A Fine Madness by Alan Judd (best classic books TXT) 📕

Mary laughed at that, which provoked me. I warned him against further street fights, saying, ‘Your temper leads you by the nose and you are like to get it broken.’

‘What you call my temper I call a passion for justice which is as like to lead me to the noose in these times as to a broken nose. Not a danger that threatens you, eh, Thomas?’ With that he smiled and nudged me with his foot under the table. Mary smiled too. She was always willing to indulge him.

Indeed yes, sir, indeed he did coin. After a fashion but in a manner close enough to the crime itself as to make no difference, you might say. Of course, it is not my place to ask, sir, but is His Majesty especially interested in coining? Are there perhaps threats to the coin of the realm now and does he wish to hear of this as an example of how—?

Very well, sir, the episode was a couple of years after Mr Secretary died and not long before Christopher’s own end. Mr Secretary’s death was a terrible thing in our world. In the confusion that followed most of his records were destroyed by Francis Mylles and his household staff. I rushed to Seething Lane to preserve them, since intelligencers who do not know what they have in their records are destined endlessly to repeat themselves in ignorance and failure. But I was too late. He died in the night and news did not reach me until late the following morning, by which time many papers had been destroyed and some removed by Sir Robert Cecil, Lord Burghley’s son, whom Mr Secretary was bringing on in his own image. Some were also removed by Thomas Walsingham. Among those destroyed were many pertaining to my own work. Fortunately, however, I had enough in Whitehall to help me continue deciphering for whomsoever would employ me after.

I stayed for the funeral the following night. It was in darkness in St Paul’s churchyard, conducted almost in secrecy as Sir Francis directed, with few mourners, just his immediate family and personal staff. His daughter wept but his wife, who had witnessed more of his suffering, was dry-eyed. I was honoured to be asked to be a pall-bearer along with Francis Mylles and a couple of others. Normally pall-bearers would have been men of Sir Francis’s rank but he was buried hurriedly without their knowledge. He was heavy, it was raining and after the briefest of services we slipped and stumbled several times on the wet grass and mounds as we were led to a corner of the graveyard by the minister bearing a torch. When we eventually found the grave it was too narrow for the coffin to slide in easily and Francis and I had to force it down with our feet, which seemed disrespectful. At one moment Francis got his end down farther than mine so that Mr Secretary was being tipped feet-first into his grave. In pushing my end harder I slipped on the mud at the side and almost tumbled in after him. The grave-diggers were in such haste to finish and get away they might well have buried me with him.

He wished, he had said, for his wife and daughter not to be put to the expense of an elaborate funeral – such as when he had paid for seven hundred mourners at the funeral of his son-in-law, Sir Phillip Sidney – and I suspect the humility and obscurity of a plain funeral seemed to him a more fitting approach to his Maker than pomp and grandeur. That he was confident of meeting his Maker I do not doubt. I wish I had the confidence now to believe as he did. It is thanks to Christopher that I do not.

His last days were consumed by great suffering which he bore with patience and stoicism, seeing it as a cleansing fire he had to pass through before reconciliation with our Lord. It was his old enemy, the stone, that caused such pain. Poley put it about afterwards that his urine came out of his mouth and that there was such stench in his room that none could bear it. It is true that in carrying the coffin, our noses pressed against the sides, we all found a foul smell. But Poley also said that he died of a pox of his yard caught from a whore in Paris, which I cannot believe. Anyway, Poley was not there and, as always with that man, you had to sieve his assertions through a fine net of evidence. He too must be long dead now – I have not heard of him for twenty or more years – but I don’t doubt he will be spinning such a yarn in Hell that the Devil himself cannot tell truth from lie.

The passing of Mr Secretary wrought a change in my own life, not for the better. He had been my guide, my mentor, my example, in some ways more a father to me than my own. We were never personal with each other, never intimate, he being naturally a distant man, but there was an understanding between us, a sympathy of mind and purpose, unspoken but known and felt. He was a man of inflexible integrity, there was nothing about him I did not admire, nothing I did not seek to emulate, though I knew I could never match him. As the clods of earth thumped onto his coffin in the dark, and we all stood in silence save for his daughter’s weeping, I feared for the future. I suspect we all did.

C

HAPTER

E

IGHT

Christopher’s coining, sir, of course. I shall tell you, I shall. Please bear with me, I beg you. All these things have a context and it is their contexts that lend significance, give meaning. There is no straight path and I must go roundabout about to bring you home.

There was