Gloriana's Torch

by Patricia Finney

  The galleas was towing them along to keep up with the rest of the fleet, the wings of oars flashed in the sun and a sound came from the ship, as if the ship itself was singing. It was a strange rhythmic song, and the oars flashed in time with it. Pasquale could not hear very well because one of his eardrums had broken from the explosion, but he rather thought they were singing words, strange foreign words. ‘Da meer a kuh is kallay, da meer a kuh is kallay.’ Probably some nonsense to help them keep the beat.

  Rocking in a harsh bed with a wonderful view, Pasquale watched the galleas and its beautiful oars, listened to the singing of the galley-slaves, and gradually got colder. He shivered but was not present for the shivering, nor the pain it triggered off. The sun set and the night came down just as the towing cable to the galleas parted. San Salvador drifted on the tide, under the gleaming stars of the blackest night.

  As Pasquale floated away he found a strange rocky passageway, heading towards light, which burnt his eyes, hurting him worse than the gunpowder explosion ever had, an agony of brightness and kindness. Someone was standing there, waiting for him. An angel, perhaps? To lead him away from what was obviously the Gate of Hell?

  He looked at the person, found it was a shining man, naked, facing away from him. The man turned round and Pasquale looked into the face of Christ, pierced by its crown of thorns. But when Pasquale looked closer he saw that Christ was circumcised, was no different from that Jew he had tortured. Horror rooted him where he was, dread spread frosty fingers through all his heart.

  ‘Josef,’ said Christ to him sadly, ‘Josef, why did you persecute Me?’

  Simon Ames

  Lisbon, Spring 1588

  It was a long time since Simon had been an inquisitor, and while he sat in the holding cell, he thought carefully about what he should do. Unfortunately, his memory was far too good, but at least most of his sensitive knowledge was five years old and he did not yet know what he had come to find out from his brother. In the summer of 1587, Francis Ames had sent the cargo to signal an emergency – myrtle leaves, sewn in a silk bag. Nunez and he had discussed deep into the night the best way to respond, in the state of war between England and Spain. Drake had just raided Cadiz and burned a lot of ships and also a vast many barrels, causing ruin to many of the Spanish industries. There was already a shortage of good sherry sack in London, although Nunez had bought up an entire cargo of it for the future. In the end they decided that Simon himself must voyage to Lisbon and make contact with Francis directly. It was possible that Francis wanted quiet extraction from his deep cover as the harbour master’s clerk. Simon was the only available Ames brother with no vital work in Walsingham’s service and he would be able to judge the situation.

  There was no harm in trying to make some money and besides he needed good cover. Dr Nunez decided he would carry iron and guns and powder to the Slave Coast of Africa, there to load slaves and ship them over to the Caribbean, where the sugar plantations desperately needed manpower. Thence he would carry sugar to Lisbon and from Lisbon would bring the information and possibly his brother, together with Seville oranges, sherry sack, olive oil and spices for sale in England.

  And so Simon had ventured out in a brig owned by Nunez through two intermediaries in Antwerp. His wife had forced him to take her with him, outrageously telling him that she would neither eat nor drink until he changed his mind and nor did she, for two and a half days until he broke. The last time she had let him out of her sight, as she said, he had ended by being chased by dogs through London and badly wounded in the shoulder. His children he knew would be safe with their grandfather, and perhaps it was no bad thing for her to be away from the Queen’s England. Not that Elizabeth was the kind who took out her anger on men’s wives, although her father had been such a man, only …

  It was certainly comfortable to have a wife with him, until her maid had sickened and died with the flux and then Rebecca had taken the disease and been near enough to dying herself until Simon had brought the strange black woman to attend her and found he had somehow bought a witch. Had she really called the storm from the mast, or had that simply been insanity and madness followed by an accidental storm? It was what he had said to the interfering little drunk of a priest, who had almost certainly betrayed him.

