Gresham spoke softly. 'There is no threat to a King from me. Nor ever has been.' He paused. 'There would have been no threat even had Will spoken with me. Will never spoke. He had no time. And you were worried about a note, or some secret letter from Will to me? Was that why my rooms were ransacked in the House?'
Cecil was silent. Both men took the silence as meaning yes.
'Well now, there's an irony would have appealed to Will. You see, I know my men. I know those who work for me. And I know that Will Shadwell could neither read nor write to save his life.'
He stood up, remembering to make it look painful, and left without ceremony given or received. Cecil was standing by the window, motionless, as the great door closed.
He had told the truth about Will Shadwell to Cecil, at any rate. If Cecil had bothered to check, instead of simply ordering Shadwell and Gresham murdered, he would have found Shadwell could neither read nor write. As for Cecil's tale, it could be true, or it could be another lie. Thomas Percy was a newly appointed Gentleman of the Bedchamber, better able than most to supply details of who entered the King's inner chamber. Cecil probably did think he was protecting the realm from its enemies by all he did, that he was the saviour of the nation.
Mannion was waiting for him. The crowd of hopefuls had not diminished.
'Now for Alsatia?' enquired Mannion, expressionless. 'Now for Alsatia,' confirmed Gresham, remembering to limp slightly as if in pain from the load strapped to his belly until they were well away from Cecil's lair, and sure they were not being followed.
There was no Watch to call out the hour in Alsatia. No constable or serjeant-at-arms entered Alsatia to serve his warrant. There were no walls around Alsatia, yet its boundaries excluded friends of the state just as the iron walls of the Tower excluded its enemies. If London was a fine ship, Alsatia was its bilges, the lowest sump where all that was foul-smelling gathered and stank. Gresham's spies, his scum, came to the various meeting places in ones and twos, draped and cloaked not against the cold but against discovery and recognition. No-one walked straight in Alsatia. All skulked along in the shade of the leaning, stinking buildings, all sought to walk in shadow.
The House lay shuttered, many of the servants sent home to the country to help with the harvest. The dust gathered in Gresham's rooms at Granville College, his place on High Table empty.
Gresham had set up camp on the first floor of a foul-looking three-storey house with mildew rotting the outer timbers. Inside it was a different story. Stout new doors blocked the way into the first-floor rooms, which were newly floored. The shutters of seasoned timber had had paint loosely splashed on them to make them look old, but underneath the mess were also clearly new.
'You've had these rooms prepared?' asked Jane. She looked thinner, and there was still a slightly haunted look to her eyes, but her spirit was returning.
'Of course,' said Gresham, genuinely startled. 'This isn't the first time I've had to vanish.'
The pile of books in the corner was one antidote to boredom. Disguise was the other. Mannion adorned himself in the rough jerkin and cowl of the stonemason, tools strapped to his belt. Gresham wrapped himself in a poorer version of Mannion's costume, setting himself up as apprentice to the older man. Jane they put in a filthy smock. She could be a common-law wife, a whore or even a sister to Gresham. In Alsatia no-one cared, and in the wider streets of London no-one had time to notice.
Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, the information dribbled in, often as tattered and piecemeal as those who brought it. It was three weeks of boredom, of trudging through the filthy streets, of keeping two eyes in the back of their heads, of disturbed nights when a scream or a howl sent Gresham and Mannion grasping for their swords. Three weeks before a real picture began to emerge. Most of it came from servants, of course. There was no house where the servants did not know more than their Lord and mistress about what was going on.
Sharpy Sam was one of Gresham's most valuable sources. An elderly, grandfatherly figure, he was a wandering tinker who would sell you an occasional pot or pan and sharpen your knives, or sing you the latest ballad over supper, and was tolerated by the authorities in his illegal wandering life simply because he was useful. Many an unsuspecting scullery maid had taken pity on Sharpy Sam and invited him for a morsel of food and a warm by the fire, to find herself left a short while later with a memory of pleasure and a bastard in her belly.
Gresham knew Sam's annual progress. The Midlands and the west in high summer, London in late autumn and the south coast for the winter months. He had sent one of his own men, a young, lusty recruit with a love of horseflesh and women, to ride hard after Sam and brief him with the same names Moll had given him. Catesby. Kit Wright. Jack Wright. Tom Wintour. Thomas Percy. And Francis Tresham, of course. Even before Sam presented himself to talk to Gresham there was news enough, so much news indeed that Gresham marvelled at even Cecil's not finding it out. The men had been meeting regularly. They were all Catholics, all linked by blood or by marriage, and frequently by both. Then, out of the blue, a greasy John at one of the taverns in the Strand reported another name. Guido or Guy Fawkes, an armourer and mercenary.
The name and his profession clinched it for Gresham.
Why did a group of Catholics, many of whom had a history of rebellion only a few years earlier with the ill-fated Essex, want to meet with a soldier and armourer? Such men knew about weapons, armour and powder. The presence of one of Northumberland's relatives and henchmen had to be crucial. So did the servant gossip of great stocks of weaponry and horses over and above any conceivable need being laid in.
A group of dissident men in regular conclave. A professional soldier. A potential leader drawn from one of the oldest aristocratic families in the kingdom. Weapons and war supplies being bought in.
It had to be an uprising.
With the Spanish troops quartered in Dover? Possibly. Was Northumberland involved? He was the only Catholic with the breeding and the standing to act as Protector if King James was done away with. If Gresham were in Northumberland's rich shoes, he would not bother with the Spanish troops in Dover, except as perhaps a distant threat to divert Cecil's attention. Rather he would turn not only to all the young English Catholic men blooding themselves and defining their manhood in the European wars, but to all the disaffected soldiers in Europe who might smell easy meat in knocking a new Scottish King off an English throne. After all, had not a Catholic ambassador described James in the hearing of his court as 'a scabbard without a sword'? Europe was more scared of Queen Bess than they were of James. Scottish Kings were brought up to defend themselves by a knife in the back, not a cavalry charge to the front. There was nothing approaching an army in England, and the only man left to build and lead a fleet was Sir Walter Raleigh, languishing in the Tower on a trumped-up charge of treason.
Gresham paced up and down the small room, spilling his thoughts to Jane and Mannion.
'It must be an uprising!' he exclaimed. 'These men aren't courtiers, men who wish to rule! They're gentry, foolish idealists, men who think because they've held a sword and fought off a drunken ploughboy in a market-town brawl that they're soldiers. I don't believe the Earl of Northumberland could stir himself to be King if he was asked by Jesus himself! No, their plot must be to kidnap the King. He makes it easy. The man's besotted with hunting. Where easier to grab a monarch than in a forest where his men are bound to be split up? Take him, hold him in some stronghold with two or three hundred well-armed men. Move your mercenaries and your missionaries over from the Lowlands before a navy or an army can be mustered. The King's a coward. Show him some cold steel, prick him a little, make him sign what you will. Make him call a Parliament, make him promise God on earth to the people. Ride him in state back to London… they will have to kill Cecil, of course…'