'I am as true as truth's simplicity, And simpler than the infancy of truth.'
There was so much to do. Yet it would be months before Gresham was physically able to do it. He lay there, fretting, in his bed, knowing that the leg must be kept still at all costs in its wooden splint, knowing that on his calm depended his ability to walk again without a limp. He ordered weights, used them until his breath tore at his throat, building his upper body strength.
The arm had healed beyond his belief. There was an angry scar there, for sure, to join the others on his body, but he felt no lessening in his control, no weakening.
They had lost five men in all from the coach, and one disabled for life. John, the coachman, found in a back alley with his head broken open, a blow that should have killed him and was probably designed to do so. Two of the men had been on the river and at The Globe when they had beaten off" the attackers. Gresham felt their loss like brothers. Scars mend, but never quite heal. People die, and are never quite replaced. Young Tom he promoted to deputy coach driver. No conquering general surveyed his army with more pride than Young Tom surveyed the coach on the first morning he drove it out in all its glory. It was an ugly, cumbersome thing, but for Young Tom there was nothing more beautiful in the world. There were pistols, loaded and ready, on the coach whenever it set out, and four blunderbusses loaded with nails. Walter the boatman and three of his crew were working for Gresham now.
They had found Nicholas. With something approaching despair, Gresham and Mannion had known that Marlowe would slip again into anonymity. Walsingham's spies had received a training in the field that was second to none. Yet Nicholas was easier meat, a bought servant.
He told them everything, without torture. The thin face and bloated body of the man who had come up to him in the tavern. The bag of gold, more money than he could have hoped to earn in a lifetime. The moment when he had decided to betray a lifetime of service.
Weeks ago, there would have been no argument. An implacable Gresham would have killed Nicholas himself without thought. Instead, stuffed in his bed, he looked to his wife as Nicholas sobbed and screamed before them. She gazed at the face of the man who had betrayed her and her children, driven them to what would have been more than her death, her eternal shame, but for a chance holing of a boat and a random meeting on the river.
'Let him go,' she said quietly, 'and never let him come within a mile of my family again.'
Too much death, too much suffering. It would have been easy to have him killed.
Mannion dragged him to the gateway of The House. He looked at the traitor in front of him, itching to do justice. Nicholas jibbered and shrieked, convinced he was going to die. I would like to take the gold you were paid, thought Mannion, and heat it until the coins melt all into one. And then pour it into your mouth. Instead, he looked at the pathetic thing in front of him.
If you're seen or heard of in London, in Cambridge, or within a hundred miles of my master and my mistress, you'll die,' he said flatly. 'And if I catch sight or sound of you ever again you're dead, as you deserve to be now.' He paused. 'Well,' he said, 'you came into this world with nothing. That's how you'll leave.' He turned to the men he had stationed by the gatehouse. Laughing, jeering, they came over and none too gently stripped Nicholas of all his clothes.
'She said I shouldn't kill you,' said Mannion, 'so I won't.' He smashed his huge fist straight into Nicholas's mouth and nose. There was an explosion of bone, teeth and flesh and Nicholas was flung to the ground in the dirt of the yard. Staggeringly, he was still conscious, more the pity for him. The branding iron, in the shape of a straight 'T' for traitor, was ready. Mannion plunged it down on to Nicholas's forehead. He screamed and bucked under the pain.
'Now, Master Nicholas,' said Mannion, 'go out and face the world as you've made it for yourself.'
Four men grabbed an arm and a leg each and like a sack of flour the naked and branded Nicholas was hurled into The Strand, the gate closed on him.
They contemplated kidnapping Overbury, in the long discussions Mannion held with Gresham by his bedside when Jane was not there. Kidnapping and killing him. In one sense it would have been easy enough. He was no great noble, no great lord surrounded by guards and walls and stout, locked gates. Yet this was no vanishing of a simple man, another body face down in the Thames, another unexplained disappearance. Robert Carr would scream, the country would scream and the King, for all they knew, might scream in sympathy with his bed-mate.
