'The mine?' Cecil could hardly force the words out.
'Remember? They tried to dig a tunnel under the House of Lords, before they found and hired the cellar. It came to grief against the foundations; they simply couldn't drive through them. You thought they'd abandoned it, didn't you? Well, the plotters did, but Fawkes didn't. Northumberland brought some miners down from the north- west. They were kept in isolation for a week, never told what they were doing, and sent home with a fat purse. Probably dead by now, if Northumberland has any sense. They widened the tunnel, secured it. Didn't have to dig all the way through the foundations, just part way in. Enough to bring a wall down.
'They packed it with barrels of powder. Fawkes used some of the good powder from your cellar. You'll find the stuff in the cellar is all decayed, more or less. The rest they bought in. If the powder held out, they were going to blow up the mine on the day you had your first show trial. Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, and the hero of the Gunpowder Plot! Except the Catholics fooled him, kept another mine hidden from him and blew a wall out of an empty House of Lords just to prove how little Robert Cecil was actually in command on the very day he was bragging just how wonderful he was.
'You'd have been a laughing stock, forced into immediate resignation. The King would survive, the laughter rebounding on him and blowing a hole out of his authority. If I was them I'd have had pamphlets printed, pointing out that the Catholics could have blown up the whole farce with the people inside it if they'd wished, making it clear they had the power to provoke a rebellion, but had chosen not to use it. James would almost certainly have had to call in Northumberland as his Secretary after that, to make peace with the Catholics. Beautiful, isn't it? Let you make all the running, let you blow yourself up to maximum height and then prick your balloon with a gentle little explosion where the only physical casualties are a few bits of stone, and the only other casualty is one of the Papists' most bitter enemies: you.
'It's still there, of course. I mean the mine, and the powder. I set my servant guard over it when we found it, but called him off when I came here, just in case you sent someone and he got arrested as a conspirator. We wouldn't want old Mannion to find himself being nabbed like Guy Fawkes, would we? So I suppose Northumberland could have sent someone down there right now to blow it up, since you appear to want to implicate him in the Gunpowder Plot.'
Gresham stood up easily. He looked out of the high window in the direction of Westminster, as if for a cloud of smoke.
'I'd get someone down there pretty quickly, if I were you. Someone to secure it, take the powder away. Someone you can trust not to talk. We wouldn't want London knowing there was a plot you knew nothing about, would we?' Gresham made as if to leave.
'Oh, by the way,' he said, 'there is just one other thing. I'll make Francis Tresham give himself up, so you can have your full set of conspirators. But I want no torture, and I want a fake death to get him out of the Tower and out of England. He won't trouble you again, I guarantee. Are we agreed — on that oath you swore? Tresham has just become both near and dear to me.'
Cecil nodded, a curt, hard nod. Gresham nodded ironically back, and left the room, almost casual in his manner. As he reached the nearest wall out of sight of Whitehall, he leant back against it, and breathed for what seemed like the first time in an hour.
Why had Gresham remembered Tresham's talk of the tunnel Fawkes and the others had tried to dig from the house they had rented, the tunnel they had given up on when the cellar under the House of Lords became available? Perhaps it was simple curiosity, perhaps it was the realisation that a secret tunnel leading up to the walls of the House of Lords was an open invitation for the future, a hostage to fortune and a loose end that simply needed to be tied up. Perhaps most of all it was Wintour's staying on in London, for far longer than was reasonable, and Wintour's obsessive attempts to reach the street in which the house was situated. Had he been trying to hide in the tunnel? Or had he hoped to reopen it himself, ironically wishing to stage the same embarrassment for Cecil as Northumberland had planned all along?
It had been easier than Gresham had thought to gain access to the house from where the plotters had started. A desultory guard was on duty now the first excitements were over, easily bluffed into allowing Gresham and Mannion entry by the obvious wealth of Gresham's clothing and his casual use of Cecil's name and title. Gresham had half expected to find nothing, or at best the caved-in remnant showing what happened when amateurs tried to play at being miners. They had found the shaft under the floor, despite the care of the miners in re-laying the boards their work had scuffed and splintered.
