Gresham had been summoned to Cecil two days earlier, a measure of Cecil's concern being that he would only hand the letter to Gresham in person. An extra measure was the fact that the meeting was not in any Palace, but in Cecil's surprisingly modest London home. It was the place where he kept the servants most loyal to him. Gresham knew that much from having tried to bribe them all without success. The transaction had been brief and businesslike. The house and the servants were draped in black. Lord Burghley's death had just been announced. Had Cecil loved his father? If he had, he was not showing it.
If it became known that Gresham was going to Scotland with a message for its King, he might as well slit his own throat and save someone else the trouble of doing it. So how could he disguise his mission?
The answer had been Mannion's idea. It was highly audacious, so much so that Gresham did not bother to clear it with Cecil in advance. It was more fun that way.
'You've said it yerself often enough. Hide the truth by telling it. Tell 'em you're going to Scotland.'
'Brilliant!' said Gresham. 'And tell them I've a letter from Robert Cecil to the King of Scotland?'
'No,' said Mannion, 'tell 'em you've reason to believe that girl you took on board, and who's the biggest pain in your life, actually had a Scottish father. Tell 'em you're going to try and unite her with her blood relations — which is the best way you can see of getting 'er off your back, an' the sooner the better. You'll be very convincing on that score, I reckon.'
'Hang on,' said Gresham. 'Apart from the prospect of spending quite a long period of time with the bloody girl, and the fact that she'll almost certainly throw a fit and lock herself in her room for a year if I even mention it, I'm implicated in every plot that's going at present. So does it really make sense for me to announce I'm going to Scotland, when everyone knows James is one of the main contenders for the throne?'
'Makes sense if you gets a permit from the bloody Queen,' said Mannion. 'You know her well enough. Ain't many people going up to Scotland on a regular basis, things being what they are. Mebbe she wants a letter delivered as well.' Mannion obviously thought he'd made a joke.
The problem was that the old drunkard might be right. Going to Scotland with a passport from the Queen was the best cover of all. But the first problem was the girl, who was most likely to reject any suggestion that she might come simply because it came from him. The second problem was the Queen. Her body might be ageing rapidly, but there was no sign of the decay entering her brain. Could he fool her into granting him a passport? When she had knighted him ten years earlier in that terrible dungeon in the Tower of London, the sword she had used could just have easily gone through his neck as tapped him on the shoulder. The work he had done since had both harmed and helped his standing with her — if anyone ever knew what their standing was with the Queen.
He gained an audience surprisingly quickly considering everyone in England wanted a private audience with the Queen. Yet perhaps it was not so surprising. Increasingly the old lady seemed to act on a whim, living for the moment as if she realised that her own moments were more and more limited by time, the one thing over which she and no other human had control.
Delay. That was the problem. Elizabeth had always had an uncanny knack of letting time sort her problems out for her. Outsiders saw it as vacillation, but Gresham was not so sure. In this instance he needed a firm answer from a woman to whom firm answers were increasingly becoming an anathema.
The only thing shocking about her today was the extraordinary red wig she was wearing. The gimlet eyes were as hard as ever, her breath capable of knocking a fly out of the sky at fifty yards, and the jewels on her lavish dress enough to buy an army. It was early evening, when the majority of England whose lamp and candle was the sun were heading to their beds. Whitehall Palace proved its usual warren, but Gresham realised how serious things were when he was ushered through a string of rooms and suddenly found his male escort replaced by giggling ladies-in-waiting. His audience was being held in the chamber directly outside the Queen's bedroom. What was even more frightening was that, with a quick nod, she dismissed the female attendants. Gresham hoped for Mannion's sake they had been banished to whatever antechamber he had been forced to leave him in. Some of the ladies-in-waiting were known to be keen on a bit of rough.
If he had not known better he would have sworn the Queen had been crying. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen, the make-up beneath them showing signs of rapid and rather ineffective repair. It was said that she had hand-fed Burghley the old man's last meals on earth, like a mother feeding her young child.
