kept from me and those I do not know about.'
Damn her! Why could not the old body be matched in the mind? Was there anybody stupid in this mad, deranged Court, or did they all have the brains of the Queen, Cecil and Essex?
'So here you are,' said the Queen, taking a sip from her glass. 'Undoubtedly you want something from me. No one asks to see the Queen for love, only ever because they want something in her power.' She held up her hand, as Gresham opened his mouth. 'Enough! Cease before you start. I have had enough of piled words. Tell me what it is you want. Spit it out, man.'
There was no pause in Gresham's answer.
'I wish your passport for me to visit Scotland with my ward and a servant.'
The words hung in the air.
'You always were clever, Henry Gresham. Cleverer than anyone, except perhaps for my little pygmy, and certainly clever in a different way from him. Others would have spun me a cock and bull story about why they wished to visit the country of the impudent young man so hungry for my throne.' There was real venom in her voice. Gresham had a strong impression that Queen Elizabeth of England did not much like King James of Scotland. Perhaps the fact that she had ordered the execution of his mother did not help. 'You choose to say nothing.'
Gresham continued to choose to say nothing. The strain was actually harder than filling the air with noise would have been. Babbling is easy.
In earlier years the Queen would have got up at a moment like this, and started to pace the room restlessly. It used to annoy Gresham because it was exactly what he did. Instead, she stayed seated. Gresham noted the cushions piled high beneath and around her. They were new. The Queen had been renowned for sitting on hard wooden seats for hours on end. How times were changing.
'Well, now,' said the Queen, actually settling back into her cushions, but with a wicked gleam in her eye. 'As Sir Henry is apparently struck dumb for a moment, let us see if an old woman…' She paused momentarily and cocked what remained of an eyebrow at him, as if daring Gresham to challenge as any courtier would do the assertion that she was old. Gresham continued to say nothing, his face impassive. '… can come to some conclusions. It is a long, painful journey to Scotland, and an inhospitable country with few charms for a man of wealth and taste. Therefore Sir Henry has strong reason to go there. His ward, who they tell me he has not bedded yet, is unlikely to be the real reason. Given the importance of Scotland to those who are already playing dice for my throne and who believe me dead already, the real reason is therefore likely to be a plot. But whose plot? And is Sir Henry for or against the plotters?'
Gresham was challenging his own body not to sweat, his own face not to redden. This was getting dangerously close.
'My little pygmy hates Henry Gresham, but uses him.' She was looking intently at Gresham now, daring him to show by a flicker of his face that she had hit the mark. 'As he, for some reason, seems willing to be used. But there are others, of course. Sir Henry is a lifelong friend of the greatest rogue in my Court, Sir Walter Raleigh, who as so many of my Court would like nothing more than to have a line of communication open with the… King of Scotland. And my Great Lord the Earl of Essex has been heard expressing admiration for Henry Gresham the soldier, just as so many others have been whispering that this same Henry Gresham is in this plot, or that plot or the other plot. And my Great Lord of Essex is not above suspicion in seeming willing to bend the knee in obeisance to the north.'
There was a long silence.
'Which one is it, I wonder? Which of those professing undying love and loyalty towards me as their Queen wishes to send a covert message to my rival in Scotland? Or perhaps it is all of them? Or is it the King himself who has asked to see you? Is the whole pattern in reverse, with His Royal Highness of the frozen north making the running, seeking to use this same Sir Henry Gresham as his intermediary with one of those named earlier? Or, God forbid, with all of them?'
There was another, even longer silence.
'I command you to make answer,' said the Queen simply, and Gresham knew that his time of silence had ended. 'Why do you wish to go to Scotland?'
'Majesty,' he said,*I have a lust for porridge and it will not be denied.'
For a moment he thought he had gone too far, as a flicker of yellow flashed across the Queen's eyes, and then she burst into a peal of laughter, so intense it rocked her fragile body. When she had stopped laughing, and had wiped the traces of spittle off her lips with a delicate handkerchief, she looked at him again.
'And was I stupid enough to expect a straight answer from you? Tell me one thing. Just one thing.' 'Your Majesty?'
‘I have lost my father.' The mood change was sudden. God knows how anyone could keep track when she and Essex were in the same room together. Lose her father? Henry VIII had been dead these many, many years. Gresham could see the tears rising up in her eyes. Real tears. Good God! 'My Lord Burghley is the nearest thing I had to a father, and now he is gone. I have already lost my executioner, Walsingham, who bankrupted himself for me. I have lost… so many of those who were my friends. And you, with your good looks, your money and your wit, you who were trained by Walsingham, you could have stepped into his shoes had you so wished. But you never showed any interest, fled to the Low Countries to fight in stupid wars and no doubt prove your manhood in the lunatic way men seem to have to do… you are the only person I know, Henry Gresham, who gave up a position of power in my Court when it beckoned him, when to acquire it would have been so easy. Why did you spurn advancement?'
'Your Majesty,' said Gresham, who felt it was time he strung more than two consecutive words together, 'I am one who believes that most of life is a pretence, and who struggles more and more to see or to find meaning in it. Life at Court, even in your service, would for me simply have been another pretence. I am sorry.'
'Yet you miss out the most important thing of all,' said the Queen, 'if you wish to keep your life and your liberty.'
'I do?'said Gresham, nonplussed for once.
'If you were simply seeking to flatter me, you would have pointed out the mere truth. You have done several things for which you should have been hung, if not drawn and quartered. Yet never to my knowledge have you once undertaken an action that would threaten my life or my throne.'
Well, that was true, thought Gresham, though all too often that had not been the motive in his actions. He nodded, acknowledging the truth.
'So tell me this. If I give you my passport to Scotland, will anything that takes place there threaten my life or my throne?'
For a brief moment he saw the real fear that haunted this woman in the small hours when she was alone. Her powers were waning as she lost the battle with time. The men who had put her on the throne and kept her there — Burghley, Walsingham and the rest of the pack — were dead or dying. How easy now to speed up nature: a subtle poison in her food; the assassin's knife; even a carefully mounted rebellion. Ring out the dead wood, ring in the new. The Queen is dead. Long live… a new Queen? A new King?
Gresham did actually take time to think this one through. Slightly to his surprise he found he was not willing to lie to Elizabeth. She was foul-breathed, not infrequently foul-mouthed, infuriating in her procrastination, had probably denied the country an heir simply to preserve her own power for as long as she lived and was the most devious person he had ever known, as well as the most selfish apart from himself. Yet she had brought peace to a ravaged England for forty years, and given her people in exchange for all that it gave her the one thing a monarch could give their country: stability. The Spanish had not invaded, for all that they had tried. Ireland may have been falling apart for most of her reign, Tyrone threatening to wrest the whole country back into Irish hands, but it was of more use to royal vanity and land-starved nobles than to any normal Englishman. The harvest might be bad, the bottom fall out of the wool trade, and a thousand natural calamities befall Jack and Jill. But at least in the reign of Elizabeth their problems were from natural calamities. No wild horsemen trampled their crops at harvest time or ran with their babies on the end of a pike, and no marauding armies took their wives and daughters even as they burnt their house down. Unlike Essex, military glory had never ranked as an ambition in Elizabeth's mind. Like Burghley and Cecil, she saw war primarily as a waste of money. So Gresham ran through at break-neck speed all that might result from his rescuing the reputation of Cecil with James. Try as he might, he could find no scenario that would threaten the Queen. It would probably be better in the name of stability if Cecil was cleared in the eyes of James. It might stop the both of them plotting even more.
