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.'