'So the issue is not whether you die, but how. We could arrange for you to be kissed by the rack again…' A shudder passed through Fawkes's frame. 'Or, of course, we could arrange for a clean break at your execution.'
Those sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered were first of all hung, and then had their entrails dug out before being chopped into pieces. If the prisoner made a suitable confession and prepared to die in a manner that pleased the crowd and the executioner, he was let to hang until he was either dead or wholly unconscious, and only then cut down and dismembered. Other prisoners would be cut down almost immediately the halter had tightened around their neck, and left to experience the full pleasure of the executioner's crude surgery.
'Now,' said Cecil, almost gently, 'let us consider. Is it the rack, or a slice through the tongue to render you speechless and a long death on the scaffold? Or no more meetings with the rack and a quick death? Well, it will mean a trial, of course. And we could always try to speak out there, couldn't we? And an execution, too, where we might wish to speak more than the people should hear. But it would be good, very good for Guy Fawkes to go to his death and say nothing. What talk can there be of conspiracy if the man who was set to blow the powder says nothing of it? Oh, they will talk and conjecture, for a thousand years for all I know. But with you silent, my friend, they can never know, can they? No, my friend, much as it grieves me, we are in a bargaining situation. You have something I need — your silence. I have the power to grant you an easy death, little though you deserve it.'
Fawkes stirred on his cot. A croak emerged from his mouth. Cecil gazed carefully at the prostrate figure, checking that no knife or weapon was lurking on his person, and bent down close to listen.
'Ah, my Lord of Northumberland? You are still loyal to him, are you? A very praiseworthy thing in a servant.' He bent down again, to listen to the muted whisperings. He stood up, a colder and darker tone in his voice. 'Agreed. I swear on my oath that Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, will not be brought to execution by any power or inaction on my part. Strangely enough, as another has recently pointed out, I have never broken my sworn oath.
'Yet I wonder if your concern for the ninth Earl might not be linked to his support of your wife and child? Yes, I know of it. And of them, though a devil of a time it has taken me to find them. So I will swear another oath, swear that they will both die, most horribly and at most great length, should you break your oath of silence.'
Why take the risk? thought Cecil, as he swept from the room, leaving the broken figure behind him.
Gresham would have told him. Gresham would have said that he was a man whose whole life had been based on control, on having the strings of the puppets in his hands. Then a figure, Henry Gresham, had come along and shown that those same strings, the strings Cecil thought he held, were in fact held by another man, a man who had taken control completely away from Cecil's hands. Could Robert Cecil, by force of will and by imposition of pain, bend this man Guy Fawkes to obey him, to take the secrets he held to his grave? Cecil needed to know he could do this thing. If he could then his power was undiminished. He was like the mighty Mark Antony, whose power failed him only in the face of the one man, Octavius Caesar. He would block Gresham from his mind. Yet hidden from Cecil's own sight, he and Gresham knew that the secret of Cecil's survival lay in one man alone, and that was not the man who would go to his death on the scaffold with the other plotters.
There had been a brief flurry when at the trial Fawkes had pleaded ‘Not Guilty'. Cecil's heart had started to beat louder, but he had kept his outward calm and merely looked at the broken man in the dock. Fawkes had mumbled — he could hardly speak — that he had not understood some of the charges, and the crisis had passed. In fact, Cecil mused, it had probably been not so much a potential rebellion against Cecil, but more an attempt to protect some of the Catholic priests implicated in the plot, and Father Henry Garnet in particular. It was to no avail. Garnet would die, in agony, as was right.
It had been a bitterly cold morning when the first four had been dragged through the streets. The sentence had been for the traitors to be hauled at the tail of a horse, heads dragging on the ground. Amusing though the humiliation was, interpreted in its simplest form it meant the prisoner was likely to drown in the filth of the streets, or have his head banged so much as to make the executioner redundant. The crowd must not be deprived of their sport, so the prisoners were placed on a wicker hurdle for the first part of their ordeal. Would Jane wait and watch for him in a nearby house as he was dragged through the streets? wondered Gresham. He hoped not. You were best seen as already dead at this stage in the proceedings, and no dignity was to be acquired from any part of what went on.
