him up and sat up all night, sleepless, pondering. Now Essex was awake and feverish. His eyes darted round the room.
'I ride for England,' he said to Gresham.*Now. Without warning.'
To meet the Queen?' said Gresham. 'Or to take her throne?'
Essex gave a harsh, brittle laugh. 'Her Majesty is surrounded by evil men, advisers who advise only evil and her own destruction. I have three hundred men, here, swordsmen all, who will ride with me. Ride with me to force Her Majesty to listen to the truth.'
'You haven't answered my question,' said Gresham. 'Do you ride to meet or to rebel?'
'Do you wish to know before deciding whether or not to ride with me?'
So it had come to this. A half-maddened Earl riding in thunderous haste half across England, dragging three hundred wild, excited hotheads along with him. If word got ahead, it would be seen as an invasion, troops would be mustered. At the very least there would be a pitched battle in London. Essex could not be King. But should he be allowed to ride like a lamb to his own slaughter, or be allowed to bring peace and good order crashing down around his ears in England?
And someone out there was wanting to murder Henry Gresham! There was a truth out there still waiting to be discovered. A truth important enough for someone to want him dead in order for it to remain buried. Someone who believed he knew something of crucial importance. His every instinct shrieked at him not to believe Cameron Johnstone. His accusation of Cecil was too clever, too convenient for it to be true.
'My Lord,' said Gresham softly, approaching Essex as one approaches a wild, slavering dog, 'three hundred men won't wrest the Crown from Elizabeth. Ride with fifty if you will. Ride with fifty, and ride into London as the Earl of Essex returned to right a wrong. Ride with any more, and you ride as the man who wants to be King Robert of England. And they'll destroy you — the Cecils, the Raleighs, the Howards, the other noble families. They'll not permit one of their kind to have precedence over them, and they'll fight you and yours to the death. Their death, your death and the death of England.' Gresham looked pityingly at Essex, whose eyes had shrunk to pinpoints. 'Don't unleash civil war in England.'
But if one was a true servant of the Devil, was not that precisely what one should do?
Essex looked long and hard at Gresham. He seemed a little calmer.
'You might not need to rebel, my Lord,' said Gresham, even more gently. 'Win over the Queen, persuade her of the rightness of your cause, and all you wish will be yours anyway.'
'Will you ride with the Devil?' asked Essex.
'I've done so all my life,' said Gresham.
And so the ride began that evening as the sun was setting over the battlements of Dublin Castle. Fifty men, Essex ordered, though seventy-five were there shouting and yelling at grooms, falling over each other. That was all right, Gresham thought. Only half that number would survive the mad dash to London.
The horses whinnied, clattered round the courtyard, rose up on their hind legs, their riders cursing and reining back hard. Last-minute orders were given to servants, too few baggage horses were loaded with too many stores. Young men were stuffing shirts, bits of food, leather water bottles and flagons into saddlebags. A servant ran to bring his young master his sword, scabbard and belt, put his foot in a pile of steaming horse dung and piss, slipped and fell headlong. The sword fell out of the scabbard, rattled along the cobblestones. The young man leant impossibly low out of his saddle, like an Irish horseboy performing tricks, scooped up the sword, left the inlaid leather belt and scabbard on the ground where another horse trampled on it, splintering it into two halves. Shouting. Everyone shouting. Yells and shrieks, tears and whoops of joy. With a rattling, groaning crash the great gates were opened, the flood of men piling out on the road to the harbour.
'You quite sure you want to be on this ride? You do want your 'ead on a pike on London Bridge, don't you?' said Mannion.
'If I can keep up with him and talk sense to him, it won't come to that,' said Gresham. 'And I'm the only one of this lot who can talk sense to him. Are you coming?'
He had not told Mannion about the child.
'Of course I'm bleedin' well coming!' said Mannion, outraged. 'I alius comes, don't I? Particularly when I think it's bleedin' madness!'
