kill riot to protect me but to survive.'
Gresham gave a mock bow. 'I'm flattered you rate my skills so highly. But all you do is raise my curiosity about the nature of this message. It doesn't startle me that you'll ruin me or anyone else to ensure your survival. It startles me that something so threatening to your existence has happened as to make you take the risk of employing me, and by so doing revealing your desperation,' He sat back in his chair and smiled at Cecil. 'You see, I won't accept your mission unless I know exactly what the threat is to you, and what the message I carry actually says.'
Cecil smiled a thin, victorious smile.
'You have no threat to bring against me,' he said, with the slightest trace of smugness.
'Do I not?' said Gresham with the same infuriating smile.
There was a blur of movement, and Cecil found his neck being rammed forcibly against the carved wood of his chair, an arm choking the breath out of him and the blade of a dagger actually piercing the loose, wrinkled skin around his scrawny neck.
'You never were a spy, my Lord!' whispered Gresham in Cecil's ear. 'With one brief tightening of my arm here you are dead, or with one brief stab of this dagger up through your warped back.' As if to emphasise the point, Gresham tightened the grip of his arm for a moment. A single strand of dribble left the corner of Cecil's mouth, ran over his chin and landed on the fine velvet of Gresham's dark doublet. 'I leave you here, seated, stiffening in your chair. I have at least five minutes to make my exit, time enough for a poor spy such as me. You see, your message was so damning to us both that you could not afford a servant to listen to it. And your followers, when you are discovered? There is the shock of finding you dead, the confusion, the chaos. I've no doubt you will have left instructions for the revelation of the plot I am meant to have sponsored. Men such as you seek their revenge even in death.'
Cecil appeared to be suffocating. Gresham allowed a tiny relax-ation in his grip, whispering close in the man's ear as he might to a lover. 'Yet a dead man is never obeyed as rapidly as one who is living, a man whose patronage is at an end is never obeyed as is a man who still has favours to hand out. And me? One hour. One single hour. That's all I need to vanish, to disappear where you and yours will never find me. I've money put aside to satisfy ten men's wildest dreams. I've horses for me, my servant and anyone eke I care to take, even a trunk packed for just this very moment. I've a ship whose only job is to wait for me, to take me overseas if my world collapses around me. And every horse, every sailor has been planned for a time when there's no time, when speed means the difference between life or death.'
This time it was Gresham who paused for effect. He was surprised by the thinness of Cecil's body as he grasped it. The man was all skin and bone.
'So tell me your message. Or face my putting my plan into action, not yours.'
Cecil vomited. A pity, thought Gresham, allowing Cecil's head to crane forward so that no sick lodged in his throat and suffocated him. You lost respect if you wet or filled your pants, or threw up the contents of your stomach in front of another man. And you hated the man who saw or caused it even more. Or perhaps Cecil could not hate Gresham any more than he did?
'Let me go!' Cecil croaked. The arm relaxed, but as Cecil sucked in air and allowed his head to sink forward he saw the dagger poised in front of his eyeball. He started back, and the blade followed, its point almost touching his eye.
'Tell me now,' said Gresham, 'what your message is, or you lose an eye shortly before you lose your life.'
'The Earl of Essex has written to King James of Scotland,' said Cecil. Gresham sensed he had taken a decision. He relaxed his hold, moved the dagger and saw Cecil sag forward, retching.
Gresham was still by his side. Both men knew what would happen if Cecil cried out for help. 'Saying what?' said Gresham.
Cecil's breathing was returning now, and he was gaining control of himself.
'King James has heard the rumours associating Essex, Southampton and his crew with satanism and with sodomy. James loathes satanism before all other human evils. He prosecutes accused witches personally, testifies to the evil of Devil-worship. He is also a sodomite, and denies that sin with all the passion of a man who wants to throw the first stone.' The breathing was almost back to normal. 'Essex has told James that he, Essex, and the other ward, Southampton, were asked to bow to satanism and to sodomy in their youth. By me. And told him how they have denied it, and how I, the son of their guardian, is the anti-Christ.'
Gresham leant back, and the dagger went silently into its hidden sheath.
'And James will believe it?' he said.
'The King of Scotland is most likely to succeed our present Queen. I have told him for years past to beware of Raleigh. I warned him of the wrong man.'
Well! That was a message for Gresham to bear to the man who had saved his life, to Sir Walter Raleigh.
'I underestimated Essex, saw him as a popinjay, a plaything for the Queen. He has stolen a march on me, poisoned the likely heir to the throne against me. Unless I can reach James in time, the poison will bite. Instead of simply reading what he has been sent, the King of Scotland will start to believe it.'
'So you wish me to betray Essex?' asked Gresham.
'No,' said Cecil. 'I wish you to protect those you care for most, and put right a wrong. I also expect you to see that the greatest disaster that could befall this country would be to have the Earl of Essex as its King, or in a position of real power in its governance.'
'You're at your weakest with a man such as Essex. You are correct: he would make an appalling King. But Essex thinks with his heart. Much of the time he thinks wrongly. But at least his decisions are based on blood flowing through his veins.' 'Essex will not defeat me,' said Cecil.
'No?' said Gresham. 'Yet you don't see what Essex has. You are the cold intellect who is never wrong. You command through fear. Essex is the passionate fool, who is usually wrong — but who commands through love.'
'Love does not decide the fate of nations. Love creates scandals, not power. It is fear that rules.' Cecil was now fully back in control of himself.
'To a point, my Lord. Yet you forget one thing. Any prison only operates because the inmates cooperate with the jailers. There are always fewer jailers than there are prisoners. True, there are locked doors. But those doors have to be opened sometimes: food has to be given; access with lawyers has to be afforded. If every prisoner decides to rise up against his jailers, the jailers die. You rule by fear. The prisoners cooperate through fear. But give them a leader they love, and they have an antidote to their fear.'
'Sentimental nonsense!' spluttered Cecil.
'Is it?' said Gresham. 'This country is ruled by fear. London Bridge displays the heads of traitors on pikes over its main gateway. The people are invited to see traitors hung, drawn and quartered. But what if they find someone they love as they love Essex? At what stage does love conquer fear? They cheer Essex in the streets. They scrawl 'Toad' on your walls. You don't understand popularity, because you've never experienced it. Indeed, you scorn it because you don't understand it. But rebellion happens, and it happens in the moments when love and passion break through fear and repression.'
'So you tell me that you love the Earl of Essex?' Gresham heard the scorn and fear that Cecil put into the naming of his enemy and his title. 'That you will betray me and my message to Essex, and the power of love will triumph?' *No,' said Gresham, 'and your question reveals not only how little you understand men such as Essex, but how little you understand men such as myself. Essex can command the mob. He has the power of love — blind, unthinking, living only for the moment Yet he's a fool, for all his intelligence. A rather special fool. A brave, handsome, rather dashing and rather glorious and all-too-human fool, but a fool nevertheless. Essex is passion, romance and glamour. Essex is in love with himself. And he yearns for the simplicity, as he sees it, of a soldier's life. All this means he is bound for destruction, because nations do not run on passion, romance and glamour. I could love Essex as I hate you. That doesn't mean to say I could ever serve him.'
4I do not care how you justify taking my message to King James. I care only that you do so.'
Gresham's mind was churning. Cecil's wife was probably the only person who had loved him, and she had died eighteen months earlier, leaving his two children motherless. It would be simplicity itself to have them killed. There were men in every tavern in Southwark who would jump at the chance. Should he threaten Cecil with this?
