Percy was leading William through a Cretan labyrinth of dark narrow streets, in the direction, as far as he could tell, of the Palace of Westminster. It was a raw, cold afternoon. Percy’s hat was pulled down over his face, and a long cloak concealed his clothing. Every so often he stopped, crouching into an embrasure or doorway, and surveyed the street behind them. To William these precautions seemed both absurd and exciting, like a childhood adventure glimpsed through an adult’s recollection. Satisfied that they were not being followed, Percy turned a corner and yanked William into a porch beneath a protruding clapboard penthouse. He rapped on the door with a soft, coded knock of short and long taps. The door opened quickly to admit them, and as quickly closed again behind.
William could not see who had let them in. A dark passageway led into the house. Through the window he could glimpse a small garden, with an outhouse, roughly-constructed from old yellow bricks. The garden seemed surprisingly well-tended, with a covering of bright green turf. There were no flower-beds. Behind the outhouse he could see a pile of timber, straight lengths of trimmed and chiselled lumber, neatly stacked, and partially covered from the weather.
Fawkes and Catesby sat at a table in a low-ceilinged room. Wright lay sleeping on a rough truckle bed in a corner. Wintour was not there. The air was foul with Nicotan. Fawkes and Catesby seemed physically exhausted, grimed from head to foot with reddish mud, black soil and yellow clay. White tracks showed on their faces where the sweat had run down and cleared the dirt.
A table was piled with food and drink, pies and cooked meats and bottles of wine. Another table bore a heap of pistols and powder flasks.
“How goes it?” asked Percy, taking off his hat and cloak.
“Well enough,” grunted Fawkes. “But slow.”
“We have until 7th February next year,” observed Catesby, as if the date were fixed in his mind. “Slow, but sure.”
“Would someone like to tell me what’s going on?” asked William.
“Here,” said Percy, “we may talk freely. Everywhere else the city is full of ears. The houses listen. Even the air cannot be trusted. Sit down and take a drink, Will. Is there wine?”
The others gestured towards the side-table. They seemed too tired to stand up. Percy poured for all of them.
“We rented this house from one Whynniard, a Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe,” Percy explained to William. “He lodges elsewhere. On the other side of that wall is a chamber. Next to that chamber, the Palace of Westminster. We are within a short distance here of the Prince’s Lodgings, the Painted Chamber, the House of Lords itself.”
“Good God,” breathed William.
“Holy is his name,” said Catesby automatically. He was almost asleep.
“From here, the Parliament House is within our reach. But proximity is not power, and reach is not strength. We follow your Plot, you see, William. To come at them unseen, out of the darkness, to strike from below, like demons from Hell. We are digging a mine from under the floor of this next room, into the vault beneath the House of Lords.”
“Old mole,” said Catesby sleepily. “Like your ghost, William. But not so fast.”
“The mine will take us to below the cellar, and we will break through the floor to enter it. We will have the powder stored safely elsewhere. You will know where, when the time arrives. For now the work is to dig, to excavate, to undermine. We labour at night, when there is no-one abroad to hear our noise. It is cruel work.”
“Your turn,” said Fawkes.
“Ay,” said Percy. “Come, Will, let me show you the mine.”
Percy took up a lantern and led William into an adjoining room. The floorboards and stone foundations had been removed, and in the centre of the chamber gaped a large hole, a good three yards square, buttressed on all four sides with planks of timber, and with a turned round crosspiece laid over the gap. William peered over the edge, and gazed down into darkness.
“How deep is it?”
“This is the shaft,” said Percy. “Twenty feet or so. We surveyed the ground between here and the Palace, and dug deep enough to allow for variation in levels. The tunnel leads off from the foot of the shaft, and will run beneath our chamber, below the foundations of the Palace, and then directly through the floor into the vault beneath the House of Lords. Once it is in place, we will introduce the barrels of powder.”
Percy picked up a couple of short-handled shovels, and held the lantern over the shaft. A wooden ladder was nailed to one side.
“Coming down? Here. Hold the lantern.”
