Tresham felt a deep, inner exhaustion as he entered the familiar doors, doors that once had been comforting to him. Catesby, Fawkes and Tom Wintour were there, with Robert Keyes. He had not liked Fawkes on their one previous meeting, feeling in him a contempt for the civilians with whom he was temporarily involved. His dislike had increased now he realised that this was the man who had planted the powder, and the man who was prepared to light the fuse to it. To Hell with the Lords in Parliament, who probably deserved to go there anyway. The powder could blow up whoever it pleased, but there was a terrible danger of Francis Tresham being caught in the blast..
From the start Tresham sensed a difference in Catesby. They were seated together in a room of dark oak panelling, bare of portraits but with mullioned windows overlooking the tended garden. By it a kitchen maid was poking at a mass of green in the kitchen garden, seeking the best plants to take back inside to Cook. Tresham looked enviously down on her bent back, noting her complete absorption in her task. Could his life ever be that simple?
'We're bound to blow up several of our own kind. Not just common people — the people whose leadership we depend on! Are we Catholics, or are we cannibals, feeding off our own kind?' Tresham was pushing at the point.
There was a sardonic grin on Fawkes's face. He rarely spoke, and when he did it was with a strange tang of Yorkshire and Spain in his accent.
'People die in wars,' he said now. 'Innocent people, as well as guilty people and soldiers.'
'For too long,' said Catesby, 'we've seen our battle as being about ideas and faith. Those things aren't "what we fight with. They're what we fight for. And fight we must. Do you think those who might die in the Lords would think their lives lost if by their death we bring God's rule back into England?'
'They won't be able to tell us, will they?' grunted Tresham. 'They'll be dead.'
'Some, not all. Many won't come, because they know they'll have to pass legislation against our kind. Others we can warn.'
They ran through the list. It was far too long. There was young Thomas Howard, recently appointed Earl of Arundel and restored to that ancient title. How could the young Lord Vaux be allowed into the massacre, given what the Vaux women had done for the Faith over the years? Tresham argued, as he had to, for his two brothers-in-law, Monteagle and Stourton. Then there was Lord Montagu… why, Gatesby had dined with two of them hardly a week past. Had he taken their supper whilst looking at them and knowing he was signing their death warrants?… Tresham had an unexpected ally in Robert Keyes, when he spoke in defence of Lord Mordaunt. Keyes was Tresham's age, a large man with a flowing red beard, but a generous soul, for all that he was a poor man. He had been one of the first to join the conspiracy. Perhaps it was the pair of them speaking out in favour of Mordaunt that provoked Catesby to show his fangs.
'Mordaunt!' he sneered. 'Why, I wouldn't tell that man a secret for a room full of jewels! It's precisely because of men such as him that we can't tell all and sundry what's to happen. They'd destroy us as readily as if we marched to tell the King ourselves.'
'But the young Arundel,' said Tresham. 'Surely if we kill such as him we're killing our hope for the future?'
'Why, then, stop him from coming by other means. Isn't there a man here who could give the boy a wound that'll keep him in bed for a week or two?'
A splutter of conversation broke out around the table. Catesby let it run.
'Hold!' he announced firmly, after fully quarter of an hour of pointless debate with no conclusion. 'I myself have warned Montagu.' He glared round the table, daring any there present to deny him his right. 'One or two of the others, possibly, I might tell hours before, if I so decide. You will leave it with me.'
There was total silence around the table.
'This is no petty squabble,' he carried on, in a low voice that carried as if it had been sharpened. 'This is the battle for the soul of England. Didn't Christ die to redeem us all? Wasn't Christ innocent of all evil? Didn't his mother, and his father, have long hours to mourn his death? Sometimes the innocent must perish with the guilty, sooner than lose the battle.'
They arranged to meet again on October 23rd, at The Irish Boy.
