He started and, rather guiltily, buttoned up his doublet correctly.
'Look,' he said, 'I know where we've been, but I don't quite know where I am yet. One thing only: no more 'My Lord'. If you have to use something, make it… oh, I don't know… sir?'
'Why, yes, sir,' she said, bobbing a curtsy like a simpering little parlour maid, with a wicked smile lurking at the corner of her mouth.
What did it mean when you left a girl you had just slept with, and found her even more beautiful after the event than you had beforehand? He had not wanted this to happen, or at least had persuaded himself so, but like her something in him had recognised a strange inevitability about the whole thing.
He spent the rest of the day in a daze. Mannion kept an impassive face and said nothing. That night, when he had gone to bed and the embers of the fire were flickering, there was the merest whisper of a door opening, and she stood by the bed. Hesitant, confused as he had never been before in his life since the night he had lost his own virginity, he drew back the cover. Jane slipped in.
Next morning when he woke she was gone, leaving no trace of her presence except for the slightest indent in the pillow and a lingering perfume. When Mannion came, they started the ritual of dressing as first light was coming up over the rooftops. If Mannion smelt a slight fragrance in the air, he said nothing.
He remembered these days as a strange interlude in his life. Outwardly, nothing changed with Jane, except they rarely argued. Once, when she had complained that the cook was paying too much for fish and she suspected the relationship between her and the fishmonger was not entirely restricted to fish he had responded by saying that as far as he was concerned the fishmonger could be going to bed with a school of whales. She had said that he ought to care more where his money went, and he had said it was his money… all like the old times. Just when they were about to start going at each other she giggled, and he stopped in his tracks. ‘What is it?' he said.
'It's your image,' she had said. 'Cook does look very like a whale! And she puts her lips together and blows out with a sort of — 'Harumph!' noise. Just like the books say a whale does. And,' she said, getting carried away, 'the books also say that the breath the whale expels smells awful, and cook can smell awful at times.' Looking at her for the first time with the scales pulled from his eyes, he saw her life force, her exuberant energy. Ruby was the right jewel for her.
At night she came to his bed, and it was strange and new and unlike anything he had ever experienced. Sometimes it was gentle, sometimes almost violent and at other times they did nothing except talk to each other, in stage whispers as if Mannion who slept outside the door did not know what was going on inside. And for the first time in his life he talked to someone other than Mannion about his childhood.
London was convinced that rebellion was imminent the day after Grey assaulted Southampton. As it so often was, London was wrong. The apprentice boys, so frequently the source of riot in the crowded streets, slowly stopped working with half an ear cocked for disturbances, ready to down tools at a moment's notice and start to break some heads. The guards at Whitehall went back to normal manning levels, and it was rumoured that late one night cartloads of muskets and small arms rumbled and rattled their way back into the armoury in the Tower of London, whence they had been summoned to reinforce the guards at Whitehall.
And then the storm broke, one Saturday after what George would undoubtedly have described as Gresham's revelation in an attic.
Gresham was in deep thought when Jane came to see him. There was a purse on the table in front of him, open where he had just taken money out to give to an informer who had skulked in through the back door of The House. It was early morning, and the man had given Gresham much food for thought.
'Sir!' she said, breathless and flushed, 'there's something very strange happening at the Globe. One of the delivery boys was full of it this morning, and I've checked and it's true. Something I think you ought to know.'
'Tell me,' he said, only half interested, his mind churning over what he had just heard. News from a delivery boy did not seem likely to change the world.
'A group of Lord Essex's men were at the Globe yesterday. They saw the play, and then apparently one of them, Lord Mounteagle I think, offered the players forty shillings — forty shillings'. — to put on a performance of Richard the Second. You know — the old play by Shakespeare!'
'I should think the players'll have forgotten the lines by now,' said Gresham. 'It hasn't been performed for years now, has it? It's hardly the height of fashion.'
'That's what the players said, apparently. But the money was too good, and they've agreed to stage it. Tonight. You know what it means, don't you? The play, I mean.'
'It's the story of the rebellion by the Welshman Bolingbroke, who's shown as a loyal and good servant to a fickle monarch. He's banished, returns to England and, with the help of Welsh support, overthrows and imprisons Richard, eventually becoming King himself,'said Gresham.
An incitement to rebellion? A signal to London of what was going to happen? He jumped up to his feet.
'Are we going to the play?' Jane wanted to be in the action.
'Yes. Perhaps. Why not? But first I have to see someone.'
Plays were performed in the early afternoon, after the main meal of the day which, for most people, was at noon. There was time for Gresham to do what he had to do and see the play. 'Who?' asked Jane.
'I have to see a man called Smith,' answered Gresham grimly. He took Mannion and four men with him and returned in time for their dinner. There was a sense of suppressed tension in him. 'Are we going to the play?' asked Jane.
'Yes,' said Gresham. 'But I warn you it could be dangerous. I'm gambling that Essex will be there, so that I can talk to him. I must talk to him! If he is there, you'll be safe. He won't attack me if there's a woman in the party, I know it. If he's not, it could get nasty. Very much so. So if you come it's as our insurance, but at great risk.'
He could see the fear in her eyes, but also the excitement. 'Will I need a pistol?' she asked. 'Can you stuff one in your dress?' 'I'd rather you carried it for me.'
They ordered the boat. Unusually, Gresham chose the crew.
The playhouses were on the south side of the river, outside the strict boundaries of the City of London and thereby granted a little more freedom to do what the City Fathers so hated them for doing. Plays were seditious, evil things in the opinion of many, inflaming the popular imagination and corrupting it, hotbeds of riot, breeding centres for plagues of the body and plagues of the mind. It was a damp, cold day, though not wet enough to cancel the performance. The actors had an awning over the stage, and those who could pay sat in the tiered ranks and boxes of the wooden 'O' that was the Globe theatre. Only the groundling stood and caroused in the open area of the pit, and they were used to being soused.
It was a smaller crowd than usual flitting across the river, and the Globe was only half full, some put off by the damp, some by the unfashionable play and others fearful of what this revival might mean. Some people came onto the streets when rebellion was in the air but more locked and bolted their doors. Yet it seemed as if every rabble-rouser, Welsh peasant and unemployed soldier who had ever walked London's streets was packed in the theatre. Half an hour before the play was due to begin the noise level was rattling the timbers and shaking dust out of the thatch.
'Is this safe?' asked Mannion, not usually prone to feeling nervous.
'For us? For London? Or for the Queen? I don't know,' answered Gresham. Southampton was there, he saw, Mounteagle and the vulture-like Gelli Meyrick, plus a host of the others Essex had gathered round him like a graveyard gathers corpses. And Davies, of course. Would Essex come? Surely he would. For months now he had refused to leave Essex House, citing the danger he believed he was in from his enemies. The attack on Southampton by Grey, when for once the odious little toad was apparently doing nothing more than riding about his own business, had confirmed Essex in his opinion, and produced a host more pamphlets. Even without their master, the mood of the assembly was dark, violent, poisonous.
They had been spotted by the Essex crowd — Gresham, Mannion and Jane, together with the eight men who had rowed them there. There was a strict order among them for who rowed to the play, and such trips were a zealously guarded perk of working for Gresham. Gresham had ordered the rota to be thrown out of the window this time, and had chosen the men himself. Jack, Dick and Edward were there, and five others whose qualifications for the trip seemed to be in the broadness of their backs rather than in their love of poetry. They were on open seats on the first tier, just to the side of the stage. Essex's major cronies were in the same tier, taking the middle seats as befitted the patrons of the performance. Meyrick nudged Davies, and both men looked up to gaze calmly at Gresham. He gazed back. The two men looked impassively at him for a moment, whispered a few more words and turned away.
