But to begin at the beginning would mislead you because it would appear that my knowledge of him advanced incrementally, step by step over years, whereas that is not how we know people. We meet someone, we form an opinion and there they stay, pinned to the wall of memory unless illuminated by some new event or encounter, a flash of lightning which shows them from a different angle or facing another way. We think we know what they are but we know not what they may be. It was so with me and Christopher and it is true of ourselves, of all of us.
Or I could start with his end, that flash of steel, last of several in his short life. When people still spoke of him that is what they wanted to hear about. Could that be His Majesty’s interest? No, of course, you cannot say. But if I started with his end it would mislead you by giving the impression that everything before was leading up to it, a causal chain, one thing leading to another. Indeed, in those days there were some who even suspected a conspiracy. I hope I can set His Majesty’s mind at rest on that. Truth and life are always more haphazard than we like to think. There was no determination in Christopher’s death, no series of causes, still less any plot or design, in my opinion. Yet, looking back on it now, it seems to me it was inevitable. Inevitable but not necessary, if you accept my distinction. It was in his character to die young and in a violent manner. He need not have, he could have chosen differently, but given what he made of himself he was destined to burn bright and be abruptly extinguished. It is impossible to imagine him fading away like the rest of us, unless we imagine him as someone quite different. Similarly, you could say of me that it was inevitable I should eke out my closing years in a little room in the King’s Bench prison, with its barred window and smoking candles and small coals. Inevitable that I should never burn bright, like him, but splutter long and slow, fading. But it was never necessary because I could have managed my life differently, I could have chosen differently, but that I did not, would not.
Lust in age is a little fire in a dark field, wrote another poet, one I believe Christopher knew. It is true also of life in age, but he never lived long enough to see that. He bled out on Eleanor Bull’s floorboards in full combustion, the flames of life still roaring and leaping. He never knew decline, unlike me, and I cannot conceive how he would have lived with it. He would not have been Christopher if he had.
So I shall start neither at his beginning nor his end but five or six years after we first had dealings with each other, which was when I began to realise he was not the straightforward young man I had taken him for. True, we had already shared dramatic times resulting from the actions of treasonous men, a few of them good men but misguided, almost all of them foolish, but some capable schemers of murderous intent. Christopher was very young then and our dealings were friendly but businesslike, though signs of his complexity were there, had I paused to notice. But I was busy and merely relieved that he took to our trade naturally, as if already familiar with its crooked byways and hidden places.
Near the end of June 1587, after the Queen of Scots was executed, I was summoned to the house of my master, Mr Secretary Walsingham. Sir Francis was one of the two most powerful men of the kingdom, a man whom Queen Elizabeth always heeded although she never did love him as she loved her other faithful councillor, Lord Burghley. I think Mr Secretary was too stern and too dark for her to love him, dark not only in counsel but in hair, beard, eye and doublet. He always wore black, as devout men did, and in jest she would call him her Moor while he, also in jest but without smiling, would call himself an Ethiop. He rarely laughed; his humour was in his words. Her Majesty preferred men with a lighter touch, gallant, ready men who flattered and flirted, but Mr Secretary never flattered, not even the Queen. His wit was quiet and his humour dry, both were best savoured in retrospect. He was never one to set the table at a roar, being a forward Salvationist, a man of the Godly party. He spoke his mind as plainly to the Queen as to the meanest beggar. She had the wisdom to value that but she did not always like it.
Mr Secretary lived with his wife and daughter on Seething Lane near the Tower in a large high house with a narrow front that concealed the extensive quarters hidden from the street. A house of many rooms, all dark-panelled and with so many unexpected doors, passages, steps and corners that I never felt I knew it all, though I visited often and even worked there on occasion. Sometimes Mr Secretary had prisoners lodged with him, special prisoners to whom he wanted to talk – or listen – at leisure. The house was so rambling that you never knew how many others were within. He could have lived grandly, building great houses like Lord Burghley and others at Court, but he was modest in all things. His house was like himself, of plain and modest demeanour, or front,
