in the Solent. So we killed him. We knew his replacement would be more cautious.' Gresham was amazed by how calmly he said the last words.
'You killed the Marquis of Santa Cruz?' Was there, for the first time, the slightest sense of fear in Cecil's voice?
'I didn't kill him. Mannion did. My servant. He'd been sent by Santa Cruz to the galleys as a captured English sailor. He had a reason. More than anyone else. He got into dalliance with one of the Marquis's cooks, became used to visiting her in the kitchens and waited until the Marquis's favourite food was to be served before sprinkling it with an odourless and taste-free poison. We were surprised at how easy it was, though he was an ill man anyway.' The pain was now affecting Gresham's brain, sending sharp lances of red-hot iron into his head, splintering his thoughts like a sharp stone shattering the flat reflections of a pond.
'So you say!' snarled Cecil. 'Yet again there is no evidence, except from a hulk of a man who would say that Satan was his rather to save his life. You cannot explain your defection from our mission to Flanders, to the Duke of Parma. You deserted your English compatriots. You broke my trust, the trust I had offered you by allowing you passage with my party.'
The Queen's party, actually, thought Gresham, but Her Majesty could read that nuance as well as he.
'To sail to Spain. To join the Armada. On the flagship. To stand by its commander.'
'I didn't just stand by him,' said Gresham weakly. 'I saved his ships. From the shoals. Warned him, when his own pilots couldn't see what was happening.'
‘You saved the ships of the Armada!' said Cecil, incredulous. He was shocked at the prospect, shocked that Gresham would own up to it.
'Helped save them,' said Gresham through his pain. ‘Why should more men die? More fine ships be sunk? The Armada wasn't the point. It never was.' As he paused for the breath he really did need, he realised how feeble it sounded.
'Wasn't the point?' said Cecil, again in what seemed to be genuine disbelief. Perhaps he was sorry that his victim had gone mad before the rack had done its work. 'If the Armada wasn't the point, what was?'
'The Armada itself, the ships, could only have made a difference if it'd landed its troops, taken the Isle of Wight, gone into Plymouth. Then it might have achieved something. I had to make sure it didn't stop. That's why I saved it. If they'd lost half their ships on shoals they'd have had to be defensive, cut their losses, might well have landed, stopped their advance. They only kept on to Calais because they were more or less intact.' Gresham stopped again. His breath was coming in rasping grunts now, and he was having to pause in mid-sentence to fill his lungs. It was as if the potential of the rack was squeezing them to half, a quarter of their capacity. 'The ships weren't important, as long as they didn't land the troops they had on board. The ships were only ever half of what might happen. It was the army, Parma's army, that was all that mattered. Without Parma's army, the whole thing was useless. Wouldn't work.' Gresham saw Cecil's throat move, saw him about to speak. Mustering all his strength, he cut in. 'I went to talk to the Duke of Parma,' said Gresham. 'That was all it was about. That was all it was ever about. To meet with Parma. To stop him sending his troops to join the Armada..'
'I know you met with Parma. One of my men heard you confess yourself to him as a Spanish spy! Hid under the floor! You were greeted by him as a long-lost friend!'
A wave of exhaustion had appeared on his horizon, rolling on to the beach where some enemy had pegged him out. There were no flowers on a sailor's grave. He would die shouting his pain under the water, unheard even by the fish. When would this farce end? He had done what he had to do. Now it would end in a tearing and wrenching of limbs. Make it now, dear God, let it start now so that it might end the sooner. 'I've told you,' said Gresham, 'Parma thought I was a spy working for Spain.'
'And all this on Walsingham's orders, of course!' said Cecil scornfully.
'Talking to Parma was Walsingham's idea,' said Gresham dreamily, a strange peace starting to settle over him, anaesthetising his limbs. 'That was the whole point of my being set up as a Spanish spy. So I could talk to Parma. I think the Spaniards surrounding Parma must have got wind of what I was being sent to do. They tried to kill me. Just before we met Parma.'
'How can that be? You tell us that the Spanish think you are a spy for them, and then that they tried to kill you?'
