The Conscience of the King

Henry Gresham sat in the great high-backed chair, looking out through the tall mullioned window over the East Anglian meadows. For a few moments he was at peace, the sardonic smile gone from his face, features relaxed, the book lying almost unnoticed in his lap. The smells of early summer wafted across the Great Hall, grass and turned earth mingling with the faint smell of smoke from garden fires.

He felt extraordinarily calm. He had risen early that morning, noting the still-warm other half of the bed. For years Jane, now his wife, had always managed by some alchemy to rise before he did, and grant him the space to re-enter the world in private.

In private, that is, except for the figure of Mannion. If the one certainty in Gresham's life was that Jane's slim, warm body would be gone from his bed when he awoke, the other was that Mannion, that immense hulk of a man, would drift in silently to the room almost as soon as Gresham's feet touched the floor, towel in hand, ready to guide his master to the adjoining room where the bath had already been filled. This morning he had rejected the ritual, putting on instead a rough country jerkin and trews over his clean linen, stuffing a simple cap on his head and walking out past the startled servants wiping the sleep from their eyes as they came to terms with their own world. He had strode out of the house, lungs taking in great gasps of the still, chill morning air. Mannion, with a wistful eye back at the house and breakfast, had followed him in silence. He knew where Gresham would be going. It had to be Excalibur's pool.

Gresham had called it that when he bought the house. If ever there was a pool from which an enchanted hand might bring Excalibur, this was it; a bend in the river channelled out by the years into almost the size of a small lake, the water deep in history, cool and pure.

Mannion sniffed as Gresham stripped off and prepared to dive into the pool. Gresham heard it, as he was meant to. He turned to his body-servant, grinning, stark naked in the still-cold morning air.

'This is a magical place! An enchanted place! Can't you feel it, old man?'

'Funny how you can miss these things,' Mannion replied in a tone that did not imply any great respect for magic or enchantment. 'I thought it was just cold and damp.'

'Have you no imagination?' Gresham half shouted as he prepared to dive in to the darkness of the pool, thin strands of early morning mist still clinging to its luminous surface. *No,' said Mannion, at least able to close that one up without further discussion. 'And if I did have, you can be sure neither of us'd be standing here catching our deaths this morning!'

Gresham pulled back, aborting his dive, interested.

'And how do you reckon that?'

'Because it's your so-called imagination that's got you into most of the scrapes that my lack of it has helped pull you out of. Now are you going to dive in, or are we both going to die of your imagination?'

Not for the first time, Gresham reflected that it was usually a bad thing to engage the servants in conversation before breakfast. He gasped as the cold river water bit benignly into his flesh. Mannion was waiting with the towel as he climbed out, dripping, on to the grassy bank. Mannion noted with approval, as he always did, the firmness of Gresham's body, the muscle under just the right layer of flesh. In the cold, patches of Gresham's skin, all down his right side, had turned just the slightest shade paler than the rest of his flesh. If Mannion remembered holding Gresham in his arms for weeks on end, or Gresham his screaming for release from his agony when the powder had burned all that side of his body, then neither said anything. They did not need words in order to communicate.

They walked back in companionable silence to The Merchant's House. Medieval in its origins, it had once been little more than a Great Hall with a kitchen attached. Extended and added to over two hundred years, Gresham could feel the heat of the house extend towards him like outstretched arms. He found it difficult to explain its magic, but he knew it was centred in the Great Hall. Once, in a different age, whole families and their retainers had lived, squabbled and loved in this Hall, with only the kitchens, store houses and rooms for the master and mistress separated off. Now, with its tapestries and fantastic gilded and beamed roof, the Great Hall was simply the largest room at the centre of a complex of corridors, levels and parlours, a positive industry of a house, the noises of which Gresham could perpetually hear faintly in the background. Summer was truly in the air, and there was a sense of reawakening in all the subdued sounds around him, a stirring of limbs aching from the winter. Yet the Great Hall seemed almost impervious to this tumult. In its time it had seen and hosted all that human life could offer. It was called The Merchant's House, but Gresham guessed some rich merchant had bought it from the nobility who had first built it and then fallen on hard times, or perhaps even fallen on the executioner's block. No merchant would have built that Hall. Its confidence was the confidence of a blood-line, not of earned money.

