conversation which had just taken place. No doubt the luckless Sir Henry had explained how the man known to him as Jonathan Noyce had fallen into his company two weeks previously, not long after learning from a local informant that refugee plotters might be hiding in his county. In turn, Noyce would have explained that, after spending weeks searching Holbeach and nearby houses, he too had received word that the notorious Nicholas Owen and two priests, all of whom were suspected plotters, had been run to ground at Hindlip Hall.
With the men fast approaching, the watcher turned and began to run along the gallery, glancing through the windows as he passed them. Armed with Mrs Habingdon’s information, which had already guided him to the four empty priest holes, his course was pre-determined. As though on ice, his boots skated across the boards and he turned into a smaller hallway before bursting through a door.
The pounding of feet, booted now, grew louder, striding across the floor in a fashion so determined that there could be little doubt about the final destination: his hiding place. All of a sudden, the ends of the earth seemed closer than Owen had imagined. With no weapon at hand he uttered a final prayer. But even now, as the light began to break in through the gap in the shifting timbers, it came to him that a locking device on the interior could prevent such an uninvited entry. But it was too late. There would be no more building projects. The enemy had breached his defences and he was about to be taken. He pressed himself against the back wall, determined to make his extrication as difficult as possible, and watched as the man who would be claiming bounty on him showed his face in the entrance.
“Mr Quick!” exclaimed Owen, scarcely able to believe his eyes. “Gads sir! I thought … I thought you were a priest hunter.”
“There hangs a tale,” said the breathless man in the aperture. “This is far too small,” he said, shaking his head in disappointment at the sight of the crouching man on the other side. “There is barely room for one in there, let alone the two of us.”
Owen had been holed up for so long, that the implication of this observation appeared to pass him by. “What of our friends?”
Quick tried to ignore the miasmic stench emanating from the freshly exposed hiding place. “Never mind them. We have enemies a plenty about to enter the house. We need another hiding place. As the house seems riddled with them I trust you can oblige?”
Owen nodded. “I was not far from trying to remove myself from here to there, when you made your entrance.”
“Then we must move quickly,” said the man, who for days had been known as Mr Noyce but was now answering to Mr Quick. After checking that the coast was still clear, he reached in a hand and pulled the hunchback from his refuge. “The silver, you have the silver?”
In response, Owen produced a bag, which he had some difficulty lifting. Quick took it from him and closed the hole behind them. As they moved off with Owen in the lead, it was obvious that days of confinement and immobility had taken their toll. He was limping along on stiff limbs, when a sprint was required. Quick, perhaps eager to live up to his true name, did what he could to help him along and speed their progress.
Quick served as crutch to his companion and struggled to keep a grip on the bag as they hobbled down the hall. At the top of the stairs they halted, the sound of raised voices giving away the presence of men in the vestibule below. But there was also a woman’s voice. It was Mrs Habingdon delivering a tongue-lashing. “Mr Noyce has been in my house for these three days past, prying into crack and crevice and now you tell me that
They did not wait to hear Sir Henry’s reply, and thanks to the ever resourceful lady of the house and her raised voice, knew better than to descend the stairs. “This way,” whispered Owen, gesturing along the landing. With the movement returning to his legs he guided them to the rear of the house to a more modest set of stairs. “For the use of the servants,” he said as they made their way down. Quick glanced out of a window and was perturbed to see any chance of slipping out through a back door denied them, as soldiers took up fresh positions in the rear court. On reaching the ground floor they disappeared down another flight of stairs and entered into the under-croft.
Sir Henry was the first to enter the room but Noyce, still unaware of the reason for the Justice’s agitation, was not far behind. Although in disarray, the bed-chamber was an elegant room, which was why Sir Henry had commandeered it on his arrival at the house. Garments lay scattered throughout, but in the absence of his man- servant and dresser — and Mrs Habingdon’s unwillingness to provide such — how could he be expected to keep the place in order? The drapes hanging from the beams of the four-poster were billowing like sails in the wind. Sir Henry drew his sword and approached the bed. He pulled back one of the drapes and let out a gasp.
Noyce lifted an edge of the thin wooden panel before letting it fall back on to the bed. With sword drawn Sir Henry climbed up on to the bed, cracking the panel in two as he set his feet upon it. At the head of the bed there was a hole in the wall, which had been exposed by the removal of the panel. Sitting a small distance back from the panel’s frame were sturdier timbers, sitting one on top of the other like the planks in the hull of a boat. These had been pulled aside to reveal a dark chasm through which a draught of cold air was blowing.
“Your room I presume?” said Noyce, as he kicked aside a large night-shirt while securing a view into the exposed hiding place.
Sir Henry was standing on his own pillows and peering into the darkness. He said nothing.
Noyce could barely disguise the contempt in his voice. “Then one of them was hiding less than an arm’s length away from where you have been resting your head at night.”
Sir Henry put a hand to his neck and replied bitterly, “That would appear to be the case. And thanks to this damned draught I can now barely move my head on my shoulders.”
If Noyce was wondering how Sir Henry could have failed to notice the draught previously, the sound of an empty bottle falling from under one of the pillows was enough to provide an answer. “Let us hope, sir, that your head stays on your shoulders. The king will not look kindly on failure in this matter.”
Owen and Quick tip-toed past the busy kitchen, where a soldier could be heard working his charm on one of the serving girls. They approached the pantry, where the day before Mrs Habingdon had directed Quick to an unoccupied hiding place. Small it may have been, but his “discovery” of that cubby-hole — along with several others, in the company of Sir Henry — had done much to impress the Justice of his reliability. The scheme had almost worked: he had succeeded in passing himself off as the country’s most celebrated priest hunter, had all but convinced Mrs Habingdon of his allegiance to her own cause and, with the soldiers out of the way, stood every chance of getting the silver off the premises. But all that had been spoiled by the appearance of Noyce.
Gratifying as it was that their destination was not the dreadfully tight space in the pantry, this more accommodating space in the scullery next door was still considerably smaller and more uncomfortable then even the rudest cell in the Tower. While incarcerated here, his devout companion had his rosary beads and prayers to keep his mind occupied, but Quick needed more than incantations and baubles to distract him from the closeness of the walls. When what he had always considered to be a long line of female conquests proved only long enough to provide a pitifully brief distraction, his thoughts turned to the events of the past few weeks.
The taking of Guido Fawkes and his powder, sitting unburned within the confines of hoop and stave, had been only the beginning. The plot involved a dozen or more conspirators at its heart, and many more with knowledge of it. Under instruction from the Spanish Ambassador in London, Quick arrived at Huddington Court, where, with his impeccable references he was accepted into the company of thirty or more conspirators and supporters; despite being grateful for that, he couldn’t help look down on them for their naive lack of suspicion. In the event of the plot’s success, which required king and parliament by then to be blown to the high heavens, this meeting would have seen the formation of an army. At that moment their numbers were small, but spurred on by success there would have been determination and money enough to expand their ranks a thousandfold.
But king and parliament, being alive to do so, went to great lengths to broadcast their survival and to expose the plot as a failure. It was a state of affairs which made these thirty or more — not first recruits, but a gang of desperados — hell-bent on saving their own skins. It would have been good to complete his business there at a time when, at least for a man who knew his business, escape was still a straightforward matter. But the
