'Let him go,' she said quietly, 'and never let him come within a mile of my family again.'
Too much death, too much suffering. It would have been easy to have him killed.
Mannion dragged him to the gateway of The House. He looked at the traitor in front of him, itching to do justice. Nicholas jibbered and shrieked, convinced he was going to die. I would like to take the gold you were paid, thought Mannion, and heat it until the coins melt all into one. And then pour it into your mouth. Instead, he looked at the pathetic thing in front of him.
If you're seen or heard of in London, in Cambridge, or within a hundred miles of my master and my mistress, you'll die,' he said flatly. 'And if I catch sight or sound of you ever again you're dead, as you deserve to be now.' He paused. 'Well,' he said, 'you came into this world with nothing. That's how you'll leave.' He turned to the men he had stationed by the gatehouse. Laughing, jeering, they came over and none too gently stripped Nicholas of all his clothes.
'She said I shouldn't kill you,' said Mannion, 'so I won't.' He smashed his huge fist straight into Nicholas's mouth and nose. There was an explosion of bone, teeth and flesh and Nicholas was flung to the ground in the dirt of the yard. Staggeringly, he was still conscious, more the pity for him. The branding iron, in the shape of a straight 'T' for traitor, was ready. Mannion plunged it down on to Nicholas's forehead. He screamed and bucked under the pain.
'Now, Master Nicholas,' said Mannion, 'go out and face the world as you've made it for yourself.'
Four men grabbed an arm and a leg each and like a sack of flour the naked and branded Nicholas was hurled into The Strand, the gate closed on him.
They contemplated kidnapping Overbury, in the long discussions Mannion held with Gresham by his bedside when Jane was not there. Kidnapping and killing him. In one sense it would have been easy enough. He was no great noble, no great lord surrounded by guards and walls and stout, locked gates. Yet this was no vanishing of a simple man, another body face down in the Thames, another unexplained disappearance. Robert Carr would scream, the country would scream and the King, for all they knew, might scream in sympathy with his bed-mate.
In the event, it was made easier for them. Overbury's closest servant, the chamberlain to his household, proved willing enough to-talk. A man had come, he said, demanding to see his master, late at night. He had seen him before, had let him in several times for drinking sessions with his master. A strange figure, with a small head and a bloated body and a high-prancing step. He had papers his master would pay a king's ransom for, the man had said imperiously. Almost against his better judgement, knowing the violence of his master, the chamberlain had let him in. Overbury had drawn his sword at the sight of the man, buffeted him and pinned him against the wall. 'Thief!' he had screamed. 'Betrayer of my trust!'*No,' the man had replied, calm despite the sword pinned to his throat, 'perpetrator of your sweet revenge!' There was a moment when he thought his master would have pierced the man's neck. Then Overbury dropped the sword. Ordered the chamberlain to leave, peremptory. Scuttling to the embrasure that should have been bricked in when the new building was made but somehow had never been done, the chamberlain sat and listened. Revenge. That was the theme. Overbury had been beaten, humiliated by this man Gresham, had he not? He, the speaker, had the most foolproof plan for revenge, a revenge that Gresham could never scrub from his body or his brain had he access to all the waters of Lethe. All it needed was gold to bribe servants and to hire men and boats. And in return, as well as the most beautiful spoiling revenge, there were papers! Papers that could be most damaging to the King, to his bishops and his ministers! Papers Overbury could use. Papers in exchange for the letters the man had stolen. And then, as the details of the plan to despoil this Gresham's wife had emerged in the strange, high-pitched voice of the man, a mixture of terror and fascination had overwhelmed the chamberlain, huddled behind the embrasure. He was primed to tell, hating his master, fearing the man who had visited him, out of his depth.
Revenge was enacted in another place. In April, a grinning Mannion came to tell Gresham that Sir Thomas Overbury had been required to undertake an embassy to Russia. Refusing the offer, the King had consigned him to The Tower, and was showing no signs of intending to release him. The two men's laughter shook the house.
Gresham had thought it fit to tell the King of the night on the river. At first, buttressed up in his bed and with the quill feeling strange in his hand, he had been tempted to get a secretary to write the note. Then he had rebelled against his own weakness and persisted. Four lines into his carefully penned manuscript he had crumpled the paper into a ball and hurled it from him. Then he had settled again, taken new paper, recharged the quill. He told the story simply; his wife's kidnap, Marlowe's plan, the frantic evening when His Majesty had been dismissing the evening's events as a damp squib and men had been dying on the river beneath him. He made no mention of Overbury.
He had thought there would be no response, had written simply to explain his own inaction, pinned to a bed with a leg in timber. The King's messenger caught him by surprise, arriving in a blare of trumpets. The messenger was obsequious, emphasised the gift was to Lady Jane Gresham. They opened it together. A jewel, a ruby of immense size and beauty. Set in a simple gold ring, the more to show off its extravagance.
'It's worth a thousand… two thousand pounds!' Jane gasped. The note with it was on the finest possible paper. 'For your pains', it read, with a simple 'J' scrawled at the bottom.
'Wet frog?' asked Gresham dryly. lRich wet frog!' said Jane in delight, pushing the jewel on to her finger.
Then came the morning that he walked for the first time. They took the wood off his pale, shrunken leg. It was strange to feel the air breathing against the flesh after so long. He sat up and tried to swing his leg off the bed. It did not move. He ordered it, more firmly this time. It obeyed.
Jane looked at him. Mannion looked at him. Dr Napier, the long-suffering, pedantic, marvellous Dr Napier, looked at him.
He stood up. Carefully, it was true; painfully, even. Yet he stood, on both his legs, and remained standing.
They clapped him, and he grinned back at them.
But still no sign of Shakespeare, and Marlowe lurking out there in the shadows. Jane felt a sickness to the pit of her stomach at the thought of him. The security measures they were now forced to take were more and more burdensome, the toll of so many seem' ingly endless nights and days sitting by Gresham's bedside mounting up. At times she felt like screaming with frustration.
Perhaps it was this frustration, the pent-up energy of a mind without enough to do, that turned the final key and made clear what had been muddied for so long.
Gresham needed to sleep less and less during the day, but in payment for the strenuous exercise he insisted on undertaking to rebuild the strength in his leg Dr Napier made him rest for an hour at noon. Jane sat by the window. She had gone for her copy of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis.
‘It's beautiful,' she said. 'What a pity they never really let him write his own plays.'
It was as if she was gazing into a full-length mirror when all of a sudden the whole length of it shattered, as at one single blow, and the world dissolved. And she was left staring at the truth.
'Quick! Quick!' She rushed to her feet, so urgent as to grab Gresham by the arm. 'The papers you took from Marlowe! The writings that were with the King's letters! Where are they? I must have them, now!'