William disliked confined spaces, but did not wish to show any fear. He had been down a coal-mine in Warwickshire, but could not honestly say he had enjoyed the experience. He raised the lantern over the shaft, and Percy clambered down into the darkness. When he reached the bottom, William followed. At the foot of the shaft a low tunnel disappeared southwards. It was no more than four feet high, and a little wider. Stout baulks of timber braced the reddish brick-earth at the sides and above, shoring the tunnel and preventing collapse. These pit-props were placed at intervals of a yard or so. Plank stretchers squared off the joists, and the roof was roughly sealed with floorboards from the house.
“Little John showed us how to make these,” Percy explained, pointing to the props. “You cut them a little too long, and bray them in with a lump hammer. We had a few falls before we brought him in.” He dropped to his knees and scrambled like a rat into the tunnel. William was obliged to follow with the lamp. The floor of the mine was wet: the river was not far off. As they shuffled through, William noticed that in places the walls were formed from the deep, residual sandstone on which London sits. Laboriously the conspirators had chipped and cracked their way through solid boulders.
“That one took us a week,” said Percy proudly. “Almost killed me.”
Some yards further on, they reached what in a coal-mine would have been the face. A blank wall of yellow clay, scattered with small stones, and flints, and bits of quartz that winked in the lamplight. Piles of excavated earth lay waiting to be cleared, and two empty buckets stood ready to hold it. William set the lantern down. Each man took a shovel and began to fill the buckets.
The work went slowly in the confined space, every movement condensed and miniaturised. But at last the buckets were full. They crawled back along the tunnel, each dragging a heavy pail of red and yellow brick-earth and clay. When they reached the shaft, Percy climbed up the ladder and threw a rope over the crosspiece. William attached a bucket to the rope, and inch by inch it was hauled up and over the edge. The second bucket was raised in turn, and William followed, still holding the lantern, up the ladder. As he reached the top, a familiar face greeted him over the lip of the shaft.
“If it ain’t Master William,” said the face, in a hempseed Oxfordshire burr. “Rising from the grave, like the ghost of your own father. Remember me?”
Nicholas Owen, or to use his soubriquet, Little John, was a dwarf, a carpenter, and a Jesuit lay brother. He was also one of the most remarkable men of his time, if only for combining these incommensurable qualities. This was the same Owen who had provided the recusant population of England with the opportunity of practising their faith in the darkness of secrecy and concealment, since it was he who had constructed that baffling maze of tunnels, secret passages, priest-holes and oubliettes that enabled Catholics to harbour priests, conduct masses and conceal the elaborate properties of their faith. Owen had also worked in the theatre, which was how Shakespeare knew him.
“’Ow did that trap-door work, then?” he asked, as he helped William to haul himself clear of the shaft.
“Like a dream,” said William. “We pushed it open from below, and it swung up, paused, and slammed backwards onto the stage so the audience gasped with fear. Before they’d even caught sight of the Ghost!”
“Ay, I thought it would.”
“But what brings you here?”
“Why, I’ve been helping these gentlemen with their little tunnel. What do you think of it?”
“It’s perfect,” replied William. “And now I know why you’re here. You’re the only man I know who could stand upright in it.”
Owen laughed, took one of the buckets and dragged it outside. Percy and William took the other between them. Owen pulled his pail to the outhouse in the garden, opened a low door and disappeared inside. Following him in, William was surprised to observe that the outhouse contained nothing but piles of earth.
“Here we store the earth from the tunnel,” said Percy from behind him. “So it cannot be seen. Then at night we lift the turf and spread it over the garden.”
“I see,” said William. “Eventually the garden will be so high you’ll be able to jump down into the Palace.”
They returned to the house and rejoined the others. Fawkes and Catesby were engaged in an argument. Wright still lay on his bed, but awake and listening to his fellows.
“It’s hard work, Guido, I know. But it can be done.”
“How long have we been working on this tunnel?” asked Fawkes.
“Two weeks exactly.”
“And what proportion of its necessary length have we excavated?”
“About a quarter.”
“Six more weeks then. We will never do it. Not before Parliament opens on 7th February.”
“Then we will increase our efforts. Speed up the work. Double our shifts.”
Wright groaned, and his head fell back onto the mattress.