In the event, it was made easier for them. Overbury's closest servant, the chamberlain to his household, proved willing enough to-talk. A man had come, he said, demanding to see his master, late at night. He had seen him before, had let him in several times for drinking sessions with his master. A strange figure, with a small head and a bloated body and a high-prancing step. He had papers his master would pay a king's ransom for, the man had said imperiously. Almost against his better judgement, knowing the violence of his master, the chamberlain had let him in. Overbury had drawn his sword at the sight of the man, buffeted him and pinned him against the wall. 'Thief!' he had screamed. 'Betrayer of my trust!'*No,' the man had replied, calm despite the sword pinned to his throat, 'perpetrator of your sweet revenge!' There was a moment when he thought his master would have pierced the man's neck. Then Overbury dropped the sword. Ordered the chamberlain to leave, peremptory. Scuttling to the embrasure that should have been bricked in when the new building was made but somehow had never been done, the chamberlain sat and listened. Revenge. That was the theme. Overbury had been beaten, humiliated by this man Gresham, had he not? He, the speaker, had the most foolproof plan for revenge, a revenge that Gresham could never scrub from his body or his brain had he access to all the waters of Lethe. All it needed was gold to bribe servants and to hire men and boats. And in return, as well as the most beautiful spoiling revenge, there were papers! Papers that could be most damaging to the King, to his bishops and his ministers! Papers Overbury could use. Papers in exchange for the letters the man had stolen. And then, as the details of the plan to despoil this Gresham's wife had emerged in the strange, high-pitched voice of the man, a mixture of terror and fascination had overwhelmed the chamberlain, huddled behind the embrasure. He was primed to tell, hating his master, fearing the man who had visited him, out of his depth.
Revenge was enacted in another place. In April, a grinning Mannion came to tell Gresham that Sir Thomas Overbury had been required to undertake an embassy to Russia. Refusing the offer, the King had consigned him to The Tower, and was showing no signs of intending to release him. The two men's laughter shook the house.
Gresham had thought it fit to tell the King of the night on the river. At first, buttressed up in his bed and with the quill feeling strange in his hand, he had been tempted to get a secretary to write the note. Then he had rebelled against his own weakness and persisted. Four lines into his carefully penned manuscript he had crumpled the paper into a ball and hurled it from him. Then he had settled again, taken new paper, recharged the quill. He told the story simply; his wife's kidnap, Marlowe's plan, the frantic evening when His Majesty had been dismissing the evening's events as a damp squib and men had been dying on the river beneath him. He made no mention of Overbury.
He had thought there would be no response, had written simply to explain his own inaction, pinned to a bed with a leg in timber. The King's messenger caught him by surprise, arriving in a blare of trumpets. The messenger was obsequious, emphasised the gift was to Lady Jane Gresham. They opened it together. A jewel, a ruby of immense size and beauty. Set in a simple gold ring, the more to show off its extravagance.
'It's worth a thousand… two thousand pounds!' Jane gasped. The note with it was on the finest possible paper. 'For your pains', it read, with a simple 'J' scrawled at the bottom.
'Wet frog?' asked Gresham dryly. lRich wet frog!' said Jane in delight, pushing the jewel on to her finger.
Then came the morning that he walked for the first time. They took the wood off his pale, shrunken leg. It was strange to feel the air breathing against the flesh after so long. He sat up and tried to swing his leg off the bed. It did not move. He ordered it, more firmly this time. It obeyed.
Jane looked at him. Mannion looked at him. Dr Napier, the long-suffering, pedantic, marvellous Dr Napier, looked at him.
He stood up. Carefully, it was true; painfully, even. Yet he stood, on both his legs, and remained standing.
They clapped him, and he grinned back at them.
But still no sign of Shakespeare, and Marlowe lurking out there in the shadows. Jane felt a sickness to the pit of her stomach at the thought of him. The security measures they were now forced to take were more and more burdensome, the toll of so many seem' ingly endless nights and days sitting by Gresham's bedside mounting up. At times she felt like screaming with frustration.
Perhaps it was this frustration, the pent-up energy of a mind without enough to do, that turned the final key and made clear what had been muddied for so long.
Gresham needed to sleep less and less during the day, but in payment for the strenuous exercise he insisted on undertaking to rebuild the strength in his leg Dr Napier made him rest for an hour at noon. Jane sat by the window. She had gone for her copy of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis.
‘It's beautiful,' she said. 'What a pity they never really let him write his own plays.'
It was as if she was gazing into a full-length mirror when all of a sudden the whole length of it shattered, as at one single blow, and the world dissolved. And she was left staring at the truth.
