'But then again, this looks a good game, and the least you can do if you've disturbed me is let me play it too.'
They smiled then, shy little smiles. Trust and fear, thought Gresham, and some affection. Three of the ingredients that make a fine commander. Am I treating my children like soldiers under my command?
If he was, one soldier kept a lawyer in the barracks.
'Your arms are bigger than ours,' said Gresham's daughter. 'You must have a forfeit!'
Where had she learned to speak like that at her tender age? Those huge, dark eyes; the thin, wiry little body; the intensity and the control in the voice. In a moment Gresham was rushed back to his first meeting with her mother, Jane. A bastard girl in a godforsaken village, beaten to perdition by a vicious stepfather, demanding that the gentleman pay a forfeit because he had blinked before she did.
He blinked now, and saw his daughter before him again. Yet as it had always been with her mother, he felt a strange, defenceless feeling overwhelm him. She was very like Jane.
He became businesslike. Fathers should be formal, precise and definite with their children. In a very short space of time it was agreed that he should have a five-point handicap on a match of six throws. He had argued for three points, his children for ten, and they had compromised, at five. His children forgot who he was as he totally threw away the first ball, hitting the leg of the third chair along.
'Damn!' he said, engrossed, then looked round with a guilty start. Walter and Anna pretended they had not heard him. Walter landed his neatly within the circumference of the bum roll and Anna lodged her ball just outside of it.
When Lady Jane Gresham entered the Hall, with Mannion beside her, it was to find her husband, Sir Henry Gresham, kneeling on the floor in peasant's jerkin and trews, beating it with his fists and yelling in mock horror that he had lost to devilry and witchcraft. Walter and Anna were dancing round him, alternately shrieking, 'We won! We won!' and trying to hug him to say thank you for the fact that he could be so silly.
Jane had seen Gresham kill a man by cleaving his head in half with a boat axe, an exultant grin on his face as his teeth drew back over his lips. He had consigned men to torture, had himself been strapped to the rack. She knew he could be without pity or remorse for those who threatened him, or her. And here he was, treating his children as if they were the most fragile alabaster.
The children saw their mother and rushed towards her, all decorum forgotten. In a trice they were wrapped round her.
'Mummy, Mummy, Father came and we thought he was angry but he played with us and we won…'
Jane was dressed plainly, to manage the house and her children rather than to impress at Court. Nonetheless, every lady painting and corseting at Court would have given their souls to look as she did. The body was straight as an arrow, the complexion clear, the legs as long as heaven and the breasts the reward for having made the journey. Her head was chiselled and her face extraordinary. Its classical beauty was simplicity itself, yet it flickered and changed and flashed a different reality every second. The eyes. It was always the eyes with her, almost black but with a strange sparkle to them and the same primeval depth as the pool that Henry Gresham had dived into this morning.
'Good morning, my lord,' said Jane, managing to manifest total control, exasperation and a mild, irritated affection all at the same time. 'I thought I had only two children in my care. Now it seems I have three.'
Gresham stood up. 'Madam,' he announced, standing to his full height, 'I must make formal complaint regarding your motherhood.'
The two children disengaged from their mother and stood back, alarmed.
'Sir Henry!' replied Jane, sweeping to her full dignity, 'I am appalled. How may I have failed in my sacred duty to your heirs?'
'You have failed, my lady,' replied Gresham in the most sonorous tones he could muster, 'in that you have had the temerity to bring into this world two young striplings,' he glowered at his children with such severity that they fell back, 'who have managed to beat me fair and square at bowling!'
With that, he flung out his arms and his children ran in glee to their embrace.
'Take these young hounds outside,' Gresham said to Mannion after a moment, gazing swiftly at Jane who nodded imperceptibly, 'and give them some exercise, so they learn to leave their father undisturbed and, of course, to let him win.'
Mannion, like a vast and ragged hen, gathered the two chickens under his arms and led them off, chattering happily. He would walk them for an hour or more through the woods, as he had done with Gresham when he was a child, pointing out to them the different notes of the birds and the names of the wild flowers. They would know how the other birds fell silent when a hawk was in the wood, spot the patches of water where the fish were to be found in the river and learn which leaf to rub on a nettle sting.
'They're good children,' Gresham said when they were alone.
Well, I'm glad,' said Jane. 'It'd be a little difficult to put them back from whence they came if you didn't like them.' They talked, for a while, the tittle-tattle of houses and servants. There was no mention of the sadness that joined them, the memory of the baby who had been born dead. The baby who had broken the fragile cycle of Jane's fertility. There would be no more children born to Sir Henry and Lady Gresham.
Was he finally calming down, this husband of hers? Jane wondered. With a king secure on his throne, a brilliant heir to the Crown and the Catholics vanquished, would he cease to be Henry
Gresham the soldier and spy she had always known? Would he increasingly be taken over by the College he had refounded, and become Sir Henry Gresham the gentleman and the academic? A part of her soul yearned for it to be so. The other, stronger part told her the truth. Yet for a moment she allowed herself to gaze on Gresham, slightly dishevelled, seemingly at peace with himself.
It did not, could not last. It was late in the afternoon, the rooks and the men in the fields starting to head home, when they heard the sound of a tired horse, and a beating at their door.
Cecil's messenger. Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury. Lord Treasurer and Chief Secretary to His Royal Highness King James I of England and Scotland. Cecil hated Gresham with the malice of acid on steel. It was a feeling returned with interest by Gresham. Yet each needed the other, a poisoned symbiosis that grappled both to its breast. Cecil's messengers had summoned Gresham countless times, always the harbinger of potential death and destruction, always the guarantor of trouble, and always, for some reason, coming just before or after nightfall.
'Perhaps,' said Jane caustically, cynicism the first cover she could find for her growing fear, 'he lies waiting outside for the last two or three hours of daylight, so as to make an entrance?'
Cecil was dying, they both knew. Those who had seen him said he stank and was rotting from within, his thin limbs no longer able to support him and racking him with pain. Jane had not expected this last summons. The fact of its coming from a man so nearly dead chilled her to her bones, made this last call from Gresham's old enemy the most terrifying of them all.
The messenger's name was Nicholas Heaton. Gresham took care to know these things. He was muddied enough, almost as big as Mannion, sweat-stained and stinking from his ride. His hair was thinning on top, though he tried to cover it with long, lank strands plastered down over the bald patch on his pate. As if to compensate for the lack of hair on his head, he wore a huge, florid moustache that extended in two luxuriant curls beyond the side of his face. It would have been ludicrous were it not for the almost palpable sense of threat the man emanated.
Heaton managed the merest nod of a bow to Gresham.
'My master is dying. He requests that you might spare time from your academic pursuits to visit him on his way to Bath. He has urgent need of speech with you.'
A man soon to be out of a job might be expected to show more respect. Gresham had too much self-respect of his own to allow Heaton's insubordination to get beneath his skin, yet he was intrigued.
'And after his death, what fate befalls you, Master Heaton?'
'My master has arranged for me to transfer my service. To the King.' There was pride in his voice, and arrogance.
'I'm delighted for the both of you,' said Gresham with an unctuous sincerity that only a liar could muster. Suddenly his tone cut the air as a razor through soft flesh: 'Take care. Those who rise to greater heights have far further to fall.' Only much later was Gresham to realise the appalling irony of his words. 'As for your present and still-living master, I'll come. I've always come, haven't I? Tell him so. Where do we meet?'
'He's left Theobalds to go to Bath. Some of his physicians believe there'll be a relief from his pain there, in the