“We are exhausted already,” said Fawkes. “We must finish by the New Year. We will need time to install the powder. And while we slave down here, there is other business that remains undone. Our plan to seize one of the young princes, or the Princess Elizabeth. The securing of more horses and armour, musket, pikes, shot. Keeping the Catholic nobles on our side. All this goes by the board, while we play at being miners.”
“Then there is only one other solution,” said Catesby simply. “We bring more men into the plot.”
“My brother will come in,” said Wright. “And Tom’s brother, Christopher.”
“If you can trust them, then let us have them in,” said Fawkes impatiently. “But no more. How often have we agreed that the circle must be kept tight and strong? There can be no room for a weak link.”
“Speaking of weakness,” put in Percy, “where is little Tom?”
“Wintour has gone to the Palace of Westminster to hear the news,” Fawkes replied. “He should have returned by now.”
“I’ll go seek him there,” said William, fearing another summons to the underworld, another hour inhaling the dark dust.
Fawkes shrugged. “Aye. Tell him to get back here.”
William left the house, and crossed over to the Palace. Cold was falling with the darkness. His breath smoked in the raw foggy air. It was Christmas Eve. The taverns were full of drunken revellers, soaking themselves in ale and wine, with no thought for the morrow. A holy day. As William picked his way carefully through the dark streets, light streamed from the windows of alehouses, lighting up a heap of rubbish, a pool of vomit, a dead cat, a drunk helplessly sprawling on the ground. Ragged voices bawled out a Christmas hymn.
Lullay, lullay, thou tiny child …
A pretty young whore fluttered her tongue at him from a doorway.
“Wha’ ya want for Christmas, ’andsome?”
“Not a dose of the clap from you,” replied William, “that’s for sure.”
“Too late for you, you bald-headed bastard.”
The great mediaeval hall towered above him. Crowds of people milled round the doorway, jostling, pushing, shouting to one another. A pair of noblemen came out of the hall, richly dressed in immense furs, and were immediately assailed by a throng of the desperate, the needy, the merely curious. Their attendants beat back the importuners, and the lords were escorted to their waiting carriage. For a moment William caught a glimpse of the brilliantly-illuminated hall as it must be seen from the outer darkness of deprivation. Like the lonely dragon in an old poem he had once read, looking across the dark fens of alienation towards the bright lights of the mead-hall, hearing the sounds of music and laughter, and nursing an inconsolable hatred, deep in his wounded heart.
William slipped through the crowd and entered. From the shadowy loft-space above, the great timber angels that buttressed the roof looked down inscrutably. The session of Parliament seemed, from the empty benches, to be over for the day. A group of courtiers in sober black, conversing together on the dais, were putting their papers away, as if some announcement had just been made. He caught sight of Wintour standing at the edge of the platform, and pushed through the dispersing crowd to join him.
“What’s the news?” William asked him in a whisper. “Good or bad?”
“Hard to say,” was Wintour’s reply. “Parliament is prorogued. But not to 7th February. Till 3rd October.”
“October?”
“Ay. It gives us more time. But it puts off our venture.”
“More time for the tunnel?”
“Ay. But the iron is hot now. Who knows if it may not have cooled by the autumn?”
Together they left the building, and returned to their house of conspiracy.
“Well?” asked Fawkes.
“Prorogued,” said Wintour. “To 3rd October.”
“3rd October!” exclaimed Fawkes. “A reprieve! We can finish the tunnel, as planned, by the New Year. Then we have a whole nine moons to do the rest: get the powder, raise the horses and arms, plan the coup. Talk to our friends abroad. I see in this the hand of Providence. It gives us a greater earnest of success. We have more time.”
“More time for digging,” said Catesby dejectedly. “What fun.”
“I can’t feel my hands,” said Wright.
“Let me counsel you,” interjected Owen, who had quietly come in from the outhouse. “You gentlemen be delicate. Not used to such labours as these. And ’tis the evening of Our Lord’s birthday. Why don’t ye all take a rest? Go home for the night. Take a bath, a drink, some food, get some sleep. William and I will take your shift tonight. He was a poor country boy, like me. He’s used to hard graft.”
William tried to remonstrate, but was seized by a fit of coughing. Dirt blocked his throat. “I think I already have a case of the black lung,” he said, spitting dust.
