The House, the man who had rescued her was little more than an absentee adventurer and rather too many of them remembered their master as a ragged-arsed urchin who, like Jane, had wandered the endless corridors and passages of The House, owned and loved by no one. She too had been free to wander The House from its finest rooms to its lowest cellars. And she had listened. Oh, how she had listened, a mere child, wide-eyed and posing no threat to anyone. What she had heard had horrified her. The Gresham fortune was feeding half of London. Even worse, basic repairs were being neglected. She had never had any position of power; she had always been cast as the victim: 'Ah, there she is — the poor little bastard girl rescued by that strange man who does the dirty work for the Cecils!' Jane could remember the moment, the single defining moment, when she had declared war on life as a victim. It was when she saw three sides of beef being delivered to The House, and two of them just as quickly being whisked off to destinations unknown; a nod and a wink the only currency that changed hands. It was then that she had given herself a purpose in life. Henry Gresham — Sir Henry Gresham — was a book she could not even lift off the shelf, never mind open and read the pages. His House was a different matter altogether: that she could read and understand. From that moment it became her aim to run The House as it should be run.
How to do it? Very difficult, as she had no status and was nothing more than a discardable whim of her master. Yet she had one thing, one thing only, on her side. None of those in the employ of The House and her master knew the exact nature of the relationship between them. The fact that there was no such relationship was as true as it was not widely known. She had traded shamelessly on that ignorance. She had waited until she had turned sixteen, the age at which many a girl was married and nominally at least became responsible for running a household. She had positioned herself in the right place when the sides of beef arrived, and at the crucial moment when a grinning labourer was about to cart the majority of the delivery off elsewhere she had asked, in a loud voice, 'Does my master know where his beef goes?'
There had been a stunned silence, and the grin had frozen on the face of the man with one of the sides of beef hung over his back. The cook had fought back, inevitably. Jane had planned for this.
'Stop your nonsense, girl!' she had said. 'What do you know about such matters? Get about your business — and while you're at it, out of my kitchen!'
'I know you're cheating Sir Henry!' Jane had said with an air of absolute finality; inwardly she was quaking. 'And if you carry on doing so, I shall tell him.'
They had reached an agreement, the elderly cook and the young girl. These sides of beef would go their way, as they had done for so long, but would cease to do so after that. As of now. And if the lucrative business ended, her conversation with Henry Gresham — the one he would never in reality have allowed her to have — would never take place.
She had then gone immediately to the steward, and demanded that she scrutinise the meat orders in future. Reduced to panic by the thought of what could be revealed about his mismanagement, he had agreed.
Slowly, Jane had thought. One piece at a time. It had taken her two whole years to gain control, to do the steward's job while he continued to receive the rewards. Yet it gave her a strange satisfaction to know that The House was now well managed, albeit at one remove.
And Mannion had proved her greatest ally. The stables in The House were as corrupt as the rest of it. Certainly Gresham's fine horses — one of the few things he really did seem to care about — were well fed and well looked after, but so were many other horses in London from money siphoned off from The House. The Head Groom was a vicious bully, renowned for the violence he inflicted on prostitutes in the stews of Southwark. Jane had left him until last, partly through fear, partly through realisation that he would be her greatest enemy. He was no cleverer than the others, the sum of money he was taking from his master no greater than others, but he hated women. He, of all the power figures in The House, would not bow down under a threat from a woman, and he also had the strongest position. Gresham cared more about his horses than he ever did about his ward, and the Head Groom was good with horses, one of the best in his profession. Would Gresham care how much money was wasted if his horses were well cared for? In her heart of hearts, Jane thought not. And she had no doubt that if it came to a choice between the welfare of his horses and her welfare, there would be no competition. She actually, went to her show-down with the Head Groom convinced that he would win, for the moment at least, and that she would be lucky to emerge from their conversation with anything less than a black eye or a bloodied lip.
It had certainly been heading that way. He had actually stood up and started to walk towards Jane, his right hand clenching into a furious fist, when suddenly he stopped. The stable door had opened. Someone was standing there, blocking out the light.
'If you lay a finger on 'er,' said Mannion, 'you're dead. Tragic episode. Man killed by 'orse. Except it won't be an 'orse that kicks your pathetic little life out of you. It'll be me.'
The man looked at Mannion, stunned. There was an air of absolute finality in what he had said. When he chose to exercise it, Mannion carried massive authority.
'And while you're at it,' Mannion said, in the same flat tone, 'pack your bags. You just resigned. You got an hour. Otherwise, I'm telling you, one of these 'orses is going to behave out of character tonight.'
The man left the stables, his white face suggesting that The House would have a vacancy for a new Head Groom within the hour.
Jane was stunned. She had not even realised that her master and Mannion had returned to The House. She had not seen Mannion at work before. The sheer, blunt force of the man in part overwhelmed her, made her feel fragile and will o' the wisp. And no one had ever helped her before, not like this, except for the one moment when the fine gentleman had rescued her from poverty and humiliation. Jane was used to being alone, and acting on her own.
