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.
After the king’s first successful visit to Theobalds it was as if he could not keep away. Every summer brought the court hungry as locusts out of London and into the country, to stay at Theobalds and then to move on in a constant circle of all the wealthy houses. The courtiers braced themselves for the unimaginable expense of entertaining the king, and sighed with relief when he moved on. He might shower the host with honours or with favours, or with some of the new farmed-out taxes, so that a favourite might grow rich collecting a newly invented duty from some struggling industry; or the king might merely smile and pass on. Whether he paid for his board in privileges or took it with nothing more than a word of thanks, his courtiers had to provide him with the best of food, the best of drink, the best hunting they could manage, and the best entertainment.
They had learned their skills with Queen Elizabeth; no-one could teach them anything about lavish hospitality, extravagant gifts, and outright sycophancy. But King James demanded all this and more. His favourites too must be honoured, and his days filled with unending sport, hunting hunting hunting, until gamekeepers were at a premium and no man dared cut down a tree in a forest which the king knew and loved. His evenings must be filled with a parade of pretty men and pretty women. No-one refused him. No-one even thought to refuse him. Anything the new king wanted he must have.
Even when he wanted Theobalds Palace itself.
‘I shall have to give it to him.’ Sir Robert had left his palace as he often did to find Tradescant. The gardener was directing the garden lads at the entrance to the maze. A team of boys was being supplied with blunt knives and sent into the maze on their hands and knees to root up weeds in the gravel. A team of older men would go with them with little hatchets and knives to trim the yew hedging; they had already been lectured with passion and energy by John as to the care they must take to keep the top of the hedge even, and on no account, on pain of instant dismissal, were they to cut an unruly bough in such a way that it might leave a hole which would make a peephole from one path to another and spoil the game.
John took one look at his master’s dark expression, abandoned the pruning gang and came to him. ‘My lord?’
‘He wants it. My house, and the gardens too. He wants it, and he’s promised me Hatfield House in return. I’ll have to give it to him, I suppose. I can’t refuse the king, can I?’