thought for a moment. 'I 'ate fuckin' people who try to kill us,' he said finally, taking a pull on his tankard and smacking his lips. There was something special about food, drink and, for that matter, sex, after a man had looked death in the eye and beaten it. For this time, at least.
'More than you hate fucking Scots?' said Gresham. The drink would not help his head the next morning, but it was helping to dull things now, which was what mattered.
'Depends if the fuckin' Scots try to kill us. What a right bloody mess!' Mannion said. 'Everyone thinks you're plotting against everyone else. Cecil would kill you at the drop of a hat — if you don't deliver that bloody letter. The Queen'll reduce you to rags — and me as well, come to think of it — and probably have you knocked off in the Tower while she's at it, if you don't deliver her bloody package. Essex — God knows what 'e'll do, 'cept I wouldn't trust him as far as I can spit and he ain't goin' to like it if 'e 'ears you've carried messages gettin' Cecil off the 'ook. And now we've got someone else — or mebbe one 'o them trying to kill us.'
'Not trying to kill us exactly,' said Gresham wearily, 'though they would've done, I'm sure. All this business tonight was about getting what we carried. But which one? Cecil's message? Or the Queen's? Did Essex get wind of a message that would stop his campaign with James? Or have we walked into plots from the Pope, from Spain or from France, without realising it? And how did whoever it is know about either package? Has someone infiltrated Cecil's household? Or the Queen's? The Court leaks like a sieve, but when it really matters, both Cecil and the Queen are past masters at keeping secrets.'
'I'll tell you somethin',' said Mannion.' 'Ooever organised that boat that attacked us… it's not someone used to dealing with you.'
'How so?' said Gresham. Mannion's mind was clearly working on a different track to his own.
'Tailing us like that. How often does another ship weigh anchor and leave a mooring at exactly the same time as another? Why would a faster ship like that one stay just so far behind us? A courtier wouldn't notice it. We would. That boat, and the man who ran it, it's someone who don't really know you, someone who's got you down as just another stupid messenger.'
The miscalculation had cost twenty men their lives. Gresham tried to get his aching brain around the problem. Who was trying to kill him? Was it just for the messages he carried? And if it was, why were they so important? Whoever it was had access to real money. Hiring a decent boat and the men to sail it did not come cheap.
'What about 'im up there?' asked Mannion. The look-out had regained consciousness now, could be seen straining at his bonds.
'We'll decide about him in the morning,' said Gresham tiring suddenly of the killing. 'Your watch or mine?' he asked, aching from the core of his soul for Mannion to take over.
'I reckon I'll manage the first two hours,' said Mannion. 'You get your head down for a bit. But there's summat we 'ave to do before that.'
They could have just heaved the dead bodies over the side, would have done so without a moment's thought in the heat of the battle. But now it seemed different. After the red mist of battle something like sanity returned. Or was it simply a different form of madness? They would give each man a cannon ball tied round his ankles, and Gresham, who they had been trying to kill a short while earlier, would say a few words he did not believe over them as they slid off the plank into the sea. We cling to these rituals, thought Gresham, and where there is clearly no meaning in life we try to give it some significance in death. It was a necessary farce. He moved wearily, needing to check that the stiffening bodies had indeed been laid out with their legs and their arms straight. It did not do to have the sickening crack of an outstretched elbow in the middle of a funeral service as the body slid down the smoothed wood.
The Council Chamber seemed empty, but much of the power of England was there — the Queen, Essex, Lord Admiral Howard of Effingham, now Earl of Nottingham, Robert Cecil and the Clerk of the Signet, Thomas Windebank.
They were standing, the great men, as they often did. Essex was red in the face, almost shouting. The other men were pale-faced, nervous, sensing something wild and uncontrollable in Essex. The Queen was impassive, her head bent low. No smiles now between her and Essex, no sparkling eyes or fine compliments.
It was Ireland, of course. The need for a new Lord Deputy in Ireland was beyond pressing, was now a dire necessity. Elizabeth had decided on Essex's uncle, Sir William Knollys. Essex had started to argue passionately against his uncle, one of his greatest allies in Court, and was forcibly putting the case for Sir George Carew. It was transparent. Carew was one of Cecil's men, and his absence from Court would aid Essex greatly and inconvenience Cecil to the same extent. In addition, Ireland had a wonderful habit of either killing its Lord Deputy or ruining their political future.
Elizabeth raised her head, interrupting Essex's tirade.
'I thank you, my Lord Essex,' she said imperiously, 'for your wise counsel. But I am Queen.'
Essex did not have the sense to shut up. He tried to interrupt her. Mercifully, she chose to ignore him, and carried on. 'Sir William Knollys will go as my Lord Deputy to Ireland. It is decided.'
Essex's fists were clenching and unclenching, the colour rising higher and higher in his face. With an expression of sheer contempt and a gesture that would have been more suitable for a man rejecting the advances of a whore, he turned his back on her.
He turned his back on her.
It was an inconceivable insult to turn one's back on the monarch, unthinkable, unspeakable.
Elizabeth's head jerked upright, and what little control she had left she lost. With one swift move she leant forward and delivered a stinging box on his ears. The sharp smack of her slap echoed in the appalled silence of the stone-vaulted chamber. One might deliver such a blow to a silly lady-in-waiting, or to an idiot servant. To do so in public to an Earl, at a Council meeting, in the full panoply of state business, was unprecedented, unbelievable.
Essex turned and shrieked at Elizabeth. And worse, inconceivably worse, he clapped his hand to his sword hilt, and pulled perhaps two or three inches of the steel out of its scabbard.
There was a gasp from the other men. To make to draw one's sword on the monarch was high treason. It was not an insult that would have the perpetrator banished from the Court. It was a gesture that would have the culprit kneeling on the block at Tower Hill.
This is an outrage!' screamed Essex, apparently oblivious to the dual outrage he had just committed. ‘’I will not bear this!' He took his hand off his sword hilt, more in the manner of someone making a great concession than of a man recognising a great error. 'I would not have borne this from your father, and I shall not bear it from you, a woman.'
The men were transfixed, gazing in horror at the sword hilt. It was Nottingham who stepped forward, put himself between the Queen and the errant Lord, pushed him back. Nottingham said nothing.
There was silence in the Chamber.
Essex was flushed, standing at his full height. He looked round the room, saw no help from the other men there, looked in the eyes of the Queen and saw what Anne Boleyn must have seen in Henry VIII's eyes at the very last.
He rushed from the room. Had the first two or three steps been an attempt to retire gracefully, facing the Queen? Or had it taken him that long simply to turn?
All eyes were on Elizabeth. She gazed in silence for a moment at the door through which Essex had left. Then, without another word, she swept past the other men, and left.
Essex stormed down the corridors of the Palace, oblivious to where he was. Suddenly he came to a dead end, a dark, brick-built avenue ending starkly where what had once been a door had been filled in. He paused, as if waking from a dream. It was the dark, narrow tunnel that had been the stuff of his dreams. Here. Now. Real. What had he done? What had he done!
He had always been obsessive, prone to swings of mood. Yet always before he had been able to pull back, a deep instinct warning him in time to allow his charm to work its wonders. Always, until… What was the figure forming in his imagination in the pattern of the brickwork? Was it the pensive face of a small boy?
Alone, with no servants and certainly no Queen to see and hear him, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, sank to his knees, and sobbed. Sobbed almost like a little boy.
