Meanwhile, as the torches lit the sweating faces and threw shadows into the corners of the beautiful building, as the light glanced off" the jewels and the silver and the gold, just beyond the reach of the light, there lay the ordinary men and women of England. Most would be lying on a pallet if they were lucky, on an earth floor with a leaking roof and walls little more than mud. Their meal would have been some portion of a rough baked loaf, with more sand than flour in it if the miller was up to his trade, some scraps of filthy meat, a fresh-caught fish if Fortune had smiled on them. Their children would be bare-footed, and if the family had a poor animal it would be there in the room with them, its stink just another stench to go with that of the bodies for which soap was a ludicrous luxury.
Contrasts, clashes; the peace of the Church and the violence it caused among men; the beauty of the music echoed by the retching of the drunk and pampered guests; the wildest perfumes alongside the stink of piss. It was all summed up by the person of the King, thought Gresham. The jewels bedecking his body would be worth hundreds of thousand of pounds, never mind those on his wife's flesh, his clothes worth an Emperor's ransom, yet the man himself was unkempt, unwashed and stank to high heaven. What matter the show, if the inside was rotten?
As the four men pulled strongly towards Whitehall and the King's Landing, Gresham asked, not for the first time, how a just God could let such a world exist. The answer was obvious. There was no justice. There was no logic in creation. There was no God.
There was simply survival. The measure of a man was not how he seemed before his maker, but how he seemed before himself. To live long was to succeed; to die young was normal; to die was to cease to exist, and so life was to be lived to the fullest and to the utmost while it was there to be savoured. It was a joke, a joke so vast that no one human could ever properly understand the cosmic scale of its laughter.
He gazed fondly at Jane, her girlish excitement palpable. She had spent the last stages of the voyage excitedly demolishing the dress sense of the other guests as they hove into sight. Immediately they came in earshot she became a haughty and silent presence, stepping daintily from the boat and causing all eyes to turn in her direction.
It did not take him long to find out that he had missed Bacon's speech of welcome — only one of many, Gresham heard, and rather too intellectual and rambling for the taste of most of the early revellers and the Court. Gresham felt a momentary pang of annoyance.
Already casting around and looking for Sir Francis Bacon, his eyes lit on Cecil. He was huddled in a corner with a small entourage of cronies. Or perhaps he was standing straight, but just looked huddled. The air seemed to darken around Cecil and his cronies wherever they stood, as they moved through the quadrangle, and become more chill. Cecil's eye caught Gresham's. He raised an eyebrow by the tiniest height, and gave the slightest possible nod of his head, before returning his gaze to his own company.
'Bastard!' muttered Gresham, cheerfully, and sought about him for someone important to torment. Then he remembered Jane, feeling a conscience pang that he must see to her amusement, and was rescued by the sight of Inigo Jones and John Donne with his wife. Jones was a bag of nerves on this night, as his design for the 'machinery' of the masques which Queen Anne loved so much was to receive its first test after the banquet. As for poor Donne, banished from Court for marrying his patron's wife and sent for a time to the Fleet prison, he was allowed back occasionally so the King could pester him into accepting high office in the Church. He could not give up the wife he loved, which stopped him from one area of preferment, and he was at heart a Catholic, which barred him from accepting the preferment offered by the King. Donne was threadbare, but surprisingly cheerful, and the love he showed for his wife was pathetic.
There was a tap on Gresham's shoulder. A servant, plainly dressed, spoke softly in his ear.
'My master requests a brief interview with you, sir. Would you be so kind as to spare a few moments of your time?'
'Your master's name?'
'He would prefer to announce himself.'
Gresham flicked a finger at Jane, muttered a few words in her ear, and left her with Donne who was rewriting the opening of Genesis to suggest how the new King came to be created, to the credit of neither the Holy Book nor King James. He motioned to Mannion, who emerged from out of the shadows where he had ensured a plentiful supply of food and drink.
The servant led them to a small room on the first floor of a nearby quadrangle. He opened it, and invited Gresham to enter. A figure sat in a tall chair, back to the door, in front of a small table and a blazing fire. There were no hangings for a man to hide behind that Gresham could see. He smiled at the servant, who was holding the door half open, bowed down low, and kicked the door back out of the man's hand with all his might. It flew back on its hinges, banging off the wall with a magnificent crash, and rebounding with sufficient force to knock the shocked servant forward on his heels. The figure in the chair started sufficiently to knock over his wine glass, and leapt to his feet, turning in alarm to view the cause of the upheaval.
It was Sir Francis Bacon.
'My apologies, Sir Francis,' said Gresham, albeit with his infuriating careless grin on his face. 'Doors are good places for men to hide behind with a knife, particularly so when one does not know who it is one is being invited to meet.'
That, thought Gresham, will teach you not to give me your name.
Bacon looked as if his heartbeat had returned to merely twice its normal rate by now, and some colour had come back into his cheeks. He nodded to Gresham and invited him to sit down.
'My apologies, sir. I'd forgotten what it is to be a man of action — particularly as it wasn't in that role that I asked to see you.'
There was well-cooked meat on the table, and what looked like a delicate dish of fish. It too was cooked through, unlike much of the food Gresham had seen outside. A fire blazed in the hearth. A man who could command good food, a fire and a private room at one of His Majesty's gatherings was no fool, Gresham thought.
Bacon was a relatively small figure, his most notable feature what his friends described as deep hazel eyes, which his enemies (who outnumbered the friends) described as snake-like. He motioned to his servant, who was muttering words by the door among which could be heard 'oaf', 'ruffian' and even a hint of 'call yourself a gentleman…' He was rubbing his hand, which had near been wrenched from the arm when Gresham had hurled the door out of its grip. The servant, with marked unwillingness, brought a bundle tied in tape to Gresham, and surlily plonked it down on the table before him. It was a bundle of books, six in all, identical.
'I call it The Advancement of Learning. I've been working on it for many years. In it I ask for the cobwebs to be blown off our vision of learning. I ask that we seek anew to experiment, and to learn from that experimentation, as the only way that true learning will advance.'
'I'm honoured, Sir Francis. But why should I be so honoured, the mere bastard son of a merchant and an occasional supplicant at the altar of learning?'
'I was more inclined to make a present of six copies of my book to the Patron of Granville College, Cambridge, and the man who more than any other is responsible for the rising star of the College.'
Gresham looked at Bacon impassively, inclining his head slightly forward as if Bacon had spoken to him in a foreign language he did not quite understand.
'Forgive me, Sir Henry. I know your wish to be anonymous, and whilst I don't understand it I can be capable of respecting it. Yet I too have my spies — or, rather, I have those in Cambridge who will respect me for my mind, and trust me as such, rather than see me as a lawyer, a Parliamentarian or a candidate for high office. Your secret is safe with me, and with old Thomas here — who is, by the way, the only one of my feckless crew of servants who I'd trust with such a secret.'