His children had come in through the door at the other end of the Hall, talking quietly to each other. The room gleamed, rich with the shine and smell of polish. Gresham felt an irritation, and half rose to banish them from the formal room of the great house, the room that was his to be alone in whenever and howsoever he required it. This was an adult room, not a nursery. Then he fell back, unseen, as he caught the words of their conversation.

'Sssh!' It was Walter, six this year and the older of the two, who happened to be making the most noise. 'If they hear us they'll make us leave!'

'Why will they make us leave?' That was the small, piping voice of Anna, rising five. Learning to speak extraordinarily early, she had always done so with perfect clarity.

'Because adults do that sort of thing.'

'Then are adults not very clever?'

'I… I… I don't know!' safd an exasperated Walter. 'Let's get on with the game.'

Gresham relaxed back into his chair, grinning, still hidden from his two children. Now there was the subject of his next academic work, he thought. Man, the dominant species, brought to a grinding halt by the seventh rib asking a sensible question. And what was Man's answer? 'I don't know! Let's get on with the game!' How many men had Gresham known who treated the deadly serious business of life as simply a game? The only difference between Gresham and other men was that he had learned long ago that there was no answer, that life was indeed a game and survival its only victory.

The game in this instance, or so it appeared, consisted of skipping the length of the vast table centred in the Hall and placing something a few feet past its end, itself only a few feet from the back of Gresham's chair. Feeling increasingly like a naughty child himself, Gresham looked round to catch sight of what his daughter had laid on the floor.

Good God. It was a bum roll. Or two bum rolls, to be precise. These were the padded half-hoops that a woman wore resting on her bottom to exaggerate the size of her hips and the narrowness of her waist, and to put a barrier between the flesh and the steel wires that extended her skirt out to the ludicrous lengths required by Court fashion. There would be hell to pay when their loss was discovered.

The game quickly became clear. Walter and Anna each had a packed leather ball. Underneath the table was a narrow tunnel formed by the extravagantly backed oak chairs tucked under it. Bowling the ball under the entire length of the table so that it emerged to rest in the centre of one of the bum rolls acquired top points. Bowling the ball so that it hit the end of the bum roll meant no points. A few points were scored for clearing the table but not reaching the embrace of the bum roll.

The temptation was too much.

'Can I play?' asked Gresham, standing up.

Children were meant to doff their caps to their father after his breakfast, ask him to pray for them and invite his formal blessing. Formal. Restrained. Fathers did not romp with their children on the floor.

But it was a good game, and he did want to play.

His two children, ludicrously small now that he was upright, jumped back as he spoke but calmed immediately as they recognised their father.

'Do you… do you… do you mind us being here, Father?'

It was Walter, the brave little soldier standing in front of his officer, always unsure of what erratic authority would decree yet wanting so much to get it right.

'Of course I do!' said Gresham firmly. 'You've disturbed my peace and quiet and you've no right to be here.'

Interesting, he thought, most children's faces would have fallen at that. His children were too young to control all their muscles. Both flickered, and blinked, but their control at what must have seemed disaster in their tiny lives was remarkable. Both stood straight before him. Unwilling to demand more of their courage, he spoke again.

'But then again, this looks a good game, and the least you can do if you've disturbed me is let me play it too.'

They smiled then, shy little smiles. Trust and fear, thought Gresham, and some affection. Three of the ingredients that make a fine commander. Am I treating my children like soldiers under my command?

If he was, one soldier kept a lawyer in the barracks.

'Your arms are bigger than ours,' said Gresham's daughter. 'You must have a forfeit!'

Where had she learned to speak like that at her tender age? Those huge, dark eyes; the thin, wiry little body; the intensity and the control in the voice. In a moment Gresham was rushed back to his first meeting with her mother, Jane. A bastard girl in a godforsaken village, beaten to perdition by a vicious stepfather, demanding that the gentleman pay a forfeit because he had blinked before she did.

He blinked now, and saw his daughter before him again. Yet as it had always been with her mother, he felt a strange, defenceless feeling overwhelm him. She was very like Jane.

He became businesslike. Fathers should be formal, precise and definite with their children. In a very short space of time it was agreed that he should have a five-point handicap on a match of six throws. He had argued for three points, his children for ten, and they had compromised, at five. His children forgot who he was as he totally threw away the first ball, hitting the leg of the third chair along.

