If Betony does, she’s not of a mind to share the fact. The only sounds in the kitchen are Vaesy’s increasingly frustrated voice, Francis Deniker’s scribbling and the crackling of the fire.
‘I think we should call a halt to this experiment,’ says Lumley. ‘We’re getting nowhere.’ He raises his left palm to indicate that Deniker may stop wasting paper.
Thus he fails to notice Vaesy’s free hand seize the girl’s other wrist, trapping it so firmly that it becomes a mere extension of his intent.
For a moment, only Vaesy and the girl share the bond of understanding. Her body locks into a spasm of fear as he draws her hand towards the smoking spit-iron. She twists away from the fire, away from the man whose grip she cannot escape. Her feet flail against his shins. He seems not to notice.
‘Fulke, in the name of God’s blood – no!’ shouts Lumley.
Vaesy shoots him a silencing glance, as though Lumley were one of his junior physicians.
Sprint thinks: I know how to stop him. I’ll hit him with the nearest heavy kitchen implement I can reach. But for all his independence, Sprint has never before considered assaulting a knight of the realm. So he, in company with Lumley and Deniker, remains frozen to the spot.
As if the will to resist has suddenly drained out of her body, Betony crumples. She looks into Vaesy’s stern face, the tears streaming down her scrubbed cheeks. Her hand is so close to the burning spit-iron that were she to unclench her fist now, her fingertips would touch it. She bows her head, accepting the inevitable torment like a martyr going willingly to the flames. She closes her eyes.
But she does not speak.
The heat against her flesh is the warm sunlight spilling through the summer leaves. The stream burbles over the rocks. The air thrums with the beating of dragonfly wings.
Elise watches the hind supping from the water of the ford, its dappled skin the colour of pearls drenched in honey. Drink swiftly, little one! The hunter is always nearer than you think.
28
The kitchens are silent now, just the occasional crack from the logs glowing in the hearth and the soft snoring of the male scullions asleep on their mattresses.
Betony is with the female servants in their quarters in the outer court. John Lumley is confident she will be secure there. Even if she manages to slip away, the outer gatehouse is shut after dark. Unless she can fly over two storeys of brick and ashlar, she is effectively imprisoned.
Given the ordeal she’d been through, thinks Sprint as he makes his nightly rounds of the kitchens, she appeared oddly calm afterwards. Her mind seemed to have taken her to some distant place where none of them could follow.
Sprint’s father had told him once about a burning he’d attended, back in the time before Elizabeth, when the realm was temporarily Catholic again and her half-sister Bloody Mary had sent three hundred Protestant martyrs to the flames. It’s like they welcomed it, eyes lifted to heaven, hymns on their lips right up till the moment they folded up and collapsed, like all the bones had suddenly been plucked out of their bodies. Sprint has often wondered how anyone could face such a fearful death with equanimity. Now he thinks he knows.
He had enjoyed seeing Vaesy bested. When the physician had let go of the girl’s wrist at the very last moment, his face had been crimson with humiliation. It had been a joy to watch the conflict in him. Inside two minutes he’d come up with more diagnoses than an ordinary man could have afforded in a lifetime: The child is too dull-witted to speak… the child has never been taught the words… the child must be foreign and doesn’t understand the simplest of questions… The one diagnosis he’d refused to consider was that the girl was made of stronger stuff than he. By the look Sprint had seen on Lord Lumley’s face, he suspects Nonsuch won’t be seeing quite so much of the great anatomist for a while.
On the wooden counter over the bread-ovens stands a jug of small-beer. Sprint unties his apron like a crusader laying down his shield after a hard day’s battling against the heathen, pours himself a larger measure than he intended. And as he drinks, the logs in the hearth behind him give out a last dying blaze of light, bringing the front of the bread-ovens into sharp relief.
At first he thinks one of the younger scullions has scratched his mark there, or scrawled some lewd doggerel into the sooty plaster. Lowering himself into a squat – not an easy thing for such a big man – he inspects the marks, the faces of the likely suspects already forming up in his mind, in order of culpability.
He’s looking at a row of three inverted crosses, clawed into the soot in the very place where Joanna set Betony to work, before Fulke Vaesy turned up and threw everything into riot. Betony must have made them when Joanna was at some other task, he thinks.
And below the third crucifix, a teardrop of spilt blood-sauce. Or perhaps just blood. From a fingernail – as it tore into the plaster.
Perhaps Sir Fulke Vaesy was right after all, Sprint thinks, as he wonders just what sort of creature John Lumley has let into Nonsuch.
He looks so familiar to her – the man in the plain woollen tunic who sits behind the table. Familiar in the same way that Leicester and Walsingham, the two watchers who’d come to the Jackdaw, were somehow already known to her. Even though Bianca has not set eyes on him before, he is already known to her in all his tedious detail. He is yet another of those minor men of government – the ones who toil to keep their masters’ hands clean by taking to themselves the decision that a harsher degree of questioning might be in order. The ones who smile so regretfully while they show you the implements of torture you will force them to employ, because of your wholly unreasonable refusal to tell them what they want to hear. The gowned lawyers’ clerks who draft the confession you never made. The men who say they’re doing holy work, yet have something of the slaughterman in their eyes. The men who set their consciences subordinate to their service to the realm. As Bianca stands manacled before this very ordinary fellow – who will not tell her his name, but says only that he has come directly from the queen’s Privy Council to examine her – she realizes that no matter which religion they think they’re protecting from heresy, they are in essence the same.
She’d met her first one in Padua, when the Holy Office of the Faith had arrested her father. Tell me, child – have you ever witnessed him laying out a circle with his staff, and there within making incantations to summon up Lucifer? She had answered that her father was a good man and only interested in advancing physic. Is your father in frequent correspondence with agents of the heretic Queen of England? At that moment she’d understood how they worked: if they couldn’t burn you for witchcraft, they would burn you for being a spy. It didn’t matter to them which, only that you should burn.
‘Mistress Merton, please tell me: where were you born?’ says the man behind the table.
‘Italy – in Padua.’
‘So you are Italian?’
‘I am both English and Italian.’
‘Why did you come into England?’
‘My father was murdered by the Holy Office of the Faith.’
‘The Romish Inquisition?’
‘Yes. He died of despair in his cell.’
‘Then you are a true Protestant?’
Why should she tell this man what is in her heart?
‘I was informed the queen has no desire to see into her subjects’ souls.’
He writes down her answer carefully, mouthing it as he does so. Then he looks up at her, his face expressionless. ‘So then you are a papist?’