  Carrying sugar, he journeyed to Lisbon where he had never been before, where they could not possibly have known his face. Merula had been right, something had been scaring away the beggars. They must have been followed, very carefully, probably by relays of men, so they could take note of all his contacts. Who had betrayed him? Not Francis, he thought. Apart from it being utterly inconceivable, in plain fact they clearly did not yet know that Francis was his brother, nor that he was working as the harbour master’s clerk. He thought it even possible that Francis might still be free. But he had been betrayed and it would be good to know who by, so he could curse them when he burned. He understood that curses made with the last breath of life were particularly effective.

  He quite deliberately turned his mind away from the thought of burning. Now then, he thought. They never say what exactly they want because you never know what might come, and so they will … They will exert pressure without asking. I must be the outraged merchant, dealing only in sugar. When I must give them something, I will give them that I am English and I traded slaves without a licence. When I must give them something else, I will give them Walsingham’s name. When I must give them a further thing, I will give them Phelippes’ name. When the next thing must be given up, I will …

  At the bottom of the pit of memory he was building was his brother.

  He was very careful not to pray that his wife might escape. Almost certainly she would not. They would have soldiers at the ship, they might well have caught Francis by now, despite his coolness while the Holy Office arrested his brother in front of his eyes. Simon knew how much that must have cost Francis, to stand and take notes, to watch his brother marched away, and do nothing …

  What else could he give them? Unfortunately he knew nothing at all about Sir Francis Drake, never having even met the man, so he made up some interesting sounding tales about great ambushes in Cornwall, hellburner ships being created specially for El Draco.

  He sat quietly, in the darkness of the cell they had put him in, which was quite civilised really: very, very dark, of course, with only a bench and a bucket for comfort, but not damp, not airless, big enough to stand up in and lie down. Much better than many of the cells at the Tower.

  He found his fists had clenched up again and worked them to unknot the muscles in his shoulders. The Inquisition used the rack. They used thumbscrews. They used the strappado, which, in its lesser form of the manacles, had been worked to such devastating effect on David Becket in the Tower last year. They also used water torture of various kinds. They used darkness and silence, starvation and thirst if they had time, because these were the most effective, sapping the will without risking sudden death, leaving the mind unclouded by pain. If they had time to spend, but he thought they did not.

  He stood up, climbed on his bench, waved his hand in the small current of air coming from the barred opening there. The opening wasn’t a window because no light came from it. Carefully he tested the bars, moved all around checking for any weakness or crumbling in the stone. He might as well do it now, while he still could, so he would know it had been done.

  When he had gone over the whole cell, inch by inch, searching for any possibility of escape, knowing many others had done so before and would after him, and found, as he expected, nothing, he pissed into the bucket and sat on the bench again.

  He swallowed hard, blinked into the darkness, wondered again what it was Francis had been so urgent to tell him, prayed incoherently for mercy, then stopped. All the Holy Office knew of him was that he was a sugar merchant, that was all. It was entirely possible that they had picked him up on general principles, on simple suspicion of being English, since English merchants often made the triangle voyage illegally. It was
possible he had been denounced in mistake for someone else. It was possible nothing bad … or nothing very bad would happen to him.

  Of course, once they started work on him, if they stripped him naked, then, of course, they would see that he was circumcised. And then they would burn him.

  * * *

  After the interview with Pasquale, as he lay staring up into the darkness, Simon tried not to consider the future. His back and neck hurt, his stomach hurt terribly, his chest hurt, his throat hurt and his mouth hurt. Oh and his wrists and ankles were bruised. But all things considered, it could have been very much worse. He wondered if he had been close to dying the last time he drowned. All the pain and panic of struggling desperately to breathe against huge rocks of water and the pressure in his belly, it had all gone far away. He had felt as if he was floating. Unfortunately he had fallen back onto the table immediately. Was that what it felt like to die? It didn’t seem so bad.