'Very few people in Spain knew that I was meant to be a spy on their side. You don't broadcast these things. Other Spaniards, the ones keeping watch on Parma, didn't know. They must have suspected the truth. That I was one of Walsingham's men, smuggled in with a diplomatic mission. To suborn Parma. You see, I didn't obey Walsingham's orders. I was only meant to tell Parma about the fly-boats. But I had an idea. What I said to him was my idea.' He heard himself give a strange giggle.
'More water. Now.' It was the Queen's voice, coming as if from far away. Something splashed in his face. He turned sharply away, found fluid forced into his mouth. He gulped, drank, suddenly grateful for the cool flow down his throat. 'Your idea?' Something had happened in his brain, and he could not tell if it was the Queen's voice or Cecil's.
'The Duke of Parma… he was the key, all along. I knew it. I knew it.' How many times had he said that? if his army didn't move, there was no invasion, no Spanish rule in England. The Armada, everything… it was just a joke! A great big joke! A terrible joke, an awful joke, a joke at the cost of human lives…' He was crying now, he noticed, writhing under the grip of the ropes. What a waste of fluid tears were. He would need that fluid soon, to cope with the rack tearing his body apart. Or would its absence ease the pain? 'So I had Tom Phelippes forge a seal. Paid him a King's ransom to forge a letter. Unlike you. I pay for proper forgeries. A Queen's ransom…' Suddenly it was overwhelmingly important for Gresham to get this right. 'The Queen's seal. And a letter under that seal. A secret letter.' Who was it giggling in the basement of the Tower? Surely it could not be Henry Gresham, who had spent so long gaining control of his body? 'A letter from the Queen offering him the throne of the Netherlands. If he let the Armada pass him by. If he let it swimmy swim swim…'
Something slapped hard across his face. Again. There was no doubting the hand this time or the voice. It was the Queen of England. One of the rings on her fingers had cut into his chin.
' You offered the Duke of Parma the throne of the Netherlands in my name?' she bellowed.
'Yes,' said Gresham simply. Despite the slap, the world was shifting softly in and out of focus. 'And I did a bit more than that, your Majesty.' He was very proud of himself for remembering the correct mode of address. Very, very very proud. Very, very very… I offered him your throne, actually. As it happens. The throne of England, in your name. Under your seal… If he left the Armada to its own devices. Well, not your seal actually, but your forged seal.' It was so important to get these things right. The room was starting to swing round again.
He was glad he could not see the Queen's face at that particular moment. She would probably be quite cross at the thought of a young nobody offering her throne to a foreign general.
'I thought he might like that. To be King of the Netherlands. It was only English support stopping him from winning for Spain. So if England came in on his side, he'd be bound to win. For himself. Then if he ran the Netherlands, a Catholic running a Protestant country, why not England? Rubbish, of course. Should never have a Catholic on our throne again. Too much trouble. But he wasn't to know that. Seemed a good idea at the time. So I gave him a letter he thought was from the Queen, offering to name him as her successor if he agreed not to invade. Don't worry. I bribed a secretary to steal the letter back and destroy it once Parma had read it. They lose a lot of things on campaign, you know,' he said stupidly.
Gresham turned his head, searching for the Queen. He wanted to see his death sentence in her eyes. Her face appeared from somewhere. From several somewheres. It looked venomous, angry beyond belief. Gresham meant to apologise. But it did not quite come out like that.
'I didn't do it for you, you know,' he said very seriously. 'Well, not exactly. I did it for peace. For the peasants. To stop the burning. I don't believe in war, you see,' he gabbled. 'It kills people. And I want them to live. If they can. Though a lot die anyway, don't they?'
He fell back, his head thumping on the bare wood. It hurt. How strange that he should notice that among all the other pain. The slight noise seemed to echo round the silence of the chamber. A hoarse, gravelly laugh came from the corner. A laugh Gresham knew. The laugh of a dead man.
Walsingham looked half dead, but whatever his body was telling him was clearly denied by a brain that had lost none of its edge. He could only walk with a stick, and a wide-eyed servant boy hovered near him, torn between fear of his master falling and fear for where he was and who also was in the chamber. And, perhaps, fear of what happened in that chamber. Walsingham laughed again. He bowed to the Queen, who nodded back. Cecil he
