Obligation. Entrapment. Robert Cecil was the new order, or a possible variant of that new order. Yet Walsingham was ready to die only when God gave the command. In the meantime, let the new order be in his debt, in his vision. He doubted that Cecil planned anything good for Gresham. But who knew how valuable the knowledge of Cecil's plans would be when Walsingham finally acquired it, as acquire it he surely would.
'Just checking you came out alive!' whispered George, who appeared by Gresham's side as soon as he stepped into the Hall. Mannion was there too, playing his usual trick of sticking up against the wall so that people thought him to be a royal servant. 'Well, tell me! What did he want?'
'To have me blown to death in Lisbon or hung from a tree as a spy there!' said Gresham bitterly, then angry at himself for taking his depression out on his friend. Further conversation was denied them. The musicians in the Gallery stirred. The Queen's famous parsimony may have been evident elsewhere in her reception, but not in the dress of her players, resplendent in Tudor green. They stood, and a blare of trumpets rolled out through the rafters and rattled the windows of the ancient building. It was a dramatic opening, but not as dramatic as the appearance of the Virgin Queen herself.
The cynic in Gresham noted that a particularly fine chandelier had been hung at the back of the hall, over a narrow, empty dais cloaked at the side with fine hangings. It seemed to serve no purpose, until the Queen stepped out from a door hidden by one of the hangings, two cherubic page boys flinging the door open and standing aside, bowing to let her pass. Every jewel sewn into her dress, on her fingers and round her neck seemed to blaze into fearsome light, as if a glittering portion of the sun had exploded into the Hall. She was not a particularly tall woman, and her hour-glass figure was threatened by matronly wadding. The worth of the fine black and russet-brown cloth of the dress alone, with its intricate filigree stitching on the huge puffed sleeves, would have fed a small town for a year. And the jewels! Apart from the gem stones, some even placed on the vast halo-like ruff that framed her face, there were vast, sweeping strings of pearls around her neck and crowning her hair.
'That,' whispered Gresham to George, 'is an entrance.'
There was an indrawn gasp of breath as she moved to the front of the dais, and a spontaneous round of applause. It was easy to forget how fragile was her hold on power in the face of her magnificence. She gazed down at her adoring Court and a thin smile of triumph crossed her lips. She extended her hand to the Ambassador, the huge emerald ring on her finger looking like a vast open mouth, the light shooting in and out of its facets. The poor man was quite overwhelmed by events. He could not see the short stairs leading up to the dais, yet could not reach Her Majesty's hand without climbing on to the stage with her. A quick glance from the Queen and a courtier jumped to take the Ambassador's elbow and lead him to the steps. Yet he stumbled as he climbed them. The Queen, her hand still extended, looked down disdainfully at him.
'Fear not, sir!' she exclaimed in a voice strangely deep for a woman, 'this is the hand of friendship I extend to you, not the fist of war.'
A gale of laughter swept the Court, far more than the feeble joke deserved. So it was not her best. Yet the Court knew of old that a rough earthiness could cut into the formality and pretence of Court life at any moment, as the spirit of her father, Henry VIII, possessed her. They might hate her when she was not there, blame her increasingly for not leaving England with a clear heir, but here, in the splendour of her own Court, it was not difficult to see why she had survived so long and so well.
Gresham found himself dancing with the Queen before he realised it. The intricate moves had required his whole attention, and it was not until he felt the stink of the Queen's foul breath behind him that he realised the next round would place him in partnership with her. They swept towards each other, the Queen still excellent in the slower dances. Her face was unnaturally white, the pancake-layer of make-up beginning to loosen like bad plaster as the sweat and exertion of the evening wore on. Her eyes were small, narrow, as they had been on the portraits of her father, Gresham noted. She had favoured the Earl of Essex all evening, to the discomfiture of Leicester. Now she fixed her eye on Gresham, still coping apparently effortlessly with the intricacies of the dance.
'Have you spent all that money yet, Master Gresham?' she asked. She never met him without referring to his wealth, nor let an hour pass without referring to her own poverty. 'Have you spent your inheritance on the things young men spend their money on?'
'I would willingly spend it on gifts for Your Majesty,' said Gresham, a sinking feeling in his stomach. This was not the moment to cannon back into the Earl of Somerset or step on the most powerful set of toes in England, 'were it not for the fact that the greatest fortune on earth could not improve on the beauty that nature and providence gave Her Majesty.'
They moved back in stately movement for a moment, then came together again. The dance required them to walk between the other couples, fifteen or twenty in number, in two separate stages. Gresham was vaguely aware of several glances of hatred directed at him as he escorted the Queen up the line.
'Your words are impressive, young man,' said the Queen, 'and even more so because there is even a slight chance you thought of them yourself.'
Ouch; It never did to underestimate the Queen, whose capacity for flattery was only equalled by her ability to perceive when she was being flattered.
'Have care, young man,' the Queen added, her face expressionless. The dance had brought them face to face for a brief moment. 'There are those who despise you as an upstart in my Court.'
And there are those who despise you, Your Majesty, thought Gresham, as the bastard daughter of the whore Anne Boleyn, who many thought a witch. Nonetheless…
'Thank you, Your Majesty,' said Gresham humbly, in the few seconds remaining. 'Yet sometimes upstarts are better survivors than those whose entry into life was made easy for them.'
My God! What had he said! He might as well have told her that bastards should stick together! The Queen's eyes were fathomless, unreadable. They parted with the brief, formal bows the dance demanded, his deep and low, hers conventional, neither so brief as to be rude nor so long as to excite attention.
'Well, that was interesting.' George had grabbed a table in a room off the Hall, found from somewhere some scraps of food and a half-decent bottle. No servant could sit at table with their master and so Gresham had sent Mannion off to scour the kitchens, where past experience suggested he would find far better food and drink, and probably ruin a kitchen-maid in the bargain. There were plenty of available women above-stairs, for that matter, but the encounter with the Queen had rather knocked the stuffing out of Gresham.
'What was interesting?' asked Gresham. 'Her breath curdles milk inside the cow at fifty paces, and you never know from one minute to the next if it's an axe or a glove in her hand. I-'
‘Not that, fool,' said George. 'Who cares about you? I mean the way the Ambassador was received. Didn't you notice, you great idiot?'
'Notice? Notice what?' said Gresham. Perhaps he would get drunk after all, since remaining sober didn't seem to help.
'The Queen was not there to greet the Ambassador, nor to hear the speech of welcome. All perfectly acceptable in diplomatic terms, of course, but it demotes him immediately two or three places below a Prince or equivalent. No, what it shows is that this evening isn't about the Queen listening to the Ambassador, as I feared. Rather, it's to impress him. It's a show of force — or rather a show of wealth. He's meant to go back to the Netherlands and tell them how much money England has, how brilliant its Court is.'
'But that doesn't make sense,' said Gresham, grappling with the issues. 'All it means is that they'll ask us for more money and more men, when all the Queen can do is say that she hasn't got the income to hold body and soul together.' Spend a bit less on your dresses, lady, thought Gresham.
'Of course it makes sense!' said George, exasperated at his friend's inability to see what was obvious. 'While the Netherlands keep on fighting the Duke of Parma, he's hardly going to want to send half his army over to England, is he? It's leaving him completely exposed. If the Protestants think England can keep pouring money and troops into their cause, they're much more likely to keep fighting and not make a deal with Parma or Spain. Don't you understand anything about politics?'
No, thought Gresham, I do not. Or at least not enough. And as the waters get deeper and my involvement greater with every minute, I must learn. Even the most dedicated survivor needs lessons in survival
Chapter 2
