‘I . . . found it. The former occupant of my cell must have . . .’ John shrugged. ‘You know.’
‘I know a fable when I hear one. And I know that this’ – he raised the quarto – ‘is a treasonous text.’
‘It is merely a play, sir.’
‘Merely? Oh indeed! One that merely speaks on the overthrow of God’s anointed king. On mere regicide. On a paltry insurrection. In times such as these, dangerous times, this’ – he waved the paper in the air – ‘is incitement. Performed by your old friends, of course, the Chamberlain’s Men.’
‘Not for many years, sir. ’Tis an old work.’
‘It matters not. The mob has a long memory. And a text like this reminds them.’ He waved the paper in the air, threw it down, then picked up a leather-bound volume. ‘As does this, the recently published History of Henry the Fourth. By one Dr John Hayward.’ He peered over his glasses. ‘Do you know him?’
‘I do not.’
‘No. I do not suppose that prisoners mix much within the Tower.’ Cecil’s smile was as mirthless as ever. ‘For he is also here, some three floors below where you are now. Under examination.’ He let the word stand a moment before continuing. ‘And can you guess why? No, it is not really a question, Master Lawley. I will tell you.’ He leaned forward. ‘As if it is not effrontery enough to write about this subject at this time, he has the gall to dedicate the book to none other than the Earl of Essex.’ He nodded. ‘Oh yes. Dr Hayward not only tells the story of Bolingbroke’s armed rebellion and his seizing of the throne; he offers it to the man being hailed as his reincarnation. For that is what the people that daily pass Essex House call out. “Bolingbroke!” ’ Cecil shouted the name. ‘And the earl must hear them, since he is again in residence.’ Cecil glared. ‘Yes, sirrah, the mob calls upon the usurper.’
John thought of speaking what he, the unfortunate Dr Hayward and many in England knew: that the said Bolingbroke may have been a usurper but he became King Henry the Fourth, father of the victor at Agin Court and one of the Queen’s illustrious forebears in the House of Lancaster. But he doubted the other man required such a history lesson, nor was it for him to speak it if he did. The snow on the man’s cloak showed that he had come hastily, through nasty weather, for this meeting. That he had not even taken it off before summoning him showed that John was there to listen . . . and then perhaps be required, in some way, to act.
As he considered, Cecil continued. ‘Only last week the Queen declared: “Know you not I am Richard the Second?” ’ He nodded. ‘Yes. She has ever feared rebellion, and with good reason. Some of these so called noble men still live as if it were one hundred and fifty years ago, and it is their prerogative, nay, more, their chivalrous duty to muster their retainers and march.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘I, and my father before me, have spent too much of our energies defeating plot after plot. And yet I will tell you this, sirrah – never have we faced such a perilous time as now. For never was there such a threat.’ He nodded. ‘Never. And we both know who that threat comes from: your particular friend, the Earl of Essex.’
John thought of denying all allegiance. But he knew he must not . . . yet. Not until he knew more. For rumour had reached inside the Tower and spoken of an earl who had survived his violation of the Queen’s sanctuary and the desertion of his command with a reprimand; but he had been stripped of his offices and thus the income by which he fended off his myriad creditors. It spoke also of his followers, back from the Irish debacle, an impoverished and reckless crew gathering in low taverns around Essex’s house on the Strand. And of his noble friends, a faction whose wagons were hitched securely to the falling earl’s star, failing with him. But rumour, as ever, was short on details.
Carefully, John thought. ‘What threat is it you speak of, sir? I do not know much of what happens beyond these walls.’
Cecil, who had left his desk to pace behind it, stopped to consider him. ‘I suspect you know near as much as I. Which is not enough. For until most recently I was receiving regular, alarming reports. Of plots, and schemes, and secret meetings. If these did not actually take place within Essex House, they were decided upon there. With my lord of Essex’s approval.’
‘Then, good sir,’ John asked softly, ‘if all this is certain, why do you not move against him?’
