Her Last Assassin

by Victoria Lamb

  ‘And no one suspects?’

  ‘No one has come near enough to suspect, except for Mistress Hall, who accompanies me outside sometimes. And she merely thinks I have grown fat and sloth-like through over-indulgence,’ Lucy whispered, then lovingly stroked her swollen belly, ‘though it cannot be long before even she sees the truth.’

  ‘Does Master Goodluck know? He is the father, is he not?’

  ‘He is the father, yes. But I have not told him this. How could I? He might make some desperate attempt to be with me, or else to have me released, and I do not wish him to endanger himself.’ Lucy smiled, thinking of her absent lover. ‘He is such a good man, Cathy. The best man I have ever known.’

  ‘Lucy, I cannot imagine how you have suffered, alone in this place and concealing such a secret, even from the child’s father.’

  ‘It has not been so very hard as I feared,’ Lucy mused. ‘I have always enjoyed solitude, and although I dislike the unvarying confinement of this little room, I have grown to prefer my isolation to the perils of court life. Here at least I am safe from plots and counter-plots, from the many subtle intrigues that seemed to dog my steps at the Queen’s side. And so long as Goodluck is at liberty, I shall be at peace with myself. Though I admit that it has not always been easy, concealing my condition from those who guard me here.’

  The early days had been the worst, arriving at the Tower with the faintest nagging suspicion that she might be with child. Bouts of nausea had followed in those first weeks away from court, her sickness hard to conceal from her jailor. She had lied, saying she was unhappy and could not face her food because of the injustice of being imprisoned.

  In a way, it had been true. Early that summer, she had indeed been pining for Goodluck; as the days and weeks passed, she had grown resigned to her fate. The mere fact of his freedom gave her pleasure, and although her heart ached that she had been forced to betray Shakespeare in order to obtain Goodluck’s release, she could not be wholly angry with herself for telling what she knew. Lord Essex would not have wished to risk a scandal at court over his friend Southampton’s nature, so he could not have openly attacked Shakespeare. To her mind, the affair would have been quelled with more subtlety than that, perhaps with a warning or a threat. Nor had she heard anything of trouble for Will in the occasional gossip brought to her by the Tower servants, the shy girls who brought the food and laid the fire for her. The theatres had been reopened after the summer plague, and one of the girls had been taken by her uncle to a new play by William Shakespeare at the Cross Keys Inn.

  It seemed that Will had not unduly suffered for her letter to Essex, and Goodluck was free. What was there to regret?

  Later in the summer, grown too large and clumsy to make her way easily down the narrow winding stair to the yard below, she had claimed ill-health and refused to walk outside each day at the allotted hour. Mistress Hall had argued bitterly over this refusal, swearing that river air was beneficial to the health of all prisoners in the Tower. But her jailor had given up when the first winds of autumn came, and allowed Lucy to remain inside without protest. Now that she had a companion, though, she would doubtless be expected to walk outside again. And her swollen belly would be more visible in the cold light of an October morning.

  Cathy took her hands, kneeling by her side. ‘My dear friend, my mistress, will you listen to me for once and hear sense?’

  ‘Speak and I will listen,’ Lucy told her softly, though she was still thinking of the child within her.

  Goodluck’s child. Their child. She could not help remembering the poor dead babe they had brought stillborn from her womb after her fall at the Parkers’ house. A boy, and so perfectly formed, yet tiny. Too tiny to live in this harsh world. Every day she put a hand on her belly, whispering to the unseen child within her, and prayed to God that this one might live, son or daughter, to grow up strong and meet its father.

  ‘It will not be possible to conceal your condition much longer,’ Cathy began gently, ‘and you do not want the Queen to hear of it from the Constable of the Tower, as a secret brought to light by that awful woman Hall. Trust me, that would do you greater harm than if you made the admission now and of your own free will. Let me fetch you paper and ink, and you can write to the Queen tonight.’

  ‘The Queen?’

  ‘No, hear me out. You promised that you would. If you confess your sin, throwing yourself on her royal mercy, the Queen may soften and permit you to marry Master Goodluck before the babe is born.’

  Lucy considered her friend’s suggestion for a moment. ‘But when my condition is known, Master Goodluck may be punished again for … for this miracle,’ she whispered, touching her belly.