'Quick! Quick!' She rushed to her feet, so urgent as to grab Gresham by the arm. 'The papers you took from Marlowe! The writings that were with the King's letters! Where are they? I must have them, now!'
'Are you mad?' he asked, grumbling, his thoughts disturbed. 'Bits of a play in two different hands, two hands we cannot recognise. That's all they are!'
'But don't you see? They were important enough for Marlowe to put them in the pouch! Get them for me, please! Now!'
He swung his feet off the bed, noting with satisfaction the strength in his legs and through his whole body. When he came back, minutes later, she had been to the library and was clutching a dusty volume.
'You're lucky,' he said. 'Most of my papers are still hidden elsewhere from when it seemed we were going to be searched. I've only brought back a few papers, and those the ones that seemed likely to do the least damage. Here they are, for all they're worth.'
He handed her the sheets of paper, watched as she sat back in her chair, eyes devouring the handwritten manuscripts. She delved into the book she had brought, scrambled through the pages until she found the passage she wanted.
'Yes!' she breathed, 'yes! Can't you see it?'
'See what?' asked Gresham, now totally confused.
'Do you remember Hamlet? she said. 'We've seen it several times, here and in Cambridge. Do you remember?'
'You know I remember it. We've talked often enough.' Lines from Hamlet had stuck and resonated in Gresham's mind. 'The readiness is all. The rest is silence.'
'Do you remember that speech about death?'
'Of course I do. "The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns".'
'Then look at this.' Her excitement was so great she nearly dropped the book as she thrust it into Gresham's hand. It was titled Hamlet, and claimed the play had been shown at Oxford and at Cambridge.
'There!' she said, her finger pointing. 'Read!'
He read.
To be or not to be. I, there's the point,
To Die, or sleep, is that all? I, all.
No, to sleep, to dream, I marry there it goes…
He looked up at her, laughing. '"Ay, marry, there it goes!" This is gibberish. It's comic! This isn't the speech we heard…'
'Read on!' she said. Reluctantly, he let his eyes return to the page.
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.
But for this the joyful hope of this,
Who's bear the scorns and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor?
'What is this book?' he asked, looking at it distastefully.
'Published in 1603,' said Jane. 'Now look at this…' She thrust one of Marlowe's papers into his hands. The speech, that same speech, commenced just over halfway down, in a florid hand.
'It's the same,' said Gresham. 'Word for word. I still don't understand…'. 'Now read this.' Jane thrust the second of Marlowe's papers into his hands. 'There! Read it!'
To be, or not to be — that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep -
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams might come…
'Magnificent,' he breathed. The words reverberating in his head were even more powerful now than they had been from the mouth of Burbage. He looked down the page for the lines he needed:
Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But mat the dread of something after death -
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns — puzzles the will…
Had the man who had written this been where Gresham had been? Had he also so nearly crossed the divide between life and death? Whoever had written these lines had been everywhere men go, and to places men could only dream of, thought Gresham.
'Don't you see it!' asked Jane. 'We've assumed that Bacon and Marlowe and Oxford and all those others sent plays to Shakespeare and he just fiddled around with them for a bit — got them dressed up for the stage and stuck his name on them. But what if the scripts they sent in were rubbish? What if they were awful? What if Shakespeare has this… talent, this… knack of taking other people's work and making something beautiful out of it?*
Gresham was thunderstruck.
'What if Shakespeare was the real genius behind the plays all along?'
Something massively simple fell into place inside Gresham's mind. 'So there's this bumpkin from Stratford, this front man for half the nobles in England, this man who can't write anything worthwhile from scratch but has this skill when other people seed his brain… the skill to create amazing, incredible language, probably something he never realised he had until other people's manuscripts landed on his desk… and he starts adding bits and improving on the original, small bits at first, almost despite himself, and then the bits he writes get the crowd cheering so he does it more and more…'
'And the nobles can't do anything about it without breaking cover, or revealing that what they write is rubbish. Or they pretend to each other that it's what they wrote in the first place because they love to bask in the glory…'
'What a truly wonderful, god-awful, inspirational, appalling mess!' said Gresham, unsure as to whether to laugh or cry. 'So what are these papers?'
'I bet the one with the real speech on it is Shakespeare's writing. And if you want me to guess, I'll lay odds on the dire version being in the Earl of Oxford's hand.'
'Why him?' asked Gresham.
