No call from Cecil. No call from the Queen. No ghosts from his past rising up to haunt him. Nothing to do, except try to stop Granville College, Cambridge, from self-destructing, manage his finances and do the minimum to keep in at Court. The Christmas festivities were dire, the light gone from them, the Queen surly and flat. Gresham was haunted by the image of the gilded Earl, once the life and soul of these celebrations, banished with a handful of servants to a cold house on the Strand. So near and yet so very far away. What must it be like for the life and soul of the party suddenly to find himself banned from it, reduced to imagining the pleasures of others more privileged, left with only the anger and resentment of his servants and so-called friends?
Gresham felt the black waves of depression starting to advance again on the shifting sands of his brain.
'You're too used to being at the centre of things, my Lord,' said Jane at supper. 'You only know how to run at full speed, and you falter if you're asked to walk.'
He had invited Jane to their first supper together in The House on his return from Ireland. She had asked for the story of the Ride from Ireland, and for some reason he had not finished it until long after the food was cold. It had only been courteous to ask her to attend the next evening, to finish his story. She had asked him to elaborate on some of the opinions he had voiced, and so she had been asked back a third time. So it had gone on, and now she was a regular attender at supper, voicing an opinion occasionally, but for the most part just listening. He was becoming accustomed to her and he was alone in failing to notice how, in the face of his goodwill, more and more power over the running of The House passed to her. And she was very beautiful.
'She's at her worst with Essex,' said Gresham, talking about the Queen. 'You stick the knife in, or you take it out. You don't leave it half in and half out unless you want to enrage the victim.'
'What's she done, my Lord?' asked Jane.
'Dismissed all his servants from Essex House — including those who served him and his father all their lives — and let him go back there with a handful of new servants. He's a prisoner in his old house, reminded every time he opens his eyes of past glories. And she won't try him, just keeps holding these inconclusive hearings.'
'They was 'avin' fun down the road this morning,' said Mannion, helping himself to a third plate of meat and fish.
There had been a near-riot in Cheapside, when an Irish adventurer had sought to stir up the apprentice boys on Essex's behalf. The man had been whipped soundly enough to make him regret his rashness, but the populace took note.
Essex still refused to receive Gresham although he wrote once a week.
Gresham was deeply in need of a visit from George. Letters to him had received an altogether warmer response than their equivalent to Essex, but the answer was the same. Lord Willoughby, for whatever reason, was keeping to his country estates.
Cecil, on the other hand, was charming to him. It worried Gresham more than anything else. A charming Cecil was a Cecil who thought Gresham no longer mattered. And had Cecil been behind the attempt to kill him in Ireland?
Though Gresham would have fiercely denied it, campaigning in Ireland had wakened instincts in him that he was finding it hard to douse down. He had left parts of both his soul and his body in the
Low Countries, had grown up there, received his real education in life there despite everything St Paul's and Cambridge could offer. The bleak risks of soldiering, the stark simplicity and the simple pleasures of a fighting man and above all the comradeship, the sense of a clear and shared danger, were a heady mix that once inserted into a man's brain never left him. It was a restless, almost hunted figure that attended the minimum of Court functions, and joined high table at Cambridge. He was made even more restless by the news of success in Ireland. Forced to be parsimonious in their use of men, the English commanders had reinforced their strongholds, made Tyrone come to them. There had been no more defeats and growing signs of fatigue among those who supplied Tyrone with troops.
And then the world changed disastrously for the Earl of Essex, and also for Henry Gresham.
In June there was a hearing by the Privy Council, of which Essex had once been so proud a member, confirming that he had offended the Queen and failed in Ireland despite every possible advantage. In August Essex was banished from Court. The highest nobleman in the land was now little more than a country squire, permanently separated from the gold mine that was the Court, savagely separated from all patronage.
In October the Queen dealt the most crushing blow of all, deciding not to renew the ten-year lease the Earl of Essex held on the import of sweet wines, but rather to reserve the income to herself. It was one of the richest monopolies in her power. It had funded all Essex's ambition, most of his excesses and the lifestyle of an aristocrat whose parents had left him so little. Its withdrawal did not mean only that he was now yesterday's man. It meant he was bankrupt. The creditors for the thousands of pounds he owed who had held off for fear of offending someone in the Queen's favour or because the grand Earl had a guarantee to fund his debts, all those would now descend on him like vultures determined to be the first to pick the flesh off his bones.
'Is she trying to force him to rebellion?' whispered Gresham, almost to himself. 'Is this her final challenge to him?'
He wrote again to Essex. The rejection came by return.
So Gresham did what he should probably have done in the first place, and went with Mannion and knocked at the door of Essex House. The surly servant seemed willing enough to let him or anyone else in, and after that it took only a very little money indeed to be admitted into Essex's presence.
Gresham's alarm bells sounded from the moment he stood at the door. The yard was full of carousing men, the worst type of soldier, and there was no shortage of beer, though precious little bread and cheese. The story was repeated as Gresham mounted to Essex's private rooms: drunken men, filthy corridors, Essex House stinking of piss, vomit and worse.
'Stay out here and guard me,' said Gresham to Mannion, as a man with a raddled whore in tow ran past them in the narrow corridor, the woman shrieking in mock terror.
'From the whores or from the dirt?' asked Mannion.
Essex was still gloriously good-looking, thin, but not disastrously so. He did not seem at all surprised to see Gresham, and ignored all formal greetings, his face strangely vacant and empty.
'You represent my past,' said Essex, rudely, in high aristocratic mood. It clashed awkwardly with the bare floor and lack of furnishings. The sombre, unadorned black of his dress. 'It is a past I truly repent of. All of it.' He did not mention the child. Perhaps he was regretting his confession.
There was a Bible on the small desk, and a crucifix on the wall. This was a darker person now, one whom Gresham had only ever half known.
'Yet in my prayers I heard a voice telling me that if you came, despite my refusals, it would be a sign. A sign that God has chosen even a weak vessel such as you. To know the truth and to prove it.'
Gresham was deeply regretting coming. Was Essex about to tell him some great religious truth? The man who had sold his soul to Satan?
'If the truth concerns God, I doubt I'm the right person to tell about it,' said Gresham.
There was no hint of humour in Essex's eyes.
'The truth concerns Robert Cecil. And the clear proof I have of his plot to place the Spanish Infanta on the throne of England.'
Gresham's brain reeled for a moment. Was he going to believe the Earl, fascinating drinking companion that he had been, but also a man blessed with the worst judgement of anyone Gresham had known?