'Me? What've I done wrong?' asked Jane, rather plaintive.
'Nothing. You've done nothing wrong. Cecil gambled that Marlowe would risk showing himself if it meant killing me. But haven't you spotted the really terrible thing?'
Jane looked nonplussed. Gresham stared at her. He had to tell her. For all the hurt, for all the pain, he had to tell her. If she was to protect herself she had to know.
'He didn't try to kill me. He tried to kill you, Jane.'
'But I don't-' i saw his eyes in the theatre,' said Gresham. 'They were looking at you, not me. The second bolt was aimed at you. And-that first bolt, the one I felt go by me earlier. It hit the wall just where you'd been a second before. 1 was six or eight feet away.'
'What have I done to deserve this? 1 she cried out. 'I've never set out to hurt or destroy anyone in my life. 1
'He's a sick man, Jane. Sick in his mind as well as his body. He was always unstable. Now he's fired up with years of festering revenge, and the pox. I think he's decided the best way to hurt me isn't to kill me, not yet at least. It's to kill my happiness. To kill you.'
The silence seemed to stretch on for an eternity. She had fought against the thought that she and Gresham were equal targets for whichever madman was hunting them down. The realisation that she was the target, the way of inflicting the most pain on those she loved, threatened to clutch at and cut the parts of her mind that moored her to sanity. Where was the justice in this world?
'Not here, not on this earth with us,' said Gresham. Jane had not realised she had spoken out loud.
'So what hope is there?' She turned her face, despairingly, towards his.
'The hope in our own strength,' he said intensely. 'Justice lies with how strong we are. Safety lies in how strong we are. Survival lies in how strong we are.'
'I feel very weak,' she said.
'We all feel weak sometimes,' said Gresham. 'The strong are those who fight the feelings and carry on living.'
'I'll try,' she said, feeling like a lost little girl.
'I know you will,' said Gresham simply.
'Are you sure?' It was a very small voice that Jane spoke in.
'That you're my happiness? Absolutely. That it's you he wants to kill, to hurt me? No, not absolutely. But it'd be wise to assume it, until we can prove otherwise. We both know you're my weak spot. You and me, we're both at war with Marlowe, and Overbury for all I know. You know what it means. We're under siege.'
Oh God, not again, thought Jane. No leaving any house without an armed escort, no going out at all unless it was totally unavoid-able…
Mannion chose not to help Gresham, but to answer a different question. His mind had been working on it, clearly.
'That bastard Overbury wasn't behind the lot trying to do us in in the theatre.'
'Why not?' It was Jane who answered. 'He has reason enough to hate your master, and it's surely too much of a coincidence that he was there on the afternoon when it all happened.'
'He were surprised when he met us. You could see it in his eyes. And he only had a couple of men at best with him, and neither of those armed. He could have made a real difference in the fight, with a sword, but he cleared off. Are you telling me a bastard like that wouldn't want to watch and gloat if he'd gone to all that trouble?'
Gresham thought for a moment. 'You could be right,' he said, 'but it makes no difference if it's one man or two we've to guard against.'
He was pacing the room again, hand running unconsciously through the black mop of his hair. 'It's the mystery I want solved. The mystery isn't Sir Thomas Overbury or Sir Edward Coke, or even Christopher Marlowe. It's Shakespeare and these confounded manuscripts. We need to meet with Master Shakespeare. Urgently. All three of us.'
'I'm flattered,' said Jane, seeking to hide the pain in her mind and the awful, threatening waves of paralysing fear. 'But why do you need me?'
'Firstly, to stop me killing him on sight. Secondly, to stop me being too rude to him, and thirdly, because you're a trained hand in dealing with drunken writers.' Keep it flippant, make light of pain. Ben Jonson, now masque-writer-in-chief to the King, had been a friend of Gresham and Jane's for years. Only the three people in the room and Jonson himself knew that Jane read Jonson's manuscripts in draft. He howled, swore and hurled things around the room when she made criticisms, and called her every name under the sun and several from below the moon. But he always made changes, Gresham noticed. In fact, he reckoned Jane had written nearly a quarter of Jonson's Volpone, or The Fox.
'It's a pity we can't call Ben in on this. He's a great pal of Master William's, or so he says.' It was Mannion. Jonson was touring Europe as tutor to Sir Walter Raleigh's son, one of Gresham's better ideas for a pairing.
'Well, yes,' said Jane, 'but there's a lot of jealousy as well. He's always trying to put Shakespeare down. Come to think of it, Ben's actually put me off meeting Shakespeare once or twice.'
'I think I must meet this genius,' said Gresham. 'Or rather, meet him again, with his new name. We'll need to be careful. He'll know I'm one of Raleigh's party, and if he thinks I'm after him he'll run. Mannion, send our people off* to see if he's still in London. He was there at the play, doing a bit part, I saw him. Maybe he's scuttled back to Stratford, like they say he's doing more and more now. v-Find out where he is, but do it quietly. And fix a time — a time very soon — for me to meet him with my mistress.'
12
September 1612 Granville College and King's College, Cambridge
'No place, indeed, should murder santuarise.'
'he trail had gone cold.
It had happened before, often, in Gresham's life, but of all eventualities it was the one that left him most restless and ill at ease. He craved action. The combination of tension and inaction made him like a pent-up hound that turned to chew its own flesh in frustration. Shakespeare had apparently fled town immediately after the riot in The Globe. The men hired by Mahnion had scoured London and then Stratford for a trace of him, but had found nothing. At least there had been no more attacks on Gresham or his family. That fact did nothing to relieve the tedium of living their lives under permanent guard.
At least the evening ahead might offer some excitement. Was Gresham becoming a creature of the night? he wondered as he put on his academic dress for the evening meal. Work started at dawn and finished at sunset for students as well as for farm labourers. The main meal of the day at Granville College was therefore at noon. Candles and lamps were expensive, servants need to be abed early if they were to be up before the dawn to light the fires, and students needed at all costs to be discouraged from treating night as day. It all argued for the main meal to be in the full and free glare of God's sunlight. Yet Gresham had instituted, and paid for, three feasts a year, to be held in the evening in the Hall his money had built.
Why go to the extra expense? It was not something Gresham could explain easily. The light flickering off the walls and the portraits hung against the panelling, its yellow contrasting with the roaring red of the huge fire blazing in the magnificent fireplace halfway along the left-hand wall, was magical to him. That light gave the evening dinners the air of a happy conspiracy, the flowing food and drink easing conversation and loosening inhibitions. He revelled in the sense of holding back nature, flinging a challenge of light and warmth and noise into the face of the all-encompassing darkness and silence of the night.
The Fellows all met in the Combination Room before the meal, the noise of the students gathering in the Hall filtering through even the thick oaken door. The room was a new development, the common rooms of the colleges hitherto being largely the local taverns. Alan Sidesmith, the ageless President of the college, stood and greeted the Fellows and their guests as they arrived. Gresham had never seen Alan without a drink in his hand, yet had never seen him drunk. Sidesmith had a guest of his own tonight.