‘Do you think I would be standing here, talking with you, if I could?’ Cecil snapped, glaring. ‘For as you pointed out before, in this very fortress, even a court of his peers would, tiresomely, require actual proof of treason. It would be different, of course, if the Queen willed it . . .’
He broke off, looking at the other three men, silent as statuary. John finished for him. ‘I take it that the Queen does not?’
Cecil stepped closer. ‘The Queen, sirrah . . . the Queen . . .’ He hesitated, then turned abruptly to those other men. ‘Leave us,’ he commanded. ‘Wait close at hand.’
‘Master Secretary.’ If Waller was concerned for his master’s safety, he did not show it, just bowed and, with a flick of his head, ordered his guards from the room.
Cecil waited till the men had pulled the door to before continuing as if he’d not interrupted himself. ‘The Queen is not well. She has not been entirely well for a while now. In her body she is still horse-strong. But in her mind . . .’ He glared again. ‘You understand I will have your tongue cut out if you repeat a word of what I tell you now.’ At John’s acquiescent nod, he continued, ‘In her mind she conjures a different Robert Devereux. Her “sweet Robin”.’ He snorted. ‘She sends him broths and poultices for his never-ending illnesses. She receives his execrable verse as if newly plucked from the reopened grave of Philip Sidney. She has even been convinced that his act of bursting into her bedroom was the most romantic gesture imaginable. God defend me!’ he shouted at the ceiling. ‘She will not see him . . . but neither will she condemn him. Not without proof.’
He came from behind his desk now, stopped before John, stared up at him hard, as if seeking within his eyes. After a long pause he said, ‘You had the gall to once ask me in this place what my desire was. Well, Master Lawley, now I ask you yours.’
John took a breath to calm his accelerating heart. Only when he was quite ready did he speak. ‘My whole desire? It is only this – to have my life back again.’
‘Is it?’ Cecil studied him, sucking on his lower lip. ‘And do you understand that the fulfilment of that is entirely in my gift?’
‘I do so understand.’
It was obviously said humbly enough to satisfy both the man’s need to subject . . . and another need John saw in his eyes, their faces being so close. ‘Well then, Master Lawley,’ Cecil continued, as quietly, ‘in order for you to receive that gift, you must earn it.’ He nodded. ‘And the first thing you must do is rejoin the household of the Earl of Essex.’
Ah ha, thought John, but said, ‘May I ask, sir . . . why me? Surely you have men within it already?’
‘I did. Several.’ He paused, to rub at his eyes, ‘One by one my sources have fallen silent. The last of them only last week. The silence is permanent.’ He looked up. ‘For men who swim in the Thames in February lose the ability to speak.’
Not always, thought John, but said, ‘You wish me to spy upon my lord of Essex.’
For once there was no equivocation, no threat or bluster. ‘Yes,’ was the simple reply. Again it came with that flash of desperation in the dark eyes.
Though his heart was beating fast once more, John had spent a lifetime giving people what they wanted, to gain what he wanted. Matthew, the gaoler, was only the most recent. So now he breathed, shrugged, and spoke softly. ‘Then I will do so.’
Cecil’s eyes narrowed. ‘You forsake a lifetime’s loyalty in a breath? I warn you, sir, I will not be juggled with.’
John raised his hands. ‘Good sir, you asked me before we last parted to brood on loyalty. I obeyed – and I began with a tally. Not the usual calendar that prisoners carve on walls. Here.’ He tapped his head, his chains jangling. ‘This,
then, is what Robert Devereux has done for me.’ He looked above Cecil’s head. ‘He has caused me, an innocent man, to spend time in gaols such as this – and worse – for long periods of my life. He has contrived to have me killed by various of his enemies – Englishmen, Irishmen, and too many Spaniards to count. He has stolen my life more often than any other man, with the exception, possibly, of Sir Francis Drake. But at least with him, no matter how much I hated him, I always knew I was fighting for my Queen and for my country.’ He paused. ‘But if the name of Lawley has ever been linked to treason, it is only because it was yoked to the name of Essex first.’
‘You sound as if you . . . as if you almost hate him now?’
