‘Is the brute restrained?’ he asks, his voice echoing in the confined space.
‘He is, Sir Robert. With ankle irons.’
‘Then open up.’
One of the servants wields a heavy key. The others set themselves ready to prevent whatever ferocious animal is caged inside from springing free. With a tortured groan of its old hinges, the door is opened. The three servants enter at a crouch, one after the other; there is no space to do otherwise. When whatever lies beyond is no longer deemed a danger, one of them signals to Robert Cecil that it is safe to go inside. Nicholas is the last in.
The chamber is even plainer than the one at Greenwich Palace. It has the furtive smell of human sweat and unwashed clothes, and the same oppressively low ceiling as the corridor that serves it. The sole source of light comes from a tiny semicircular window set into the apex of the vaulted outside wall.
Nicholas has long known that great men like Cecil keep such chambers in their grand houses. They are the useful antechambers to the Tower, where men with ill will in their hearts towards the realm and its queen can make a full and frank confession of their sins, without recourse to the hot irons and engines of agony they will surely face later – if they fail to seize the opportunity so generously on offer here. Nicholas himself has spent a few uncomfortable hours in such a chamber, at Essex House. It was four years ago, when an enemy falsely denounced him to Devereux for plotting to poison the queen.
Not that Robert Cecil looks much like a man who keeps company with torturers. The queen’s principal Secretary of State has a tapering, scholarly face tipped by a little stab of beard. There are lines etched around the wide, full-lidded eyes that were not there when Nicholas left for Padua four years ago, and the skin beneath has started to sag a little, even though Cecil is the younger of the two by a year. There is a melancholy in the face, now. Nicholas attributes it to two bereavements: the death of Sir Robert’s young wife, Elizabeth, and that of his father, Lord Burghley, the queen’s oldest and most trusted advisor.
‘Does he have a name?’ Nicholas asks as he regards the figure lying before him on an unfurnished wooden cot set directly below the skylight. The pale light illuminates the man’s pallid face like a martyr in an altar painting.
‘Not to you, Nicholas,’ Cecil says pleasantly.
Nicholas nods in understanding. If he does not know his patient’s name, how can he later swear before an inquiry that any particular man was ever in Cecil House?
The man on the cot is younger than Nicholas by a decade, around his middle twenties. He is naked, the sinewy limbs suggesting a rural origin not dissimilar to Nicholas’s own, a childhood in the fresh air, honest labour in the field. Like Nicholas, he is dark-haired, though instead of Nicholas’s wiry curls this man has long, soft locks that might gently curtain his face if they were not matted and tangled with what Nicholas takes to be river weed. He is conscious but unmoving, save for the occasional shiver of the puckered white skin. Only the eyes are mobile. Nicholas can see no obvious sign of injury.
‘What ails him?’ he asks.
‘He’s a traitorous Irish papist rebel – that’s what ails him,’ Cecil tells him, as though he was describing a particularly untrainable deerhound.
‘Am I permitted to make a closer observation?’
‘That is why we are here.’
Chained by one ankle to the bed frame, the man remains as still as a corpse as Nicholas approaches. His head is tilted slightly, the long hair swept underneath and providing the only pillow. Now Nicholas can see dark bruises around the neck, raw weals around the wrists. Through cracked and slightly parted lips, the breath comes and goes in a slow, feeble tide, at odds with the muscular limbs. The man’s darting eyes are the only other sign of animation in the whole body. They show how he despises himself for his weakness – but not nearly as greatly as he despises those who have weakened him.
‘How did he come to be like this?’
The largest of the Cecil servants gives Nicholas a sheepish look. ‘He went for a swim, sir.’
‘He threw himself off my water-stairs,’ Sir Robert explains, glancing at the servant for confirmation. ‘Isn’t that so, Latham?’
‘He was bound at the wrists,’ Latham says defensively. ‘But he’s a strong fellow and the rope was wringing wet. When he jumped, he took me by surprise.’ He opens his big hands to show the red rope-marks on his palms.
Cecil raises one hand to lay a reassuring slap on Latham’s shoulder, accentuating the imbalance of the principal secretary’s crooked shoulders. ‘Perhaps it would be best if you explain to Dr Shelby what passed.’
Latham does his best to look consoled. ‘When we was on the water-stairs the prisoner asked where we was taking him. I told him ’twas the Tower, on account of how he’s proving somewhat constipated of tongue. Next we know, he throws hisself head-first into the river. When we fished him out again, he was palsied.’
‘Palsied?’
‘At first it were just his legs,’ Latham says. ‘I thought he was playing us for fools, so I gave him several stout kicks to bring him to his feet. But he couldn’t raise hisself. By the time we’d carried him back to the house, his arms had gone, too. Now it’s only those eyes what move. I reckon they’ll only stop their filthy jigging when the axe falls.’ A glance at his fellows to see if they appreciate his wit. ‘An’ even then I wouldn’t put money on it.’
‘Did you see him strike anything when he went into the water?’ Nicholas asks.
Latham shakes his head. ‘That part of the river is as thick as my wife’s pottage, sir. But I knows for a fact the masons left some old stones there when they rebuilt Lord Burghley’s chapel. You can sees them when the tide is out.’
‘So he could have struck his head against them when he dived in?’
‘It’s possible, sir.’
Nicholas stands over the cot. He reaches out and asks the man to grasp his hand. He gets no response. No movement – except the eyes, which fix on Nicholas’s with a loathing that takes his breath away.
And then he speaks – a short, guttural snarl in a language Nicholas has never heard before.
‘It’s his heathen Irish tongue,’ Robert Cecil says. ‘I’m told he hasn’t spoken any other since he was taken.’
‘When was that? And where?’
‘A fortnight since – in Ireland. He was caught trying to sneak into Dublin. He’s one of the Earl of Tyrone’s traitorous rogues. It is my belief he intended to assassinate the Lieutenant-General, the Earl of Ormonde.’
Nicholas asks to borrow Latham’s dagger.
‘What do you intend, Nicholas?’ Cecil says with a doubting lift of an eyebrow. ‘I have fellows properly trained for hard questioning.’
Without answering, Nicholas kneels at the patient’s feet. He inspects the arches for signs of beating. The skin, though hard and yellowed, shows no bruising. Whatever inducement to talk Latham and his colleagues have already extended, it hasn’t been made to the feet. Levelling the dagger, he presses the tip of the blade gently against the flesh of the right sole. The foot does not move. He presses again, more firmly than before. A small globule of blood blooms around the tip of the blade and trickles down over the calloused heel. Still the foot does not move.
‘May we speak privily, Sir Robert?’ Nicholas says, returning the dagger to Latham. Outside in the corridor he says, ‘What exactly is it you want of me?’
‘I would have thought that obvious, Nicholas. I want you to restore our friend to a better resemblance of health.’
‘So that you can have him tortured more efficiently?’
Cecil gives him a patronizing frown. ‘Well, there isn’t much point in torturing him if he’s dead, is there?’