'You remember when you went out to get the food when we were in Shakespeare's rooms? I was pumping him about the plays all the time, and he was giving nothing away. But I asked him about Hamlet, because it was your favourite play, and all he would say was that the Earl of Oxford hated the way it was performed. Then he looked shifty and backed off, and I didn't think anything about it because he was looking so shifty all the time. I bet the other paper is Oxford's writing. And I bet something else too — that Oxford published that book on the bed!'
'Why so?'
'He died in 1604, remember? Been ill for long before that. Everyone says he was a strange man at the end, half mad. Mad enough to think his version was the real one, the better one. Mad enough to publish it too, particularly when he felt he was dying.'
'The Earl of Oxford's last will and testament, you mean?' said Gresham. if he wanted to be remembered by that he must have been mad!'
'Perhaps it helped kill him, poor man,' mused Jane. 'The book was a disaster. That's why I could pick it up so cheaply at St Paul's. I wonder if Oxford waited for it to be hailed as a masterpiece, and then died when it was laughed off the bookstalls?'
'He died of the plague,' said Gresham. ‘In Hackney. Don't you remember? There was a scandal about it. Apparently he left no will, and his son forgot to put up a memorial to him.'
'So if there was a will, bequeathing his manuscripts…'
‘It's gone now,' said Gresham. 'Buried by the heir who wanted nothing to do with it all. It's a brilliant theory. But we need a copy of something in Shakespeare's handwriting to prove it.'
But they found something better than that.
There was a crash on the door and Mannion appeared, throwing something in front of him. It was a drenched Shakespeare, shivering to his bones, dripping foul water all over the floor. He was dressed as a housewife, his beard and moustache gone but the stubble on his lips ludicrously at odds with the lace around his neck and the full-flowing gown.
'Look what I found crawling out of the woodwork!' said Mannion proudly. 'Thought I'd just go and check up on our man outside The Globe, the one keepin' an eye on things. Lo and behold, this woman comes out of the play. 'Cept no woman I've ever met walks like that. So I goes up to him or her, curious, and the rest's history. Very fetching, he was, in his little bonnet. Got swept away, that did, in the river.'
'You great fat fool! You total idiot!' This was another new Shakespeare, standing eye to eye with Mannion, his rage seeming to run through his every fibre. For the first time in his life, Gresham saw someone actually physically shaking with rage. 'I was coming to see your master!'
Even Mannion was stunned by the intensity of the stupidly dressed man in front of him. What an extraordinary figure Shakespeare was, thought Gresham. He must have kept this rage in check for the boat journey over to The House and then unleashed it just now as he was thrust into the room. Could this man store moods, like others stored food, and bring them out of his emotional pantry on demand?
Shakespeare turned to Gresham. ' It's all over!' He was calming down, but like a boulder that has tumbled down a huge scarp and is now on more level ground, his range still had momentum and power.
'What is all over?' asked Gresham, beginning to feel his own anger rise within him. If this damned man had had the decency to be either an artist or a fraud then perhaps lives would have been saved, the sum total of human terror reduced if only by a little. Yet he had to be both a supreme artist and a fraud, complicating things beyond belief.
'Marlowe. Your friend Marlowe.'
Gresham felt rather than saw the tide of revulsion, the gasp of fear from Jane at the mention of the dread name.
'He went to Burbage, Hemminge and Condell. My friends! My friends who at the clink of coin and sight of a manuscript were willing to betray me!'
The tears were of anger, not self-pity. Gresham motioned Shakespeare to sit down, Mannion to bring wine. Shakespeare looked for a moment, then sat, suddenly deflating like a stuck bladder.
'How to betray you?' asked Gresham quietly.
'They told him where the manuscripts were kept. The original manuscripts. In the handwriting of the King, Andrewes, Bacon, Oxford, Derby, Rutland, Raleigh — ' there was the tiniest of flickers across Gresham's face — 'the Countess of Pembroke, you name it… and, of course, Christopher Marlowe. They knew, the three of them. Always have known. Encouraged me in the fraud…'
'And did they know that most of the original manuscripts were hugely enhanced when you put your hand to them? Did they know that the ideas came from others but that the real genius came from you, Master William Shakespeare? Did they know that most of these plays would be just another afternoon's entertainment if it weren't for the poetry you have in your soul?' Gresham's voice cut like a saw.
