'Guy or Guido Fawkes, otherwise known as the servant John Johnson, was a double agent, supposedly working with Catholic forces in Europe for some years, but in practice working for you. Robert Catesby, the true leader of the Gunpowder Plot or whatever you will choose to call it, either stumbled into him, or was directed his way by another of your agents, when Catesby and a group of Catholic hotheads needed someone who could lay a slow train of powder. You knew about the Gunpowder Plot from the start. You used Fawkes as one of your inside men for the whole duration of the plot, allowing it to ripen so that you could discover it amidst the greatest public attention and so win a lasting popularity for you, and for the King. I believe — though I have no evidence for it — that you let it blossom also in the hope that it would reveal a leading noble as one of its leaders, perhaps one you saw as posing a threat to yourself. Did you hope to implicate Raleigh? Or was it simply Northumberland? In any event, you encouraged another of your double agents, Thomas Percy, to become involved and to work again on the inside of the plot on your behalf. Fawkes, I suspect, was to be bribed with money and a free passage out, perhaps even to go back to Europe as a hero and remain on the inside of the
Catholic rebels over there. Percy was to be bribed, perhaps even with the Earldom itself.'
'And how do you know all this… fantasy? This… invention?'
Cecil's eyes had never seemed more dangerous, his hunched body more ready to pounce.
'I have had my own man on the inside of this plot. I wrote that letter you have on your desk, to splinter and disperse the plot before harm was done. I brought Knyvett out an hour early, so that Fawkes could be found. It was I who caused the powder to ignite at Holbeache House. Oh, and by the way, I shot Thomas Percy.'
'You dared to challenge my will?' Cecil was roaring now, the first time Gresham had ever seen him lose his control.
'Challenge your will? Are you God, as well as Secretary to His anointed?'
'You have no evidence of this. No evidence at all.' Cecil's voice had dropped, his body fallen back into the chair.
'I have a story that men will believe, because it fits so many facts and fits the hatred and suspicion they have of you. I have the drafts of that letter you have in front of you — and a devil of a time it took, I can tell you — in the same hand and in a manner that progresses so convincingly that all will believe the authorship. And I have a plotter. Francis Tresham, to be exact, kept where you will not find him.' Gresham doubted that last comment, personally. If Cecil pulled out all his resources he could find anything, even a clean spot on the King's body. 'And several signed accounts by Tresham, undeniably in his hand, and witnessed, hidden also where you will not find them.'
'What is it that you want from me?' hissed Cecil.
'A chair would be pleasant,' said Gresham, with a polite smile. He was still standing. Angrily, Cecil motioned him to sit, never once taking his eyes off him.
'Do you hate me, Henry Gresham?'
It was an odd question, coming from the source it did, but Gresham paused to answer it.
'Yes, most certainly. More so than perhaps any man alive or dead.'
'Then you wish to destroy me?'
'Oh, no!' Gresham's laugh so startled Cecil that he fell back a little, and blinked owlishly. 'You see, only a person whose soul stinks like the foulest sewer could run a country such as this. A murderer, a torturer, an abuser, a liar, a cheat and a lost soul before God. These are necessary in a ruler. Some people have to die, of course, some have to meet the rack and some have their guts sawn out in front of crowds to make peace happen. Some, it is true, have these things happen to them who do not deserve them, or who are unlucky, or who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but all things come at a price. Peace and stability carry a higher price than many. And they carry the highest price of all for the ruler, the leader of that midden we call politics and human life. They carry the price of a lost soul, and eternity spent in Hell. Yes, I hate you, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. Because I hate you, I am happy for your soul to be the price of peace in this country. I would like to kill you, to see you suffer and writhe in front of me as you have seen so many others. But I must make Machiavelli's choice, and go for the greater good at the expense of some of the lesser pleasures.'
The silence extended for a minute, perhaps more.
'So what it is that you want from me?'
'Nothing.'
'Nothing?’
