The rebel heart

'As I explained, my Lord,' said Gresham, 'I've agreed to equip a company at my own expense. Should you wish to consult me, I'll come, as I've come today.'

'Why does she thwart me at every turn?' asked Essex, his voice almost a whisper.*Why? Does the past mean so little?'

Gresham shuddered to think what the past held between Essex and Elizabeth.

'My Lord,' said Gresham, 'there's reason enough, if you but calm down.' 'Reason?'

'Of course,' said Gresham. 'The Earl of Southampton made one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting pregnant. You know better than I Her Majesty's whims. She hates her ladies having affairs with younger men, God knows why. She hates them even more when they have babies. Perhaps it's too cruel a reminder for her of her own past, her own failure to complete a woman's duty. Yet she can no more stop the flow of sex in the Court and its inevitable result, than stem the Thames. To add insult to her injury, your friend then went and married the girl, again without her consent. He's lucky enough not to be still in the Tower. The Queen's certainly not going to give permission for him to mount anything else for a while, never mind give him command of her horse.'

And the man's a silly little idiot with no more military training than a rag doll and even less brain, whose sole idea of military service is riding around on a horse looking glorious. God knows why Essex favoured him. It was one of the endless complexities of the man.

'And as for Sir Christopher, he's a good enough soldier, but he has no links with Ireland except through your family, and he's an unashamed Catholic. I've no reason to doubt his loyalty…' said Gresham, thinking he had no reason to confirm it either — he suspected Blount's loyalty was to the Essex family alone — 'but Ireland is a Catholic nation ruled by Protestants. To those who don't know him, Sir Christopher is potentially one of the enemy, not one of their rulers.'

Would Essex start to froth at the mouth again?

'I am not well,' was all he said. 'Those who tax me do not realise what they take out of my poor body. I sense it within me, the illness that killed my father, the rotten inner core that can break out at any minute. My curse is to have been born fair, so that people look no further and see my real state of health.'

What a wonderful actor the Earl would have made. The problem was, he dramatised everything, turning life into a script for a play.

'I know a good doctor,' said Gresham, thinking of Stephen Perse and feeling immensely stupid once he had said it. Even Perse had limited remedies for a gross attack of self-pity.

‘It is not a doctor I need,' said Essex, managing to combine a huge sigh with an equally huge sense of melodrama. Oh God, he was speaking as if reading from one of the player's scripts now. 'It is our country that needs a doctor.' He looked straight at Gresham, an unfathomable bleakness in his gaze. 'There is no doctor for my illness, and no cure.'

'In the meantime,' said Gresham, 'we can't offer the whole country a drink but we can certainly have one ourselves.' There was sweet wine on the table. Without waiting for permission, Gresham poured two glasses and offered one to the Earl.

Essex started to sit up, looking angry for a moment and then allowing his face to relax.

'You aren't like the others who serve me,' he said, rather plaintively.

'That's because I don't serve you.' said Gresham. 'I'm here by my choice. It leaves me free to say what I want to say, as distinct from what you want to hear.'

'Before you think yourself too much in charge,' said Essex, 'do you wish to know who tried to leave you at the bottom of the sea, on your recent northern trip?'

Gresham hid his annoyance. Essex had an excellent spy network. Gresham's was better, and London was a city of tongues. If Gresham had not been stuck on a boat, or had dared put Mannion ashore to start an investigation while he flogged up to Scotland, he too would have found the small man with the beard. It must have been the sailor who owned up to being 'family', the one who had leapt overboard. He must have run back to London, told his story in the taverns and walked into or been reported to someone paid by Essex. Essex had had a flying start to find the man. It would explain why Gresham's efforts had been so fruitless. The attacker must have been a prisoner of Essex's all the time. What a waste of time and money on the agents Gresham had sent out to scour London for the man.

"What even you mightn't know is that they were after you, not the messages you carried.'

Damn! How did Essex know about the messages? Or did he know about them? Was he just shooting in the dark, hoping to land a hit?

'I envy you your certainty,' said Gresham.

All of a sudden, this was a different Essex. He was the efficient mastermind of a complex spy network.

'Then you envy me something I don't have. The man in charge was betrayed to me by a fluke. One of the men he had trusted to sail with him, or at least hired to sail with him, owed a debt to my father. My long-dead father. Telling me that the man had sailed to attack you was his way of saying thanks and repaying the debt. That and the fact that you appeared to massacre very nearly everyone else he had hired. He was rather shocked. My informant sees you as a cross between Satan and Ghengis Khan. As for the man who hired him, I had him taken immediately I was given the story. Smallish, with a goatee beard and a strange hint of an accent. You wouldn't envy him. It took him… some time to tell what he knew. What little he knew.'

'How long did you torture him, my Lord?'

'Long enough,' replied Essex, 'or so I'm told. I wasn't present in person. I find that sort of thing rather distasteful.'

Gresham saw in his mind the flickering torches on dripping stone walls, the metal heated in the furnace, the stench of red-hot iron on human flesh, the pincers, the bloody mass at the end of a man's hands, the mouth agape with blood where the teeth had been slowly, ever so slowly pulled.

Essex could never quite wait long enough. Huge impatience was the price he paid for his occasional bouts of vast energy. If he had waited, knowing Gresham was bound to be interested in what he said next, and forced Gresham to ask the next question, it would have given him a moral ascendancy. As it was, he lost patience first and spoke.

'He was most insistent that his aim was to kill you. Not to gain access to whatever packages you carried. Those interviewing him were of the opinion that it was true. They're experienced in such matters.' The narrow, watery eyes of Southampton came to Gresham's mind, and the cruel malignancy in the eyes of Gelli Meyrick.

'Men under torture say what their torturers want to hear, to stop the pain, regardless of whether or not it's the truth,' said Gresham. 'Even the Queen knows that, which is why she so rarely has men tortured.'

'That's certainly true,' said Essex conversationally. There was strength back in his voice again, though he still sounded exhausted. 'But as I said, those doing the business were convinced that in this instance it was the truth. Perhaps because they had only started on him that day. Unfortunately, they could find out no more, including who paid him and why. He killed himself.'

'That was casual of your secretary,' said Gresham.

'They were moving him from being chained to a wall, to chaining him on a table, so I understand.' Gresham noted that Essex had not denied the presence of Gelli Meyrick. 'They thought he was unconscious, let him drop to the floor and turned round for a moment to prepare the table. It gave him enough time to grab a blade that was nearby — one of the one's they had been heating up for him, in fact — and stick it under his own ribcage. He died immediately. Warmly, but immediately.'

'Well, he would, wouldn't he?' agreed Gresham.

'Now tell me about Cameron Johnstone,' said Essex, who was proving full of surprises that day.

'What do you already know?' asked Gresham.