Martin Stephen: The Conscience of the King

And because she was lonely, appallingly lonely, and more terrified than she had ever been in her life of losing the man who gave meaning to her existence, she talked of that terror, the lurching, rattling moments in the coach when she had clasped the children desperately to herself, being flung from side to side and terrified that she would be hurled out on to the road. The awful silence as the coach had ground to a halt and she had been hauled roughly out, reaching down in a paroxysm of anger and fear for the knife she carried strapped to her inside leg and feeling the blow to the side of her head. She talked of the utter horrors of waking, devils beating at the side of her face, to find herself trussed and chained by the neck like a slave girl. The appalling feeling of helplessness in the face of this bloated monstrosity. The anger and the bitter recrimination… why had she not spotted something was wrong? Gresham would have seen something was wrong! She was just a weak, stupid woman, in her element checking the supply of preserves and feeble as a child when real business was in hand. And then the sickening, stomach- and brain-churning realisation that this foul, evil thing intended to have her, in front of her children, and there was nothing she could do! Without realising it, her hand tightened on Gresham's as she gazed into the fire and recreated her own hell. Could she have been born to be penetrated by this satyr? Well, many a woman had endured worse and stayed silent — but her children would know and have seen her so violated! The syphilis! The pox! To live on for a few more years in the face of her husband, diseased? And then the answer had come to her. She could bite off her tongue! And her mouth had been open at its widest, ready to clamp down hard and without hesitation, when the other boat had hit.

She was panting now, breathing heavily, her hand still clutching Gresham's.

His hand tugged at hers.

She looked down, disbelieving. His hand, gently, was squeezing hers.

She leaned over him. His eyes were closed still. Two, three huge tears dropped from her eyes and fell on his lids. 'Warm,' he said. 'Warm.'

An eye opened, blinked in her tears, and shut again. Hurriedly, she brought the cloth by her side to his eyes and wiped them. He was speaking, croaking, a half-whisper. She leaned forward, her ears nearly pressing his lips.

'I should… have been there,' he was trying to say. 'I should have been there.' Then, something else, stronger this time. Both his eyes were open. 'You must never die on me. Never…'

She screamed her happiness, screamed it out for the whole house to hear, screamed it so that Mannion leaped up as if the whole Spanish army was in his tent and The House under attack.

'If he comes back, you must hold on to him. Do not let him slip back into oblivion…' Dr Napier had said.

Her grip threatened to kill him all over again. Crying, babbling, calling out, she made him keep those eyes open, made him speak, made him live.

It was easier being dead, thought Gresham. Much calmer. Much quieter. Yet perhaps, after all, this was better. He smiled into the eyes of his wife.

Late March-27th June, 1613 London

There was so much to do. Yet it would be months before Gresham was physically able to do it. He lay there, fretting, in his bed, knowing that the leg must be kept still at all costs in its wooden splint, knowing that on his calm depended his ability to walk again without a limp. He ordered weights, used them until his breath tore at his throat, building his upper body strength.

The arm had healed beyond his belief. There was an angry scar there, for sure, to join the others on his body, but he felt no lessening in his control, no weakening.

They had lost five men in all from the coach, and one disabled for life. John, the coachman, found in a back alley with his head broken open, a blow that should have killed him and was probably designed to do so. Two of the men had been on the river and at The Globe when they had beaten off" the attackers. Gresham felt their loss like brothers. Scars mend, but never quite heal. People die, and are never quite replaced. Young Tom he promoted to deputy coach driver. No conquering general surveyed his army with more pride than Young Tom surveyed the coach on the first morning he drove it out in all its glory. It was an ugly, cumbersome thing, but for Young Tom there was nothing more beautiful in the world. There were pistols, loaded and ready, on the coach whenever it set out, and four blunderbusses loaded with nails. Walter the boatman and three of his crew were working for Gresham now.

They had found Nicholas. With something approaching despair, Gresham and Mannion had known that Marlowe would slip again into anonymity. Walsingham's spies had received a training in the field that was second to none. Yet Nicholas was easier meat, a bought servant.

He told them everything, without torture. The thin face and bloated body of the man who had come up to him in the tavern. The bag of gold, more money than he could have hoped to earn in a lifetime. The moment when he had decided to betray a lifetime of service.

Weeks ago, there would have been no argument. An implacable Gresham would have killed Nicholas himself without thought. Instead, stuffed in his bed, he looked to his wife as Nicholas sobbed and screamed before them. She gazed at the face of the man who had betrayed her and her children, driven them to what would have been more than her death, her eternal shame, but for a chance holing of a boat and a random meeting on the river.

'Let him go,' she said quietly, 'and never let him come within a mile of my family again.'

Too much death, too much suffering. It would have been easy to have him killed.

Mannion dragged him to the gateway of The House. He looked at the traitor in front of him, itching to do justice. Nicholas jibbered and shrieked, convinced he was going to die. I would like to take the gold you were paid, thought Mannion, and heat it until the coins melt all into one. And then pour it into your mouth. Instead, he looked at the pathetic thing in front of him.

If you're seen or heard of in London, in Cambridge, or within a hundred miles of my master and my mistress, you'll die,' he said flatly. 'And if I catch sight or sound of you ever again you're dead, as you deserve to be now.' He paused. 'Well,' he said, 'you came into this world with nothing. That's how you'll leave.' He turned to the men he had stationed by the gatehouse. Laughing, jeering, they came over and none too gently stripped Nicholas of all his clothes.

'She said I shouldn't kill you,' said Mannion, 'so I won't.' He smashed his huge fist straight into Nicholas's mouth and nose. There was an explosion of bone, teeth and flesh and Nicholas was flung to the ground in the dirt of the yard. Staggeringly, he was still conscious, more the pity for him. The branding iron, in the shape of a straight 'T' for traitor, was ready. Mannion plunged it down on to Nicholas's forehead. He screamed and bucked under the pain.

'Now, Master Nicholas,' said Mannion, 'go out and face the world as you've made it for yourself.'

Four men grabbed an arm and a leg each and like a sack of flour the naked and branded Nicholas was hurled into The Strand, the gate closed on him.

They contemplated kidnapping Overbury, in the long discussions Mannion held with Gresham by his bedside when Jane was not there. Kidnapping and killing him. In one sense it would have been easy enough. He was no great noble, no great lord surrounded by guards and walls and stout, locked gates. Yet this was no vanishing of a simple man, another body face down in the Thames, another unexplained disappearance. Robert Carr would scream, the country would scream and the King, for all they knew, might scream in sympathy with his bed-mate.