They were so close John could see it there again in the other man’s eyes, hear it in his halting voice. Hope allied with need. If he had just expressed his whole wish, he now knew Cecil’s too. His heart slowed – because he knew that he could grant it. ‘Almost?’ He shook his head. ‘Nay, Master Secretary. Do not qualify my hate with such a word.’
Cecil stared for a long moment. ‘I have always wondered about you, John Lawley,’ he finally said. ‘That savagery in the blood we talked about, the night we first met at Whitehall.’ His lips scarcely shaped the words. ‘How far could you go in it? What are you capable of doing?’
‘Capable?’ The man had leaned so close that John could have bitten off his ear. Or wrapped the manacles around his neck and snapped it before the guards had got the door open. Both things he was capable of. Neither would satisfy either man’s desire. So instead he whispered, ‘If I could ’scape all consequence? On earth at least?’
The slightest of nods led him on.
‘Well then,’ he breathed, ‘I would cut his throat in the church.’
The stare held for another extended moment of scrutiny before Cecil turned and moved back to his desk. When he reached it, he spoke again, without looking up. ‘And what would be your price, John Lawley, for such an act? I am not so foolish to think you will switch allegiances for love of me, Queen or country. Men act, at the last, for themselves.’
‘They do.’ John raised his chained hands. ‘You spoke before of your power to end my life entirely. You also have the same power to set me entirely free.’
‘Agree to serve only me, you will be free this hour.’
‘Leaving here would only be the first freedom. “Entirely” was the word. To never again have my life placed at someone else’s command.’ He swallowed. ‘Master Secretary, for what I must do in your service . . . which may require something in the end that you can guess at . . . I will need something in return.’
Cecil still did not raise his eyes. ‘Name it.’
‘Absolution.’ The man looked up at that, startled by the term. ‘I know it is a word from the old faith. It is not a concept your Puritan one admits. And I will not seek it from God, or any of his intermediaries, at least not yet. But I seek it from you, here, now.’
‘What . . . absolution could I grant?’
John paused. In all the nights of dreaming for a moment when he could again take action for himself, this was one course he had considered. But the other man need not know that. ‘I . . . I would require a document. A pass. One that will relieve me of the consequence of any crime that I commit on your behalf. It will free me also on the instant from arrest. Any crime,’ he added more forcefully, in case the point had been missed.
The look in Cecil’s eyes showed that it had not. ‘What you ask of me is nearly impossible.’
John kept his voice steady. ‘Then that makes two of us.’
The other man’s head jerked up. The two of them stared at each other. At last Cecil moved behind his desk. ‘How do I know you would not use such a document against me? I could sign this . . . carte blanche here, you could stab me the next moment and then walk free.’
‘I think you know that is not what I would do. Nor what would happen. My freedom, whatever the paper stated, would be short after such an action. Along with my life. Besides ’ – he stretched the chains around his wrists to their limit – ‘you have heard where my hatred lies.’
Again Cecil stared. Then he forsook his desk, moved away again, and with his face to the wall spoke softly. ‘What you speak of, only one man in England has ever had before. It will give you impunity in the realm to do . . . anything.’
‘Anything,’ John repeated, as quietly. ‘As it will give me freedom from all of you. From the Queen. From the earl. Even from you, Master Secretary.’
Cecil nodded. ‘Then I will draw up the document you require. I will write it myself. Here, now, and have it seen and witnessed only by the Constable of the Tower – though I will not fill in your name.’ He turned. ‘Such actions as you contemplate should remain unassigned. It will also be stated that it is . . . redeemable just once. Otherwise . . . what a career a man such as you could have, Master Lawley!’ That thin smile came again. ‘You shall have it, a handsome purse for your expenses, and your freedom – within the hour. Waller!’ he shouted. The man was through the door within a moment, hand on sword grip. ‘Master Lawley is to be freed. Find him fresh clothes. Give him his choice of weapons. Return him here when he is ready.’
‘Sir.’ Waller gestured to the door. John, suddenly aware that these were the first steps to the freedom he craved, not quite believing, took them slowly.