Shakespeare had wine in his hand now. It was forgotten. Two, three huge tears formed in his eyes, rolled down his muddy cheeks, carving a little wobbling path of white in the brown. 'They knew. And they were prepared to sell me out. My friends. My lifetime friends. That was the deal, you see. Marlowe would get all the manuscripts, after giving Burbage, Hemminge and Condell a great lump of money. There'd be a performance, a big one. And then Marlowe would appear. It's what he's always wanted, don't you understand? The biggest dramatic moment of his, of anyone's, life. Christopher Marlowe, the great Christopher Marlowe, the founder of the Elizabethan stage, the master of the blank verse line… and not dead after all! Here, alive, on stage. His great enemy Cecil vanquished by death.'
Something cold and still had entered Gresham's mind, speeding his thoughts as a sledge with razor-sharp edges cuts through snow, silent, powerful and vicious.
'And after he appears like a Jack-in-the-Box, and the audience is gasping with wonder and amazement,' said Gresham, 'then he makes his second announcement. That while they, his loyal public, thought he was dead, he was dead only in name. His writing continued, almost to the present day. They know the plays of William Shakespeare? Did they really think that such plays could be written by a poor country boy from Stratford with no education? No! He, Christopher Marlowe, in the long, long years of his exile, had used Shakespeare as other noble minds had used Terence thousands of years ago.' Gresham had risen to his feet now. He stood in the centre of the room and flung his arms wide in the manner of the great Burbage in a great tragic lead.
'I AM MARLOWE AND I AM ALIVE! I AM SHAKESPEARE, AND HAVE LIVED ALONGSIDE YOU IN THIS THEATRE AS HIM FOR TWENTY YEARS PAST! MY ENEMIES-ARE DEAD! THE MASTER HAS RETURNED!'
There was silence in the room.
'My God,' said Mannion, 'wouldn't the little bastard love that? ‘Wouldn't he really, really love that?'
Jane was struggling to overcome her revulsion, desperately seeking to prove to herself that she could think logically about Marlowe. 'But wouldn't the other authors complain? Claim the credit?'
'Don't you see?' said Shakespeare, almost in desperation now. 'He's cleverer than all of us. Many of the authors don't want to be revealed. They'll stay silent. Someone like the Countess of Pembroke will be laughed out of Court if she claims authorship — a woman, for heaven's sake, able to write like that? What a joke! Either that, or it will herald a very different attitude to women, for life. And without the manuscripts, and with half the original authors dead, where's the proof? If Hemminge, Condell and
Burbage are prepared to betray me — and they are — then he claims my plays as easily as a hawk cuts out of the sky and catches a newly born rabbit.'
'Are you sure they will betray you?' asked Gresham. This time he got up and poured anew measure of wine into the goblet of his old enemy.
'Yes. They've been different, strange with me recently, but that's not how I know. They did the deal with Marlowe in The Globe, over a meal they had brought in. They forgot the servant who served them the meal. Said enough to make him suspicious. He came to me. "Sorry, Master Shakespeare," he said. "Very sorry to intrude. But it sounds to me as if Masters Burbage and Condell and Hemminge are going to let someone else take the credit for all those plays what you wrote. And that ain't right…" Pathetic little man,' said Shakespeare with a sad and bitter laugh. 'His sense of justice was outraged by what he heard so he listened at the door. Didn't know it was Marlowe, of course.'
'Do servants often talk to you?' asked Gresham, remembering the grumpy old man at the Dominican Priory.
'All the time, actually,' said Shakespeare, rather wistfully. 'Don't know why. They always have. Remember that speech in King Lear’. ‘ About poor wretches who bide the pelting of the pitiless storm?'
Gresham nodded his head.
'That came from the same man who warned me about Burbage and the rest of them. He came in drenched one day. Said as how wretches like him had no defence against the rain. Pitiless it was, he said.'
'And from that you wrote what you did?'
Shakespeare looked surprised, his grief forgotten. He also looked confused. 'Why… of course I did. I mean, he virtually wrote it for me, didn't he?'
'No, he didn't actually,' said Gresham, looking at Shakespeare with new eyes. 'He gave you the raw material. Very raw material. God — if he exists, which I very much doubt — gave you the poetry.'
There was a long silence.