'So, Sir Henry!' the monarch exclaimed, 'the rare moment comes when you ask to see me! I seem to recollect that for much of my reign it has been my job to command you to attend my Court.' The tone was harsh, combative. It was as if she wished to banish any concept of softness.
He was alone with the Queen. She was in a black gown, with a high neck, its folds sparkling. It was what passed as casual wear for the Queen but still had enough whalebone in it to strip a decent-sized whale of its skeleton.
'Your Highness, I-' Gresham started to say.
'Your Highness,' carried on the Queen, in a fair copy of Gresham's tone, 'I recognise the threat you pose to my existence, and your absolute power over my fortunes. I am rich enough not to need your patronage, arrogant enough not to seek your approval in normal times and intelligent enough to be able to flatter you more amusingly than most.'
The Queen paused. Gresham doubted that the Italian who had just set up in London teaching people the manners of the Court would have an answer as to what one did when the Queen started to mimic you. She was seated in a high-backed chair that was not quite a small throne. A fine Venetian glass had been left by her ladies, and she leant over daintily to sip from it. It was as likely to be boiled water as wine, if Gresham's experience was anything to go by.
'Do tell me. Have I summed you up?' Her tone was deadly serious. And when the daughter of Henry VIII used anything deadly, wise men listened.
Ah well. Men — and women — only had one life. What was life without risk? And who wanted to die in their bed of old age?
'Your Majesty, the greatest flattery I can afford you is to acknowledge that my wealth can be confiscated by a wave of your hand, the seat of my arrogance severed from its neck by a wave of altogether different material, and intelligent enough to realise that I am at this moment desperately trying to think out stratagems that will avoid either eventuality. Or, to put it more simply, yes. You have summed me up. Rather too well, as it happens.'
The Queen looked at Gresham for a moment, her expression unfathomable. Then she spoke, 'I have tolerated you because even with your arrogance and shameless good looks you have done me good service, but also because of all the people I have known in my time your superb flattery has never been offered other than with a supreme awareness that it was simply flattery and not the truth.' She leant forward. There was real anger in her eyes. 'I know more than you think I know about your role in the fate of my sister, Mary Queen of Scots.'
Gresham had decided in his youth that to reveal one's fears and one's emotions was the ultimate weakness, and had imposed a rigid self-control on his body. It was only that which enabled him to stop going white.
'I know what you know about the first Armada. I think I could be said to have drawn it from you on the rack.'
The hint of a smile played across that small part of her lips liberated from make-up. Brave men had been known to burst into tears and confess their all when simply shown the rack. Gresham had been strapped into it and the torture about to start when he had held that particular conversation with the Queen. The strangest thing had not been her presence in the torture chamber, but that she had come to the Tower of London at all. She hated that place above all others, ever since she had entered in through Traitor's Gate, accused of treason by her sister Queen Mary.
'And then there are the other affairs, those I have known about, those I know about that we
re intended to be kept from me and those I do not know about.'
Damn her! Why could not the old body be matched in the mind? Was there anybody stupid in this mad, deranged Court, or did they all have the brains of the Queen, Cecil and Essex?
'So here you are,' said the Queen, taking a sip from her glass. 'Undoubtedly you want something from me. No one asks to see the Queen for love, only ever because they want something in her power.' She held up her hand, as Gresham opened his mouth. 'Enough! Cease before you start. I have had enough of piled words. Tell me what it is you want. Spit it out, man.'
There was no pause in Gresham's answer.
'I wish your passport for me to visit Scotland with my ward and a servant.'
The words hung in the air.
'You always were clever, Henry Gresham. Cleverer than anyone, except perhaps for my little pygmy, and certainly clever in a different way from him. Others would have spun me a cock and bull story about why they wished to visit the country of the impudent young man so hungry for my throne.' There was real venom in her voice. Gresham had a strong impression that Queen Elizabeth of England did not much like King James of Scotland. Perhaps the fact that she had ordered the execution of his mother did not help. 'You choose to say nothing.'