“You were only down there an hour!” exclaimed Percy.
“I’m used to the fresh air of Paris Garden,” said William. “To breathing stale beer, rank sweat and steaming horse-shit. Not subterranean London brick-earth.”
“I’ll look after him,” said the little man, slapping William hard on the back. “Don’t fret.”
The others were too desperate for rest to resist, and so wasted no further time in quitting the house, silently and cautiously, one by one. William was left alone with Owen, who gathered some lengths of timber from behind the outhouse, and threw them down into the shaft, together with a hammer and some other tools.
“You fit then, boy?” he asked William, and shinned quickly down the ladder. William followed, again holding the lantern. Owen was already up at the face, proceeding to prop the work the others had completed. The labour of setting the props, banging in the cross-beam, and adding the stretcher seemed effortless in his practised hands. Meanwhile he talked away to William, who crouched over the lantern and listened.
“It ain’t right that gentlemen should have to do work like this. Not that they ain’t up to bearing hardship, as they do in the wars. They’re tough lads. But God gave us different gifts: some to work with their hands, some with their minds. To each his own. Those chaps could do more in an hour with their thinking and talk, than ever they can do down here with a pick and shovel. Mr Percy, now, and Mr Fawkes, they can dig with the best. But young Wintour, and Wright: good men, capable and clever, but useless bastards down the pit.”
“You do swear a lot for a priest, Nicholas,” said William, admiring the little man’s versatility.
“Oh, I don’t swear as a priest, Master Will,” said Owen earnestly, his accent losing some of its bumpkin vernacular. “No, I swear as a carpenter. Even St Joseph must have cursed now and again. When the hammer hit his thumb.”
“So you keep your identities quite separate, then?”
“I do. I’m three things, as you know. A Jesuit, a midget and a craftsman. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, don’t it? ‘A priest, a dwarf and a carpenter walked into a tavern.…’ Here, Will, with your wit, you could finish it for me.”
“So the priest said to the carpenter,” improvised William, “‘Make me a crucifix.’ ‘You’ll never,’ said the dwarf, ‘get me up on one of those things.”’
Owen laughed in delight as he hammered in a joist. “No, I keep my trades distinct. This job, now, I do as a carpenter. They know I can do the work, and keep my mouth shut. As a priest, I don’t know why they’re digging a hole in the ground under Westminster. They don’t tell me. If I overhear any talk of treachery, why I just forget it. Do you think I remember everything I hear in confession? If they asked me for spiritual counsel, I’d tell them what the church tells me: that all good Catholics should be patient and obedient, and do nothing to stir up the powers of the state against them.”
“And have they asked you?”
“No,” he replied, wrestling a length of floorboard into position above the cross-beam. “Not once.”
“But you must have your opinions, as a priest, on what you know, as a carpenter, is being undertaken here? Do you think, for instance, just for the sake of argument, that a believer should take action against a king who persecutes the church?”
“Our Holy Mother Church has often preached tyrannicide as a just cause. In the case of our own poor country, she trusts in the Lord, and hopes for a better day. God has caused the death of many an evil ruler. Pass me that piece of planking, will you?”
“In such cases, their deaths must be God’s will,” William replied, giving him the piece of wood. “But take another case: what if a man set out to kill an evildoer, but cannot reach him without harming innocents, caught in the way? What of an army, whose bombardments slaughter civilians alongside military? What of the man who plants a bomb, hoping to destroy his enemy, knowing that many who have done no harm will also die in the blast?”
“I’ve known many soldiers torment themselves with such questions. ’Tis a hard decision, and great cruelty, to kill innocent men and women. But many enterprises would have to be given up, and many opportunities lost, if we invariably forwent such sacrifice. Our faith holds to the doctrine of the just war. You know, St Augustine. It is essential, for anyone prosecuting a just war, to observe the principles of justice. If the death of innocent people is something accidental, and by no means desired by the man who wages the just war, and if he hates this consequence, he may, without violation of justice, allow their death. He is not obliged to cease waging war, notwithstanding the damage done to innocent parties.”
“And is this true theology?”