  Certainly they would kill him, but how? Legally, he thought they could not burn him for heresy. He had forgotten earlier how punctilious was the Inquisition in its obedience to law. Spanish law, of course, was carefully designed to allow the Holy Office to do what it did, indeed to prescribe what it did, but nonetheless, legality itself was maintained. He remembered how he himself had been careful to get royal warrants for putting to the question in his days as an inquisitor. Now he looked back on the man he had been and hardly believed it had been him, Simon Ames, although he knew it had, knew they were the same person, though he was used now to people calling him Mr Anriques. At the time, of course, he had felt uneasily that he was serving a law he did not like but which was better than the death of the Queen, than anarchy.

  From Pasquale’s expression, Simon rather thought he fell outside their law and that this would upset the Holy Office deeply. Naturally they wanted to relax him to the secular arm and burn him immediately, and all things considered, he thought it would be better if they did. Another likelihood was that they would quietly forget about him and he would rot in his cell until he died. Another was that they would continue to question him, on general principles, until that killed him. But the legality of it hung over everything. Simon thought he understood Pasquale: as long as everything was tidily legal, Pasquale would have no mercy. Once a shadow fell on the purity of the law, Pasquale would be all at sea.

  All at sea. A good metaphor. Simon liked the sea and relaxed comfortably into his memories of it. He had been astonished to find that he did not suffer from seasickness, even in the mighty storm that Merula had apparently summoned. He was not experienced in it at all, was no real seaman, but he had enjoyed watching the Master and Commander of his uncle’s ship and asking what happened when this rope was pulled or that sail unfurled, watching the sailors at their work. The way it all fitted together was beautiful: angle upon angle, line upon line. It all made sense.

  The Master had been complimentary of his understanding, had acceded to Simon’s request to go aloft with one of the foremen of the tops. It had been one of the most exhilarating moments of his life, even if also terrifying. Halfway through his painful climb up the ratlines, he had felt them vibrating and stopped to wonder what was making that happen. Then he realised that it was the shaking of his knees, reverberating up and down the rope-web as if it were a plucked lute string. He took a deep breath, tried to settle himself. The futtock-shrouds had been the worst part: up went the foreman of the tops, hand over hand, hanging backwards like a monkey and Simon had followed in a terrified scramble and hung panting on the next set of ratlines while the crewman humiliated him by tying him on with a rope and patted his shoulder.

  The platform of the fighting top seemed to be going round and round in circles as Simon clung on, but the sea all round … the wind … He had looked down at Rebecca, staring up at him white-faced, laughed and waved, somehow illogically cheered by her terror. Then he had clambered back down to the deck so she could scold him.

  He had promised himself he would not think of Rebecca and yet he did, constantly. He assumed she had been arrested, the Almighty have mercy on her, probably tortured as he had been. It would be worse for her; she was only a woman, she knew so much less of the world, even though she was a mother and seemed to carry out a great deal of her father’s business, she still appeared fragile to him. She had terrified him when she was so ill. He had been sure she would die like her tiring-maid and leave him completely bereft …

  He had lived perfectly happily without women for many years, visited by the occasional succubus in his sleep, but never really missing them. Unlike Becket, he had never felt the need to risk his health and wits by visiting the whores in the South Bank stews. He had not been so very disappointed when Rebecca turned him down the first time, when he had still been serving the Queen and Walsingham as an inquisitor and pursuivant of Catholic priests. Later he had been very shocked when she had made it known to him through his aunt, Leonora Nunez that now he had left the Queen’s service, she would consider his suit. As Aunt Leonora had pointed out, she was allowed to be imperious since she was the only child of a very rich merchant, and if the match could possibly be made it would be an excellent one.

  Aunt Leonora had swung into action before he was fully recovered of the lungfever, a fact Simon occasionally thought suspicious. They had not known each other at all, apart from two very formal meetings, before they stood under the marriage tent. On their marriage night he had been too tense and too drunk to do more than carefully consummate his marriage with a delicate, fawnlike creature he could hardly believe really belonged to him. Only gradually had they come to know each other.

