Martin Stephen: The galleon's grave

'Your Majesty!' Cecil made as if to kneel again, confused, perhaps even appalled, his world falling about his ears.

'Get up!' she said, 'and cease your fawning! And you,' she glanced down at Gresham, 'you can stay there. You!' The voice was a snarl, directed at the jailer, its rasp the killing edge of Henry VIII. 'Get your Queen a seat! And do so now.'

A stool appeared as if from nowhere. She sat.

Gresham considered a clever comment that he would bow if his circumstances allowed it, but thought better of it. His limbs were really aching rather seriously now.

'So, my little pygmy, you propose to interrogate a man you tell me is a very great traitor, without my knowledge. Nor, indeed, my consent for torture.' She looked towards the rack and its splayed occupant. In theory and in law, the consent of the monarch was required for torture to be used. 'Yet I am ever generous as Queen. I grant you my permission. Carry on your interrogation. Now.'

Gresham's heart failed him. The Queen had just commanded his torture.

Cecil was ever quick to recover, Gresham noticed. Clearly the presence of the Queen had not been part of his plan, had shocked him to the core, yet already he had adapted, mutated to meet present circumstance.

‘You deny you have been a spy for Spain, here in England? A regular attender at illegal and illicit Mass?'

Were his ears still ringing from the drubbing the San Martin had received? His eyes still weak from his incarceration in the bowels of the Revenge? His wits addled by weeks of poor food and continual stress? What other condemned man had to speak in his defence strapped onto the rack, with no advocate to plead his cause? No matter. This was here and now. The next few words would decide his fate. And how tall he was at burial.

'I deny I've been a spy for Spain. As for an attender at Mass, I've been so for three years, God preserve my soul. An attender in Her Majesty's Service, as instructed and advised by my Lord Walsingham.' That same Lord Walsingham who was now dead, and his only alibi.

Cecil was nearly spitting now. 'Attending Mass in Her Majesty's Service? How can it be?' Cecil raised his hand to order the jailer to tighten the rack.

'Hold.' It was the Queen. The man dropped his hands from the wheel. 'Let him speak before the pain fogs his judgement.'

'In Her Majesty's Service. On the orders of Walsingham. When I was sixteen, seventeen years old. A student. An impoverished student. I was offered money. To seek out a priest, attend his secret Mass. Present myself as a Catholic'

'And you sold your soul for money?' asked Cecil managing to make his voice sound incredulous.

'No,' said Giesham. The pain in his limbs had ceased to be an ache, was a real, sharp pain. 'I kept my soul and its Protestant heart I did it because it would allow me to pose as a spy for Spain. And also, I did it for excitement!'

'And not for money, of course!' said Cecil trying to sound scornful. Why was the Queen here? How was it that she was here? The questions were clearly screaming in Cecil's brain, so loud as to interfere with his control.

'Those who have money from birth confuse it with blood,' said Gresham. 'Only those who've known what it is to live without money realise that there are things more important.'

'Such as?' sneered Cecil. It was his first mistake.

'Such as excitement, the thrill of living, when one is young and life seems to offer bleak prospects elsewhere. Such as honour. Such as love of one's country, when one feels no love for any fellow human being. Such as doing what is right'

'Yet you spied for Spain!' Cecil taunted, playing his trump card.

'I appeared to spy for Spain.' Gresham's left arm was shooting agonising barbs of pain into his whole body. Why only the left? Why not the right? Reluctantly, Gresham wrenched his mind back to the main issue. 'They received information from me that seemed to be true. Bits of truth, sanitised so as to do as little damage as possible, passed on to me by Walsingham so that I could pass them on to the Spanish.'

'So you had access to the Court of Spain, did you?' said Cecil, the disbelief in his voice almost visible. *No,' said Gresham. How long could an arm cry out in protest before it became gangrenous? 'Access only to a courier. A courier in Cambridge who found out the truth about me, that I was no spy but a double agent A man I had to kill, early the next morning, in the meadows round Grantchester, before he could tell his masters the truth and ruin years of preparation.'

There was another rasping of a door. Strain as he might, Gresham could not force his head back far enough to see who had come into the chamber. There was a ringing in his ears now, blotting out hearing. His throat had dried, his voice becoming hoarser by the word. Something moved in the room, and blessed clear, fresh water was being held to his lips, passing down like an iceberg to his throat and stomach. The jailer stank, Gresham noticed, of rank sweat and stale piss.

'So you say!' snarled Cecil. How had Gresham heard the door open, staked out as he was, and Cecil been oblivious to it? 'Yet you forced your way on to Drake's great expedition to Cadiz. A true spy of Spain!'

The other arm was starting to shriek pain now. There was a strange comfort in the balance. The legs were not feeling too good either. He had to concentrate! He had to beat the pain! 'A spy for Spain only on the evidence of a forged letter and a planted prayer book. A letter forged by you, Robert Cecil,' said Gresham. 'You never knew that Walsingham had set me up as someone who could infiltrate Spain. So you set up your separate path to damn me to

Drake, as a Spanish spy. So that you could dispose of me as a man you disliked, but more importantly so that when I died, conveniently far away at sea, you could deliver my fortune to the Queen, as a traitor and a man with no heir. You arranged my death to buy credit with the Queen, and no doubt with your father as well.' He thought better of mentioning Mary Queen of Scots in front of the Queen. Of course Cecil had wanted to blame Gresham for the delivery of the death warrant, and take some of the blame off the Cecil family. But as Gresham had come perilously close to doing just that it did not seem wise to raise it.

'You are feeble,' scoffed Cecil. Where was the Queen? If Cecil's nervous glances were to go by, at Gresham's feet, below his line of vision. 'Where is your evidence?'

How extraordinary that a man stretched out on the rack could have his interrogator on the defensive. 'Evidence? Well, there is a tiny bit, actually,' said Gresham.

A bar of pain had started now across his midriff, threatening to outweigh his arms and legs in the stridency of its signal of pain.

'You see, Robert Leng kept the letter damning me as a Spanish agent. He would do, wouldn't he? And I… acquired it from him.' It had not been difficult to take the letter from a man with a broken leg. 'The extraordinary thing about that letter is that it reads correctly, it's even got a passing imitation of the right seal, but the writing… it's in the hand of your chief clerk. You could have given the letter over to my old friend Tom Phelippes to forge, if you'd been prepared to pay his price. But you're a mean man, aren't you? Unwilling to spend where you don't deem it necessary? Drake wouldn't know your clerk's hand. You gambled on forging that letter in house. Used one of your own men because it was cheaper. Gambled on Drake taking your bait. Gambled on that letter never surviving, never being subjected to scrutiny.'

'Your Majesty!' Was there the slightest hint of squeak in Cecil's voice? From the direction of Cecil's bow, Gresham had got it right. The Queen was seated at the end of the rack, beneath his line of vision. 'It is clear this man is a traitor!'

Another rustle, another waft of that perfume and the stink of bad breath. A face like that of the Queen appeared in his vision, swimming in and out of his consciousness.