Martin Stephen: The Desperate remedy

Poor Digby, innocent baby that he was. He had played the romantic fool at his trial, and he spoke at length, and to very little purpose, on the scaffold. It had not helped him. He had been cut down almost as soon as he had hung, and carved up fully conscious. Immediately after the crowd had gone its way, the rumour had started that when the executioner had held up the bloody lump of flesh that was Digby's heart, with the cry 'Here lies the heart of a traitor!', Digby had cried out in his death pangs, ‘You lie!' Well, Gresham reflected, someone might have heard those words. All he had heard was Digby's final agonised screams. Old Robert Wintour and John Grant had died decently enough, Tom Bates needing to make a speech.

The second batch of executions contained Fawkes. Tom Wintour, now recovered enough to die, Ambrose Rookwood and Robert Keyes went along with him. Keyes cheated the hangman at the last, hurling himself off the scaffold and breaking his neck the minute the halter was around it. Fawkes was last to go. He mumbled a few words — 'forgiveness' and 'the King' was all Gresham could hear, near as he was. The pathetic figure had to be helped on to the scaffold. His neck broke cleanly as he was hung. Strange, thought Gresham, that the crowd were denied the full bloody rites of this perceived ringleader. Stranger still that he had made it to execution, knowing what he knew. Or was it the real Fawkes? For all Gresham knew, some village idiot had been acquired in the place of the man who had died on the rack. He hardly cared. All he did know was that Cecil would never allow Guy Fawkes to live.

Mannion had come with him on both occasions. ‘Nothing like a good execution!' he had stated with enthusiasm, and even now he was comparing the eight deaths with others he had seen, for all the world like a man comparing plays or sonnets. He munched on a mutton pie as the conspirators were put to death, one by one. Jane had not come. 'I've excitement enough in my life,' she had said, 'without needing to smear my eyes with blood.' Gresham had found her crying, the night in between the executions.

'Why are you crying?' he had whispered to her, reaching out in the night.

'For the women,' she had sobbed, 'and for the children. For the innocents, left behind with no inheritance, their lives ruined by these stupid men. These men who care only for their great cause, and leave behind them weeping the only true great cause a man can have.'

Gresham could have said how those damned were only a tiny proportion of those who would have suffered if rebellion had broken out, if the plot had not been smashed and exposed. Yet was it so? Would more, or fewer, men have died, women been widowed and children been orphaned if Gresham had kept out of the whole affair? Cecil had it under control, did he not? Fawkes would have lived on, Percy been ennobled, a few plotters executed.

So what had Henry Gresham done, except send Guy Fawkes to the rack and Thomas Percy to his grave?

Gresham lay awake, the occasional ripple of a sob still passing through the beautiful body lying next to him. Was it Machiavelli's choice that he had made, to keep a corrupt ruler in his place? Or was it simple vanity?

It was a cold wind blowing across the marshes. The small boat that would take them out to meet the tiny pinnace was rocking in the water, the slap-slap of its hull loud in the night. Gresham wondered if there were troops at that moment searching the south-coast port where he had let it be known that the embarkation would take place. He doubted it, but it would be a good test of Cecil's word.

The priest, Father Garnet, had been arrested. He had tried to defend himself at his trial, but he had no defence. What did a court of King James care for the secrecy of the confessional? If he knew of treason and a plot to murder the King, his duty as a subject was to report it, never mind whether he heard it in a wooden box with incense all around him. He was a dead man from the moment they laid hands on him, and Garnet knew it as well as the court.

Francis Tresham slipped out of the fisherman's hut in which he had been waiting. Gresham and his men had needed to check the area, to exchange the password with the two sailors in the small boat. He could smell the fear on Tresham, as well as the drink with which he had been filling himself for days. Spiriting him out of the Tower, supposedly dead, had been ease itself with Cecil's word behind the conspiracy.

'Here’ he said, thrusting a parcel at Tresham and forcing himself not to speak in a whisper. 'Money, and your papers. You are now Matthew Brunninge. Your passage to Spain is booked. Congratulations. Like Jesus, you've risen from the dead.'

'Will he live happily ever after?' asked Jane, snuggling up to him as they. watched the boat move gently out through the creek.

'I doubt it,' said Gresham. 'But then again, who can say who'll live happily ever after?'

'Sir Henry,' said Jane, stepping away from him, 'I think it's time I became your wife.'

For once, Gresham let his shock show on his face. What the Devil had this woman? To talk of marriage. On a windswept Norfolk coast, surrounded by potential enemies and busily involved in spiriting away a traitor and sworn enemy of the Crown, not to mention someone who had supposedly died of a urinary infection in the Tower!

'God help us!' exploded Gresham. 'I…'

'You see,' said Jane, ignoring him completely, 'it's one thing for me to be your whore. It is another thing for our son to be born a bastard.'