Cecil’s voice halted him. ‘Yet know this, Lawley. You do not make such an agreement with me and break it. If you betray me, I will find you out. I will see you disembowelled on Tower Hill if I can. Yet even if this paper protects you once from the law, you would never sleep easy again. For it will not save you from a dagger in the night. Your only precedent discovered that.’
John clasped the door edge – and though he wanted to be gone now, he could not help the question. ‘And who was that man?’
The Secretary smiled. ‘It was my father who gave it to him. You may have known him, since he moved in similar, overlapping circles to you. For he was a man of the theatre. And he was a spy. His name was Christopher Marlowe.’
A wave of hand dismissed him finally. In the corridor, Waller unlocked the chains, but John barely acknowledged him, just stared at the door. ‘Poor Kit,’ he murmured. He had indeed known the man. Thoughts of him, of the near past, the immediate future, kept him motionless, even when Waller bade him walk. For once he moved, the path could lead to many fates as unpleasant as the dagger in the head that had taken the life of Will’s great rival.
He’d been speaking his friend’s words not an hour since. But it was Marlowe’s that came to him now. ‘ “Our swords shall play the orators for us”,’ he mouthed.
‘What mumble you, man?’ said Waller. ‘Come now.’
He came. The Master Secretary had mentioned weapons. Waller was leading him to them. But more than a sword, what he truly required was a dagger – small, well balanced, where he always carried one, in a sheath between his shoulder blades. He knew he would need it there, and soon, for his very first reunion, the one he walked towards now.
He would need it when he next saw Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.
XXX
Conspiracy
The wherryman threaded his vessel between frozen clumps, the winter having recently loosed its grip only enough to thaw the ice that had bound the Thames for a month. Mist rose, a chill exhalation that easily penetrated through the layers of clothes John had been given. Shrugging deeper into his cloak, so that his ears were covered, he peered between hat and scarf, envying the boatman the warmth of his exercise. The man was even sweating. John had offered him double the shilling he would normally receive to row him, solo, all the way from St Katherine’s Stair at the Tower to his destination.
As they cleared the race under the bridge, the temptation to land at Southwark near overwhelmed. Yet John kept silent, ordered no detour. For there was no life there, only delay. Until he had achieved what he had resolved to do before Sir Robert Cecil, there was no life for him anywhere.
He looked as the
y went by, of course. At the spire of St Mary Overies, close by which Tess would be planning her nuptials in the inn she would shortly be selling. At the Globe, where Ned, at three in the afternoon, was perhaps essaying one of his last roles for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The thatched O itself brought memories, of John’s last time there, the day of his capture and imprisonment. They had been playing Julius Caesar, and he had heard Burbage declaim words that he had read since, again and again, in quarto, in the Tower.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasm or a hideous dream.
He was caught in that interim – the river’s mist, the snow-choked sky, the chill that gripped his bones, the plash of oars, the boatman’s sweat all seeming to hold the boat where it was, caught between his decision in the Tower and the acting of it that lay ahead. Shivering, not just with cold, John took his gaze from the playhouse and tried to bring his mind with it.
And then they were there. As the bow scraped the dock, he stayed for a moment longer on the bench. Up ahead, across some gardens, the fifty chimneys of Essex House thrust up against the snow clouds. Perhaps five emitted smoke. Though the day was as cold as a nun’s teats, he knew his noble lordship had little money to spend on firewood. Little to spend on anything. Yet desperation so loves company, boats like his were moving like water beetles across the Thames, filled with men clutching weapons to their chests – and threads where their purses should hang. Most would not even bother to whisper their treasonous aims. If the drum did not beat, and no piper skirled, the summons to rally was still loud to men as desperate as their lord, loudly answering his call.
At last John rose, stepped on to the dock, paused again, jostled by customers who sought his vacated place. Pulling his cloak tight, he felt about him all that the Master Secretary had given him: the carte blanche, sewn into the edge of his new doublet; his restored sword and buckler; his silver-filled purse; a slim vial that smelled of apothecary’s tincture and was a cure only for life itself; finally what he suspected he would rely on most in the end, as he always had: the dagger sheathed between his shoulder blades.
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