Martin Stephen: The Conscience of the King

'In the past he wanted to use you, and didn't mind if you died in the process. Now he's dying, he'll want to use you provided you get killed in the process. He'll want to take you along with him to hell. You're the only one who's ever got the best of him.'

Gresham did not challenge the conclusion. Instead, he looked at the population of Bath. 'Do people ever walk in Bath?' he asked, looking round. 'Or do they only hobble, or be carried by servants?'

He was surprised at the address he had been given by Nicholas Heaton. It was grand enough for a successful provincial lawyer but too poor by half for the King's Chief Secretary. He said as much as his knock on the door was answered by an obsequious servant dressed in Cecil's livery.

'I wonder at my lord of Salisbury taking such lodgings. Aren't they beneath his usual style?'

'My lord has great pain in any movement. It's necessary for him to be as near to the baths as possible.'

They waited in a dingy room. Its panelling had been brightly painted quite recently, in the current fashion, but the job had been badly done and paint was flaking off already. The hangings had faded almost completely into drab greyness, and only a few vague figures could be discerned among the overwhelming pattern of dust that was all that held them together. The glass in the windows was of poor quality and had a sickly yellow tinge. Everything was coated with filth, and the smell of damp in the room made it stink like something unwashed. Another servant brought in wine. He was fresh-faced, little more than a boy, with eyes wide open to the wonder of the world and his luck in being servant to such a great man.

'Thank you,' said Gresham, whose life had been saved on more than one occasion by a servant who had noticed that Gresham called him by name and treated him as a human being. 'Your name is…?'

The servant halted, on his way out of the room, surprised to be addressed. 'Me, sir? I'm Arthur, sir…' Arthur gazed at Gresham in total awe, unaware that his mouth was hanging open. 'Sir… sir, forgive me, I…' Arthur was clearly bursting to say something.

'Spit it out, lad,' said Mannion.

Arthur saw a tall, muscled figure dressed from top to toe in. black except for a white collar worked with breathtaking and exquisite skill. The clothes breathed money, despite beingalmost ostentatious in their lack of ostentation. The body they covered seemed as if it were a coiled spring, ready at any moment to break out. Yet it was the face that Arthur could not take his eyes from, a face of arrogance, of immense strength, of flickering humour yet strange vulnerability — a face that seemed to have all the humours of the world in its angularity.

'Sir… sir…' Arthur was stuttering. 'What I wanted to know, know more than anything else was… did you meet Guy Fawkes, as they say you did?'

Gresham looked Arthur straight in the eye. 'Yes, Arthur, I did meet Guy Fawkes. As they say I did.'

Yes, thought Gresham, I did meet Guy Fawkes, a rather decent and honourable man in many respects, certainly more honourable than many of those who hounded him to his death. And I was responsible for stopping his escape, springing a trap upon him and delivering him to a death no animal should endure, administered by your master, Robert Cecil. And by failing to tell the truth about Guy Fawkes, quite deliberately, I helped keep your master in power and a dribbling Scottish homosexual as king. All in all, I did a brilliant job.

'And, sir,' said Arthur, so intent and intense that he forgot to splutter, 'was he as they say? Was he the devil incarnate?'

'Yes, Arthur,' said Gresham solemnly. He felt the mischief in his soul bubble and startto rise. 'He was the devil incarnate. And I tell you what very few other people know, a secret you must vow at all costs to keep to yourself. Do you vow, on your soul and all that you hold holy?'

'I do, sir, I do, I do…' Arthur was transformed by a paroxysm of yearning.

'When he was examined, it was proven that he had a cloven foot!'

There was a moment of extraordinary silence.

'Sir!' said Arthur, standing to attention, real tears in his eyes. 'I shall never tell a soul! And… thank you!' He rushed from the room.

'Well,' said Mannion, 'that'll be round the servant's hall in five minutes flat. Still, at least you made him leave the jug.' Mannion helped himself. Cecil's wine had always been cat's piss, served in golden goblets, a strange emblem for the man. Mannion would have drunk real cat's piss quite cheerfully if it had been proven to be alcoholic.

There was a noise of carriages outside, in surprisingly short time, and much shouting and apparent confusion. The Earl of Salisbury had made haste back from the baths. He was bustled in to the room in a chair carried by four men, another man by his side.

There was a moment of stunned silence. Cecil was shrouded in blankets, a thin, emaciated version of his former self, shrunken, wizened and dried out. The skin on his face was drawn tight over his skull like a death's head, only the hard, dark eyes recognisably the same as ever. One hand protruded slightly from the blankets, shaking uncontrollably. This was a wreck of a man, thought Gresham, a pitiful caricature of what had once been. A stench of something foul and rotten came from within the blankets. There was scant dignity in death, and what little that there was had been taken away from Robert Cecil. And what good to you is it now, thought Gresham, that you are the First Earl of Salisbury, that you have held power beyond the desire of monarchs? You have no power over this ignominy, this humiliation that leaves the vision of a demented cripple as your memorial.

'Good day, Sir Henry,' said Cecil. The voice was thin, wavering, but still recognisably the same. It reeked with the same insincerity. 'As ever, it is a pleasure to see you.'

'My Lord Salisbury,' said Gresham urbanely. 'And Sir Edward Coke.' He nodded to the figure beside Cecil. 'Not only the normal pleasure, but a pleasure almost doubled.'

Cecil's companion was a surprise. After Cecil himself, Sir Edward Coke was the man Henry Gresham most loathed above all others. Old now — he must be sixty — Coke exuded a youthful energy, a magnetism that all near him felt. Setting himself up as England's leading legal expert, and of ferocious, icy intelligence and application, Coke had been chief prosecutor at the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh. A charade, the trial had turned Raleigh from one of the most hated men in England into a folk hero, by virtue of its palpable unfairness and the dignity with which Raleigh had defended himself. Denying Raleigh any legal representation, Coke had not even allowed him to call his chief accuser as a witness, and had made a mockery out of justice. Every reason for hating lawyers, and for hating men with no principles except their own vainglory, was summed up for Henry Gresham in the figure of Sir Edward Coke. And now both he and Cecil were facing him.

'Have you both had a pleasant day?' asked Gresham solicitously. Cecil was dying in agony. Coke's idea of a pleasant day was finding yet more reason to hate papists, sodomites and his own daughter, not to mention anyone the King needed convicting at short notice. In Gresham's experience, being nice to such people caused them more agonies than anything else.

'I am lowered into the baths, Sir Henry,' said Cecil in a parody of his former voice, but still with a practical, factual tone to it.

'They do it in a strange contraption of a chair they have built spe-cially for me. The ropes snag on occasion, which is not pleasant. My numerous physicians tell me it is important I go no deeper than waist height.' indeed, my lord,' replied Gresham easily. 'I must attempt to be present the next time they hoist you over the watery void, and see if I can cut the rope-'