  ‘Maybe so. But better to risk further punishment now than face it later, when it is too late and the babe is born out of wedlock.’ Cathy made a face. ‘Remember, I was in the same position when I was carrying James. We had to marry with a child in my womb, and his mother never let me forget the shame of it. But how much better to face that humiliation now, than for your child to be born into it. Do what I suggest,’ she urged Lucy, kissing her hands. ‘Write to the Queen and admit your shame. Take this last risk and see what it brings you.’

  To marry Goodluck, to be his wife at last. It was a temptation. But there were greater things at stake here besides her own happiness and the future of their child.

  ‘I will write to the Queen and beg for clemency,’ she agreed slowly, ‘but not yet. Give me a few more days in which to consider what to say.’

  She smiled at her companion. It was strange to be so comfortable in her presence again. Yet despite the betrayal between them, it felt almost as though Cathy had never been away. They were still firm friends, regardless of the horrors of the past year. Now at last she had someone to confide in, and would no longer need to pace the room at night, her heart almost bursting with all the secrets it had to keep.

  ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘in the last note I received from Goodluck, he indicated to me that he was working in disguise, watching a man for Lord Essex. If his mission is interrupted too soon, it may endanger the Queen’s life.’

  Three

  A MAN WAS BEING dragged away as Goodluck was brought into the Tower cell where Topcliffe enacted his interrogations. He averted his eyes from the barely conscious victim, stripped to raw flesh and unable to walk, all the fingernails ripped off his right hand and both his knees crushed in some mangling device, leaving a bloodied mess of lacerated skin behind. He understood the necessity for torture when the information to be garnered was of vital importance to the state. When it was merely a matter of determining a man’s faith, however, the agonies inflicted were too barbarous to be Christian.

  The cell was large, holding a rack and an iron cage as well as other implements of torture he recognized: long-handled irons thrust into the red-hot heart of a brazier, a high bar on the wall where a man could hang for hours until his arms were wrenched loose from their sockets, a leather whip, a small bundle of birch twigs for tormenting the feet, pincers to remove finger- and toenails, and a variety of smaller tools laid out on a rough board, their use thankfully unknown to Goodluck.

  Topcliffe perused the letter from Lord Essex, then dismissed the guard who had brought him. Alone in the cell, the two men looked at each other in silence.

  Slowly, Topcliffe walked around Goodluck, sizing him up as though considering how he would fit on the wall chains or the rack. His eyes gleamed with malice. ‘I remember you, Master Goodluck. I remember all the men who have been brought before me. As I recall, you were strong. But not strong enough to resist the hot irons.’

  ‘I am not here to be tortured this time,’ Goodluck reminded him. ‘Only to persuade a Portuguese spy to trust me. He will follow soon. We may not have much time.’

  ‘If we are to convince this man you are in the pay of the Spanish, it will not be enough to chain you up and crack a whip in your direction. You must be made to bleed a little.’

  Goodluck could see the sense
in that, though his skin crept at the look on Topcliffe’s face. ‘A very little, perhaps,’ he agreed.

  He glanced at the implements laid out on the side tables, many still bloodied from their last victim. He felt sick at the thought of being subjected to any of them, but could see that his chances of success depended on making this look real.

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  Topcliffe fingered the whip, glancing at Goodluck speculatively. ‘There is this.’

  ‘I thank you, no. Something that will do less harm, yet still bloody me enough to suggest a night of torture at your hands.’

  The Queen’s interrogator hesitated over the smaller implements, then selected one, a narrow coil of metal lined with tiny sharp teeth and topped with a stout wooden handle. This fearsome-looking tool he shoved into the glowing brazier.

  ‘Strip off your shirt,’ he instructed Goodluck. Once he was bare-chested, Topcliffe secured him to the damp cell wall, fastening metal cuffs about his wrists. ‘Now you are my prisoner.’

  Topcliffe removed the toothed coil from the red-hot brazier, then approached Goodluck. Close enough that Goodluck could smell his foul breath, Topcliffe rolled the coil slowly down his chest and belly, searing his skin, pressing so deep that the metal teeth tore into his flesh with every cruel rotation.

  When the coil reached his lower belly, digging into the tender flesh there, Goodluck uttered a cry and jerked instinctively against his restraints, though he had promised himself not to show any weakness.

  Topcliffe smiled, removing the metal coil from his flesh. ‘My own invention. You admire it? If you were in truth a suspected traitor, the metal teeth would be heated in the fire until they were red-hot. Then you would be stripped completely, so that I could continue lower, tearing into your groin and thighs. That is when most men break down, begging to make their confession instead.’