'Well, nothing really. I wanted to have the pleasure of your knowing what I knew, that your attempts to gag and mislead me had failed, as well as your pathetic attempts to blackmail me. I suppose I ought to have your oath that you will take no steps to harm me, or those closest to me. No strange deaths in alleyways, or long decaying illnesses from poison.'
'Is not the Papal archive enough?' asked Cecil, his hatred of Gresham beginning to infect his voice.
'I thought it might be, but you proved me wrong. And it's not just the Papal archive where I keep papers, believe me. But you see, there is something strange about you, rotten and corrupt as you are. I have never known you go back on an oath you have sworn. Quite extraordinary. But this oath will be special. You will swear it on the life of your son.'
'On the life of my son… but I…' Cecil was almost speechless, grabbing for words.
'You had better pray for a long and peaceful life for me, my woman and my servant. Because if we die, in any way that might lead back to you in any way, your son will die.'
'You would not…'
'Yes, I would. You cannot lock a child away from life. Unless you can hide it away completely you cannot lock it away from the reality of death. Look at me, Robert Cecil. And then tell me if you think I lie.'
Unwillingly, Cecil found himself looking straight at Gresham.
'You have sought to bring your full power against me. You have failed. You will swear to do everything in your power to ensure that no harm of any kind comes to Henry Gresham and those nearest and dearest to him. And if you break your oath, your son will die.'
There was no lie in Henry Gresham's eyes. There was a look that told of all the innocent children those eyes had seen slaughtered, the women raped, the babies with their throats slashed. There was a look that told of the plotter Kit Wright, fighting for his religion, leading a mad, hopeless and courageous charge into the yard at Holbeache. Kit Wright, the stolid, dependable Kit Wright, the man who thought quite genuinely that if one believed in something then one had to be prepared to fight and to die for it. Kit Wright, who could in many respects have been Mannion, if Mannion had chosen to give his total loyalty to Catholicism instead of to Gresham. Brave and foolish Kit Wright, lying in the filth of the courtyard, with a rough soldier frantically yanking at the silk stockings on his dead legs for booty.
Yes, thought Robert Cecil, my son will die at this man's hands if I break my oath. The hatred gleaming in his eyes, with every word dragged out of him as if by red-hot pincers, Robert Cecil swore his oath.
'Well, that was good,' said Gresham lightly. 'Every good boy deserves favour, and so I'll give you something else for your pains, and as a gesture of my goodwill. I wouldn't have you deposed, Chief Secretary. It amuses me to have that in my power, but it's a power I won't exercise. Someone less evil might come along to run the country, and perhaps if you were deposed you might have time to take a part of your soul out of the Hell it so richly deserves.'
'Cease this jesting!' said Cecil. 'Have you not had your satisfaction?'
'This isn't jesting,' said Gresham, 'and if there's any satisfaction in the air, it will be your own. You hold Guy Fawkes, don't you, in the Tower at this very moment?'
Cecil did not answer. He knew Gresham knew the truth.
'Wondering what to do with him, no doubt. What jolly talk there must have been between you both, when he was brought in by Knyvett's men. Has Guy Fawkes ever mentioned to you his relationship with the ninth Earl of Northumberland?'
'His relationship?’
'Yes. You thought Fawkes was
your man, didn't you? It never crossed your mind that he was someone else's. Before he started to receive money from you he'd been employed by Northumberland. From the outset, in fact. It was Northumberland who spotted him as a young man, sent him over to Europe and paid to settle his wife — Maria, I think she's called — and their son Thomas, in his absence. You see, Fawkes never was a soldier of fortune. He always was a soldier of conscience. When you came along with your offer for him to turn spy, Northumberland encouraged him to say yes. Northumberland always despised you, never trusted you. It amused him to have one of your spies in his pay.
'And then Catesby came along. Northumberland knew the plot was a disaster, knew it would turn the country against Catholics.
And he knew exactly why you were urging Fawkes to go along with it. So he planned a little surprise all his own.'
'Are you seeking to tell me that this Guy Fawkes was in the pay of Northumberland?' said Cecil.
