The men of the town council, their comfortable burghers’ robes now tattered and loose against their famished bellies, have already met to discuss a Spanish offer of mercy, Bell recounts. All are in agreement: when Matins is over, the burghers will make as bold a progress as they can manage to the town gates and throw them open to the enemy.
‘It was still snowing when the Spanish rode in,’ Bell says, making a fluttering gesture with his fingers, though whether it is intended to convey the snowfall or is rather an anxious trembling for what is to follow, neither Nicholas nor Bianca can be sure.
The Spanish commander is Alba’s son, come to do his father’s dirty work – a pisspot-sized Caesar in a burnished breastplate, as Bell now paints him. A gloriously waxed moustache astride a horse. A pointed beard in a Castilian comb-morion helmet with a gleaming silver crest on top, impervious to the damp that bedraggles everyone else.
And beside him rides a tall young man with receding hair and a thin, hard nose like a hawk’s beak, who wears not armour, but the black gown of a doctor of medicine.
What is the young Arcampora doing in Naarden? Nicholas wants to ask. But he’s transfixed by the grim need to hear out Porter Bell’s story – however awful he knows it is going to be.
Even as he speaks the word ‘doctor’, Bell shakes his head vigorously. ‘Dressed as a doctor,’ he says, correcting himself, ‘but he’s really the Devil himself, disguised as a man of healing.’
During the parley, Porter explains, Arcampora had assured them that Alba and his son were good Christians. Merciful men. And because he was a physician, they had trusted his word.
‘“You will all be spared – helped to recant your heresy,” is what he’d said,’ Bell recounts. ‘So we let them in. We stood around and watched them eat their provisions and drink their wine in the Markstraat. They even threw the scraps to the children who gathered to gawp at them. So we believed what this man of medicine had told us. That was the day I learned how well the Devil lies,’ Bell says, his eyes beginning to glisten.
Now his voice has to tear the words out of his memory. ‘They were still drunk the next morning – when the killing began. They used anything they could put their hands to: shot and club, rope, stones, blade and pike, sometimes just their fists. Anything that would speed the slaughter of Naarden.’ He stares down at the table as if it’s a mirror glass, though Bianca cannot bear to imagine what he’s seeing in it. ‘They almost managed it, too. Eight hundred souls, or thereabouts. The spared not even those babes-in-arms who’d survived the famine. Then they set the town alight.’
The last sight he’d witnessed, Porter Bell tells them – before the random shot that laid him bloodied and senseless on the ground – was of Arcampora casually observing the slaughter, singing papist hymns in Latin, rejoicing that he was witnessing God’s holy work.
‘I shouldn’t even have been there,’ says Bell miserably. ‘I’d slipped in, carrying secret dispatches from the Orange forces, as a favour to Sir William Havington. Then I’d gone and broken an ankle, trying to sneak back out again.’
‘How did you come to survive?’ asks Bianca, moved almost to tears.
‘I must have lain beneath the corpses for a day or more, bloodied by the passing of that Spanish ball, but otherwise unhurt. Alba’s son and his devils had gone. Arcampora had gone, too. A week later, a farmer found me hobbling along the snowy banks of the IJsselmeer, all but frozen to death and raving about the Devil.’
Behind them, the spectators are cheering the combatants in the cock-fight. Bell glances over his shoulder.
‘Look at them: they see two birds ripping each other to bits and think they know what death looks like. Well, let them wait till the Spanish come here. Then they’ll know what real fury is.’
Nicholas refills Bell’s tankard from the jug. His own, Bianca notices, is barely touched.
‘But that’s not the last I saw of the Devil’s physician,’ says Bell weakly, like a child recounting a nightmare. ‘The farmer sold me to the Spanish. I can’t blame him: famine was everywhere and the Dons were offering a bounty on mercenaries. They threw me in a stinking hole in Haarlem while they decided whether to hang me or not.’
‘And that was where you encountered Arcampora again?’ Nicholas asks warily.
‘I recognized him at once – put the fear of damnation into me. He would come into the cells and speak to us, as if he were seeking to find out what manner of men we were. Whether we were pious or blasphemers, clever or lacking in wits. Whether we prayed to our Maker or cursed him. Then he’d go and select one of us.’
‘Select? For what?’
‘At first I thought it was for interrogation, perhaps even execution, for none he chose ever returned. Then one of the guards told me what he was about.’
Porter Bell falls silent for a moment. Nicholas opens his mouth to prompt him, but a sense of mounting dread stops his tongue.
‘He was choosing men to take part in his obscene blasphemies,’ Bell continues, making a broad, circular sweep of the stubble on his head with the gnarled fingers of his right hand. Nicholas sees in his mind’s eye the skull that Buffle unearthed in the beech wood beyond Cleevely, the hole bored so carefully through the bone. And although he understands at once what Porter Bell means by the gesture, he also knows he can never tell this man what fate he believes has befallen his youngest son.
‘Surgery? On the skull?’ he suggests, praying Bell cannot read what is in his eyes.
‘Arcampora became quite open about it, boastful even. He was performing great and wondrous physic, he said. One day he would prove to all mankind that the seats of reason and emotion are to be found in the brain, not in the heart or the blood.’ Bell stares into his tankard, as though peering through a window into his memory. ‘Can you imagine what it was like to be there – waiting in the piss-stinking straw, half-starved – wondering if the next time Arcampora came, his eyes would fall upon you?’
‘How did you manage to escape?’ asks Bianca in a cracked voice.
‘I didn’t. I was just lucky. The Hollanders caught a brace of Spanish caballeros and traded them for golden guilders and fifty prisoners. I was one of them.’
The story of Porter Bell’s return to England – and to a new imprisonment in a cell built of his own terrors, invisible but no less inescapable – is swiftly told. As Mercy Havington had said, it is a story of ever-steepening decline. Of one son who died in Holland and another who stayed with him, to wipe the shit and piss off Porter when he crawled home from the alehouse, until he, too, could endure his father’s tormented flailing no longer and turned his back.
‘Do you know where Tanner is now?’ Nicholas asks cautiously.
‘Safe at Havington Manor, thank the Lord. Safe from me.’
‘Tanner hasn’t come to visit you recently?’
Porter Bell looks shamefaced. He shakes his head. ‘Why would he – after what I put him through?’ He holds up his tankard, as though to make a toast. ‘He’s made more of himself than his father ever did, I’ll give him that.’