A wider gathering was planned for the day after at The Mitre tavern in Bread Street, between Cheapside and the river, though not for the conspirators. Catesby was cheerful enough to muster a smile when he told his devilish company not to meet him there. He was due to meet ambassadors for the archdukes. He had spread the word that he and Charles Percy, Thomas Percy's brother, were forming a troop to go and fight in Europe, partly to lure away any Government spies in the taverns, partly to reassure Anne Vaux and Father Garnet. For those who did not probe too deeply, the expedition was good enough cover for their purchase of horses and weapons.
From Bread Street, mused Francis Tresham, you could see both the Tower of London, its White Tower with its four new pepper-pot cupolas, and St Paul's, still without its steeple after a lightning blast in Elizabeth's reign. Prime executions spots, the Tower and St Paul's. He felt a clawing in his stomach, and wondered if the crowds would be gathering in one of those spots to see his disembowelment before November 5th.
It had to be stopped, this madness. It had to cease.
Chapter 9
The miners were thin, wiry creatures with an aversion to washing their backs and muscles made of corded steel. If they were to avoid discovery, it was essential that their work was done at break-neck speed, and in silence. The men could be housed easily enough, shutters kept tight and a single candle the only light. Food and drink were brought in after midnight, with those bringing it carting the waste away at the same time, usually choosing to dump it in the river where it was sluiced away. The men had been well briefed. Any curiosity they might have had was torn out of them by the sheer physical pressure of the work. The armed guards placed there to ensure that none of the bumpkins went sightseeing had an easy job.
'Silence!' Their overseer barked a whispered command and the men froze, those still in the tunnel slinking back. A rattle of hooves and wheels outside had stopped. There was a shouted command, the cart started up again. The men relaxed, the remainder climbing their way out through the hole in the floor, dripping sweat on to the newly sanded boards.
The men worked naked in the tunnel, though a few made a rough pouch for their testicles, to protect them from cuts, or placed a sweatband round their head. By their standards it was not difficult work, the main opening having been cut, but the scenes underground still looked like a vision of Hell. The feeble yellow light flickered over the naked bodies, glinting off the sweat that caked them, and seeming to emphasise the dark patches where muck and earth had become embedded in the miners' flesh. The air was foetid, stinking of sweat, piss and decay, and the light cast huge shadows on the rough wall as the miners hewed away at the subsoil and rock. The shadow dancers seemed like huge mythical creatures, beating punishment into an unyielding earth to the tune of the picks' out-of-tempo clink and thud. The job would soon be done, the miners sent back home richer but none the wiser.
Above the ground, London went about its normal business. The bankers and moneylenders bowed low and opened the doors of their fine timbered houses in Goldsmiths' Row, whilst yards away, hidden from sight and mind, the rat-infested rookeries held families of eight or ten souls, crammed into the one room. The prosperous shop owners took their over-dressed wives to sit on the benches by St Paul's and to hear the sermon, watching all the time to see which Privy Council member and which wife of which famous Lord was sitting in the privileged north gallery of the Cathedral wall. Meantime hungry-eyed men waited for the gawping sailors and country bumpkins come to see the great Cathedral, knowing that a false dash at a purse would mean the gallows only a few yards away from where the word of God was being preached. God was a strange master in this greatest of all cities. A wretch was being whipped through the street at the tail of a cart, for having denied God, whilst the moneylenders thronged the aisles of London's Cathedral. The bright-painted two and four-oar wherries cried out for trade on the riverbank, peaking as the time came for the afternoon performances in the playhouses across the river in Southwark. Sitting on one of their plush-covered cushions was a young girl, dressed as if for Court. She ran her hands through the water, the same water on which swans were floating a short way away. She had been told not to, but the pattern of the water and the sensuality of its cold across her hand were too great to resist. Later, she sucked her hand without thinking, watching as they neared their landing jetty and gazing in wonder at so many fine ships on the river. In seven days she would be dead, the incessant bleeding to which her surgeons submitted her sapping her body's resistance to the flux which raged through her thin, under-developed body. It is London, and in the playhouse Hotspur is about to proclaim: