The Conscience of the King

The sun was hidden behind a grey haze as he mounted his horse at dawn. The mist that had been but thin wisps yesterday was now a blanket, waist high, converting the flat landscape to a world of ghosts.

Was this the last summons to Cecil that Gresham would ever answer? In farewell to his ancient enemy, Gresham rode as never before. The hooves of his horse hit the ground with such force that it was like a hammer to his spine, the mud and earth they flung away from their impact flying up with the force of cannon balls. The wind tugged at his hat and as the leaping, shaking, shattering world ran by his watering eyes he urged the horse on, faster and faster. It was as if his mount knew that summer had come, and felt its strong legs stretch to three times their length, the fine muscle tightening like steel and releasing again with every movement of the insane gallop. For some wild minutes man and horse were as one, invincible, immortal in their speed and shared madness.

It had to end, of course. Gresham was not a man to take pleasure in riding a fine horse to the ground. He allowed the beast to slow down, praised it for its strength and beauty, timing it superbly so that before too long his once fiery mount was ambling along like any farmer's hack. He waited for Mannion, cursing under his breath, to catch up, and grinned at him. Mannion stayed on a horse and with a good seat, but no one in the kingdom could catch a well-mounted Henry Gresham with the devil in him.

Gresham was wealthy enough to have his own horses stabled at stages along the road to London from Cambridge. Each horse was ridden like the one before, so that when Gresham reached London the fine leather of his boots was in tatters, every muscle ached as if a hot iron had been passed over them and he was near dead with exhaustion. He slept for three hours. There were none of his own horses between London and Bath. Rather than trust to those he might find to hire or purchase along the way he took a string of his own animals, knowing that from there on his pace would have to be more seemly. He spurned the coaches that increasingly clogged the muddied roads and brought London traffic to a halt. He was not that old, not yet.

The waters of Bath had been used, so they said, in Roman times and ever after to cure the elderly and the infirm. Some of the Romans seemed never to have left, judging by the presence of} the elderly and infirm. The old Abbey dwarfed the town, almost as if by squatting over it its dead hulk took life away from the miserable place. There was an air of decay everywhere. Gresham was used to the stink of towns, but this stench had the tinge of rotting flesh in it. They brushed bugs from their sweating faces as they rode. Even this early in summer, everything in Bath was flyblown.

Mannion had taken a drumstick from one of the birds they had been served at the last inn and was now devouring it, on horseback. 'Do you want to know what I think? he asked now, a small piece of dessicated meat shooting from his mouth past Gresham's left ear as he spoke.

'You mean you can think? I'm not sure I want to go anywhere near your mind if your physical actions in any way reflect its contents. But,' Gresham sighed, '1 expect you'll tell me anyway.'

'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-'

'My lord. Is this… impertinence necessary?' Coke spoke with chilling calm.

Cecil turned to Sir Edward Coke with an effort that cost him dear. The lawyer held Cecil's gaze, then only reluctantly dropped his eyes. A tall, forbidding man with a long, oval face, Coke was ill at ease, unhappy and uncertain with this fencing between the two men. He lusted for control, for power, and hated any situation where power seemed to be ceded to others. Coke had become too used to being both judge and jury, Gresham thought.

Cecil produced something that might almost have been a chuckle, with a strange, dry rattle to it.

'Ah, Sir Henry! So droll, as ever. How much I have enjoyed your sense of humour over the years I have known you.'

'Yes,' said Gresham, 'much as the body enjoys the dagger that enters it, or the hare enjoys the hounds.' i wonder if it is not time…' Coke's voice was gravelly, sharp, though not pitched at the roar he used in court against those he had decided to condemn. They said he was charming to prisoners in interrogation, turning into a frothing fiend when later he had them in the dock. Cecil held up his hand, the blanket dropping away. Coke swallowed his words, waiting. Gresham looked in horror at Cecil's arm. The skin was discoloured, the flesh almost all wasted away. His Hps drawn back over rotten teeth, the gums retreating as if the outgoing tide on a beach, it was clear that even the gesture of holding up a hand for silence had caused Cecil acute pain.

'You think, perhaps, Sir Edward, that if I do not make haste to stop this small talk then I may be dead before we can reach an outcome?'

Coke's self control was enough to resist the sally. 'Of course, such were not my thoughts, my lord.' Outwardly servile, the phrase 'of course' made Coke's comment shiver on the edge of impertinence.

'But you would be wrong to deny it!' Something of the old spirit came back into Cecil's voice. 'You would be right to urge me to make haste, Sir Edward. I command all England, but even I cannot command death.'

No, thought Gresham, though you have commanded enough men to their deaths.

Cecil turned to Gresham, in obvious pain at the exertion. 'Sir Edward is here because he will live on after me. He is a man of power

…' Coke drew back, and gave a short bow towards Cecil. His face and posture gave nothing away. 'His power will be necessary to see a certain business through. It is this business that will need your help.'

Now it comes, thought Gresham. The muscles in his face did not move, the colour neither rose nor fell in his skin, the pulse in his neck remained constant. Those outward tricks he knew. Yet inside it was as if a slow-burning fire had burst into full riot of flame.

'Sir Edward, you will please leave us for a short while. And, Sir Henry, perhaps that great ox of a man you carry with you might leave as well.'

Gresham nodded at Mannion, and he slipped out of the room, moving quietly and silently in a manner that belied his bulk. Coke was less happy. He drew himself to his full height, chin jutting forward, hand posed on the hilt of his sword.

'Is this wise, my lord?' The thinly veiled arrogance in Coke's voice was like the flick of a whip across Cecil's words. Yet Cecil's authority held, just.

'We agreed that I would approach Sir Henry with a certain proposal. I wish to dp so, in these my last few days, on this earth, in private. You will lose no information that you need to know. And you will gratify the whims of an old man to whom you have some cause to be grateful.'

Coke stood for a moment, as if wondering whether to challenge Cecil. Finally he gave a curt nod to Gresham, ruder than no bow at all, and clattered towards the door. He was wearing a sword, probably for no other reason than to show off to the citizens of Bath. Yet he was clearly no swordsman, and like all men who did not understand the weapon they wore he had no knack of controlling it when he moved suddenly. The scabbard swung as Coke wheeled round, and as he reached the door the sword and scabbard jammed across the entrance, bringing him to a sudden halt. The leather of his belt was too strong to tear, but Coke's boots skittered out from under him and he fell forwards to scrabble on the floor. His sword landed at his feet, the hilt towards Gresham.

'I accept your surrender, Sir Edward,' Gresham murmured, 'though I am accustomed to rather more of a fight beforehand…'

Coke's eyes blazed pure hatred. He still favoured the huge ornate ruffs that had been fashionable in Queen Elizabeth's time, and his fall had skewed one side of it so that it hung by his ear, ludicrous. He flung himself to his feet, picked up his sword and thrust it back into his scabbard, and left, slamming the door behind him. Dust shot from the hangings and danced in the putrid light that came through the windows.

'Well, Sir Henry,' said Cecil, voice almost back to its old strength, 'you have a quite extraordinary capacity to make men hate you.'

'Thank you, my lord. We share that at least. To be hated by certain people is a privilege. And is there any man who Sir Edward likes except himself?'

Cecil started what might have been a laugh but turned instantly into a cough, a tearing, searing cough that seemed to pour acid from the depths of his belly to his lungs and out through his thin lips. Gresham moved to help him, but he was waved feebly away until the fit ceased.

'Ring the bell, for the servant. He has medicine…' For a moment Gresham thought Cecil was going to die there and then. He rang the bell and the servant who had been waiting outside the door entered quickly. From a pocket in the side of the chair he brought a stoppered bottle, and forced some of it down his master's lips. It settled Cecil. At the merest nod, the servant left.

'I will be ready to speak in a few moments,' Cecil gasped, and paused. God knows what this is costing him, thought Gresham. He is shortening his life by every sentence he speaks.

'You are aware of my lord the King's affections towards young men?' Cecil's voice was clear again.

'The whole country could hardly be unaware of them.'

'And do you know Viscount Rochester?'

'My lord, I am in Court on occasion. Who does not know of Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester? I believe also that the good lord was given some property belonging to a friend of mine.' Carr had a special place in Gresham's catalogue of sinners. King James had taken away Raleigh's beloved estate at Sherborne to give to his lover, on whom it was wasted.

Robert Carr, a lowlands Scot with the body of an angel and the brain of a sheep, had been King James's favourite for several years, dominating his company and, it was said, his bed. With Cecil's impending death there would be no barrier to Carr becoming the sole source of favour at Court.

'I understand Viscount Rochester was recently made a privy councillor?' Gresham said, as if it were a point of no real consequence. It was known that Cecil had bitterly opposed the appointment. As his illness had grown, so Cecil's power over the King had been slipping. King James had a morbid fear of death, and the smell of death was all over Cecil.

Cecil ignored the jibe. Gresham knew him too well to believe that he had not noticed it.

'I will be blunt with you. It appears that letters exist between my lord the King and Robert Carr — or Viscount Rochester, as he now is — that are of a compromising nature.'

'How so?' Gresham's interest quickened.

Cecil coughed again and Gresham waited for the spasm to pass.

'I have not seen these letters. I am given to believe they are… specific… perhaps even… highly coloured… concerning relationships between men. The physical nature of relationships between men. And between two men in particular.'

'Ah,' said Gresham. There was silence for a few moments. 'I take it that in effect these are love letters between the King of England and his male lover. Specific love letters.' Cecil said nothing. 'And,' Gresham continued, 'that were these letters to become public it would not help the status of the monarchy?'

Cecil's eyes turned up towards Gresham. There was more in them than the pain of a terminal illness.

'Help? It would destroy all I have worked for in these years of trial! The Church would condemn the King instantly. The Puritans in Parliament would call out the hunt of the self-righteous upon him. The saner element in Parliament would look at the uncontrolled expenditure they are increasingly asked to fund and call foul on a sodomite king. And England would laugh at its monarch! Do you hear me? The country would laugh at its monarch. Monarchy can withstand many things — corruption, abuse of power, immorality. Ridicule it finds hardest to survive.'

Cecil had feared ridicule more than anything else in his life. A cripple, the runt of the litter yet brought up as a great man's heir, he had more to fear than many in an age which mocked deformity. Gresham thought for a moment. He settled on a poor stool, one of four by the scarred and battered table in the room.

'There must be more,' Gresham said. 'No monarch has been laughed out of power. The executioner's axe cuts short laughter alongside life.'

This time it was Cecil's time to pause.

'Yes, there is more. The King increasingly withdraws from political life, seeking only to hunt obsessively and spend time with his young men, Robert Carr in particular. Yet this is not the time of Queen Elizabeth, when the only alternative to her was rule by Spain or Civil War.'

'Prince Henry?' Gresham interrupted.

'Yes. Prince Henry.' Cecil's voice was so dry and wasted that Gresham had to lean forward to hear it, like a rustle of dead leaves on the earth. 'We have a brilliant young prince, an heir to the throne who promises more than any other in living memory. A statesman, a man of faith, a man of intelligence and skill — and still only a child! O dear God in heaven! Had I had such material to work with! What a world we might have made!'

The intensity in the whispered voice was all the more frightening because of its fragility, the impression of a man clinging on by willpower alone.

'Well, it is not to be. But there are those, not least of all the Prince himself, who see the way things are going with King James in charge, and who seek a change now, before the monarchy rots beyond redemption. These letters could be just the cause they need — not to kill the King or rise up in rebellion but to force him to step aside for his eldest son and heir.'

'"Had I had such material to work with." My lord Cecil,' said Gresham, 'if the disclosure of these letters would bring about such events, why should you or I oppose them? You yourself have praised the heir. Why not King Henry IX? Why should he not take over?'

'Because they must not learn how to depose a king and replace him with another! Do you not see? Parliament, the Puritans, the country

… once they are given the right to choose a king, they will never lose it.'

'Would it be such a bad thing?' mused Gresham.

'It would be a terrible thing!' hissed Cecil. 'Politics can never look at the man. It must always look at the principle. They rid themselves of a king they do not like, justifying it on the basis that the heir is different. Then what follows? What if the heir turns rotten? If he dies? If he offends one of the great noble families, who then turn to one of their own nominees? Then turn to the next best, or the most promising, and do so time and time again. This way is madness. It must not be allowed to happen!'

'And do you think these letters could depose a king?'

'I think a king can depose a king, if the king is a sensual fool whose instinct for survival lessens with every month that goes by. King James is indolent, and confident. It is a dangerous, dangerous mixture. The letters could be the push that topples him over the edge of his own making. I do not know what will come to pass! I would know, if God had only allowed me to live, and I had been able to advise and perhaps even influence the outcome for the better. Now others must do it for me.'

'What role does Sir Edward Coke play in all this?'

'It was reported to him that the letters had been stolen, from Sir Thomas Overbury. I suspect Overbury sees Coke as powerful enough to take action, lawyer enough to relish the intrigue and self-serving enough to realise how much credit the safe recovery — and destruction — of the letters would bring him with the old King. In any event, Overbury will work with Coke to regain the letters, which is more than that most impossible of men will do with any other.'

Sir Thomas Overbury was Robert Carr's dark angel. They were inseparable. Intelligent, ruthless, determined and arrogant almost beyond belief, Overbury was seen by many as Carr's manager, providing him with the intelligence he himself lacked. If any incriminating letters existed, Overbury would want their power and be most aware of what the loss of it would mean.

'However, these letters are not all. You are a playgoer, I believe, Sir Henry?'

'I frequent the playhouses when I am in town, yes.'

'Two manuscripts were stolen recently from The Globe theatre. Both were plays, both written by the man they call Shakespeare. You know Master Shakespeare.' It was a statement, not a question.

The air thickened between the two men. There was a long pause. Finally Gresham spoke..

'I know him, though I knew him first by another name. William Hall, was he not? Or at least that was the name he used when he travelled abroad on state business and claimed his thirty pieces of silver.'

'You overestimate Hall's part in your friend Raleigh's downfall. As does Raleigh himself.'

'I doubt it,' Gresham replied. 'But what I do accept as truth is that Mr William Hall — whose company of players, I seem to recall, suddenly became The King's Men and the most favoured actors in the land very shortly after Sir Walter Raleigh's conviction and imprisonment — has hung up his spying boots and become Master William Shakespeare. Actor, poet and play-maker, no less. He's done very well since Raleigh was imprisoned on a false charge. Very well indeed. Was that the reward you chose for him? To make his disorderly crew The King's Men? And, yes, I know his plays. They are very good, unfortunately. Outstanding, even, better perhaps than any others. Surprisingly so for those of us who knew him when he was doing a different job.'

'You will know what price is placed on these manuscripts, and what security surrounds them.'

There was an insatiable demand for plays for the theatre as companies were putting on sixteen or seventeen shows a season. Any company with a hit on its hands kept the manuscript as secure as a prized daughter's maidenhead. It did not stop rival companies from putting shorthand writers in the audience to scribble down the text of a hit, or bribing leading actors in a company to dictate a verbatim account of their parts — and what they could remember of other people's parts. To lose a manuscript was to give your play to your rivals. Apart from reasons of security, the expense of copying out whole texts meant that full versions of a play often only existed in at most three copies. Actors were given their own lines and cues on separate sheets for rehearsal and learning, and these were counted out and counted in as if the paper they were written on was twenty-four-carat gold.

'Difficult for the players if a manuscript is stolen,' mused Gresham, 'but hardly life-threatening for the King, I would have thought?'

'Life-threatening for the porter who was murdered to gain the manuscripts,' croaked decil. 'Yet the players are The King's Men, are they not? They see this theft as an insult to the King himself — or so they say, in asking for his help. But the importance is that our information suggests the same person who stole the manuscripts may also have stolen the letters. A Cambridge bookseller, we think — another reason to call on you and your local knowledge. Identify the man who stole the manuscripts and we believe you will identify the man who stole the letters.'

'So what is my role in all of this?' asked Gresham, frantically working to process the information he had received.

'Sir Edward Coke is a lawyer, not a spy or a diplomat. Whoever has these letters needs to be found, then killed or bought off. Coke would kill readily enough, but he only knows how to do so by means of the law. He lacks the skill to find a secret package, and lacks the experience of dealing with its owner once found. Skills you have in plenty, Sir Henry. And you, of course, know Cambridge very well.'

