Earthly Joys

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There was a wherry boat waiting at the lord’s private jetty but it was otherwise deserted.

‘For London?’ the man asked without much interest. ‘In a hurry?’

‘Yes,’ John said shortly.

He stepped into the little boat and he thought the lurch it made at his weight was what caused the sudden pounding of his heart. He sat in the prow of the boat so the man might not have the chance to look in his face, and he wrapped himself warm in his cape and pulled down his hat over his face. He was sure that the sunlight along the river was pointing a rippling finger towards him so that every fisherman and riverside walker, pedlar and beggar took particular note of him as the boat went swiftly downstream.

The river flowed fast down to London, and the tide was on the ebb. They did the journey quicker than John had hoped and when the boat nudged against the Whitehall steps and John leaped ashore it was only dusk. He blamed his sense of sickness on the movement of the boat. He did not want to recognise his fear.

No-one paid any attention to the working man with his hat pulled down over his eyes and his cape up to his ears. There were hundreds, thousands of men like him, making their way across London for their suppers. John knew the way to Lord Monteagle’s house and slipped from shadow to shadow, making little sound on the dirt and mud of the streets.

Lord Monteagle’s house was lit by double burning torches in the sconces outside. The front door stood wide open and his men, hangers-on, friends, and beggars passed in and out without challenge. His lordship was dining at the top table at the head of the hall, there was a continual press of people all around him, friends of his household, servants, retainers and, towards the back of the hall, supplicants and common people who had come in for the amusement of watching the lord at his dinner. John hung back and surveyed the scene.

As he waited and watched, a man touched his shoulder and went to hurry past him. John recognised one of Lord Monteagle’s servants, a man called Thomas, hurrying to dinner.

The note was in John’s hand, the direction clear. ‘A moment,’ he said, and pressed it into the man’s hand. ‘For your master. For the love of Mary.’

He knew what a potent spell that name would weave. The man took it and glanced at him, but John was already turning away and diving into an alley out of sight. He took a moment and then peered cautiously out.

Thomas Ward had entered the big double doors and was making his way to the head of the table. John saw him lean to whisper in his master’s ear and hand him the note. The job was done. John stepped out into the street again and strolled onward, careful not to hurry, resisting the temptation to run. He strolled as if he were a working man on his way to an inn, hungry for his supper. As he turned the corner and there was no shout of alarm, and no running footsteps behind him, he allowed his pace to quicken – as fast as a man who knows that he should be home by a certain time. One more corner and John allowed himself to run, a gentle jogging run, as a man might do when he was late for an appointment and hoping to make up for the delay. He kept a sharp watch out among the dirt and cobblestones so that he did not slip and fall, and he kept a brisk pace until he was ten, fifteen minutes away from Lord Monteagle’s, out of breath, but safe.

He took his dinner at an inn by the river and then found he was too weary to face the journey back to Theobalds. He headed instead for his lord’s house near Whitehall, where Tradescant might always command a bed. He shared an attic room with two other men, saying that he had been sent to the docks for some rarity promised by an East India trader but which had proved to be nothing.

When all the clocks in London struck eight, John went down to the great hall and found his master, as if by magic, also resident in London calmly seated to break his fast at the big chair at the head of the big table at the top of the hall. Robert Cecil raised an eyebrow at him, John returned the smallest nod, and master and man, at either end of the hall, fell on their bread and cheese and small ale and ate with relish.

Cecil summoned him with a crook of his long finger. ‘I have a small task for you today and then you can go back to Theobalds,’ he said.

John waited.

‘There is a little room in Whitehall where some kindling is stored. I should like it damped down to prevent the danger of a fire.’

John frowned, his eyes on his master’s impish face. ‘My lord?’

‘I’ve got a lad who will show you where to go,’ Cecil continued smoothly. ‘Take a couple of buckets and make sure the whole thing is soaked through. And come away without being observed, my John.’

‘If there is a danger of fire I should clear it all out,’ John offered. He had the sense of swimming in deep and dangerous water and knew that this was his master’s preferred element.

‘I’ll clear it out when I know who laid the fire in the first place,’ Cecil said, very low. ‘Just damp it down for me now.’

‘Then I’ll get back to my garden,’ Tradescant said.

Cecil grinned at the firmness of the statement. ‘Then your job is finished here, go and plant something. My work is coming into its flowering time.’

It was only after 5 November that John learned that the whole Gunpowder Plot had been discovered by Lord Monteagle who had received a letter warning him not to go near Parliament. He had, quite rightly, taken the letter to Secretary Robert Cecil who, unable to understand its meaning, had laid the whole thing before the king. The king, quicker-witted than them all – how they praised him for the speed of his understanding! – had ordered the Houses of Parliament to be searched and found Guido Fawkes crouched amid kindling, and nearby, barrels of gunpowder. On the wave of anti-Catholic sentiment Cecil enforced laws to control Papists, and mopped up the remaining opposition to the English Protestant succession. The handful of desperate, dangerous families were identified as one confession led to another, and as the young men who had staked everything on a barrel of wet gunpowder were captured, tortured and executed. The one bungled plot forced everyone from the king to the poorest beggar to turn against the Catholics in a great wave of revulsion. The one dreadful threat – to the king, to his wife, to the two little princes – was such that no monarch in Europe, Catholic or Protestant, would ever plot again with English Catholics. The Spanish and French kings were monarchs before they were Catholics. And as monarchs they would never tolerate regicide.

Even more importantly for Cecil, the horror at the thought of what might have happened if Monteagle had not proved faithful, if the king had not proved astute, persuaded Parliament to grant the king some extraordinary revenue for the year and pushed back for another twelve months the impending financial crisis.

‘Thank you, John,’ Cecil said when he returned to Theobalds in early December. ‘I won’t forget.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ John said.

Cecil grinned at him, his schoolboyish conspiratorial grin. ‘Much better not to,’ he replied engagingly.