Coke's overwhelming sense of his own value and significance would never let him see why he could not be trusted with all and everything. Sharing a job was to Sir Edward Coke as much of an anathema as sharing a prosecution.
'No, Sir Edward, you would not be able to see why the Earl wished me to become involved in this business. I suspect my late Lord of the Flies recognised your weakness, which is that you think you know so much. Such people are a risk to themselves. They need to be placed with those who are willing to admit their ignorance.'
'You claim to know too little?' asked Coke, flat-voiced, his lawyer's brain leaping like a ferret at a rabbit's throat. He was almost visibly working to categorise and pin-point the nature of his opponent.
'I claim to have been told too little by my lord Cecil, and to recognise all the dangers to myself that lie therein. But then again, I'm more than used to working to Cecil's half-orders. You, I think, are a novice.'
'You are so little concerned for your own life that you would risk it, by your own admission, for you know not what?' asked Coke, his fish-eyes giving nothing away this time.
'Good, Sir Edward, very good,' replied Gresham. 'Our language is starting to reverse. Your questions are becoming shorter and shorter, my answers longer and longer. If this carries on I shall start to reveal more and more about who I am to your lawyer's brain. Is this always how you trap witnesses?'
'I do not trap witnesses.' There was acid in Coke's voice. Gresham said nothing. The silence between the two men lengthened. It was Coke who broke first. 'I care more for the law, and for justice, than you can ever imagine,' he said.
'How can you know what I imagine?' asked Gresham.
'Do not play with words with me!'
'Isn't that what lawyers do?'
'How can such as you presume to be a man of law?'
'I don't presume. I have too much self respect,' Gresham replied self-deprecatingly.
Cut. Thrust. Parry. Cut. Thrust. Parry. Gresham was starting to enjoy himself. Coke was energised now, the power almost visibly flowing through his ageing body. He spoke with scorn, hurling his words at Gresham.
'Self respect for yourself! Self! It is all you know, all you can speak of. The law speaks of respect for all people and their rights. Your self respect is little more than glorified selfishness!'
'True,' said Gresham. The best way of disarming an opponent was always to recognise when he spoke the truth. 'Yet my adoption of selfish survival as my creed is a response to those such as you who plead the law and justice as your creed, using it as a cloak for your greed and vanity.'
'A feeble defence!' grated Coke.
'Honesty is no defence against corruption, and never has been. Honesty merely makes men weak.'
'The honesty of the law*is its strength!' said Coke, as if stating a truth that could not be denied.
'It would be, if it were honest.'
'A feeble plea!' said Coke, voice full of scorn.
'True again,' said Gresham. 'As feeble and as frail as the humans you tear to pieces in your courts. Yet the difference is that you claim to be honest to all people while seeking power and wealth through your sycophancy. I know only how to be true to myself.'
That seemed to halt Coke in his assault. Had there once been a decent man buried among that arrogance, and had Gresham somehow reminded him of the betrayal of his soul?
'So what is it that you live for, Sir Henry?' asked Coke, part scornful, part in fear.
'For my honour, Sir Edward.' Gresham said it simply, with a dignity that undercut the crowing of Coke's legal brain. 'So that when death comes to me, I will be able to say that for all the stupidity of this life, at least while I lived I made things happen. To say that 1 survived. To say that I kept my honour, my self respect and my pride.'
Coke was trying to answer, Gresham could see. Half-formed words seemed to launch up into his throat and work the muscles there, but somehow died before they reached his mouth. Finally his words emerged.
'So you will die happy, Sir Henry?' Coke tried to put a world of sarcasm into his words but somehow the sting was lost.
'No man dies happy. I hope to die at peace with my honour, Sir Edward. You? You pretend to serve the law yet serve yourself. I hope you die with honour. I suspect you will die merely with possessions.'
There was a long pause.
'It doesn't matter, really, does it?' said Gresham, his voice almost kind. 'You see, we only need to work with each other.'
'Can you work with me on this matter?' Coke's voice had regained its composure. The previous conversation had been inconvenient. It had provoked thoughts of the wrong kind, therefore it had been dismissed. Not forgotten, but placed somewhere in a file where it could be coldly remembered without impacting on present day reality. Good, thought Gresham, very good. Not as good as Robert Cecil, not yet, but getting there.
'I can work with Satan if I have to,' said Gresham. 'After all, I came near to doing so when I worked with Robert Cecil. As I was saying, shall we get down to business?'
The two men looked at each other. Again, Coke broke first. He glanced away, down to his long-forgotten papers.
'Then, as you said, we should get down to business. These letters that were stolen. Cecil had spies.' Coke raised an eyebrow in Gresham's direction. 'Spies other than yourself. They reported that a Cambridge bookseller had been involved in the theft. Rumour, you understand, only rumour, based on one single instance where a man who might have claimed to be a Cambridge bookseller might have tried to sell letters to one of Cecil's agents which might have been the ones "we are seeking to find. That was one reason why the Earl thought of you to help us out, with your knowledge of Cambridge.'
'Does this bookseller have a name?'
'It is here, somewhere…' Coke rummaged among his papers. 'Ah, yes! "Cornelius Wagner". How very elaborate…'
A sudden, vague chill took Gresham's heart. Cornelius Wagner. There was no bookseller called Cornelius Wagner in Cambridge. Gresham knew them all. Yet he also knew of a Cornelius, and of a Wagner. Where had he heard the name?
'I had hoped to meet you with Sir Thomas Overbury,' Coke said, 'but it appears he must have been delayed…'
There was a ruckus outside the door then, shouting and a heavy thud. The door impacted inwards with a sharp crack and the servant whose head had appeared round the door earlier was flung into the room by what was clearly a hearty kick from the man standing in the doorway. The servant's head was bloodied from a cut that ran across his forehead. He was crying with a mixture of shame and anger, his hand wiping away tears and blood until they mingled and ran down his wrist to stain his shirt with a pink wetness.
'Sir!' The servant tried to speak. 'I am so sorry, I…' Coke raised a hand to silence him. The boy rose clumsily to his feet, a tear ripping half the leg of his hose. He bowed his head.
'You may go now,' said Coke, gazing at the figure in the doorway.
'Insolent pig!' said Sir Thomas Overbury as the servant scuttled past him, hand raised to ward off further blows.
As a consequence of his close relationship with James I, the vast majority of the King's correspondence was passed on to Robert Carr, unopened, for him to deal with. Carr, whose brain was small as if to compensate for his magnificent body, passed it on unopened to his oldest friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, who then dictated the answers. Overbury had brains enough for both of them. A tall, handsome figure capable of biting wit, his power as the eminence noir behind the King's favourite had added to his natural vanity and arrogance, until he was frequently described as insufferable by even the mildest men at Court. The King tolerated him because he was in love with Carr, but in truth, he both distrusted and disliked Overbury. Queen Anna, otherwise a feather-brained and overblown lapsed beauty, hated Overbury with unequalled venom. In a rare display of power, Queen Anna had forced Overbury to flee to Paris the year before. He had been allowed to return simply because without him Robert Carr had floundered under the duties imposed on him by the King. It was a very tender and fragile truce.