He’s staring at the beauty of a full moon. It’s the most magnificent moon he’s ever seen. A terrible longing comes over him: the overwhelming desire to gaze on this brilliant white beautiful disc until his sight freezes over, until it becomes the only thing he will ever see again.
Then the smoky glare from a burning torch blots out the pristine image. Hands seize him by the shoulders. He feels himself lifted up, dragged roughly from the back of the cart and onto his feet. He turns his head, longing for one last sight of that glorious moon, and by its light sees the high, grey stone wall of the Bulwark Gate of the Tower a short distance away. He realizes he’s in Petty Wales. They’re going to kill him in Tobias Munt’s warehouse.
He hears the rasping of a heavy door opening. Florin and Dunstan drag him inside like a laden sack. Someone slams the door behind him, shutting out the clean, pure moonlight and leaving only the oily flames of the carter’s torch to show the way.
Nicholas catches glimpses of columns of casks and wicker tubs, hemp sacks and wooden boxes, towering upwards into the darkness. He smells the heavy odour of grain and timber, oils and spices, animal hide and unwashed wool, all mixed together in close confinement.
He is brought to a halt before a stocky figure in a leather jerkin. The man has a lazy, shiftless face, with a thin mouth that cuts across his face like a slash.
‘What is this you’ve brought me, Master Florin?’ the man asks.
‘No sale required for this one, Master Munt,’ says Florin with a coarse laugh. ‘You can write him off as spoiled goods.’
‘He’s a spy,’ says Dunstan. ‘To be put to the hard press before we kill him. Lord Tyrrell wants to know who employs him. Watch if you want, or go about your business. It’s all the same to us.’
‘I really would like to stay for the spectacle, Master Dunstan,’ Munt says. ‘But a note has been delivered to me, which I must convey to his lordship without delay. I’d be obliged if you didn’t spill more blood than I can scrub off the floor, if it’s all the same to you. Sometimes the customs searchers come calling, and I don’t have a licence to run a butcher’s shambles.’
‘You won’t even know he’s been here,’ says Florin.
‘Unless the bowels go,’ Dunstan adds. ‘That’s always a risk.’
Florin looks up appreciatively at a hook set into a beam above his head. ‘Any means of suspension, perchance, Master Munt? Chain or hemp – makes no difference.’
Munt disappears into the darkness, returning a few moments later with a coil of rope.
‘This will do nicely,’ says Florin. He takes the rope from Munt and, with practised ease, tosses it over the hook at only the second attempt.
For a moment Nicholas thinks they intend to hang him right here. But Dunstan has spoken of employing the hard press to make him talk. And as he feels one end of the rope being tied around the bindings that pin his wrists behind his back, he realizes how they’re going to do it: strappado. They will haul on the other end of the rope, pulling his arms out and upwards until he’s suspended by them. Then his own weight will rip his shoulders out of their sockets. He has treated freed prisoners of the Spanish who’d been tortured in such a manner. They had described pain beyond endurance. In a bizarre moment of detached observation, he wonders if his screams will be heard on the far side of the Bulwark Gate.
But Florin has one final terror in store for him. One last act for when he’s told them everything they want to know. Florin takes the carter’s torch and stands in front of Nicholas, the grin on his face revealing the missing teeth he’d lost to Nicholas’s saddle in the beech wood. He raises his other hand so that Nicholas can see what he’s holding. Clenched in his fist is a twisted length of iron, a wooden handle at one end and a broad, circular cutting blade at the other – a carpenter’s auger – just made for drilling through living bone.
18
Luzzi, the sailing master, appears on the stern-castle. Seemingly oblivious to the tension, he takes off his cap before addressing Santo Fiorzi. ‘They are on Lyon Quay, master,’ he says. ‘It is time to go below, I think.’
Bianca helps Fiorzi lead Bruno down the steps of the stern-castle and onto the main deck. Her cousin moves carefully, like an old man unsure of his legs.
The grating over the wide hatchway to the cargo hold has been pulled aside, exposing what looks like a black hole leading into the depths of the river. Peering in, Bianca sees an almost vertical ladder. At the bottom, a flicker of lantern light appears as one of the Sirena’s crew positions himself to help Bruno descend. Then the river lifts the Sirena’s hull and the floor of the hold seems to rise towards her, bringing with it a wave of nausea. Bianca steadies herself, checks Bruno is safely down and then – summoning all her courage – slips her legs over the edge of opening.
Reaching the deck below, Bianca imagines she has entered the gut of St Margaret’s serpent. Huge wooden ribs twice the width of a man’s thigh rise out of the darkness on either side. She makes a hurried sign of the cross over her breast as she steps away from the ladder.
The crewman sets his lantern on a hook in a nearby deck-beam. It begins to turn gently to the movement of the river, striking fragments of detail out of the darkness: casks of fresh water; sacks of victuals for the voyage back to Venice; coils of hemp cordage and spare yards for sails; even a small demi-culverin, for defence against the Barbary pirates who roam into English waters, and which will be brought up and mounted when the Sirena is at sea. And set into a small clearing is a makeshift throne for Bruno the cardinal’s emissary to sit upon, made out of bags of flour. Still weak, he sinks onto it gratefully, a diminutive doge of his own little republic. Bianca and Fiorzi – who is now clad in his usual disguise of plain jerkin and slops – take up their positions as his loyal ministers on either side.
They don’t have long to wait.
Bianca hears hushed voices on the deck above. She looks up as three dark figures appear at the edge of the hatchway. There’s no mistaking Tyrrell, his great beard frosted by moonlight. Arcampora is just a silhouette to her, angular and infinitely menacing. Between them stands a willowy figure, slightly hunched, like a prisoner being led to the scaffold. They begin to descend the ladder, Tyrrell first, then Samuel Wylde, then Arcampora. Bianca notices Tyrrell has a sword at his belt.
When they reach the deck, Tyrrell pulls back the cowl of his cloak and nods to her in recognition. He’s lost none of his scowling menace. His eyes blaze as he pushes Samuel forward, as though he expects everyone to kneel. What Arcampora is thinking is impossible to say. His hawk-like features seem frozen. Only Samuel Wylde shows emotion. He stares around in alarm, as if he thinks he’s about to be incarcerated, left to a lingering demise in a dark cell. He looks, to Bianca, like the most unlikely pretender to a throne she can imagine. It occurs to her that neither Tyrrell nor Arcampora has thought it necessary yet to tell him what the Brothers of Antioch have planned for him.
‘Signor Barrani, I am pleased to see you restored to health,’ Tyrrell says, his voice flattened by the timber walls of the hold. ‘We had heard your injury was severe.’
‘God favours our work, my lord,’ says Bruno from his makeshift throne. ‘He has spared my life for a purpose.’
He; me; but mostly Nicholas Shelby, thinks Bianca.
‘Then let us hope he spares it a little longer,’ says Tyrrell coldly. ‘Because we have a spy in our midst, Signor Barrani. Dr Arcampora’s men found him sniffing around at Cleevely, like a dog on heat.’