Martin Stephen - The rebel heart

Mannion returned. 'Sir Andrew Golightly is staying for two nights. He's booked supper for one in a private room. Up there. Servants took it to 'im ten minutes ago.'

They mounted the creaking stairs, ingrained with the smoke from lamps and candles and the cheap coal on the blazing fire, which periodically belched fume, smoke and sparks out into the main room as the wind started to get up outside.

Gresham lifted the simple latch on the door, and walked in. George was coming to the end of his meal, hacking at some hard cheese with his knife as the door opened. He hardly looked up.

'Ten minutes more,' he said, 'and bring me another flagon while-' He looked up. The colour drained instantly from his face, and he stood up.

'Henry! I was just about to come and see you… sudden call to London… business…'

He looked at Gresham, who gazed back expressionless. Slowly his words slowed, and stopped. The two men stood staring at each other in silence.

'When did you first start to spy for Cecil?' asked Gresham finally. 'And did you think that spying on me for him was all in the way of friendship? And how did it feel when you saw your contact on board another ship full of men trying to kill me?' ‘I–I never-I-'

'George,' said Gresham with intense pity, 'I can read you like a book. You've not only betrayed me and everything I thought we meant to each other, you've betrayed yourself, got yourself in way over your head, you poor, idiot booby.' Gresham shook his head, partly in disbelief, partly to rid himself of a terrible pain. George looked as if he was about to be sick. He made a sudden movement. Without anyone quite knowing how it got there, a dagger was cleaving into the wood inches in front of George's face, handle shaking gently with the force of impact.

'I won't kill you now, as I've killed everyone else who's betrayed me, simply for the sake of our friendship. But if you make even the slightest move for a weapon, or any sudden move, I will kill you. Do you understand?'

George cleared his throat, made a noise, cleared it again, swallowed and finally got words out, 'I understand. And I believe you.' *Now,' said Gresham, his voice cold as a frozen sea, 'you'll tell me everything. Mannion!' Even Gresham's tone to Mannion was grim, clipped, short. 'My old friend here's been turning to the bottle increasingly often. Fetch two flagons from the landlord to oil his tongue.'

Mannion left, and took five minutes to return clutching two black large jugs of wine. The two men were still staring silently at each other. Neither had said a word.

'Now, damn you!' and for the first time some of the intensity of Gresham*s feelings crept through into his voice. 'Tell me the truth!'

'Mortgaged,' said George.

'Speak up!'said Gresham.

'Mortgaged!' George nearly shouted. 'Mortgaged to the hilt! All my estate. Mortgaged by my worthless father. Debts everywhere, and the estate collapsing. Walls not mended, wells running foul, corrupt stewards, the wrong crops sown in the wrong fields — and then three bad years, what grain there was rotting in the fields. Men and their families — my men, people I'd grown up with, men and women I knew by name — facing starvation. And marriage to a wife whose fortune turned out to exist more in the imagination of my father than in any reality, and whose mother insists on living like a Queen.'

'So someone came…' prompted Gresham.

'I borrowed as much money as I could. Tried for positions at Court, was rejected all the time. No powerful relations, no contacts; just friendship with the wildest member of the Court, which did me no good at all. I was about to be bankrupted. Then a man came to me. Offered me enough money to bail me out, see off the most pressing debtors for six months or so.'

'And what did this man ask for in exchange for his money?'

'He wanted me to spy on Essex!' There was anger in George's voice. At least he had some spirit left. 'Not you! He said he was working for the government, and I assumed that meant Cecil, and that Cecil and Elizabeth feared Essex above all others as an enemy and future King of England. Well, I hated Essex — you've always known I hate Essex — so I didn't see that as a betrayal. You only came into it because I could use my friendship with you to get closer to Essex, get inside his social circle.'

'But it didn't stop there, did it?' said Gresham. 'And before he gave you the gold, he made you sign a paper, didn't he?'

'How did you know?' said George, shocked.

'Just tell me,' said Gresham.

'Well, yes, he did make me sign something. It was that or ruin, and everyone knows that half the Court's taking money from Spain! I thought it's what they made everyone do. I thought if everyone else at Court was getting their slice of the pie, why shouldn't I? And then-'

'And then,' said Gresham, 'your little tame man paid you even more money to spy on me. To tell him what I was saying to Essex. He said of course that he knew I was going to Scotland for Cecil, but that you had to tell him if I was about to be sent on any secret missions for anyone else, or carry any secret messages. And where I was to go.'

'Well, yes,' spluttered George, going a deep red, 'but he assured me-'

'That I wouldn't come to harm,' said Gresham. 'Indeed, you would be helping me. Your little man, who spoke perfect English and could so easily have been Cecil's man, who knew so much more about what was going on than you could ever hope to know, told you that if any mission you reported on was going to be dangerous for me he would warn you, and you could warn me. Knowledge, that was all he was after. Pure knowledge. And of course you told him, you poor fool, that I was carrying a message from Elizabeth as well, didn't you? And he thanked you and said that if you carried on simply watching and reporting, not only would no harm come to me but you would find yourself in receipt of a Court pension, or perhaps even a share in one of the lesser monopolies-'

'But how do you know all this? You've used almost his exact words-'

'Because it's how I would have played you, like a fish on a line, how any professional would play a poor, bumbling idiot who stumbled into their trap.’

The words were tumbling out of George now. 'And then you told me about the man. On the boat. With the goatee beard. You told me he was the leader of a brutal bunch of thugs who tried to kill all three of you.'

'And your little world fell apart, didn't it?' said Gresham pityingly. Except there was a harsh undercurrent in his tone. 'All of a sudden you started to realise that you'd been betrayed, that your little man would as like kill me and you if it suited him, and that you'd been used. Used by Cecil. And you probably thought it was about the Queen's message, that in some way Cecil feared it and wanted it stopped, and me stopped in case she'd told me what it was. And you realised what you'd become Judas.'

'I never meant to-'

'It's the most pathetic excuse people like me hear all the time. If your panic over money hadn't totally clouded any judgement you might have had, you'd have seen that the only thing in the interests of Cecil and others is Essex's total destruction. Either by a rebellion that brings him down, or by his making a total fool of himself. And I'm one of the few people who every now and again has been known to talk sense into him, so I pose a threat to all those who want Essex dead.'

'But you've never faced the loss of everything you own and love!' It was almost a howl from George.

'I owned nothing for a large part of my life,' said Gresham witheringly. 'And I can assure you, I value my honour and my friends more than my possessions.'

In the silence that followed, the talk from the crowded inn filtered through the door. Someone walked heavily across the floor in the room above, and a few tiny particles of dust fell from the thick, dark beams on the ceiling.