Page 324 of A Column of Fire

The party entered the House of Lords by the main door and searched the great hall and the two adjoining rooms, the Prince’s Chamber and the Painted Chamber.

Unfortunately, Ned did not know what he was looking for. A concealed assassin? A hidden cannon? Nothing was found.

How will I feel, Ned wondered, if this really is a false alarm? I will look foolish, but the king will live, and that’s all that matters.

At ground level were various apartments. They searched the porter’s lodge and the Wardrobe Keeper’s apartment, rented by Thomas Percy; then they entered the storeroom, going in through the door Suffolk had broken down earlier. Ned was surprised at how large the place was, but otherwise it was as Suffolk had described it, even to the servant in cloak and hat guarding the place.

‘You must be Johnson,’ Ned said to the man.

‘At your service, sir.’

Ned frowned. There was something familiar about Johnson. ‘Have I met you before?’

‘No, sir.’

Ned was not so sure, but it was hard to tell in the flickering torchlight.

He turned to the firewood stack.

There was a lot of it. Did Thomas Percy intend to start a conflagration? It would quickly blaze up to the wooden ceiling of the storeroom, which must be the floor of the chamber of the House of Lords. But this was an unreliable method of assassination. In all likelihood someone would smell smoke, and the royal family would be hustled out of the building in safety long before the place burned down. In order to be a serious danger, a fire would have to develop fast, with tar and turpentine, like a fireship, turning the building into an inferno before anyone could get out. Was there tar or turpentine here? Ned could not see any.

He moved closer to the stack. As he did so, he heard Johnson stifle a protest. He turned and looked at the man. ‘Something wrong?’

‘Pardon me, sir, but your torch is giving off sparks. Please take care not to set light to the wood.’

Johnson was unnecessarily jittery. ‘If the wood catches fire you can stamp it out,’ Ned said dismissively, and he went closer.

The wood was stacked with meticulous neatness. Something deep in Ned’s memory was struggling to get out. This scene reminded him of another, long in his past, but he could not bring it to mind. He felt that he had stood like this, in a dark storeroom, looking at a pile of something, once before in his life, but he could not think when or where.

He turned away from the stack to see that everyone else was watching him in silence. They thought he was crazy. He did not care.

He looked again at Percy’s caretaker and noticed that the man was wearing spurs. ‘Going somewhere, Johnson?’ he said.

‘No, sir.’

‘Then why are you wearing spurs?’

‘I was on horseback earlier.’

‘Hmm. Your boots seem remarkably clean, for a man who has been riding in November weather.’ Without waiting for an answer, Ned turned back to the firewood.

An old table with a hole in its top stood near the stack, and Ned guessed that someone had stood on the table to place the topmost bundles carefully.

Suddenly he remembered.

It had been the terrible night of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris. He and Sylvie had taken refuge in the warehouse in the rue du Mur where she kept her secret store of banned books. They had listened to the muffled sounds of riot in the city, the hoarse shouts of men fighting and the screams of those wounded, the pop of gunfire and the demented ringing of hundreds of church bells. In the warehouse, by the light of a lamp, Ned had looked at a stack of barrels that appeared to fill the space floor to ceiling and side to side.

But some of the barrels could be removed to reveal boxes of contraband literature.

‘By the Mass,’ Ned said softly.

He handed his torch to another of the search party and clambered onto the table, careful not to put his foot through the hole.

Once standing fairly securely on the table, he reached up and removed the top bundle of faggots. He threw it to the ground, then reached for another.

He heard a scuffle and turned.

John Johnson was making a run for it, dashing across the storeroom to the far end.