“Ay, it is. We call it ‘double effect.’ A single action has two consequences: one good, one bad. A man undertakes an action. If the good effect countervails over the bad; if the bad effect is involuntary; and if the one cannot be brought about without the other – then his conscience is clear.”
“Is this not equivocation?”
“Of course. There are for a Christian many instances where two incompatible things are equally true. Christ was both God and man. Our Blessed Lady was both virgin and mother. God made the world, yet permitted men to nail Him on a cross. Communicatio idiomatum. We cannot reconcile such truths to one another. Yet we give them equal weight, we speak of them as one.”
“I see. Very persuasive. They don’t call you Jesuits for nothing.”
“I would hope not. But understand one thing: none of these men has confided their intention to me, or to any other priest. It is an article of faith with them. They do not want to involve the Catholic clergy in whatever enterprise it is they pursue. If it is a capital matter, and it fails, they will all die. Some of them will be tortured first. They do not want their priests to suffer the same agony of torment, the same shameful death. Not one could bear to see a priest, who has brought them, in his own hands, the body and blood of Christ, hung up in iron manacles, stretched, racked, maimed.”
“Would they do such a thing? Would they do that, even to one such as you?”
Owen stopped work, and fell to examining a knot in a piece of timber. “Because I am small, you mean? Because my body has already been twisted, and broken? Because even a wild beast would hesitate to inflict cruelty on such a poor, bent, crippled creature as this?” He held out his hands for Shakespeare to examine, palms upwards. Each of his wrists was scarred with a dark red cicatrice. “I was brave enough, or if you like enough of a fool, to preach the innocence of the blessed Edmund Campion. This is what they did to me. They locked the manacles on my wrists, threaded them with a chain, passed a rope through the chain and hauled me up till my feet left the ground.”
“I’m guessing that didn’t take long.”
Owen laughed. “But I told them nothing. Now Campion’s a saint in heaven. I long for nothing so much as to meet him again, when I too am called to Christ’s supper. And now I must drive this face a foot deeper before morning. You clear the earth behind me with the shovel, and fill the bucket for me, William, there’s a good boy. But understand and remember this: no Jesuit priest is involved in any conspiracy against the king.”
“And anyway, you’re just a carpenter.”
“And a dwarf.”
Without delay Owen set to work with his pick, attacking the clay deposits with short, concentrated blows, hacking vigorously at the wall of earth. William had swung an axe in the open air, but had never done such work in a confined space, where there is scarcely room to pull back the pick before striking with it, so all the power of the blow has to come from the workman’s shoulders and hands. It is backbreaking labour. The earth crumbled and flaked off, here fragmenting into sandy powder, there coming away in thick kneaded clods.
The tiny man stood in the low tunnel, and William took the shovel and began to clear the earth behind him. Soft lamplight illuminated their labours. The poet and the priest, thought William, digging a mine. How grotesque. What are they seeking? The empty tomb? The Nibelung’s gold? The lost plays of Sophocles? What lies at the end of this tunnel: bliss, treasure, glory? Or pain, disappointment, death? Is it the path to a brave new world? Or just an empty hole in the ground?
24 April 1605. Silver Street
“Master Shake-a-spear?”
The boy leaned nonchalantly against the door-post of William’s room, hands in pockets, hat slouched on his head, exuding the supreme self-assurance of the London street-urchin.
“Approximately. What is it?”
“Master Percy, ’ee wants you. Dahn the ’ahse.”
William’s Warwickshire ear had never become attuned to the harsh carillon of Bow bells. He could just make out “Percy.”
“Darn the arse?”
“’Ass right. Dahn the ’ahse.”
“Oh, down the house?”
“That’s what I said, innit? Speaks English, don’t I? What you keep repeating me for?”
“Is that your message?”
“Nothing wrong with my words, mate. You ain’t got no reason to mock my vocabulary, you toffee-nosed bastard.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to pay you for this.”
“No need, mate. Don’t need none o’ your piss-poor pennies, you pen-pushing ponce. Already been paid, by a real gentleman. He give me a whole groat. See?”
“Spend it quickly,” advised William. “With your capacity for insult, you can’t have long to live, you abusious young villain.”
