'In circumstances that were as accidental as they were fortunate. The man who delivered it is dead. We'd noted his earlier visits, and were watching him.' It would do no harm for Cameron to know that Gresham had in some way been responsible for the death, or that he had outguessed him. Jane had not known, of course, that Gresham had ordered Cameron and his servant watched like a hawk, or that all Cameron's outgoing letters had been intercepted. The irony was that Gresham had perhaps been too clever by half. He had not ordered incoming people to be searched, fearing it would tip Cameron off, preferring to have him believe he was unwatched in the hope that he might thus reveal more about who and what he was. The other irony was that despite all the money Gresham had spent on surveillance it was an angry horse that had revealed the real threat. And a watchful girl who happened to be able to read. 'In any event, the circumstances leave me in no doubt that it's genuine. Are you going to deny it?'
'The fact that the letter is genuine? No. The writer certainly intended to give me an order that he intended me to obey. What I do deny is that I would necessarily have carried out that order. Of that you have no proof.'
'Rather difficult to prove,' said Gresham, 'if the evidence one way or the other is likely to be my corpse.' His voice would have turned boiling water to ice. 'Except for one thing. Essex's officers just tried to have me hung, on the grounds of my being a spy for Cecil and passing back bad news to Court. I managed to get out of that one, just, with Essex's help, and as he clasped me like a long-lost friend he whispered two words in my ear. Cameron Johnstone. He was telling me that it was you who set up his Council. That it was you who were behind the idea of making me a sacrificial lamb. Perfect: you get someone eke to do the dirty work for you. And you stand by the scaffold, wringing your hands over how unfair it is and trying to offer consolation to George and Mannion.'
Cameron said nothing.
'I believe you're taking money and orders from someone who wishes me dead. I need to know who it is, and why.'
'And I won't tell you,' said Cameron simply. 'If you're vulgar and brutal enough to torture me, I'll hold out as long as I can, but then give you one of a hundred names any of which might be true. You're not a man short of people who want him dead, and your history goes back a long way. You'll never know if the information is the truth or not.'
Cameron was not denying that he had set out to have Gresham killed.
'I wasn't planning to torture you. Not in that way,' said Gresham.
'Am I meant to say thank you?' asked Cameron caustically. He was showing remarkable bounce for a man in his position.
'You told us a very interesting story when we first met. A very moving story about your wife and children.'
There! Something had changed in Cameron's impassive face, something behind the one eye that was still open.
'And it was the truth. You see, I rarely take things at their face value. I had people check up on you. More difficult than it would have been in London, but money always talks and Mannion is very good at going to taverns and inns where people do things for money and not for morality. Your wife and children did die, and there's every possibility they caught the plague from a spy sent to you from my Lord of Northumberland.'
'So?' asked Cameron, eyes steady now.
'The best stories are always the ones that are true. Or at least, true in part. I enquired a little further. It appears that your marriage was foisted on you by your advocate father as a condition of your inheritance, that it was functional at best and that it is possible that one of your children was actually the child of you and your mistress. Your childhood sweetheart, as it happens, the girl you always wanted to marry, and who you brought to Edinburgh and set up at no small expense with her other child who was certainly yours and lived with its mother.
'Apparently you were quite a good lawyer, but the need to keep two households and the sheer excitement of it all started you doing dirty work for the King, for Northumberland, even for Scotland's ally France and, so it's rumoured, even for Spain. There are those in the taverns who believe you also have a route to Rome.'
Cameron said nothing. Gresham could almost see and hear his mind working, putting up idea after idea to meet this new and unexpected situation, testing each one and discarding it, all at lightning speed.
'It took me three months. The easier task was to find out where your mistress lives, far harder was to find where you keep your money. But I did find out both. Or those I paid so handsomely did. So let me be plain. I won't torture you, even if you tell me nothing. I will keep you prisoner: we'll knock you out again, and bundle you back to England with a good half dozen of my men. What I will also do if we finish this little talk without my having found out the truth is to arrange for the place your mistress and child live to be burned down, and for the same favour to be afforded the place where your money is. Neither will survive. It's as simple as that.'
Did he mean it? Gresham knew he did. A life for a life: those he loved had been threatened, could die; it was the way of the world. And the final irony was that he, Gresham, was using exactly the same threat on this man as Cecil had sought to use on him. Had Gresham so cheapened himself as to become his enemy?
Cameron knew Gresham's threat was genuine. He was a man whose continued life was testimony to his success in measuring risk.
'Cecil,' he said. 'It's Robert Cecil who ordered your death, at least as far as I know.'
Gresham raised an eyebrow.
'It is truly as far as I know. I have never met Cecil, never spoken to him. All my orders — and my money — came through the little weasel of a man you tell me now is dead.'
'Your evidence for thinking your master is Cecil?'
'My actual evidence? Laughingly little. I was approached shortly after I landed with you, by this man. Asked if I would be willing to spy on you. And then to kill you. Naturally, I was interested to find out who wanted you dead. There was one obvious candidate. Cecil.
So I casually dropped his name into a sentence, in a way that made it seem clear I assumed I was now going to work for Cecil' 'And?'
'And the man went ballistic, turned a bright shade of pink, and spent so much time persuading me that Cecil was the last person he was working for as to convince me the opposite was true.'
'And why should Cecil want me dead?'
'I assume you can work that one out yourself. Firstly, he hates you, for personal reasons that have no basis in logic, but are simply a fact. More importantly, he's desperate to have the same position with the next King or Queen of England as his late father had with the present one. For that reason he is trying to manipulate the succession with every means at his disposal. I know at first hand that he's wooing my master, King James. I've recently come to believe that he's also wooing Spain with equal fervour. I think you call it riding two horses at the same time.'
'So how do I feature in all this?'
'The recent death of King Philip changed things for ever in the Court of Spain. The most trusted allies and secretaries to the King are now no longer certain of their place, new men of influence are coming on the scene all the time, making exactly the same sort of play for power that Cecil is hoping to do on the death of Elizabeth. Cecil's terrified that his dealings with Spain will be revealed. He's never trusted your relationship with Spain since you survived sailing on the Armada. He believes you may have links there, even be a secret Catholic and admirer of Spain. He believes you're the person most likely to ferret out his illicit correspondence with Spain, and that if you did you'd delight in using it to destroy him.'
'Why employ you as my assassin?'
If a bound and tied man could look pityingly on his interrogator, then that was what Cameron did.
'If a man known to be in the service of King James kills a leading English courtier, and one who seems to have a special relationship with the Queen, he could use that as a form of blackmail on James. Plus the fact that Cecil will then kill me.'
‘Well’ said Gresham, 'I didn't think it would be simple. Now, do please tell me why Cecil will have you killed as well as have you kill me?*
'Because he knows that I'm close on his heels with regard to his dealings with Spain. I made the mistake of asking too many questions of too many members of the Spanish community in London, before I knew who I could trust. One of them talked to Cecil. The answer's obvious. Get me to kill you, his prime threat, then get someone else to kill me, his secondary threat. Why do you think I was so keen to come with you to this God-forsaken country
