'Why are you crying?' he had whispered to her, reaching out in the night.
'For the women,' she had sobbed, 'and for the children. For the innocents, left behind with no inheritance, their lives ruined by these stupid men. These men who care only for their great cause, and leave behind them weeping the only true great cause a man can have.'
Gresham could have said how those damned were only a tiny proportion of those who would have suffered if rebellion had broken out, if the plot had not been smashed and exposed. Yet was it so? Would more, or fewer, men have died, women been widowed and children been orphaned if Gresham had kept out of the whole affair? Cecil had it under control, did he not? Fawkes would have lived on, Percy been ennobled, a few plotters executed.
So what had Henry Gresham done, except send Guy Fawkes to the rack and Thomas Percy to his grave?
Gresham lay awake, the occasional ripple of a sob still passing through the beautiful body lying next to him. Was it Machiavelli's choice that he had made, to keep a corrupt ruler in his place? Or was it simple vanity?
Epilogue
It was a cold wind blowing across the marshes. The small boat that would take them out to meet the tiny pinnace was rocking in the water, the slap-slap of its hull loud in the night. Gresham wondered if there were troops at that moment searching the south-coast port where he had let it be known that the embarkation would take place. He doubted it, but it would be a good test of Cecil's word.
The priest, Father Garnet, had been arrested. He had tried to defend himself at his trial, but he had no defence. What did a court of King James care for the secrecy of the confessional? If he knew of treason and a plot to murder the King, his duty as a subject was to report it, never mind whether he heard it in a wooden box with incense all around him. He was a dead man from the moment they laid hands on him, and Garnet knew it as well as the court.
Francis Tresham slipped out of the fisherman's hut in which he had been waiting. Gresham and his men had needed to check the area, to exchange the password with the two sailors in the small boat. He could smell the fear on Tresham, as well as the drink with which he had been filling himself for days. Spiriting him out of the Tower, supposedly dead, had been ease itself with Cecil's word behind the conspiracy.
'Here’ he said, thrusting a parcel at Tresham and forcing himself not to speak in a whisper. 'Money, and your papers. You are now Matthew Brunninge. Your passage to Spain is booked. Congratulations. Like Jesus, you've risen from the dead.'
'Will he live happily ever after?' asked Jane, snuggling up to him as they. watched the boat move gently out through the creek.
'I doubt it,' said Gresham. 'But then again, who can say who'll live happily ever after?'
'Sir Henry,' said Jane, stepping away from him, 'I think it's time I became your wife.'
For once, Gresham let his shock show on his face. What the Devil had this woman? To talk of marriage. On a windswept Norfolk coast, surrounded by potential enemies and busily involved in spiriting away a traitor and sworn enemy of the Crown, not to mention someone who had supposedly died of a urinary infection in the Tower!
'God help us!' exploded Gresham. 'I…'
'You see,' said Jane, ignoring him completely, 'it's one thing for me to be your whore. It is another thing for our son to be born a bastard.'