The boy was already on his way down the stairs. “Yeah, lah-di-dah, use long words at me, why don’t yah? I’m as good a man as you are, any day. I’m a Prentiss, mate.”
“Fuck off,” shouted William after him. By now Mountjoy had stuck his head out of the workshop door to see what the commotion was.
“Wat is all zis badinage? Go away, you naughty garcon, you.”
“Up yours, Froggy,” the youth called back over his shoulder.
“And retournez not to zis quartier. Zis is a quartier respectable. We don’t want none-ayour sort ’ere, you Cockeney whoremonger.”
“There’ll be no glass left in your winders by next week,” was the response. “I’ll vouch for that.”
“Oh God.” William put his head in his hands. Perhaps it was time to move lodgings. In any case, by October he would either be living in a royal palace, or dangling on the end of a rope. Briefly, that is, pending total evisceration. He pulled on his boots and went down into Silver Street.
He reached the house, gave the secret knock and was admitted as before. Percy stood guard outside the chamber of the mineshaft, gloomily peeling the shell off a hard-boiled egg. Fawkes entered shortly afterwards. He had been sent for too.
“How goes it?” asked William.
“You need to see,” said Percy shortly.
The three of them descended the ladder, and joined Catesby, Wright and Wintour at the end of the tunnel. They were not working, but sitting despondently side by side. Their faces, grimed and grained with dirt, showed little expression in the flickering lamplight.
“Tell them,” said Percy shortly to Catesby.
“Tell us what?” asked Fawkes suspiciously.
“Look for yourself,” Catesby said simply, and held the lantern towards the wall of earth at the end of the tunnel.
“What am I looking at?” asked Fawkes. Easily the tallest of the men, Fawkes had spent little time cramped in the tunnel, and was less familiar with its topography. William knew immediately what they were talking about, and cursed softly under his breath.
Where there had been a flat face of clay and earth, with the occasional extruding boulder, there was now a massive stone wall. Constructed from blocks of sandstone tightly packed, still held firmly together by mortar that must have been laid centuries before, the foundation wall of the Palace of Westminster decisively closed off their excavation. Immeasurably thick, obdurate and resistant, built to withstand all accidents of water and earth, of fire and air, it looked like a wall built by the giants who had once inhabited the earth.
“You said we would undermine the foundations,” Fawkes said accusingly to Catesby. “That we would dig below them, and so reach the cellar floor.”
“Yes,” said Catesby angrily, spitting black dust between his feet. “But who knew how deep these walls would go? No building has ever been grounded like this. They must have raised their foundations on top of an older wall. There’s no way we could have known. Anyway, there it is. If our measurements are correct, it must be all of twenty feet thick. To pierce it will be a protracted and cruel labour. And every blow we strike will echo and re-echo round the neighbourhood. We will rouse the devil himself with such a din, let alone the night watch. And then more tunnelling on the other side. It’s impossible.” His head dropped on his folded arms.
“We have to revert to the first plan,” said Wintour. “To gain access to the cellar. Perhaps we can lease all the apartments up there, and have the whole space to ourselves.”
“Not in six months, you won’t,” said Catesby, who had spent much time exploring that avenue. “Or even a year. They just won’t sell. The sites are too valuable.”
All fell silent. The earth began to close in on them. In the silence a slight dripping of water from the roof seemed to splash loudly onto the timbers. From somewhere in the soil around them came the muffled squeaking of rats.
“Right,” said Fawkes, with the air of a man who is taking charge. “We will abandon this for the time. Get Owen to replace the floorboards over the shaft. Lock up the chamber. I will go abroad to fetch help. I will find men who will do anything, and say nothing.”
“What men, Guido?” asked Catesby.
“Men who owe no allegiance to the king, and have no fear of death,” Fawkes replied. “The rest of you, get back to your daylight duties. If any of the leases fall vacant, seize them. But we can’t rely on that happening. Start to gather the powder at the house in Lambeth. Store arms, ammunition, horses. Spread the word among the Catholics we can trust that a change is coming. Don’t despair, comrades. God is with us. Our time is coming: a great day in history. 3rd October 1605. The day of the Gunpowder Plot.”