'Damn!' he said, engrossed, then looked round with a guilty start. Walter and Anna pretended they had not heard him. Walter landed his neatly within the circumference of the bum roll and Anna lodged her ball just outside of it.

When Lady Jane Gresham entered the Hall, with Mannion beside her, it was to find her husband, Sir Henry Gresham, kneeling on the floor in peasant's jerkin and trews, beating it with his fists and yelling in mock horror that he had lost to devilry and witchcraft. Walter and Anna were dancing round him, alternately shrieking, 'We won! We won!' and trying to hug him to say thank you for the fact that he could be so silly.

Jane had seen Gresham kill a man by cleaving his head in half with a boat axe, an exultant grin on his face as his teeth drew back over his lips. He had consigned men to torture, had himself been strapped to the rack. She knew he could be without pity or remorse for those who threatened him, or her. And here he was, treating his children as if they were the most fragile alabaster.

The children saw their mother and rushed towards her, all decorum forgotten. In a trice they were wrapped round her.

'Mummy, Mummy, Father came and we thought he was angry but he played with us and we won…'

Jane was dressed plainly, to manage the house and her children rather than to impress at Court. Nonetheless, every lady painting and corseting at Court would have given their souls to look as she did. The body was straight as an arrow, the complexion clear, the legs as long as heaven and the breasts the reward for having made the journey. Her head was chiselled and her face extraordinary. Its classical beauty was simplicity itself, yet it flickered and changed and flashed a different reality every second. The eyes. It was always the eyes with her, almost black but with a strange sparkle to them and the same primeval depth as the pool that Henry Gresham had dived into this morning.

'Good morning, my lord,' said Jane, managing to manifest total control, exasperation and a mild, irritated affection all at the same time. 'I thought I had only two children in my care. Now it seems I have three.'

Gresham stood up. 'Madam,' he announced, standing to his full height, 'I must make formal complaint regarding your motherhood.'

The two children disengaged from their mother and stood back, alarmed.

"Sir Henry!' replied Jane, sweeping to her full dignity, 'I am appalled. How may I have failed in my sacred duty to your heirs?'

'You have failed, my lady,' replied Gresham in the most sonorous tones he could muster, 'in that you have had the temerity to bring into this world two young striplings,' he glowered at his children with such severity that they fell back, 'who have managed to beat me fair and square at bowling!'

With that, he flung out his arms and his children ran in glee to their embrace.

'Take these young hounds outside,' Gresham said to Mannion after a moment, gazing swiftly at Jane who nodded imperceptibly, 'and give them some exercise, so they learn to leave their father undisturbed and, of course, to let him win.'

Mannion, like a vast and ragged hen, gathered the two chickens under his arms and led them off, chattering happily. He would walk them for an hour or more through the woods, as he had done with Gresham when he was a child, pointing out to them the different notes of the birds and the names of the wild flowers. They would know how the other birds fell silent when a hawk was in the wood, spot the patches of water where the fish were to be found in the river and learn which leaf to rub on a nettle sting.

'They're good children,' Gresham said when they were alone.

Well, I'm glad,' said Jane. 'It'd be a little difficult to put them back from whence they came if you didn't like them.' They talked, for a while, the tittle-tattle of houses and servants. There was no mention of the sadness that joined them, the memory of the baby who had been born dead. The baby who had broken the fragile cycle of Jane's fertility. There would be no more children born to Sir Henry and Lady Gresham.

Was he finally calming down, this husband of hers? Jane wondered. With a king secure on his throne, a brilliant heir to the Crown and the Catholics vanquished, would he cease to be Henry

Gresham the soldier and spy she had always known? Would he increasingly be taken over by the College he had refounded, and become Sir Henry Gresham the gentleman and the academic? A part of her soul yearned for it to be so. The other, stronger part told her the truth. Yet for a moment she allowed herself to gaze on Gresham, slightly dishevelled, seemingly at peace with himself.

It did not, could not last. It was late in the afternoon, the rooks and the men in the fields starting to head home, when they heard the sound of a tired horse, and a beating at their door.

Cecil's messenger. Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury. Lord Treasurer and Chief Secretary to His Royal Highness King James I of England and Scotland. Cecil hated Gresham with the malice of acid on steel. It was a feeling returned with interest by Gresham. Yet each needed the other, a poisoned symbiosis that grappled both to its breast. Cecil's messengers had summoned Gresham countless times, always the harbinger of potential death and destruction, always the guarantor of trouble, and always, for some reason, coming just before or after nightfall.

