They had guts, he would give them that, thought Gresham. That, or they were being extraordinarily well paid for their thuggery. The attackers hurled themselves at the line of Gresham's men. With Jane secure behind the upturned bench, Gresham leaped forward, sword in hand.
Two of Gresham's men went down, but several of their assailants grunted, screamed or dropped like stones. Gresham's line swayed, seemed to buckle but then flexed out again. Knocked back, the man who was the leader of their attackers turned and swore at the rest for being cowards, and then leaped forward, flinging himself at the line with immense courage from the height of a bench, Whatever else he may have been, he was no coward.
He was a thin, wiry figure, with a goatee beard and small, close-set eyes. As well as a club, he brandished a long knife. Screaming, he leaped forward with his club arm upraised.
Suddenly, his hand was no longer attached to his arm. The severed body part, with the club still clenched in it, dropped to the floor while a jet of bright red blood shot from the stump. The man looked on in disbelief at his own hand falling to the ground. The blow Gresham had delivered with his sword was almost impossible.
Bone needs an axe to slice through it, not a sword blade. A sharp edge helped, of course, but the real trick was a flick of the wrists — it could only be done two-handed — at the point of impact that delivered all the strength not just of the swordsman's arm but of his whole body. There was a sickening thud as Mannion delivered what must have been a death blow, breaking soft brain tissue as well as bone.
The attackers looked at the severed hand, the smashed head of their leader, the stump of his arm. Without a word, to a man they turned and ran. They were disciplined, still, after a fashion. There was a scream from one of them,' and they turned to pick up their own. Eight or nine were grievously wounded, but still able to walk or be supported. Two of them dead? Three? Gresham reckoned it could not be less. Four with their leader. Two of the attackers, one heavy built, the other a light weight, made to grab their leader, legs stuck ungainly over a bench. Gresham's men growled, moved forward.
'Hold!' said Gresham. It was a croak, no more. His throat was dry beyond belief. It was enough. His own men held back. 'Take him,' said Gresham to the mob. His sword pointed at them, menacing, all-powerful.
The two men looked at him. His authority was complete. They darted in, grabbing the body, the bloodied head bumping pathetically as it dragged over the bench and floor. Gresham's men did not move. The heavy-set man flung the body of his leader over his shoulder. The stump of the arm was still losing blood, a thin stream now, almost in droplets. The pale, pathetic thing that had once been a human hand lay on the planks, still.
Gresham reached back to grasp Jane's wrist.
It was not there.
Then he heard a scream. Jane. Jane's voice. 'THERE!' it said.
He turned, and his heart froze in his ribs. Jane, his beautiful girl, the thing he loved more than life itself, was smeared in blood, huge blotches of blood on her face and arms and the bodice of her dress.
Where was she wounded? Where was she wounded?
Then he realised that the blood was not hers but the blood of the man whose hand he had severed, flailing over her like an obscene shower. Her eyes were wide open, and the hand Gresham had grasped so tightly was pointed over his shoulder, behind him. A part of his brain found time to notice the rough, red marks all round her slim wrist, where he had manhandled her and held on with such force.
He turned, feeling as he did so that his every movement had been slowed down ten or twenty times, noting Mannion's mouth open ever so slowly in warning, suddenly inhabiting a world of total silence. There, almost on the other side of the theatre, was a warped figure in a black cloak, the hood thrown back to reveal a whitened and shrunken pate with a wig ludicrously hanging off to one side. He held a crossbow in his hand, the bolt resting in its groove and notched, the string cocked. Slowly, ever more slowly, Gresham saw the fumbling hands, hands behaving as if they could not feel the wood and iron, raise the crossbow and hold it rock steady.
He must have watched the whole fight. Organised it. Hidden the crossbow earlier. His insurance.
The finger tightened on the release. There was a twang. The figure threw the crossbow away. It tumbled to the floor, and the figure scurried out of The Globe.
A scream of agony tore its way from Gresham's heart to his throat, but he heard nothing. He saw the bolt leave the weapon, and with agonising, awful slowness compared to the speed of the bolt turned again to thrust Jane to the ground and himself in front of her. But his hand found nothing on which it could push. Jane had dropped to the ground with a lightning reaction. With nothing to block his momentum, Gresham knew his body would coincide exactly with where Jane's body would have been, with exactly where the bolt was heading. With the very last of his strength he sought to twist in mid-air, to at least present his arm and rib cage to the bolt rather than his exposed back.
He was like a man doing a back-flip over a high bar, feet just off the ground, head flung back, chest arched upwards, when the bolt struck.
It pierced his doublet as if the satin was thin air, and ran across his rib-cage with such precision that the line of its passage was not marked with red swathe over the whole flesh but simply with reddened areas where the upwards thrust of his ribs had felt its passage. The bolt thwacked into the rear wall with massive force, embedding a third of its length into the soft timbers. Pinioned, Gresham hung by his doublet for a moment, suspended, face up to the sky. Light, sound, colour and heat returned to his life as by the click of fingers.
Mannion, in the last second of his mad rush towards his master, crashed over the broken bench and tumbled on to his back.
'God's blood!' said Gresham, drawing his head up to look at the. bolt that suspended him from the theatre wall.
A quiver of something that might have been release ran through Mannion's body. Picking himself up, but making no attempt to remove the pin that hung his master from the rear wall, he announced casually, but in a loud voice, 'I've told you what happens to people who hang around the theatre.'
The smooth silk of Gresham's fine doublet, any more than the linen of his shirt, offered no resistance to the steel of the crossbow bolt. Gresham dropped unceremoniously to the floor, in a tangle with both Mannion and the blood-stained Jane.
Suddenly Mannion's comment was the best joke ever made by anyone in the history of the world. Young Harry, a great wound on the side of his head already beginning to dry and blacken, started it with a thin, almost insane giggle. It spread through the other men, to Mannion, to Gresham and to Jane, so that they rocked and sobbed with laughter, making the very floor shake.
Their laughter did not last long. For many the pain was too keen to be overlaid by relief. One man was unconscious, another still only half conscious. Three others were coated in their own blood, groggy, confused, nursing wounds that made walking difficult. At least one had a broken arm. Others would find, in a few minutes, as the red heat of battle dissipated in their blood, that they had broken a finger or even a rib. Those that could stumbled to their feet, the wounded ones pathetically trying to smooth their dress while new red blood seeped through the blackened mess.
'Not bad,' said Mannion matter-of-factly, 'for beginners. Not bad at all.'
They stiffened with pride. Proud of what they had done. Proud of what they had prevented. Proud of their master, who had outguessed their enemy from the start, who had thrust himself forward at perilous danger, who had risked his life first and in some strange way not commanded but rather asked them to risk their lives second, if that was their choice. And, if the truth be known, proud of their mistress. No screaming, no pouting, no fainting. A mistress who had become in a moment a soldier, one of them, obeying orders. Who could look at her and deny that she was a woman? Yet who could see her courage and deny that she was in every vital respect a man?