Informer. Double-dealer. Thief. Whoremonger. Drunkard. Gambler. Pimp. But to Henry Gresham – gentleman, scholar, courtier, spy – Will Shadwell is invaluable. For in the dark and violent days of the reign of King James I, a man must know his enemies to survive, and Shadwell is one of Gresham’s best sources.
Then Shadwell is brutally murdered in the suffocating dark of an East Anglian night. But before Gresham is able to establish why anyone would want his servant dead, he is summoned to London from his Cambridge college by the man he fears most: Robert Cecil, the King’s Chief Secretary, and Machiavellian master of a sinister network of spies. Cecil wants Gresham to discover the truth about Sir Francis Bacon’s private life, but when Gresham begins his investigations, he finds that he is the one who is being watched. . .
Gresham and Cecil have long shared a mutual mistrust and loathing for each other, but the Chief Secretary’s behaviour is pushing their feud to new and deadly levels. Just what kind of a trap is Cecil setting up? And as Gresham continues Cecil’s bidding with ever increasing trepidation, his enquiries into Shadwell’s death are uncovering a plot so audacious it is scarcely believable: a Catholic uprising, a violent insurrection and a trail of gunpowder underneath the Houses of Parliament. . .
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