Strange how human life was so often cast in extremes. Light and dark. Heat and cold. Good and evil. Order and chaos. The mass confusion of their departure was met by supreme order at the quayside. With only a few hours to prepare, ships had been paid for, stored, made ready and extra vessels ordered for the horses. The calm of the embarkation did not silence the young men. All night on board ship they laughed, joked and diced, many swigging from jugs, as the sea hissed past. Essex moved among them, clapping backs, sharing jokes, laughing at things that were not funny.
Dawn. The lowest time for men, when the darkness has sapped the life from them, when the thin, cold light seems to offer no hope. More noise, more chatter.
They started to gallop through the North Wales countryside. The pounding hooves threw up huge clods of earth. Birds and animals squawked and fluttered out of their way in panic as the cavalcade rode remorselessly on, peasants and children standing back in the dreary villages of mud and looking in drop-mouthed wonder.
The first the Queen must hear of her general's return was when he walked in to confront her! Anything less and Cecil and his crew would have time to hide the Queen away, marshal troops outside her palace. Speed was essential!
Essex had never seemed braver, more sure of himself, more in command. If only they had seen this in Ireland! Single-handedly he kept up the spirits of his men, as if the force of his personality alone could drive them to London. They laughed and joked, shouted at each other as the wind tore through their hair. The tiredness crept in slowly, the bone-aching, tortured-muscle tiredness, and they talked and joked less, hunched down over their mounts more, rode on even into the darkness. Essex seemed as if he was not of this world, not possessed of muscles and sinews like ordinary men. They grabbed an hour, two hours' sleep in wayside inns, in hovels where they threw gold at the occupants, through the North Wales valleys, past the Earl's estates at Chartley without thinking of stopping. Pain, the whole journey now becoming a matter of simple endurance. They rode, savagely hard, through a history of England — the Vale of Evesham, the northern Cotswolds, the Vale of the White Horse. As their horses faded and faltered, they threw more gold in the air and took nags, anything that could bear them and had breath in its body. Through the Chilterns, London almost in their sights.
Four days and nights. Four days and nights with hardly any sleep, four days arid nights of a breathless, mindless race through England, four days and nights where Gresham wondered if they had the Devil behind them or the Devil as their leader.
Dawn on Friday. They had left Dublin on Monday. The last few days of September, the nights drawing in, the sun losing its heat. Already the smoke from the early morning fires was gathering over London, its wooden buildings creaking with the change in temperature, a thin line of condensation on the cobbles at Westminster. The Court was at Nonsuch Palace, eleven miles south of London. They had to cross the river using the Lambeth ferry. Someone saw a group of horses tethered on the other side of the river. God was on their side! They could get all of those who had survived the ride, some thirty or forty, onto the ferry, commandeer the other horses, then send it back to bring their horses along in the rear. Gresham and Mannion piled in with the others. No one looked at them with hostility. Simply by being there at the end they had proved something.
The cold and damp morning gave no relief to their aching limbs. It had rained in London overnight. The man in charge of the horses was reluctant to release them. Even gold did not sway him. One of Essex's acolytes, Tom Gerard, hit the man a sharp blow to the side of his head, knocking him over. Had anyone else passed this way? Anyone in a hurry?
Yes, the man stuttered. The great Lord Grey had ridden by only moments ago, in a great hurry.
Grey. One of Cecil's men. Had he heard of Essex's return? Was he even now riding to tell the Queen? This was no time to relax!
They piled onto the horses, Essex shouting instructions for Gerard to wait behind and bring up their other horses after them. But the road was slippery. Autumn leaves covered it, and fell on the men. Dead things, Gresham thought. Dead leaves. An omen? Mud was everywhere, the clods of earth they had thrown up in Wales matched by lumps of sodden clay and earth, besmirching them, marking their faces. A man took his hat off, wiped his brow, showing the line on his forehead where the mud had not penetrated beneath the hat. There was a clatter behind them. Troops? They swung round. It was Gerard, bringing the spare horses. He had ignored the treacherous road