Mannion had been voluble in his insistence that Gresham should not enter. Gresham had ignored him, stripping down to his shirt and crawling through the surprisingly spacious tunnel. This was no work of amateurs, he realised, noting the simple yet effective pattern of timber framing that held up the roof of the tunnel. At its end a positive chamber had been hollowed out, the powder stacked neatly in the seven- or eight-foot-deep hole that had been made in the old foundations, rumoured to be some eleven or twelve feet thick in total. Nothing had been left to chance. Lanterns, tinder, flint and fuse had been stored there, awaiting whoever came to blow the mine. There were two pointers to the originators. A napkin or towel was stuck behind one of the barrels, pinned between it and its neighbour, as might have happened if it had become trapped as a man manoeuvred the one barrel into place by the side of the other. It was simple stuff, of the sort that would be put at table to wipe a guest's hands. Embroidered into the top corner was the Percy crest. Gresham knew that Northumbrian miners worked naked in the tunnels, sometimes discarding even a loincloth, but wrapped a piece of towelling round their brow to wipe the stinging sweat off before it reached their eyes. They must have given the miners napkins from Syon House to take the place of the towelling. Gresham had worked with the moles in the Netherlands, which was why he looked carefully on the ancient stone of the foundations. Those who cut through stone like to leave a mark on it. Eventually he found it, scratched on to a stone, perhaps with the edge of a pickaxe. ' All for God and HP '. HP. Henry Percy. Perhaps the ninth Earl had deliberately recruited Catholics to work his mine, and perhaps even given whoever had supervised them a hint of what it was all about.
Gresham had guessed at much of it, of course, but Cecil had not denied it. He had known Fawkes had to be a triple agent as soon as he had seen the completed mine. It was Fawkes who supervised the mine early on, Fawkes who put the powder in the cellar and kept watch on it. The activity needed to finish the mine would never have escaped him.
Mr Fawkes, thought Gresham, was about to have an interesting exchange with Cecil.
They had come upon him at midnight, dragged him out of his sleep and from his comfortable chamber and down into the bowels of the White Tower. What had gone wrong? His grim-faced gaolers would not speak in answer to his entreaties. He knew they showed prisoners the rack, the mere sight of the obscene contraption enough often to break men. His hope died as they strapped him to the machine, still without a word being spoken.
The pain was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to Guy Fawkes. There were no words for the appalling agony that drenched through every fibre of his being, the pain that defied all experience, the pain that made his scream simply a tiny little thing heard far away on the winds of his destruction. They did not take him from the rack when finally he lost consciousness. They threw filthy water over his tortured, strung-out frame, and waited for part of him to emerge from the dark. When he did so he could hardly think. In losing its absolute top, searing edge, the pain had almost worsened, spreading out in equal measure to every limb and every extremity of that limb. It had broken his body, that he knew. He would never walk properly again, stand up like a man. It had broken his spirit too, that he knew.
The face of Cecil loomed over him, devilish in the torchlight.
'You did not tell me about Lord Percy,' he said. 'That was a pity.'
He turned to the gaoler.
'Rack him. And then rack him again. Yet keep him alive. He must walk or be carried on to the scaffold.'
The screams followed Cecil as he swung out of the chamber.
Cecil and Guy Fawkes met only once thereafter, alone. Fawkes had been tossed like a rag doll on to the rough cot in his cell.
Courteously, Cecil had asked one of the gaolers to straighten out his limbs as they lay on the bed, contemplating his fingernails as Fawkes screamed and sobbed as each limb was gently rearranged. Cecil waited. Patience was something he had always had plenty of. When there was something resembling a light of intelligence in Fawkes's eyes, he spoke.
‘You are a dead man, of course. You must realise that?'
Something that might have been a nod came from Fawkes.
