Nicholas says nothing.
‘The most extraordinary thing is,’ Lumley continues as they walk, ‘her disappearance has quite brought Lizzy out of her shell. It’s as though some malign skein connecting her to the past has been cut. I know she was in awe of my first wife, Jane FitzAlan – never thought herself Jane’s equal – but now Kat has gone, well, Lizzy’s found a worth in herself she never knew she possessed. Why, the very day I last left Nonsuch, she barely noticed my departure because she was so engrossed in a book she’d taken from the library!’ He shakes his head in sad reflection. ‘Even so, I know Kat’s crimes have troubled her deeply. We both thought Kat was an angel; but Jesu, what a malign mark she has left on so many lives.’
They walk on together in silence, towards Petty Wales and the great Bulwark Gate to the Tower. Halting in its shadow Lumley says, ‘You must bring Mistress Merton to Nonsuch when she’s fit to travel. Lizzy and I are of a mind to build a physic garden there. We would welcome her counsel.’
‘I shall, my lord – with gratitude.’
‘God protect us poor, weak men from redoubtable women, eh, Nicholas?’
‘Indeed.’
‘I keep asking myself: how did the two of them come to this? Could I have prevented it? Was I remiss in my care for Gabriel? For Kat?’
Nicholas can find little compassion for Quigley. But for Katherine Vaesy? How had the Devil entered her soul? ‘Twenty years is a long time to carry so much hate,’ he says. ‘Perhaps the child Vaesy destroyed with his incompetence was not his, but Mathew Quigley’s. Have you thought of that possibility?’
Lumley’s cold, grey northern eyes glisten. ‘It’s cruel, I know, but a part of me wishes John Warren was still alive, so he could see the consequences of breaking his daughter’s heart.’
At the north end of Petty Wales the sky disappears behind a cliff-face of ragstone and flint. They’ve reached the forbidding entrance to the Bulwark Gate, on the western side of the Tower. Here even passers-by with nothing on their conscience lower their voices and avert their eyes. The shadows seem colder than elsewhere.
Lumley presents his seal and letter of admittance signed by William Cecil. As they pass through, Nicholas steels himself for what must come.
‘Are you ready?’ asks John Lumley. ‘A man of healing may well find this too much to stomach.’
Nicholas reflects on Lumley’s words for a moment. Then he says, ‘Yes, I’m ready. What kind of man is a hunter who can’t look his quarry in the eye?’
By the light of the yeoman-warder’s lantern they climb the spiral stairs, their footsteps on the worn stones sounding like a slow tally of lives ended and forgotten. Nicholas has the nightmare sensation that the stairwell is coiling itself up behind him, cutting off his escape, as though he were being worked through the gut of some monstrous worm.
‘They say he made the wildest claims when Master Topcliffe first put him to the hard questioning,’ says the warder as he climbs ahead of them.
‘Claims? What sort of claims?’ Lumley asks, breathing hard now with the effort of the climb.
‘That he was no Jesuit, but a physician – engaged upon secret work that would raise England high in the eyes of posterity. That there was a plot against him. That he’d been betrayed by those he trusted.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Being a gentleman of the court, you must know how these papist traitors are, my lord. They’ll lie to the last breath.’
If ‘papist traitor’ causes Lumley to grit his teeth, Nicholas is unable to detect it. All Lumley says in reply is, ‘So I’m led to believe.’
The warder blunders on. ‘Master Topcliffe himself told me he feared he’d never get this rogue to confess. But I said to him, “Master Richard,” I said, “the Devil’s not yet fashioned the Jesuit who can keep his vile intent from you, when you’ve a mind to winkle it out of him.” I told him straight. No messing.’
‘I’m sure you did,’ says Lumley despondently.
Reaching a narrow landing, the warden puts his key to the lock with a great rattling of iron. The door, barely large enough to admit a child, swings open on ancient hinges. John Lumley stoops to enter. He’s been here before, Nicholas remembers. He knows what it’s like to be incarcerated in a chamber like this. Perhaps it’s not just the climb that’s causing him to breathe so hard.
The cell tapers like a carpenter’s wedge, a narrow arrow-slit of a window at the far end. The walls are half-panelled. They’re covered with countless carved messages, some little more than a weak scratching of despair, others scoured out in rage. One, Nicholas sees, is written in Latin: Parce mihi, Domine, nihil enim sunt dies mei… Spare me, O Lord, for my days are as nothing…
Gabriel Quigley’s broken body kneels in the tiny space by the window, his back towards Nicholas. A length of chain snakes from a ring-bolt in the floor to an iron fetter around his right ankle. He seems to be at prayer, the soles of his feet turned outwards. Nicholas notices they are almost black with livid bruises. But it’s not spiritual ease Quigley’s seeking – he’s licking moisture off the windowsill.
‘Stand up for the gentlemen, you Romish dog,’ growls the warder.
Richard Topcliffe has done his work with chilling efficiency. As if waking from a long hibernation, Gabriel Quigley tries to rise. But he can manage no more than a half-crouch. Using the casement sill for support, he turns to face them. He’s dressed in a heavily stained linen shirt and soiled hose. His eyes are devil-red where the minor blood vessels have ruptured. Diagonally across one side of his face runs the black, festering furrow made by the teeth of the saw Bianca wielded. He stinks of his own piss, his own vomit and – irony upon irony – his own blood.
Something appears to be eating him away from within. Nicholas thinks he knows what it is: it’s the rotting of the self that occurs when a man’s been shown the previously unimagined possibilities of his own humiliation by a torturer.
I’m not the physician – I’m the disease.
‘For the love of mercy, get him some water to clean himself with,’ Lumley snaps to the warder. ‘And a blanket. It must be colder than Hecate’s tit up here at night.’
The warder is unmoved. ‘Orders from the Privy Council, my lord. The Jesuit is to have no more ease than this. There are worse places here we could have put him in – trust me.’
‘May we speak with the prisoner a while – alone?’ Lumley asks.
‘A short while, Masters,’ says the warder.
The single chair is out of Quigley’s reach. Lumley moves it to within the arc of his chain and helps him to sit. The setting of his limbs into the angle of the chair makes Quigley cry out in pain. He stares at the open door as the warder leaves, as though he fears something terrible is about to come through it.
It’s a few minutes before he even acknowledges that Lumley is beside him. Then, in recognition, he lifts one hand to clutch Lumley’s sleeve. Nicholas notices the fingers no longer line up. Nor do they have nails.
‘I am forsaken, my lord,’ Quigley cries in a hollowed-out voice. ‘They made me say I was a Jesuit! They made me say I desired to deliver the queen in chains to the mercy of the Pope! That I plotted her death. I am condemned out of my own mouth. For the love I know you bear me, my lord, tell them they’ve made a mistake. Tell them it’s not true.’
Nicholas stares at the creature hunched in the chair. If nothing but sudden blindness could shut out the sight of what Gabriel Quigley has become – of what he, Nicholas Shelby, has brought about – he thinks he might almost welcome it. Only the image of Ralph Cullen’s body, of Jacob Monkton’s eviscerated carcass, prevents him from calling for the warden to let him out of the cell.