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In time the hurricane of grief and rage abated, and I was possessed by a calm, sad resignation.
King James was thirty-six. He had the plump, fleshy face of a sybarite,
He had a bee in his bonnet about witches – he had written a book on the subject – and he had brought in harsh legislation against them. Ned thought they were mostly harmless old women.
Fawkes looked at him hard, weighing him up. His stare would have intimidated many men, but Rollo was his equal in self-regard, and stared right back.
row house
‘I know that Jean Langlais means to kill the king,’ Ned said to her, worried and frustrated. ‘But I can’t do anything about it because I don’t know who Langlais is or where to find him.’ Margery felt crucified by guilt. She had known that the elusive man Ned had been hunting most of his life was Rollo, and she had kept this knowledge to herself.
He could not even identify the emotion that swamped him, whether rage or hatred or grief. All he could do was look away and engage his mind with something else.
IN THE LONG GALLERY at White Hall, just a few minutes’ walk from Westminster Yard, there was calm, but Ned’s instincts were sounding a raucous, insistent alarm.
He watched them with intense pleasure, fascinated by the random nature of family resemblances: one had Barney’s roguish charm, another Alice’s relentless determination, and one little girl brought tears to his eyes when she smiled just like Margery.
The family had grown like a spreading tree, and Ned and Margery had watched its progress together, until her life had come to a peaceful end three years ago. Ned still talked to her sometimes, when he was alone. ‘Alfo has bought the Slaughterhouse Tavern,’ he would say as he got into bed at the end of the day. Or again: ‘Little Eddie is as tall as me, now.’ It hardly mattered that she made no reply: he knew what she would have thought. ‘Money sticks to Alfo like honey on his fingers,’ she would have said, and: ‘Eddie will be after girls any day now.’
He did not look down at his book. He was happy with his thoughts. They were often enough for him, nowadays.