  When had he first understood what was the matter with him, this strange sickness that attacked him with hollowness under his ribs and all the way up his back whenever he spent a day without her? She had seemed interested in the riddles of the stars which fascinated him and he had instructed her in the new ideas of Copernicus, through the Englishing of Thomas Digges. She had listened and questioned him and he had discovered that she could read, which impressed him. She had asked him resepectfully if he knew Cabbala, which was when he had first thought of studying it. But she was no bluestocking. She had quietly winnowed out of his wardrobe the clothes that made him feel uncomfortable and then restocked it with clothes that somehow magically made him seem taller and less spindly. She asked his advice when she dealt with the household accounts and never minded when he corrected her arithmetic, was even willing to learn the Arab notation from him, which Aunt Leonora felt was quite unsuitable for a woman.

  Was it on the morning she brought him peaches in bed, and knelt in her smock, cutting up a peach and peeling it and eating it with such slow, teasing relish he had simply pushed her back so her head lay in the dark pool of her own hair and pleasured them both until they cried out. Or was it the night she screamed and worked as he gnawed his fingers downstairs in the kitchen, terrified that she would die as Agnes Fant had died, to give him a son? Or when she lost her temper with the wet-nurse for leaving the baby in wet swaddling clothes and punched the woman so hard she fell downstairs. That had been annoying but when Rebecca showed him the poor little creature’s red buttocks he felt she had been quite gentle really.

  Or did he truly fall in love with his wife by slow increments on every Sabbath when they lit the candles together and her skin took the candle glow and her hair became suddenly red like fire-embers…?

  Simon sighed, turned over on the bench, wished for a less hairy hairshirt and a warmer blanket, but then tutted at himself seeing they could have had him quite naked if they wanted, even though it seemed to upset them so.

  Poor Rebecca. What would they…?

  Surely they would have shown her to him by now if they had her? Surely? Perhaps they didn’t?

  He was fooling himself. They must have her. Whoever had betrayed him would certainly have betrayed her as well. When he carefully chose a drunk for a chaplain, it hadn’t occurred to him that even drunks were sometimes sober and it was hard to know when
that happened.

  He would think about his children who were safe with their doting grandfather; certainly they would miss him and their mother, but they loved the girl who had replaced the first wet-nurse, they loved their grandfather and the Queen would never vent her wrath on children. Of that he was completely certain.

  The only pity of it was, what with casting up accounts and writing letters and studying Cabbala and so on, Simon had seen very little of his children.

  There was the important moment when his son had first sat on a pony and …

  For a moment the clattering came to him as the bridle and shoes of the nippy little beast he had bought for his son, but it was the door being unlocked and opened. Simon sat up a little, shaded his eyes from the torch.

  They had a penitent’s shirt for him, painted with lurid scenes of Calvary and martyrdom and hell, which frightened him. Would they burn him after all? They had him put it on over the hairshirt and then chained him and hustled him along black passageways, then into blinding sunlight that made his eyes run with tears after so long in the dark.

  He had no idea where they were going because he couldn’t see, but at last they came to a large, cool, marble building. He was ordered to sit on a marble bench and sat examining the complex Moorish patterns in the inlay on the walls, watching as black-robed priests and friars and lawyers and their serving men hustled to and fro. From the Hapsburg crest on the wall, he thought the Holy Office had referred him to the secular arm; this was a judicial building, at a quiet time. It was almost pleasant to sit and watch them, listening to his belly growling, watching his toes twiddle in the sandals they had given him. If he sat very still, the hairshirt didn’t itch as much. At last there were orders and the clashing of halberds. He was hustled into a tall stately room where a weary-looking man in a judge’s robes sat behind a high desk. Señor Pasquale stood behind another desk, his face drawn and pale.