Coke may or may not have stinted on his sleep but he certainly did not stint on the furnishings he allowed himself. Mannion had been left in an ante room with a sniffing and disapproving clerk. Coke's study was vast, with crimson taffeta curtains and a turkey foot carpet laid over polished boards. The wall hangings on three walk were particularly fine. Coke must have had them commissioned. One showed Solomon giving judgement, another Moses damning the Jews for their worship of a golden idol, with a smoking mountain in the background. Very judicious. At a guess, Sir Edward Coke wanted to be Solomon and thought he might be Moses. It was only a short step for him to believe that he was God.
'Good morning, Sir Henry.' Coke spoke as if to a rather poor and badly behaved Ward of Court. He gave Gresham the merest glance and continued to inscribe a careful signature on the document in front of him. 'I am, as you see, most busy, most busy indeed…' The table at which Coke sat was littered with papers and bound volumes. He had not risen as Gresham entered, an act of extraordinary rudeness. Gresham adopted a solicitous expression and sat 'down on one of the ornately backed and armed chairs on the other side of the table, without being asked. From the slight stiffening of Coke's body Gresham knew he sensed the return discourtesy. Touchi. One all. Gresham's eye was caught by not one but two fine portraits of Sir Edward, posing magisterially, adorning the wall over the vast fireplace, and a third showing him with what Gresham assumed was his first wife and vast brood of children.
'It's a pleasure to come and meet you, Sir Edward,' said Gresham in his most understanding and sympathetic voice. 'Unlike your busy self, I've nothing at all to do with my time.' Coke did not look up. He was too much in control for that. But he had, Gresham noticed, managed to ruin one of the letters by the jerk his hand had given in response to Gresham's remark. He had done it just as he was forming the 'o' in his name, so that one missive was now apparently signed 'Ed. Cqke'. Gresham carried on. 'It's also always a pleasure to meet someone so exalted who is yet so… humble, so… well-mannered and lacking in vanity.'
Coke put down his quill, measured, making sure Gresham knew he was not hurrying. This was not a man to be underestimated, Gresham reminded himself. Coke had survived and flourished too long in the bitter, adversarial world of the law for that.
'You should know, Sir Henry, that the Earl of Salisbury is dead. He died yesterday at Marlborough.' Coke spoke solemnly, playing the part.
Cecil dead?
'Oh, good,' said Gresham, that same infuriating bland smile on his face. 'I'm so glad.'
That did get through to Coke. He had too much self control to rise from his chair but his colour roared up the scale towards red and Gresham saw his scrawny Adam's apple bobbing up and down several times as he swallowed. The skin was leathery, wrinkled, that of an old man.
'You are… gladV asked Coke, voice barely under control, rasping as if from a dry throat.
'Delighted,' said Gresham.
This man was an amateur! thought Gresham. He almost found himself missing Cecil. At least Cecil would never have let his true emotions show under such simple goading.
'How typical, Sir Henry, that you should go for a theatrical effect rather than deal with a serious matter with any degree of substance.' Coke put a special measure of loathing into the word 'theatrical'. Was he a Puritan? Gresham wondered. Or just someone who hated the thought of people letting their hair down and enjoying themselves.
Coke paused, and sipped from a king's ransom of a glass goblet. 'Quite frankly, Sir Henry, I was never able to see why the Earl wished you to become involved in this business.'
Coke's overwhelming sense of his own value and significance would never let him see why he could not be trusted with all and everything. Sharing a job was to Sir Edward Coke as much of an anathema as sharing a prosecution.
'No, Sir Edward, you would not be able to see why the Earl wished me to become involved in this business. I suspect my late Lord of the Flies recognised your weakness, which is that you think you know so much. Such people are a risk to themselves. They need to be placed with those who are willing to admit their ignorance.'
'You claim to know too little?' asked Coke, flat-voiced, his lawyer's brain leaping like a ferret at a rabbit's throat. He was almost visibly working to categorise and pin-point the nature of his opponent.
'I claim to have been told too little by my lord Cecil, and to recognise all the dangers to myself that lie therein. But then again, I'm more than used to working to Cecil's half-orders. You, I think, are a novice.'
'You are so little concerned for your own life that you would risk it, by your own admission, for you know not what?' asked Coke, his fish-eyes giving nothing away this time.
'Good, Sir Edward, very good,' replied Gresham. 'Our language is starting to reverse. Your questions are becoming shorter and shorter, my answers longer and longer. If this carries on I shall start to reveal more and more about who I am to your lawyer's brain. Is this always how you trap witnesses?'
'I do not trap witnesses.' There was acid in Coke's voice. Gresham said nothing. The silence between the two men lengthened. It was Coke who broke first. 'I care more for the law, and for justice, than you can ever imagine,' he said.
'How can you know what I imagine?' asked Gresham.
'Do not play with words with me!'
'Isn't that what lawyers do?'
'How can such as you presume to be a man of law?'
'I don't presume. I have too much self respect,' Gresham replied self-deprecatingly.
Cut. Thrust. Parry. Cut. Thrust. Parry. Gresham was starting to enjoy himself. Coke was energised now, the power almost visibly flowing through his ageing body. He spoke with scorn, hurling his words at Gresham.
'Self respect for yourself! Self! It is all you know, all you can speak of. The law speaks of respect for all people and their rights. Your self respect is little more than glorified selfishness!'
'True,' said Gresham. The best way of disarming an opponent was always to recognise when he spoke the truth. 'Yet my adoption of selfish survival as my creed is a response to those such as you who plead the law and justice as your creed, using it as a cloak for your greed and vanity.'
'A feeble defence!' grated Coke.
'Honesty is no defence against corruption, and never has been. Honesty merely makes men weak.'
'The honesty of the law*is its strength!' said Coke, as if stating a truth that could not be denied.
'It would be, if it were honest.'
'A feeble plea!' said Coke, voice full of scorn.
'True again,' said Gresham. 'As feeble and as frail as the humans you tear to pieces in your courts. Yet the difference is that you claim to be honest to all people while seeking power and wealth through your sycophancy. I know only how to be true to myself.'
That seemed to halt Coke in his assault. Had there once been a decent man buried among that arrogance, and had Gresham somehow reminded him of the betrayal of his soul?
'So what is it that you live for, Sir Henry?' asked Coke, part scornful, part in fear.
'For my honour, Sir Edward.' Gresham said it simply, with a dignity that undercut the crowing of Coke's legal brain. 'So that when death comes to me, I will be able to say that for all the stupidity of this life, at least while I lived I made things happen. To say that 1 survived. To say that I kept my honour, my self respect and my pride.'
Coke was trying to answer, Gresham could see. Half-formed words seemed to launch up into his throat and work the muscles there, but somehow died before they reached his mouth. Finally his words emerged.
'So you will die happy, Sir Henry?' Coke tried to put a world of sarcasm into his words but somehow the sting was lost.
'No man dies happy. I hope to die at peace with my honour, Sir Edward. You? You pretend to serve the law yet serve yourself. I hope you die with honour. I suspect you will die merely with possessions.'
There was a long pause.
'It doesn't matter, really, does it?' said Gresham, his voice almost kind. 'You see, we only need to work with each other.'
'Can you work with me on this matter?' Coke's voice had regained its composure. The previous conversation had been inconvenient. It had provoked thoughts of the wrong kind, therefore it had been dismissed. Not forgotten, but placed somewhere in a file where it could be coldly remembered without impacting on present day reality.