Gresham continued to choose to say nothing. The strain was actually harder than filling the air with noise would have been. Babbling is easy.
In earlier years the Queen would have got up at a moment like this, and started to pace the room restlessly. It used to annoy Gresham because it was exactly what he did. Instead, she stayed seated. Gresham noted the cushions piled high beneath and around her. They were new. The Queen had been renowned for sitting on hard wooden seats for hours on end. How times were changing.
'Well, now,' said the Queen, actually settling back into her cushions, but with a wicked gleam in her eye. 'As Sir Henry is apparently struck dumb for a moment, let us see if an old woman…' She paused momentarily and cocked what remained of an eyebrow at him, as if daring Gresham to challenge as any courtier would do the assertion that she was old. Gresham continued to say nothing, his face impassive. '… can come to some conclusions. It is a long, painful journey to Scotland, and an inhospitable country with few charms for a man of wealth and taste. Therefore Sir Henry has strong reason to go there. His ward, who they tell me he has not bedded yet, is unlikely to be the real reason. Given the importance of Scotland to those who are already playing dice for my throne and who believe me dead already, the real reason is therefore likely to be a plot. But whose plot? And is Sir Henry for or against the plotters?'
Gresham was challenging his own body not to sweat, his own face not to redden. This was getting dangerously close.
'My little pygmy hates Henry Gresham, but uses him.' She was looking intently at Gresham now, daring him to show by a flicker of his face that she had hit the mark. 'As he, for some reason, seems willing to be used. But there are others, of course. Sir Henry is a lifelong friend of the greatest rogue in my Court, Sir Walter Raleigh, who as so many of my Court would like nothing more than to have a line of communication open with the… King of Scotland. And my Great Lord the Earl of Essex has been heard expressing admiration for Henry Gresham the soldier, just as so many others have been whispering that this same Henry Gresham is in this plot, or that plot or the other plot. And my Great Lord of Essex is not above suspicion in seeming willing to bend the knee in obeisance to the north.'
There was a long silence.
'Which one is it, I wonder? Which of those professing undying love and loyalty towards me as their Queen wishes to send a covert message to my rival in Scotland? Or perhaps it is all of them? Or is it the King himself who has asked to see you? Is the whole pattern in reverse, with His Royal Highness of the frozen north making the running, seeking to use this same Sir Henry Gresham as his intermediary with one of those named earlier? Or, God forbid, with all of them?'
There was another, even longer silence.
'I command you to make answer,' said the Queen simply, and Gresham knew that his time of silence had ended. 'Why do you wish to go to Scotland?'
'Majesty,' he said,*I have a lust for porridge and it will not be denied.'
For a moment he thought he had gone too far, as a flicker of yellow flashed across the Queen's eyes, and then she burst into a peal of laughter, so intense it rocked her fragile body. When she had stopped laughing, and had wiped the traces of spittle off her lips with a delicate handkerchief, she looked at him again.
'And was I stupid enough to expect a straight answer from you? Tell me one thing. Just one thing.' 'Your Majesty?'
‘I have lost my father.' The mood change was sudden. God knows how anyone could keep track when she and Essex were in the same room together. Lose her father? Henry VIII had been dead these many, many years. Gresham could see the tears rising up in her eyes. Real tears. Good God! 'My Lord Burghley is the nearest thing I had to a father, and now he is gone. I have already lost my executioner, Walsingham, who bankrupted himself for me. I have lost… so many of those who were my friends. And you, with your good looks, your money and your wit, you who were trained by Walsingham, you could have stepped into his shoes had you so wished. But you never showed any interest, fled to the Low Countries to fight in stupid wars and no doubt prove your manhood in the lunatic way men seem to have to do… you are the only person I know, Henry Gresham, who gave up a position of power in my Court when it beckoned him, when to acquire it would have been so easy. Why did you spurn advancement?'
