The image of a small boy swam before Essex's eyes. Eight or nine, perhaps, with unusually fine features, startling blue eyes and. a mop of blond hair. Why? Why had he given in? Some were granted time. Others had it ripped away from them.
How could one decision so change a life? It was as if the vast, open plain that he had strode so confidently was narrowing down to a dark tunnel that led only to one destination. Could the Devil speak true?
'I thought you was meant to be in charge of things?' asked an incredulous Mannion.
They were on the river, and eight men in the Gresham livery of purple and silver were rowing lustily, enjoying the sunlight and the exercise, and the fact that their boat was the smartest on the Thames, their master a dashing figure and their livery the best on the river that day. And not one of them was thinking that if their master was proved a traitor, they might well hang. The life of a servant was inextricably bound up with that of his or her master.
‘I am. Meant to be, that is,' said Gresham.
'This ain't no joke, this really ain't. This is one o' your specials, this is, like the time you comes 'ome calm as a cucumber and tells me we're going off to join the Spanish Fuckin’ Armada.'
'I understand in academic circles it's known as the Spanish Armada. Which it isn't, of course. Not the Spanish Armada. If you remember, they sent another one a year ago.' It had been blown away by gales in the Bay of Biscay.
'Well, I know it as the Spanish Fuckin' Armada. And I was fuckin' on it, which is more than your fuckin' academics ever were. And we were bloody lucky to get away wi' that little jaunt, and luck don't come twice — I bin thinkin'.'
'Don't,' said Gresham. 'Stick to what you know best — headaches from alcohol.'
Mannion swatted the sally aside. 'If we goes off to Scotland with a little love letter from Cecil to James, we might as well hang a bloody notice round our neck saying "TRAITOR! CUT ME BALLS OFF!" Secret mission or public, we're still on a hidin' to nothing'. There must be a way out of this.'
'You don't seem bothered I'm betraying Essex,' said Gresham.
'I'm as bothered as 'e would be about betraying us — and the answer is, 'e wouldn't give a sod. You 'as your fun with these toffs, but you never trust 'em.'
They were heading to a play commanded by the Queen, at Greenwich. It would be a comedy, Gresham knew. Her Royal Rotten Teeth would not contemplate a history or a tragedy, which would inevitably mention death. And probably a bad, anodyne and totally silly comedy, as that was the way the tastes of the old lady seemed now to be set.
The boat bit into a wave, and the oarsmen rocked back slightly in their seats.
'Cecil's set us up,' Gresham said bluntly. Better the truth. Better to let those who loved him see how stupid their love and loyalty were. 'You, me and Willoughby. We're over a barrel. I'm sorry. It's my fault for not seeing it coming.'
Gresham looked at Mannion who, to his surprise, grinned at him.
'Maybe. But I bet.'e ain't seen what you'll chuck back. You'll think o' something.'
Everything humanity didn't want went into the Thames, and it was unusual for Gresham to think of it as pure. Yet in comparison with the politics of Queen Elizabeth's Court, it seemed pure beyond belief.
'Still, I don't like it,' Mannion rumbled on. 'If ever you thinks you understands something Cecil's doing, it's the sign you've got it wrong. It's never simple, with that bastard. You missing a trick, are you?'
'Almost certainly,' said Gresham, 'but that's part of the game, isn't it?'
They were within sight of Greenwich now, its flags flapping in the brisk wind. It had always been one of the better Palaces. It held a special place in Gresham's memory. He had not lost his virginity there. That had gone a lot earlier, in a back alley near St Paul's. Instead he had lost something rather more important: his heart, making love to a girl who, for a brief moment, he had fooled himself into thinking he had fallen in love with. Now, in his dotage, he knew he had only ever been in love with one girl. And she had been a Spaniard who had chosen to reject him and marry a Frenchman. Still was happily married to the Frenchman, as it happened, with five children, three of them boys. He paid someone to report to him on her, though he knew he would never see her again. Did Anna ever think about him? He doubted it, yet she had chosen to give him her virginity when she had already decided to marry her Frenchman.
Gresham's mind was churning, and with more than the memory of puppy-fat romances. Mannion was right, of course. Cecil's plans were never simple. His only weakness was that the more complex his machinations, the more he believed that no others could penetrate their complexity. Cecil's Achilles heel was his deep-seated belief, sometimes hidden even from himself, that he was the cleverest man alive.
'Ever watched a fish in a net?' asked Mannion innocently. The river was passing them by at a satisfying speed. Mannion had once been a galley slave. He said it meant that watching other people row was one of his greatest pleasures.
'What?' said Gresham, his train of thought interrupted.
'Thrashes around, don't it?' said Mannion. 'Gets itself tangled more and more. Well, us, we're in that right bastard's net. We thrash around, we'll lose it. Clever thing is to stay calm. There ain't a net made that hasn't got a weak bit in it. We got to wait, that's all. Stay calm. Find the weak bit. And swim out through it.'
'Thank you,' said Gresham, his voice laced with irony. 'Exactly what I was thinking.'
As it had been, actually. As he so often did, Mannion had put into simple terms what Gresham worked out by a more tortuous and self-denigrating route. Gresham was in Cecil's net, and moaning about it would help him and his friends no more than it would help the fish. And, unlike the fish, they would need to think them-, selves out of this net.
There was always a way out! There always was!
The oarsmen were happy because they were well paid, well fed and well clothed. There was no comparison between being a boatman for Sir Henry Gresham and the back-breaking tedium of a peasant's life. No labourer who bent over to pluck a weed received a cheer from passers-by, as Gresham's oarsmen had just received a cheer for their fine appearance from an Alderman and his whole family. But perhaps the eight lusty men who rowed Henry Gresham's boat and the Alderman with his fat wife and two fat children rowed by two sweating journeymen, shared one thing. They were going to the play. The sense of excitement was uncontrollable, one reason why the authorities frowned on the theatre so much. They claimed that the theatres were breeding grounds for the Plague, but it was the plague of ideas spawned by the players, their living pictures of Kings overthrown and rebellion unleashed, that they were most scared of.
As if marking it as a forbidden pleasure, the playhouses were largely outside the boundaries of the old city, one wall of which was the River Thames. Situated on the south bank, beyond the control of the City Fathers, they stood side by side with the string of brothels that everyone knew were owned by the Bishop of London. Visiting a play held at one of the royal Palaces was a different kind of excitement, though Gresham often thought that the only difference between sex from a whore and sex from a lady-in-waiting was that the whore told you how much it would cost beforehand.
'Funny thing, isn't it?' said Mannion, who liked nothing better than a good play, preferably with a horrible murder in the opening scene. He was reading Gresham's mind again. 'The bloody authorities'll close a theatre down at the drop of a sneeze, yet if 'er 'Ighness invites any one of 'em to a show they'll be there in their finery quicker than an 'are in March.'
He glanced back to where the Alderman's boat was bobbing in the swell, falling rapidly behind. His fat wife was starting to complain that she had known all along it was too rough to go by boat.