'Perhaps,' said Jane caustically, cynicism the first cover she could find for her growing fear, 'he lies waiting outside for the last two or three hours of daylight, so as to make an entrance?'

Cecil was dying, they both knew. Those who had seen him said he stank and was rotting from within, his thin limbs no longer able to support him and racking him with pain. Jane had not expected this last summons. The fact of its coming from a man so nearly dead chilled her to her bones, made this last call from Gresham's old enemy the most terrifying of them all.

The messenger's name was Nicholas Heaton. Gresham took care to know these things. He was muddied enough, almost as big as Mannion, sweat-stained and stinking from his ride. His hair was thinning on top, though he tried to cover it with long, lank strands plastered down over the bald patch on his pate. As if to compensate for the lack of hair on his head, he wore a huge, florid moustache that extended in two luxuriant curls beyond the side of his face. It would have been ludicrous were it not for the almost palpable sense of threat the man emanated.

Heaton managed the merest nod of a bow to Gresham.

'My master is dying. He requests that you might spare time from your academic pursuits to visit him on his way to Bath. He has urgent need of speech with you.'

A man soon to be out of a job might be expected to show more respect. Gresham had too much self-respect of his own to allow Heaton's insubordination to get beneath his skin, yet he was intrigued.

'And after his death, what fate befalls you, Master Heaton?'

'My master has arranged for me to transfer my service. To the King.' There was pride in his voice, and arrogance.

'I'm delighted for the both of you,' said Gresham with an unctuous sincerity that only a liar could muster. Suddenly his tone cut the air as a razor through soft flesh: 'Take care. Those who rise to greater heights have far further to fall.' Only much later was Gresham to realise the appalling irony of his words. 'As for your present and still-living master, I'll come. I've always come, haven't I? Tell him so. Where do we meet?'

'He's left Theobalds to go to Bath. Some of his physicians believe there'll be a relief from his pain there, in the waters. The pain is constant, and agonising. You should be warned, Sir Henry. My master is not as he was.'

'Well, that's good news at least,' said Gresham briskly. 'He couldn't be any worse, and perhaps he's improved.'

They did not offer Master Nicholas Heaton lodging, and he did not ask.

'Will you ride tonight?' Jane asked, seeing the nervous energy beginning to flow through Gresham.

'It might be wise. If Cecil's as ill as his messenger says he is-' 'Please. We know what this summons means. Cecil's never invited you into anything other than mortal danger. Tonight, stay with me. Let's remember who we are.'

Gresham half turned towards the door. Mannion was standing there, blocking it. No words were spoken.

Gresham drew himself up to his full height, arms akimbo.

'Am I the lord and master of this house? Do I have authority over my wife and my servants?'

Jane dropped her eyes, her shoulders sagging slightly. Her normal spirit seemed to have been sucked out of her by the messenger and all that he stood for. She could cope with Gresham. Sometimes it was his life that overwhelmed her. She gave a slight curtsey, an almost involuntary reversion to a childish state. His heart went out to her in a fierce bite of love. So strong. So vulnerable.

'You know that I'm yours,' she replied softly.

Good God, thought Gresham, what must it have cost her fiery spirit to say that? A pang of guilt hit him like a blow to the stomach. Who was he to march like a peacock over those whose only fault was to give him their love? None of it showed on his face. Impassive, he turned to Mannion, who had folded his arms and was stood before the door like Leviathan. 'And you?'

'Yes to the first. You're lord and master of this house. And you've certainly got authority over one of the other two, though I'm damned if I know which one…'

'Do you defy me?' Gresham stuck his chin in the air, glaring at Mannion.

'Only when it matters,' he replied.

'And you?' Gresham turned to Jane.

'I just want you to spend the night with me.'

None of the haughtiness, the icy distance she could muster with a king and the frightening authority she could exert over the servants, was there now. He loved her, he thought, more than he had ever thought he could love anyone.

Gresham looked from one to the other, Jane now looking directly into his eyes. He grinned. 'We ride at dawn for Bath. I sleep the night here. I have decided.'

Mannion refrained from winking at Jane. Of course he had decided. Yet not without a little help from his friends.

They were holding hands as they left the room, Mannion noticed. Babies. Babies. And the two people for whom he would cheerfully lay down his life.