'And?' said Gresham as if talking to a child.
'And I read the letter. Decided you had to see it. But I couldn't trust anyone else, not after I'd read it. So I made Jack, Dick and Edward agree to ride with me to Ireland, the ones who'd been with us on the Anna. I felt I knew them, and they knew and sort of trusted me, and Dick is in love with me, sort of, and will do anything I ask… and I asked Jack, because he's the oldest and the wisest, to pick three other men they could trust. I remembered what you said about — rape, and other things. And I knew it was terribly important that you see this letter, and I thought six of your men would fight off anything other than an army and if we met an army it would all be lost anyway…'
She sensed she was starting to ramble again, and made a massive effort to control herself.
'I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to disobey your orders, and I took six of your men and lots of your horses without asking you, and it cost a fortune for Jack to get us on board a ship, though I'm sure he got the best deal he could, but we rode as fast as we could and hardly slept.' All the tension, the emotion and the horror was rushing out of her now, uncontrollable. 'And all the time I was convinced that if we got here you would be dead.'
'Can I see the letter? Please?'
She leant forward, the paper clutched tightly in her hand so tightly that the paper was screwed up and wrinkled where her thumb and forefinger had held onto it. She had to make herself let it go. Gresham thought she would have died rather than release it to anyone else. Mannion had clearly been told of its existence, but equally clearly, from the eagerness with which he crowded forward to lean over Gresham's shoulder, had not seen the thing itself. In some way the girl had driven herself to cross an ocean by the belief that this letter could only be handed over to him.
He gently prised it from her grasp, opened the folds and read.
It was a curt, peremptory letter. It blasted Cameron, to whom it was addressed, for staying out of contact for too long. It reminded him that he who pays the piper calls the tune. And it ordered him, quite clearly and unequivocally, to kill Henry Gresham. It was even more specific than that. It ordered Cameron to kill Henry Gresham 'Before my Lord of Essex can return to England from his Irish folly.'
Gresham looked up at Jane, who was poised on the edge of her seat, tear stains visible on her cheeks where they had cut through the grime.
'Have you shared its content with anyone else?'
She shook her head. 'No. I did tell Jack that if anything were to happen to me on the journey, he should take the letter if it were at all possible from my — body — and make sure that he handed it to you in person.'
Gresham looked at Jane; it was as if he had seen her for the first time.
'Even here in Ireland they have hot water and rooms that can be made warm. Please go and refresh yourself after your — journey.'
From the state of her, the ride from hell might have been a better description.
'Then, if you wish, please join myself, George here and Mannion for supper.'
'Thank you, my Lord,' said Jane, for whom exhaustion had become normal. 'Please…' 'Yes?' said Gresham.
'Please don't punish Jack and Dick and Edward! Or the other three who came with us! It wasn't their fault. I made them do it.'
Gresham looked at her, and for all his control a smile started to play around his mouth. Dammit, he was becoming more attracted to this girl by the minute.
'I bet you did,' he said. 'My plan, actually, is not to hang, draw and quarter them — in front of their families, of course, just for good measure. Rather, I propose to thank, and reward them. They did well. Yet they had the lesser role. As for you, whose role was the greatest, all I have is… my thanks. Just a few moments ago, I thought I was fighting for my life with the Earl of Essex and his cronies. Now I realise the real fight may well have been behind my back. You may well have saved my life.'
He looked at her, and grinned. The way he grinned at Mannion, the way he grinned at George. He only half realised what he was doing.
'Thank you,' he said, simply and cheerfully.
She left, giving him a hesitant, almost fearful smile. As if she could not quite believe her luck. She managed to look stunningly beautiful despite — or was it because of? — her disarray.
There was a long silence after she had left the room.
'Bastard!' said Mannion.
'The one who's in this room?' asked Gresham mildly.
'No,' said Mannion emphatically. 'Not that bastard. Cameron Fuckin' Bloody Buggerin' Johnstone. That bastard.'
Gresham had registered the occasional visits of Cameron's servant. Registered them. Thought nothing of them.
There was always hope for Mannion. It was usually not a spiritual or a metaphysical hope, but a physical hope and expectation: of the next meal, the next drink or the next woman. He had decided long ago that thinking was probably a bad thing. Yet he was thinking long and hard over this one, and suffering.
