Page 307 of A Column of Fire

He glanced at Margery beside him, a bright blue hat set at an angle on her silver curls. She met his eye and said: ‘What?’

‘I don’t want the groom to see you,’ Ned murmured teasingly. ‘He may want to marry you instead of the bride.’

She giggled. ‘I’m an old lady.’

‘You’re the prettiest old lady in London.’ It was true.

Ned looked around the room restlessly. He recognized most of those present. He had been intimate with the Cecils for almost half a century, and he knew the groom’s family almost as well. Some of the younger people at the back were only vaguely familiar, and he guessed they were friends of the happy couple. Ned found it increasingly difficult, as the years went by, to tell one youngster from another.

He and Margery were near the front, but Ned was not comfortable there, and he kept looking over his shoulder; so in the end he left Margery and went to the back of the room. From there he could watch everyone, like a mother pigeon studying the other birds, looking for the magpie that would eat her chicks.

All the men wore swords, as a matter of course, so any one of them could have been an assassin, in theory. This generalized suspicion was next to useless, and Ned racked his brains as to how he might learn more.

The king and queen came in at last, safe and sound, and Ned was relieved to see that they were escorted by a dozen men-at-arms. An assassin would have trouble getting past such a bodyguard. Ned sat down and relaxed a little.

The royal couple took their time walking up the aisle, greeting friends and favourites, and acknowledging the bows of others graciously. When they got to the front, James nodded to the clergyman to begin.

While the service was going on, a new arrival slipped into the chapel, and Ned’s instincts sounded an alarm.

The newcomer stood at the back. Ned studied him, not caring whether the man knew he was being stared at. He was in his thirties, tall and broad, with something of the air of a soldier about him. However, he did not look stressed or even tense. He leaned against the wall, stroking his long moustache and watching the rite. He radiated arrogant confidence.

Ned decided to speak to him. He got up and walked to the back. As he approached, the newcomer nodded casually and said: ‘Good day to you, Sir Ned.’

‘You know me—’

‘Everyone knows you, Sir Ned.’ The remark was a compliment with an undertone of mockery.

‘—I don’t know you,’ Ned finished.

‘Fawkes,’ said the man. ‘Guy Fawkes, at your service.’

‘And who invited you here?’

‘I’m a friend of the groom, if it matters to you.’

A man who was about to kill a king would not be able to converse in this bantering manner. Nevertheless, Ned had a bad feeling about Fawkes. There was something about his coolness, his half-hidden disrespect, and his satirical tone that suggested subversive inclinations. Ned probed further. ‘I haven’t met you before.’

‘I come from York. My father was a proctor in the consistory court there.’

‘Ah.’ A proctor was a lawyer, and a consistory court was a Church tribunal. To hold such a post, Fawkes’s father would have to be an irreproachable Protestant, and must have taken the oath of allegiance that Catholics abhorred. Fawkes was almost certainly harmless.

All the same, as Ned returned to his seat he decided to keep an eye on Guy Fawkes.

*

ROLLOFITZGERALDreconnoitred Westminster, looking for a weak spot.

A collection of large and small buildings clustered around a court called Westminster Yard. Rollo was nervous about prowling around, but no one seemed to pay him much attention. The courtyard was a gloomy square where prostitutes loitered. No doubt other nefarious doings took place there after dark. The complex was walled and gated, but the gates were rarely closed, even at night. Within the precincts were all the Parliament buildings plus several taverns, a bakery, and a wine merchant’s with extensive cellars.

The House of Lords, where the king would come to open Parliament, was a building on the plan of a squat letter H. The grand hall of the Lords, the biggest room, was the crossbar. One upright of the H was the Prince’s Chamber, used as a robing room; the other was the Painted Chamber, for committee meetings. But those three rooms were on the upstairs floor. Rollo was more interested in the ground-floor rooms underneath.

Beneath the Prince’s Chamber was a porter’s lodge and an apartment for the Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe. Alongside ran a narrow passage, Parliament Place, leading to a wharf called Parliament Stairs on the left bank of the Thames.

Rollo went to a nearby tavern called The Boatman and pretended to be a firewood dealer looking for storage space and willing to buy drinks for anyone who could give him information. There he gleaned two exciting nuggets: one, that the Wardrobe Keeper did not need his apartment and was willing to rent it out; and two, that it had a cellar. However, he was told, the place was reserved for courtiers, and was not available to common tradesmen. Rollo looked crestfallen and said he would have to search elsewhere. The regulars at the bar thanked him for the drinks and wished him luck.

Rollo had already recruited a co-conspirator, the courtier Thomas Percy. As a Catholic, Percy would never be an advisor to the king, but James had made him one of the Gentlemen Pensioners, a group of ceremonial royal bodyguards. Percy’s support was a mixed blessing, for he was a mercurial character, alternately full of manic energy or paralysed by gloom, not unlike his ancestor Hotspur in a popular play about the youth of Henry V; but now he proved useful. At Rollo’s suggestion, Percy claimed he needed the Wardrobe Keeper’s rooms for his wife to live in while he was at court and – after a prolonged negotiation – he rented the apartment.

That was a big step forward.