The servant halted, on his way out of the room, surprised to be addressed. 'Me, sir? I'm Arthur, sir…' Arthur gazed at Gresham in total awe, unaware that his mouth was hanging open. 'Sir… sir, forgive me, I…' Arthur was clearly bursting to say something.
'Spit it out, lad,' said Mannion.
Arthur saw a tall, muscled figure dressed from top to toe in. black except for a white collar worked with breathtaking and exquisite skill. The clothes breathed money, despite beingalmost ostentatious in their lack of ostentation. The body they covered seemed as if it were a coiled spring, ready at any moment to break out. Yet it was the face that Arthur could not take his eyes from, a face of arrogance, of immense strength, of flickering humour yet strange vulnerability — a face that seemed to have all the humours of the world in its angularity.
'Sir… sir…' Arthur was stuttering. 'What I wanted to know, know more than anything else was… did you meet Guy Fawkes, as they say you did?'
Gresham looked Arthur straight in the eye. 'Yes, Arthur, I did meet Guy Fawkes. As they say I did.'
Yes, thought Gresham, I did meet Guy Fawkes, a rather decent and honourable man in many respects, certainly more honourable than many of those who hounded him to his death. And I was responsible for stopping his escape, springing a trap upon him and delivering him to a death no animal should endure, administered by your master, Robert Cecil. And by failing to tell the truth about Guy Fawkes, quite deliberately, I helped keep your master in power and a dribbling Scottish homosexual as king. All in all, I did a brilliant job.
'And, sir,' said Arthur, so intent and intense that he forgot to splutter, 'was he as they say? Was he the devil incarnate?'
'Yes, Arthur,' said Gresham solemnly. He felt the mischief in his soul bubble and startto rise. 'He was the devil incarnate. And I tell you what very few other people know, a secret you must vow at all costs to keep to yourself. Do you vow, on your soul and all that you hold holy?'
'I do, sir, I do, I do…' Arthur was transformed by a paroxysm of yearning.
'When he was examined, it was proven that he had a cloven foot!'
There was a moment of extraordinary silence.
'Sir!' said Arthur, standing to attention, real tears in his eyes. 'I shall never tell a soul! And… thank you!' He rushed from the room.
'Well,' said Mannion, 'that'll be round the servant's hall in five minutes flat. Still, at least you made him leave the jug.' Mannion helped himself. Cecil's wine had always been cat's piss, served in golden goblets, a strange emblem for the man. Mannion would have drunk real cat's piss quite cheerfully if it had been proven to be alcoholic.
There was a noise of carriages outside, in surprisingly short time, and much shouting and apparent confusion. The Earl of Salisbury had made haste back from the baths. He was bustled in to the room in a chair carried by four men, another man by his side.
There was a moment of stunned silence. Cecil was shrouded in blankets, a thin, emaciated version of his former self, shrunken, wizened and dried out. The skin on his face was drawn tight over his skull like a death's head, only the hard, dark eyes recognisably the same as ever. One hand protruded slightly from the blankets, shaking uncontrollably. This was a wreck of a man, thought Gresham, a pitiful caricature of what had once been. A stench of something foul and rotten came from within the blankets. There was scant dignity in death, and what little that there was had been taken away from Robert Cecil. And what good to you is it now, thought Gresham, that you are the First Earl of Salisbury, that you have held power beyond the desire of monarchs? You have no power over this ignominy, this humiliation that leaves the vision of a demented cripple as your memorial.
'Good day, Sir Henry,' said Cecil. The voice was thin, wavering, but still recognisably the same. It reeked with the same insincerity. 'As ever, it is a pleasure to see you.'
'My Lord Salisbury,' said Gresham urbanely. 'And Sir Edward Coke.' He nodded to the figure beside Cecil. 'Not only the normal pleasure, but a pleasure almost doubled.'
