Martin Stephen: The Conscience of the King

'Well preached!' said Bacon, without malice. Andrewes was renowned as the best preacher in the country. His sermons were a potent blend of intelligence and wit, but the driving force that drove his congregation to tears was the combination of humanity and sincerity. 'But we really do need to move off spiritual matters and on to Mammon. Or Cecil, to be precise. You've heard he's about to die?'

Andrewes crossed himself instinctively. 'How certain are you? 'As certain as one can be in these matters.' 'And are you pleased?' Andrewes spoke with no hint of accusation.

'Yes, I think so. He's blocked me all these years, been the main reason for my lack of preferment despite our family links. His death will certainly open up new opportunities for me. But that's not why we needed to meet. Cecil sent a summons out from Bath yesterday.'

'A summons? To whom?'

'To Sir Henry Gresham.'

There was silence.

Andrewes spoke first, hesitantly. 'And what do you think was the purpose of this… summons?'

'I can only guess that it's the business that joins us. As far as Cecil's concerned, it's perhaps the greatest loose end in his life. Started by his father, watched over by him but never ended. Now threatening to blow up in the face of the country he thinks he's ruled for all these years past, damaging — perhaps even destroying — the stability he thinks is the inheritance he's left to the future. Gresham is the obvious man to bring it all to an end.'

'Is Gresham as dangerous a man as his reputation allows?'

'In some respects, my old friend,' said Bacon, sipping his wine thoughtfully, 'he's very like you. He has more wit and intelligence than he knows how to handle, a brain as powerful as any I've ever known and as sardonic a sense of humour. He's as restless as you. In the room he occupies, time seems to go just a little faster, as it does in any church where you preach. Oh, and at times he's crippled by a sense of duty. Far too much of this dreadful morality; just like you.'

'And the differences, assuming I accept your rather wild description as holding any truth at all as far as I'm concerned?'

'Well now, there's the problem,' mused Bacon. 'Gresham's fabulously rich, so he needs bow his knee to no man, and he's utterly ruthless, sometimes even cruel. He really doesn't care about his own life. He's probably the best fighter — and I do mean fighter, not just swordsman — in the country. He and Cecil loathe each other with a venom I've rarely seen anywhere else, yet they seem to have an understanding between them that no outsider comprehends. If Cecil sets him on the trail of the truth, the odds are more than even that he'll find at least some of it.'

'Are the consequences for us and the others as bad as we've persuaded ourselves they are?' asked Andrewes.

'They vary for each of us, I think,' said Bacon. 'For you and me, there's the fact of us having been involved in a deceit, telling the great public a lie for so long. It's not good for lawyers or for clergymen to be seen as deceivers. Then there's what it is we've been doing. Given the ferment in my Parliament and your Church, we're not clever to be seen as active in that particular field. In your case, the risk is greater. There are things the man responsible for the greatest edition of the Holy Bible ever written can't be seen to be involved with. As you've been so involved. Finally, for both of us, there's the humiliation of the real truth. More so in my case than yours.'

'And for the King?'

'The same. With the complication of these letters. A great complication, I fear. And the madman who has them now.' The silence hung heavy.

'I won't have him killed.' Andrewes' tone was peremptory.

'Who?' said Bacon, startled out of his reverie for a moment.

'Shakespeare. I won't have him killed.'

'Yet if he's stopped, much of the danger goes away,' Bacon stated factually. The part of his mind that from his earliest days had been distanced from him, an eavesdropper perched over his ear listening and reporting, wondered how this sight would look to an outsider. The Solicitor General and the Bishop of Ely quietly discussing the merits of murdering a man.

'As you've said, I have my morals.' i take the point. Yet there must be a chance that Gresham will kill him. There's no love lost between them. Gresham won't be constricted by your morality,' said Bacon.

'I've no control over Gresham,' replied Andrewes, aware of how thin the theological and moral ground was over which he skated.

'Well,' said Bacon, a sigh accompanying his words, 'the job may be done for us, without our lifting a finger. It seems they're queuing up to do away with Master Shakespeare.'

Late May, 1612 The Anchor Inn, Bank Street, London

The disease was affecting him now, Marlowe knew. He was starting to lose feeling in his hands and feet, could not always sense the hardness of the ground under him as his feet landed and so had the prancing, high-stepping gait of the pox sufferer. The doctor had said the growths would come eventually — hard little carbuncles on his flesh that first blackened and then fell out, leaving a gaping hole behind them. They would be active around his penis, the doctor had said. He would piss like a watering can. The cures could stave off the end, but that it would end in death was inevitable. So little time. So much revenge.

The Anchor Inn was by the Clink Prison and there was little to choose between the clientele of both places. They were all lost souls. The river pirates used the Anchor as their base, as did several highwaymen. A warren of passageways allowed escape down to the river. This was a sump, a noisome gathering place where many of the conversations were in grunts, where men came to become seriously drunk in the shortest possible time and where nameless deals were struck in dark corners. Occasionally a flash of light from one of those darkest corners would reveal a jewel or a necklace being covertly shown, before being stuffed back into the stinking cloth in which it was wrapped. The women here were old before their time, cackling hags at twenty-five years. Marlowe had no pity for them. It was one of their kind that had launched the acid of the pox into his body and into his mind.

He had paid one of the boys to keep filling his tankard. A thin, small-faced creature with a great lump and a bruise on the side of his head, he seemed incapable of moving forward, favouring instead a crab-like sideways walk, his chin permanently held down into his puny chest as if to avoid a blow from any of the roaring mob that frequented the inn. His face was quite beautiful, Marlowe noted, if you cut through the grime and the swelling, the big green eyes and the high cheekbones set off surprisingly well by a mop of auburn hair. His innocence was pathetic. Well, innocence did not last, thought Kit Marlowe.

As his hand caressed the letters he remembered his failure. The porter they paid to guard The Globe theatre had been old, and sleeping off his drink. It had been easy to slit his throat while he slept — who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? — and pleasurable to watch as he writhed and twisted down the slippery road to hell, trying vainly to scream his fear as the air whistled out through the bloody slice in his air passage. Marlowe had broken into the room as easily as he had slit the throat of the porter, leafed frantically through the hundreds of papers. These were fair copies! Not the original manuscripts he craved! Only one scabby piece worth stealing, and that in the writing of a man long dead!

Marlowe took his grief, as he had learned to do over the years, and folded it over and over until it was a small package. Then he dropped it in the furnace of his hatred and watched it catch light and burn, renewing its strength.