The cell was some nine feet square, stone flagged, with an iron grating and a bucket in one corner and a heap of straw in another. Chains were attached to iron stakes that were driven in between the granite blocks that made up the walls. It was some consolation that I had been left free to move about. The walls were unpromising surfaces on which to leave messages but previous dwellers here had done their best. I read “Jesus Saves,” presumably written by a Christian because that was the name of their god, and a man’s name, Roger Anderson. The letters were crude but a quarter of an inch deep. It must have taken months of patient carving.
I thought how unconcernedly in the past I had heard of this or that person being sent to the dungeons. While I was jousting, or talking with Edmund and Martin, or just lying idle in the sun, Roger Anderson had been crouched in these clammy depths, scratching with a piece of metal, perhaps a nail, against hard stone. And outside at this moment the world went on—people gossiped and laughed, loved and fought—as indifferent to my fate as I had been to his.
An iron grille over the door provided light, coming in the first place from a small window, also barred, high up in the passage. It was little to start with and faded into blackness with evening. I had no way of telling time. The monotony was only broken when a jailer, carrying a lantern, brought a jug of water and half a loaf of stale bread. I asked him what o’clock it was but he did not answer. He slammed and locked the door behind him, and the flicker of light went away with his footsteps until the next door cut it off. I drank from the jug but felt no hunger. Rats got to the loaf in the night and devoured all but a crust.
My mind revolved uselessly on possibilities and reasons. It must be something to do with King Cymru, I thought, but could not imagine what. But whatever had been said of me I was confident that I only needed to see Peter to put it right. I knew I was no traitor, and could meet any man who accused me.
Time dragged by and I could not sleep. Yet after I had resigned myself to being awake all night, sleep suddenly overcame me. And when I awoke it was light enough to see my surroundings again, though dimly, and a key was grating in the lock. I struggled up from where I had been lying cramped and cold on the straw, expecting the jailer with more bread and water. It was he who opened the door, but he stood aside for another. My brother Peter looked in at me.
He said: “Well, Luke, I find you poorly housed and bedded. But at least you are back with us. I cannot tell you how bitter a disappointment it was when Greene returned and told me you were lost.”
His voice was calm, even light in tone. I said:
“I would like to know of what I am accused and who accuses me. I was told some nonsense about treason.”
Peter nodded, as though in approval. “I see that a night in the cell has not cooled your spirit. I am glad of that. As to the charge . . . treason covers it but it has another name also, different but no less ugly. The charge is murder, and I accuse you.”
“Murder?” If I had not been shivering so hard I think I might have laughed. “Whom have I murdered?”
“Someone who did you no harm, who loved you even. Your Prince’s Lady. And with her your Prince’s heir.”
His voice had not changed, was steady still, but as I grew accustomed to the light I could see his face more clearly. There was a look in it, in the eyes particularly, which I had seen before. His mother, my Aunt Mary, had looked like that when she raged at me for supplanting him and afterward when she waited, in a cell much like this, for the burning to which she had been condemned.
So he was mad: he must be. The grief which Ann’s death had brought had rankled and turned into this sour lunacy. I felt the chill of fear. I said:
“Will this charge be made in court?”
“It has been made, in your absence. You were found guilty and condemned. All that is necessary is the execution.”
Could he have paraded his madness in open court, and nevertheless got a verdict from the Captains? One had heard tales of crazed Princes enforcing the whims of their derangement, but not in Winchester. Our Captains, surely, were made of stronger stuff. The chill deepened in my belly. I said with what calmness I could muster:
“I was with you when your Lady left us to take her bath; and with you when the maid brought news of her death. I did not part from you in the time between. So how can I be guilty of her murder?”
“You covered your tracks well.” His face had a small, cold smile. “I grant that. But a murderer does not need to be present when his victim dies.”
“Poison, you mean? But Kermit told you she died from drowning. Do you say he was lying?”
Peter stared at me. “You are a better fencer than I thought, but it was to be expected. Shall I tell you a story? After you had gone with Greene’s embassy my restlessness grew worse. I missed your company: does it please you to be told that, you who were my brother? And the pain of losing my Lady grew worse also. I could not bear to look at that part of the palace which had been hers. So I gave orders that it should be pulled down.”
He paused and I waited. If not mad then he was mistaken, and given opportunity I could prove it I knew my own innocence.
“Massy, the Builder Dwarf, saw to the work. One of his men found a strange thing and showed it to him, and he showed it to me. A line ran under the floorboards to a small room, fifty feet away, that is used for lumber. The line was made of some black stuff but had metal wire inside. And the wire was joined to the metal foot of the bath in which she died.”
Now my mind was in turmoil, half understanding, half refusing to believe what he was telling me. And yet he could not have made it up. He said:
“I called in Strohan, and asked him what he knew.”
Strohan was the palace butler, in charge of polymufs but himself true man, heavy and solemn and bald of head.
“He spoke freely when he had seen the wire and where it led. Last year his only grandchild died, a girl of six, drowned in the river below the mill. His wife went to the Seer, as women do, and got messages which he said the child had sent from the spirit world. She believed this, and believed it also when the message came that the Seer and his Acolytes needed to do secret things in the palace and to have a certain room kept for them. The poor fool thought it would help the child’s ghost return to her, and Strohan did as she wished. So the work was done one day while my Lady was absent, giving thanks to her Christian God for the child she was to bear. And then they killed her, from a distance. With a machine!”
He paused, and again I said nothing. He said:
“Does this surprise you? I think not. But surely it is an incredible thing—that a Seer should use a machine to kill? I do not think the Captains would have believed it, except that when we sent men into Ezzard’s house without warning we found the machine, and words written down for using it. It eats oil and spews out something called electricity which is invisible. It is a poison, it seems, that is more powerful when it works through water. That is why the wire led to the bath. The machine struck at her only for a moment and left no trace. It stunned her, her head fell under the water, and she drowned as Kermit said. The plot was cunning and cunningly carried out.”
I said in a dry voice: “I knew nothing of it.”
“So Ezzard said, until we showed him the machines we had found. There were many. I could not understand them all and would not wish to”—his voice cracked with disgust—“but I think it likely they have had many uses. To make voices in the Seances, and crowns of light, perhaps, foretelling a great future for a Prince in Waiting? Ezzard took you with him to the Sanctuary, and brought you back. So you say you knew nothing of this?”