The chain snaps taut, pulling the lad off his feet. He lies huddled on the flagstones, his mouth gaping silently like a hind brought down by a wolf. Nicholas catches a sour odour and realizes the boy has lost control of his bladder.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ Nicholas repeats, squatting down on his aching haunches.
He studies the boy from a distance of two or three feet. He observes the streaks of black blood encrusting his face. He looks into a pair of eyes that stare wildly back at him, yet appear not to recognize any path that might lead to sanity. The knowledge of what might lie beneath the soiled linen rag tied tightly about the boy’s head turns Nicholas’s stomach to ice.
It takes a few moments for the realization to dawn that there’s an odd familiarity to the boy’s features. It’s as if Nicholas has seen him before. He’s looked into the same eyes; seen the same shape of the chin, the set of the mouth. The streaks of blood, the contorted features cannot hide the growing feeling that he knows this boy.
And then he has it.
You cannot watch a lad’s face as he dies in your arms in a muddy Dutch field and not have his features seared into your memory. Nor can you sit across a tavern table from his father, while he recounts unimaginable horrors, and not recall the man’s face. Dorney… Porter… Yes, the features are fuller, the body thicker, but the resemblance is unmistakeable, the kinship clear. This is Tanner Bell.
At first Nicholas can’t believe it. Tanner Bell is dead. Tanner Bell’s pitiful remains are lost in the beech wood. Then he remembers what Isabel Wylde said to him that day at Cleevely House, when Mercy Havington asked to see the boy: I am compelled to disappoint… Tanner went with the other boy, Finney. They left for London some while ago…
It must have been Finney’s body that Buffle unearthed, Nicholas reasons. Tanner must have lent him Dorney’s jacket. Or – more likely – Finney stole it.
Climbing stiffly to his feet, Nicholas makes a hurried inspection of the room. It’s smaller than the main hall, with other doors leading off, presumably to other corridors, other rooms, perhaps even other horrors. The only furniture is a simple wooden bench and a chair. There’s no mattress, so presumably Tanner sleeps on the floor – if sleep ever comes to him now. Nicholas thinks of Porter Bell’s recounting of his time in the prison cell at Haarlem, waiting for Arcampora to make his selections. A terrible sense of desolation overwhelms him. It’s followed by a desire for revenge that startles him with its murderous intensity.
Almost as disturbing as the damage done to Tanner himself are the chalk marks on the floor. Some have been scuffed into nothing more than grey smudges. But others Nicholas recognizes. He sees astrological symbols, such as a physician might use to draw up a diagnosis. He sees lines from the Bible, including one that he remembers from a sermon of Parson Olicott’s. It’s the answer Christ received from a demon who’d possessed a man’s soul. Christ had asked the demon his name. The demon had replied: My name is Legion, for we are many.
Then there are symbols Nicholas doesn’t recognize. There’s the Hebrew סמאל and the Greek Aπόλλυον. Beside each, the writer has thoughtfully provided the English translation: Samael and Apollyon, presumably for the benefit of his assistants, Dunstan and Florin. Nicholas is familiar with the names, again thanks to the sermons he’s endured on damp and misty Sundays in the presence of Parson Olicott. The Archangel Samaeclass="underline" the Lord’s venom, the serpent who lured Eve to the apple. And Apollyon: the Destroyer. Old Testament terror, scratched in chalk on a stone floor in Gloucestershire. And woven like a thread throughout, a serpent…
St Margaret… a Christian martyr, he hears Bianca say. She was swallowed by the Devil in the guise of a serpent. But she was so pious he couldn’t digest her…
Can it be, Nicholas wonders, that the monster responsible for this scene truly believes that – just like St Margaret – he can pass through the belly of the serpent and emerge unharmed? Does he imagine that when the history of physic comes to be written, by these acts he’ll be ranked above Galen and Hippocrates? Is it twisted piety or monstrous ambition that drives Angelo Arcampora?
Because at that moment Nicholas finally comprehends the true madness of what Arcampora is doing. Now he understands why Finney and the poor creature writhing slowly in terrified exhaustion on the end of his chain have suffered the agony of trepanation. It’s not solely to let sickness out – it’s to let something else in. The great physician from Basle truly believes that not only can he cure Samuel Wylde of the falling sickness, but he can find a way to summon Mary Tudor’s spirit and decant it into the brain of the sixteen-year-old boy he believes to be her grandson.
9
‘The first of these purports to be from me,’ says Cardinal Fiorzi, laying Nicholas’s letters on the table in Bruno’s tiny cabin. ‘It directs Arcampora to bring Samuel to London for a proper examination by our physician.’ He looks questioningly at Bruno. ‘I wasn’t aware we’d brought one with us. Were you?’
‘I think he means himself,’ Bianca says.
‘Arcampora is to bring the lad to Tyrrell’s house – at a place called Holborn.’
‘It’s in the country, to the west of the Fleet stream.’
‘There they will receive further instructions on where Samuel is to be conveyed for the examination. Do you have any notion where that might be, Mistress Bianca?’
‘Poynes Alley. It’s across the river. You can see it from here. Or you could, if we were out on deck.’
‘And what does Dr Shelby intend then?’
‘He didn’t tell me. But I assume he intends to prise Samuel away from them somehow, take him there and keep him safe until Arcampora is dealt with and Samuel can be returned to Lady Havington.’
Santo Fiorzi shakes his grizzled head, though whether in admiration or disbelief, Bianca cannot tell.
‘How does he intend to keep a sixteen-year-old boy compliant and biddable during all this?’ asks Bruno.
‘He asked me to mix something. I suggested white poppy, henbane and mandragora.’
‘You were prepared to poison my grandson?’ asks Fiorzi, horrified.
Bianca rolls her eyes. ‘He’d merely want to sleep a lot, that’s all. Besides, I’ve already committed treason by carrying messages from Lord Tyrrell to a cardinal of the Catholic Church. Do you think adding kidnap and poisoning will make the axe feel any sharper when it falls?’
‘Where is Dr Shelby now?’ Fiorzi asks.
‘Riding back from Havington Manor, I should imagine. That letter you’ve just read – I am supposed to deliver it to Munt this very day.’
‘To be blunt, Eminence, it seems as good a stratagem as ours,’ says Bruno grudgingly. ‘Similar in some ways.’
‘How far is this Cleevely from Holborn?’ Fiorzi asks.
‘About the same distance as Venice is from Bologna. Three or four days on horseback. Perhaps even longer if the roads are bad.’
Santo Fiorzi gives her a resigned smile. ‘What are a few days compared to more than thirty years?’
‘You must have loved her very much to risk coming here in person,’ Bianca says, humbled.
‘I loved her more than I have ever loved anyone, before or since. More even than the Church I swore to serve.’
I’m utterly unprepared for this, she thinks – receiving a cardinal’s confession. I’m the one who should be unburdening herself.