'Your Majesty,' said Gresham, who felt it was time he strung more than two consecutive words together, 'I am one who believes that most of life is a pretence, and who struggles more and more to see or to find meaning in it. Life at Court, even in your service, would for me simply have been another pretence. I am sorry.'
'Yet you miss out the most important thing of all,' said the Queen, 'if you wish to keep your life and your liberty.'
'I do?'said Gresham, nonplussed for once.
'If you were simply seeking to flatter me, you would have pointed out the mere truth. You have done several things for which you should have been hung, if not drawn and quartered. Yet never to my knowledge have you once undertaken an action that would threaten my life or my throne.'
Well, that was true, thought Gresham, though all too often that had not been the motive in his actions. He nodded, acknowledging the truth.
'So tell me this. If I give you my passport to Scotland, will anything that takes place there threaten my life or my throne?'
For a brief moment he saw the real fear that haunted this woman in the small hours when she was alone. Her powers were waning as she lost the battle with time. The men who had put her on the throne and kept her there — Burghley, Walsingham and the rest of the pack — were dead or dying. How easy now to speed up nature: a subtle poison in her food; the assassin's knife; even a carefully mounted rebellion. Ring out the dead wood, ring in the new. The Queen is dead. Long live… a new Queen? A new King?
Gresham did actually take time to think this one through. Slightly to his surprise he found he was not willing to lie to Elizabeth. She was foul-breathed, not infrequently foul-mouthed, infuriating in her procrastination, had probably denied the country an heir simply to preserve her own power for as long as she lived and was the most devious person he had ever known, as well as the most selfish apart from himself. Yet she had brought peace to a ravaged England for forty years, and given her people in exchange for all that it gave her the one thing a monarch could give their country: stability. The Spanish had not invaded, for all that they had tried. Ireland may have been falling apart for most of her reign, Tyrone threatening to wrest the whole country back into Irish hands, but it was of more use to royal vanity and land-starved nobles than to any normal Englishman. The harvest might be bad, the bottom fall out of the wool trade, and a thousand natural calamities befall Jack and Jill. But at least in the reign of Elizabeth their problems were from natural calamities. No wild horsemen trampled
their crops at harvest time or ran with their babies on the end of a pike, and no marauding armies took their wives and daughters even as they burnt their house down. Unlike Essex, military glory had never ranked as an ambition in Elizabeth's mind. Like Burghley and Cecil, she saw war primarily as a waste of money. So Gresham ran through at break-neck speed all that might result from his rescuing the reputation of Cecil with James. Try as he might, he could find no scenario that would threaten the Queen. It would probably be better in the name of stability if Cecil was cleared in the eyes of James. It might stop the both of them plotting even more.
It was the time he took thinking that saved his life, he realised afterwards. A dishonest man would simply have denied any threat to the Queen. The sight of him almost visibly testing each scenario against her question, his reserve forgotten for once and his brow furrowed in concentration, was the greatest testimony to the honesty of his answer.
'No, Your Majesty, there is nothing associated with my journey that could threaten your throne or your life. Or rather,' and he allowed himself a dry little smile, 'I give you my word that there is nothing I know of or can predict that would be counter to your interests. No man can ever predict with exactitude what a journey will produce.'
He thought again. Clearing Cecil's name might even allow for a smoother transition of power when the moment came for the Queen to die. And Cecil would never hasten that death. James of Scotland had spent most of his life fighting for survival amid the rabid politics of his homeland. He knew better than most that those who killed or deposed a monarch acquired a taste for it. If Cecil did anything to hasten Elizabeth's death he would not only never gain James's trust; he would hasten his own death at James's hand.
'My journey will help preserve the life and fortune of those few I call friends. And, if anything, it will help rather than hinder your own assured long reign and good health.'
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