Cecil's companion was a surprise. After Cecil himself, Sir Edward Coke was the man Henry Gresham most loathed above all others. Old now — he must be sixty — Coke exuded a youthful energy, a magnetism that all near him felt. Setting himself up as England's leading legal expert, and of ferocious, icy intelligence and application, Coke had been chief prosecutor at the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh. A charade, the trial had turned Raleigh from one of the most hated men in England into a folk hero, by virtue of its palpable unfairness and the dignity with which Raleigh had defended himself. Denying Raleigh any legal representation, Coke had not even allowed him to call his chief accuser as a witness, and had made a mockery out of justice. Every reason for hating lawyers, and for hating men with no principles except their own vainglory, was summed up for Henry Gresham in the figure of Sir Edward Coke. And now both he and Cecil were facing him.
'Have you both had a pleasant day?' asked Gresham solicitously. Cecil was dying in agony. Coke's idea of a pleasant day was finding yet more reason to hate papists, sodomites and his own daughter, not to mention anyone the King needed convicting at short notice. In Gresham's experience, being nice to such people caused them more agonies than anything else.
'I am lowered into the baths, Sir Henry,' said Cecil in a parody of his former voice, but still with a practical, factual tone to it.
'They do it in a strange contraption of a chair they have built spe-cially for me. The ropes snag on occasion, which is not pleasant. My numerous physicians tell me it is important I go no deeper than waist height.' indeed, my lord,' replied Gresham easily. 'I must attempt to be present the next time they hoist you over the watery void, and see if I can cut the rope-'
'My lord. Is this… impertinence necessary?' Coke spoke with chilling calm.
Cecil turned to Sir Edward Coke with an effort that cost him dear. The lawyer held Cecil's gaze, then only reluctantly dropped his eyes. A tall, forbidding man with a long, oval face, Coke was ill at ease, unhappy and uncertain with this fencing between the two men. He lusted for control, for power, and hated any situation where power seemed to be ceded to others. Coke had become too used to being both judge and jury, Gresham thought.
Cecil produced something that might almost have been a chuckle, with a strange, dry rattle to it.
'Ah, Sir Henry! So droll, as ever. How much I have enjoyed your sense of humour over the years I have known you.'
'Yes,' said Gresham, 'much as the body enjoys the dagger that enters it, or the hare enjoys the hounds.' i wonder if it is not time…' Coke's voice was gravelly, sharp, though not pitched at the roar he used in court against those he had decided to condemn. They said he was charming to prisoners in interrogation, turning into a frothing fiend when later he had them in the dock. Cecil held up his hand, the blanket dropping away. Coke swallowed his words, waiting. Gresham looked in horror at Cecil's arm. The skin was discoloured, the flesh almost all wasted away. His Hps drawn back over rotten teeth, the gums retreating as if the outgoing tide on a beach, it was clear that even the gesture of holding up a hand for silence had caused Cecil acute pain.
'You think, perhaps, Sir Edward, that if I do not make haste to stop this small talk then I may be dead before we can reach an outcome?'
Coke's self control was enough to resist the sally. 'Of course, such were not my thoughts, my lord.' Outwardly servile, the phrase 'of course' made Coke's comment shiver on the edge of impertinence.
'But you would be wrong to deny it!' Something of the old spirit came back into Cecil's voice. 'You would be right to urge me to make haste, Sir Edward. I command all England, but even I cannot command death.'
No, thought Gresham, though you have commanded enough men to their deaths.
Cecil turned to Gresham, in obvious pain at the exertion. 'Sir Edward is here because he will live on after me. He is a man of power
…' Coke drew back, and gave a short bow towards Cecil. His face and posture gave nothing away. 'His power will be necessary to see a certain business through. It is this business that will need your help.'
Now it comes, thought Gresham. The muscles in his face did not move, the colour neither rose nor fell in his skin, the pulse in his neck remained constant. Those outward tricks he knew. Yet inside it was as if a slow-burning fire had burst into full riot of flame.
'Sir Edward, you will please leave us for a short while. And, Sir Henry, perhaps that great ox of a man you carry with you might leave as well.'
Gresham nodded at Mannion, and he slipped out of the room, moving quietly and silently in a manner that belied his bulk. Coke was less happy. He drew himself to his full height, chin jutting forward, hand posed on the hilt