Everard Digby's wife and children had managed to find a spot on the roadside. One of their little boys had cried out. Tata! Tata!' as their father was dragged past, the baying crowds silent for a moment, the clods of earth ceasing their hurtling towards the traitor. Did the little boy notice the spit staining his father's shirt and body? wondered Gresham. Tom Bates's wife had dashed out to him on the street as well. He had apparently told her where some money was stashed, practical to the last.
Poor Digby, innocent baby that he was. He had played the romantic fool at his trial, and he spoke at length, and to very little purpose, on the scaffold. It had not helped him. He had been cut down almost as soon as he had hung, and carved up fully conscious. Immediately after the crowd had gone its way, the rumour had started that when the executioner had held up the bloody lump of flesh that was Digby's heart, with the cry 'Here lies the heart of a traitor!', Digby had cried out in his death pangs, ‘You lie!' Well, Gresham reflected, someone might have heard those words. All he had heard was Digby's final agonised screams. Old Robert Wintour and John Grant had died decently enough, Tom Bates needing to make a speech.
The second batch of executions contained Fawkes. Tom Wintour, now recovered enough to die, Ambrose Rookwood and Robert Keyes went along with him. Keyes cheated the hangman at the last, hurling himself off the scaffold and breaking his neck the minute the halter was around it. Fawkes was last to go. He mumbled a few words — 'forgiveness' and 'the King' was all Gresham could hear, near as he was. The pathetic figure had to be helped on to the scaffold. His neck broke cleanly as he was hung. Strange, thought Gresham, that the crowd were denied the full bloody rites of this perceived ringleader. Stranger still that he had made it to execution, knowing what he knew. Or was it the real Fawkes? For all Gresham knew, some village idiot had been acquired in the place of the man who had died on the rack. He hardly cared. All he did know was that Cecil would never allow Guy Fawkes to live.
Mannion had come with him on both occasions. ‘Nothing like a good execution!' he had stated with enthusiasm, and even now he was comparing the eight deaths with others he had seen, for all the world like a man comparing plays or sonnets. He munched on a mutton pie as the conspirators were put to death, one by one. Jane had not come. 'I've excitement enough in my life,' she had said, 'without needing to smear my eyes with blood.' Gresham had found her crying, the night in between the executions.
'Why are you crying?' he had whispered to her, reaching out in the night.
'For the women,' she had sobbed, 'and for the children. For the innocents, left behind with no inheritance, their lives ruined by these stupid men. These men who care only for their great cause, and leave behind them weeping the only true great cause a man can have.'
Gresham could have said how those damned were only a tiny proportion of those who would have suffered if rebellion had broken out, if the plot had not been smashed and exposed. Yet was it so? Would more, or fewer, men have died, women been widowed and children been orphaned if Gresham had kept out of the whole affair? Cecil had it under control, did he not? Fawkes would have lived on, Percy been ennobled, a few plotters executed.
So what had Henry Gresham done, except send Guy Fawkes to the rack and Thomas Percy to his grave?
Gresham lay awake, the occasional ripple of a sob still passing through the beautiful body lying next to him. Was it Machiavelli's choice that he had made, to keep a corrupt ruler in his place? Or was it simple vanity?
Epilogue
It was a cold wind blowing across the marshes. The small boat that would take them out to meet the tiny pinnace was rocking in the water, the slap-slap of its hull loud in the night. Gresham wondered if there were troops at that moment searching the south-coast port where he had let it be known that the embarkation would take place. He doubted it, but it would be a good test of Cecil's word.
The priest, Father Garnet, had been arrested. He had tried to defend himself at his trial, but he had no defence. What did a court of King James care for the secrecy of the confessional? If he knew of treason and a plot to murder the King, his duty as a subject was to report it, never mind whether he heard it in a wooden box with incense all around him. He was a dead man from the moment they laid hands on him, and Garnet knew it as well as