'Well, that's it, isn't it?' Shakespeare had changed again. He was now the Stratford grain merchant, rather plump, needing to go about his business because time waits for no man. i suppose he'll leave me alone at last once he's made his grand declaration and claimed my work as his own. No one will listen to plain old William Shakespeare, uneducated old William Shakespeare.' He turned to Jane. 'Do. you know, I shouldn't wonder if he claims my sonnets. And my Venus and Adonis. And The Rape of Lucrece. Why shouldn't he? He's got all the rest…'
And then he broke down into uncontrollable tears, the sobs racking his body as if each one was an arrow sinking into his flesh. Gresham did not stop Jane from going to him, putting her arms around him. She was holding him like a baby, rocking him back and forth. She was someone who knew what it was to have the products of one's imagination for ever claimed by someone else. She liked Ben Jonson, loved him in her own way. Yet what did it cost her to know that so much of his Volpone was her own work?
Gresham's voice came like a sudden cloudburst damping summer fire, ‘I think if anyone has the credit for your writing, Master Shakespeare, it should be you. I will see it is so.'
Shakespeare looked up. He wanted to laugh out loud, yet something stopped him from doing so. Something implacable, quite fearsome in nature.
'Where are the manuscripts stored?' asked Gresham very quietly.
Stunned, Shakespeare told him. 'They're all in the thatch of the Lord's Gallery. I hid them there after Marlowe raided the bookkeeper's room. I gambled he'd never think of my taking them back to The Globe.'
'Do you have a separate copy of all the plays? A fair copy? Kept somewhere else? Not in The Globe, I mean.'
'Yes, for almost all of them,' said Shakespeare.
'And when is the performance they're putting on to allow Marlowe to reveal himself?'
Two days from now. All Is True' said Shakespeare. 'The actors call it Henry VIII. It doesn't matter what you call it. It's the play written by the King. It's dreadful. But it's got lots of spectacle, lots of show. They decided it's the one that would drag the most people in.'
'Do you trust me to restore to you what Marlowe and the others are threatening to rob you of? The right to your work?' asked Gresham.
Shakespeare looked at the man who had been his sworn enemy, his tormentor, and had now offered to be his friend. 'Quite frankly, I don't,’ said Master William Shakespeare. 'I doubt the devil himself could do it.'
Sir Thomas Overbury sat slumped on his bed in the Tower of London. The other prisoner sat opposite, on a chair Overbury had arranged to be carried over from his apartments. He was a poor figure, his fellow prisoner. Someone Overbury would not have paused to spit at only a few weeks before.
'I was right to refuse the King!' Overbury said bitterly. The other prisoner nodded, taking a gulp of the putrid wine that was all Overbury had managed to get into The Tower. 'Me! To go as ambassador to some godforsaken frozen hole! Oh, I know what they all wanted. The plan's clear as day. Get me posted overseas and then, with my brains gone from the scene, get rid of Robert Carr.' Overbury lurched to his feet, taking a swig of his own wine. 'My friend Carr wouldn't last weeks in the… cess-pit of the Court once I was safely posted overseas!'
'You were offered an ambassadorship? By the King?' asked Overbury's companion, who had damned the King without ever actually seeing him, and might well die without seeing him too. He was not sure whether to laugh at Overbury or bow before him.
'I refused it! Of course! Who is the King to tell me what to do?'
The other prisoner blanched at that. He knew who the King was. The person in whose name he had been arrested. The person in whose name he would most likely be tortured, executed or left rotting in this place. A trace of fear swept into his mind. Was this person, this Sir Thomas Overbury, a wise man to drink with?
'This imprisonment won't last! It was necessary. The King has to do it, for the form's sake! Carr will weedle and charm James into releasing me soon enough.' Overbury was pacing the narrow room now. 'And then there'll be revenge for those who put me in this stinking pile of stone. Carr needs me. The King needs me!’
This man is mad, the other prisoner thought. He put his cheap cup down and started to edge towards the door.
'Damn this imprisonment!' Overbury raged, hardly noticing the other man. The Court was a whirlpool of intrigue, current and cross-current, and here he was with his vessel swept into a backwater, land-locked with no oars and no sail. The inaction was intolerable!
A few miles away, Henry Gresham felt a quiet satisfaction at the way Overbury had been neutralised. Yet even he did not realise that when one man causes a prey to stop alive in its tracks, he opens up a route for others to give it the death blow.