'You believe the letter? Believe it's genuine?' Gresham was the calmest of all of them.
Mannion and George looked at each other. George was pale as a harvest moon, no colour in his craggy face at all. Something was wrong with him, something Gresham could not define.
'Yes,' said George. 'The girl wasn't lying.' He looked as if he was about to say something, but it never came.
'But you're all missing the interesting point,' said Gresham. 'Actually, three interesting points.'
'That a Scots bastard wants to kill you?' said Mannion.
'That's not the point at all,' said Gresham. There was a faraway look in his eyes. 'The first point is a lesson for us all.'
'A lesson?' said Mannion, only half managing to restrain his look of concern to George. Was his master losing it? 'You ain't in College now.'
'We're none of us ever out of College,' responded Gresham. 'The first lesson is that we can't plan for everything. Least of all a maddened horse. We think we're in control, we think we have it all planned. Then something happens. Something out of our control. Something that doesn't obey our orders. Something we didn't think of — like Jane finding this letter.'
'So where does that wonderful bit of philosophy leave us?' asked George.
'With the second point,' said Gresham. 'From the start of this business, I've been running to catch up. I'd ignored Essex and seen him as the Queen's plaything. I'd become complacent about Cecil, hadn't realised he was building a plot against me, let him steal the advantage. Right from the word go I've been reacting to events, instead of dictating them. I've been following, not leading. And I hate to be a follower.'
'Is there a point to all this?' George suddenly seemed very tired, and rather old. It was the first time that Gresham had considered his friend might be getting old.
'The most important point of all,' said Gresham, suppressing his pang of worry over George. 'Who signed this letter? Who ordered Cameron to kill me?'
George shook himself.
The signature's indecipherable. It could be anyone.' 'But don't you see?' said Gresham, exasperated and showing it. 'I've made the basic mistake!'
'Being born?' asked George glumly.
'No! Not finding out who it is wants to kill me. If I find out who wants me dead, then there's a strong chance I find out why. And if I find out why I start to see some sort of path through this forest that's threatening to make me lose my way.'
'That's Cameron then, isn't it?' said George, more animated now there was something to be done. 'He's the only definite link you have. He's bound to know who gives him his orders. I suppose you'll just have to torture it out of him.' George's lips pursed in a grimace. He disliked even the idea of torture, and Gresham knew that when its possible need arose there were moments when George began to regret his friendship with Gresham, and the avenues it sometimes dragged him down. 'But I don't think you should,' said George. 'I think if you do, you become just like your enemies, and no better than them.'
'Torture?' asked Gresham. 'I'll use it if I have to, b
ut apart from the fact that Cameron's very tough, you can never guarantee that a man in physical pain tells the truth, only that he tells what he thinks will make the pain stop.'
'Physical pain?' said Mannion, picking him up. 'What other pain is there?'
'Mental pain,' said Gresham.
'What's that when it's at 'ome?' asked Mannion scornfully.
'Physical pain is when someone denies you your next meal, drink and woman. Mental pain is when you think that's what they're going to do. Can you get Cameron here, without showing what you think of him?'
'Course I can,' said Mannion. 'I'll be politeness itself.'
'Do that and he will spot there's something up. Just be normal. Tell him Essex has given me a job to do.'
Cameron came in ten minutes later, outwardly cheerful and fumbling in his bag.
'Here, I've a book for you if you…'
He looked up and into the barrel of the pistol Gresham had levelled at him. Instantly he turned and made as if to duck under both the pistol and Mannion, using the speed of his reflexes to get out of the room and gambling that Gresham needed a live man to talk to rather than a dead one to gloat over. His speed of thought was extraordinary.
He turned and the full force of Mannion's fist crashed into him. The impact knocked him two or three feet backwards, and he was unconscious by the time he hit the floor.
'I can't tell you how much I enjoyed that,' said Mannion, rubbing his sore knuckles.
When Cameron came to he was tied to a high-backed, ornate wooden chair, a separate strand of rope round his neck, pulling it back against the wood. He must have been in agony, but he only blinked once. There was a livid bruise down the side of his face already, and a tooth gone on the right-hand side, with a dribble of red blood coming out of his mouth.
Gresham held the letter in front of him so he could read it. Nothing changed in Cameron's face.
'How did you get hold of that?' he asked, slurring his words because his mouth was so swollen.
'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 th
at 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.
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