He was a clever man, thought Gresham, you had to admit. He had never actually admitted to any involvement in the plot, or that he had employed Guy Fawkes. Even the oath he had sworn had not been an admission of guilt.
'Is in the pay of Northumberland.'
'And what was my Lord of Northumberland's aim in all this?' To his credit, Cecil recovered quickly. Gresham could almost see the machinery of his brain grappling with this latest problem.
'Very simple, really,' said Gresham. 'He was going to let you expose the plot, take all the glory and revel in it. He was going to wait until you put on trial whatever few pathetic plotters you had managed to keep alive.
'And then he was going to blow up the House of Lords.'
Cecil's face went as white as a full moon.
'Oh, don't worry,' said Gresham cheerfully, 'he wouldn't have killed anyone. Or at least no-one important, just a few servants. He'd have blown the mine when the House was empty. And because of where it was, it wouldn't have been the whole House of Lords. Probably just one wall or so of it.'
'The mine?' Cecil could hardly force the words out.
'Remember? They tried to dig a tunnel under the House of Lords, before they found and hired the cellar. It came to grief against the foundations; they simply couldn't drive through them. You thought they'd abandoned it, didn't you? Well, the plotters did, but Fawkes didn't. Northumberland brought some miners down from the north-west. They were kept in isolation for a week, never told what they were doing, and sent home with a fat purse. Probably dead by now, if Northumberland has any sense. They widened the tunnel, secured it. Didn't have to dig all the way through the foundations, just part way in. Enough to bring a wall down.
'They packed it with barrels of powder. Fawkes used some of the good powder from your cellar. You'll find the stuff in the cellar is all decayed, more or less. The rest they bought in. If the powder held out, they were going to blow up the mine on the day you had your first show trial. Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, and the hero of the Gunpowder Plot! Except the Catholics fooled him, kept another mine hidden from him and blew a wall out of an empty House of Lords just to prove how little Robert Cecil was actually in command on the very day he was bragging just how wonderful he was.
'You'd have been a laughing stock, forced into immediate resignation. The King would survive, the laughter rebounding on him and blowing a hole out of his authority. If I was them I'd have had pamphlets printed, pointing out that the Catholics could have blown up the whole farce with the people inside it if they'd wished, making it clear they had the power to provoke a rebellion, but had chosen not to use it. James would almost certainly have had to call in Northumberland as his Secretary after that, to make peace with the Catholics. Beautiful, isn't it? Let you make all the running, let you blow yourself up to maximum height and then prick your balloon with a gentle little explosion where the only physical casualties are a few bits of stone, and the only other casualty is one of the Papists' most bitter enemies: you.
'It's still there, of course. I mean the mine, and the powder. I set my servant guard over it when we found it, but called him off when I came here, just in case you sent someone and he got arrested as a conspirator. We wouldn't want old Mannion to find himself being nabbed like Guy Fawkes, would we? So I suppose Northumberland could have sent someone down there right now to blow it up, since you appear to want to implicate him in the Gunpowder Plot.'
Gresham stood up easily. He looked out of the high window in the direction of Westminster, as if for a cloud of smoke.
'I'd get someone down there pretty quickly, if I were you. Someone to secure it, take the powder away. Someone you can trust not to talk. We wouldn't want London knowing there was a plot you knew nothing about, would we?' Gresham made as if to leave.
'Oh, by the way,' he said, 'there is just one other thing. I'll make Francis Tresham give himself up, so you can have your full set of conspirators. But I want no torture, and I want a fake death to get him out of the Tower and out of England. He won't trouble you again, I guarantee. Are we agreed — on that oath you swore? Tresham has just become both near and dear to me.'
Cecil nodded, a curt, hard nod. Gresham nodded ironically back, and left the room, almost casual in his manner. As he reached the nearest wall out of sight of Whitehall, he leant back against it, and breathed for what seemed like the first time in an hour.