Gresham's use of his father's wealth to refound Granville College in Cambridge was widely known.

'I am to mind Sir Edward? One of the people I despise most on earth?'

'You have worked with me plenty of times. In comparison, your hatred of Sir Edward is mere flash-frying, while mine has lingered long in the oven.'

'And why should I help?'

'Firstly, because for all your oft-expressed selfishness and lack of faith in anything, you know that peace, continuity and stability are the most important things for this country. These letters threaten all three. Secondly, because Sir Edward needs watching. He is a man of overweening self-importance and ambition. In his heart he does not believe in the absolute power of the king, but in the absolute power of the law — the law as defined and exercised by himself, of course. As things stand, he wishes to find these letters and destroy them. It would take little for him to use them instead to destroy the King. I think you would not wish your enemy to have such power.'

'So I am to find some letters that could blow the present King into hell, but do so while allowing a man I hate above all others to think that it is he who has found the letters. Then I am to watch him, and if needs be kill one of the country's leading lawyers in order to allow a sodomite king uninterrupted access to his pleasures for the remainder of his natural life. And at the same time I am to find stolen manuscripts of plays written by a man who betrayed the one man I truly love.'

'An admirable summary, Sir Henry,' muttered Cecil. 'You miss the final point, however. And by so doing, preserve peace and the reputation of the monarchy.'

'And do you trust me to do all this?'

'I trust you to do the right thing for all the wrong reasons. I trust you to take this whole sorry mess on board because it has the raw smell of danger, and for no other reason. I trust you to think it through after you have taken the decision, and to discuss it with your beauty of a wife and your clod of a servant, and then through the red haze of your excitement see some sense to it. And I trust you to survive, Henry Gresham. For that is your code, is it not? Survival as the prime virtue? For as long, that is, as God decides to spare you an illness such as mine.'

The raw hatred of Gresham, and of his own plight, that burned out of Cecil's eyes would have heated an ocean to beyond boiling.

Gresham took the decision that Cecil had known he would.

Til assist Sir Edward. It will be amusing to see how long he can cope with help from someone he loathes.'

'Sir Edward loathes everybody. And he would work with Satan if he thought Satan would help him win his case.'

'Well,' said Gresham lightly, 'you'll soon have the edge on us all. You'll be able to ask Satan yourself, face to face.'

'At least I believe in God, Sir Henry,' grated Cecil. 'At least I may intercede with Him. You, who have no belief, will surely go to hell.'

'If there is a God, He and not you will decide that. As for death, I prefer Master Shakespeare's vision of an "undiscovered country". Perhaps I'll be able to present the record of my life to an unbiased judge when I die. Perhaps, and God forbid, I'll meet the reincarnation of Sir Edward Coke. Perhaps I'll sense nothing except sweet oblivion. You're right, I've no certainty. I echo a line from Hamlet: "The readiness is all." There, you see, I do know Master Shakespeare's work.' He paused for a moment. 'I'm ready for whatever I meet, Robert Cecil. Are you?'

For a long moment Gresham thought he had killed Cecil. His head had slumped forward, his breathing had become inaudible. Just as Gresham was about to test to see if there was a pulse in Cecil's neck, Cecil raised his head.

'"The readiness is all"? We are ready in our different ways, I think, and I am certainly ready for what I will meet after death.' Cecil's voice seemed increasingly to be coming from a pile of stinking blankets and not a human being.

Gresham rose to his feet. 'I'll arrange to meet Sir Edward in London,' he said lightly. 'Goodbye, my lord. We shan't meet again, I fear. I could pretend regret. You'd see it as a lie. I wish you well on the journey you're about to take.'

'There is only one certainty, Henry Gresham. It is that you will take that same journey, sooner or later.'

'That's why I wished you well,' said Gresham as he left the room. 'And I intend, my lord, to make it later.'

He did not turn round to take a last look at Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury. He wondered, as he slammed the door, whether the dust from the hangings would settle on Cecil, and how long it would be before someone thought to brush it off.