Why had Gresham remembered Tresham's talk of the tunnel Fawkes and the others had tried to dig from the house they had rented, the tunnel they had given up on when the cellar under the House of Lords became available? Perhaps it was simple curiosity, perhaps it was the realisation that a secret tunnel leading up to the walls of the House of Lords was an open invitation for the future, a hostage to fortune and a loose end that simply needed to be tied up. Perhaps most of all it was Wintour's staying on in London, for far longer than was reasonable, and Wintour's obsessive attempts to reach the street in which the house was situated. Had he been trying to hide in the tunnel? Or had he hoped to reopen it himself, ironically wishing to stage the same embarrassment for Cecil as Northumberland had planned all along?
It had been easier than Gresham had thought to gain access to the house from where the plotters had started. A desultory guard was on duty now the first excitements were over, easily bluffed into allowing Gresham and Mannion entry by the obvious wealth of Gresham's clothing and his casual use of Cecil's name and title. Gresham had half expected to find nothing, or at best the caved-in remnant showing what happened when amateurs tried to play at being miners. They had found the shaft under the floor, despite the care of the miners in re-laying the boards their work had scuffed and splintered.
Mannion had been voluble in his insistence that Gresham should not enter. Gresham had ignored him, stripping down to his shirt and crawling through the surprisingly spacious tunnel. This was no work of amateurs, he realised, noting the simple yet effective pattern of timber framing that held up the roof of the tunnel. At its end a positive chamber had been hollowed out, the powder stacked neatly in the seven- or eight-foot-deep hole that had been made in the old foundations, rumoured to be some eleven or twelve feet thick in total. Nothing had been left to chance. Lanterns, tinder, flint and fuse had been stored there, awaiting whoever came to blow the mine. There were two pointers to the originators. A napkin or towel was stuck behind one of the barrels, pinned between it and its neighbour, as might have happened if it had become trapped as a man manoeuvred the one barrel into place by the side of the other. It was simple stuff, of the sort that would be put at table to wipe a guest's hands. Embroidered into the top corner was the Percy crest. Gresham knew that Northumbrian miners worked naked in the tunnels, sometimes discarding even a loincloth, but wrapped a piece of towelling round their brow to wipe the stinging sweat off before it reached their eyes. They must have given the miners napkins from Syon House to take the place of the towelling. Gresham had worked with the moles in the Netherlands, which was why he looked carefully on the ancient stone of the foundations. Those who cut through stone like to leave a ma
rk on it. Eventually he found it, scratched on to a stone, perhaps with the edge of a pickaxe. ' All for God and HP '. HP. Henry Percy. Perhaps the ninth Earl had deliberately recruited Catholics to work his mine, and perhaps even given whoever had supervised them a hint of what it was all about.
Gresham had guessed at much of it, of course, but Cecil had not denied it. He had known Fawkes had to be a triple agent as soon as he had seen the completed mine. It was Fawkes who supervised the mine early on, Fawkes who put the powder in the cellar and kept watch on it. The activity needed to finish the mine would never have escaped him.
Mr Fawkes, thought Gresham, was about to have an interesting exchange with Cecil.
They had come upon him at midnight, dragged him out of his sleep and from his comfortable chamber and down into the bowels of the White Tower. What had gone wrong? His grim-faced gaolers would not speak in answer to his entreaties. He knew they showed prisoners the rack, the mere sight of the obscene contraption enough often to break men. His hope died as they strapped him to the machine, still without a word being spoken.
The pain was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to Guy Fawkes. There were no words for the appalling agony that drenched through every fibre of his being, the pain that defied all experience, the pain that made his scream simply a tiny little thing heard far away on the winds of his destruction. They did not take him from the rack when finally he lost consciousness. They threw filthy water over his tortured, strung-out frame, and waited for part of him to emerge from the dark. When he did so he could hardly think. In losing its absolute top, searing edge, the pain had almost worsened, spreading out in equal measure to every limb and every extremity of that limb. It had broken his body, that he knew. He would never walk properly again, stand up like a man. It had broken his spirit too, that he knew.
The face of Cecil loomed over him, devilish in the torchlight.
'You did not tell me about Lord Percy,' he said. 'That was a pity.'
He turned to the gaoler.
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