  ‘I can readily believe it,’ Goodluck managed from between gritted teeth.

  Laying the implement aside, Topcliffe ran an exploratory hand over Goodluck’s chest and belly. He probed the deepest holes with his fingers, as though taking pleasure in his suffering. Which no doubt he was.

  ‘I do this for your own good, for you have not been tortured enough for a suspected spy.’ Having cruelly plumbed his wounds, the interrogator rubbed bloodied fingers back and forth across Goodluck’s face. ‘There, that looks better.’

  Topcliffe turned away, and began to write something in a volume that lay open on one of the tables. A note of his torturings, no doubt. Goodluck closed his eyes and tried to ignore the pain across his chest and belly. The injuries were neither deep nor life-threatening. The dozens of holes stung as they bled, however, and he could only hope there would be no infection.

  Soon there was the sound of footsteps in the corridor. Topcliffe laid down his quill.

  ‘It seems your friend has arrived. Shall we make this look more convincing?’ He plucked up a short bundle of twigs from the assortment of whips and scourges on the table, then added mildly, ‘Perhaps a few cries and oaths to promote the illusion?’

  The birch twigs were applied brutally and repeatedly to his bare chest. This was no illusion, Goodluck thought grimly. He cried out with genuine pain, and dragged on the rattling chains that bound him to the wall. Topcliffe continued to birch him as the cell door was flung open, each stroke hard enough to break his skin, a look of malicious amusement in the interrogator’s face.

  ‘Enough, enough!’ Goodluck called out hoarsely in Spanish, and meant it. ‘In the name of our sweet Saviour, I swear that I have told you all I know.’

  Two guards stood in the doorway, with Gomez between them, his wrists and ankles chained together, then linked to a rope about his waist. The Portuguese spy looked terrified as his small darting eyes took in the cell with its horrific implements of torture, then its unfortunate prisoner, his chest bare and bloodied, who had cried out in Spanish as he entered. Finally his gaze turned to the interrogator, clad in a leather apron stained with the blood of many victims.

  ‘Save thy miserable servant, O Lord Jesus!’ Gomez muttered, and clumsily attempted to cross himself, though his hands were chained together.

  Topcliffe threw down the birch twigs and turned away, as though no longer interested in Goodluck.

  On his way out, he spoke briefly to the guards in the doorway. ‘A new prisoner for me to interrogate? Take him to a cell until I have time to deal with him. It is late, I have finished for the night. And you may put this other Catholic wretch in with him. The spy has said little, but the rack should loosen his tongue tomorrow.’

  To his shame, Goodluck felt his knees buckle beneath him when the guard unchained him from the wall.

  ‘For show,’ Topcliffe had said, but Goodluck knew the Queen’s interrogator would happily have continued with that flogging until half the skin was flayed from his body. At least his bloodied appearance and unfeigned cries of pain seemed to have had the desired effect on Gomez d’Avila.

  The man said nothing further, but there was an air of terror to his silence which told Goodluck his performance had been credible. Still, it would take rather more than a few bloodied cuts to wring a confession out of this close-mouthed spy.

  Left alone with Gomez, he wasted no time but groaned, clasping his head in his hands. ‘What a fool I was,’ Goodluck muttered in Spanish, rocking back and forth as though he had lost his wits, ‘to think I could succeed in tricking the English court. They are demons!’

  Gomez watched in silence for a while. The chains binding his hands had been removed on entering the cell, but his ankles were still fastened together, hobbling him. The Portuguese spy had therefore settled himself on the damp floor of the cell, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up. Although he was clearly in fear of his life, Goodluck could tell that he was wary and would not easily be deceived.

  When Gomez finally spoke, it was with a note of deep suspicion in his voice. ‘Señor,’ he replied carefully in Spanish, ‘I think perhaps I know you. Were you at Nieuwpoort in the Low Countries with the English knight Stanley and his men?’

  Raising his head in mock surprise, Goodluck stared back at him. ‘Yes, friend, I was indeed,’ he said, trusting Gomez would not recall he had been posing as a Dutchman. ‘What, were you there too?’

  The man hesitated, still frowning, then nodded.

  ‘And now you have come to these ungodly shores, the English have arrested you, just as they did me?’

  Again, Gomez nodded, but said nothing.

  ‘Do you see what they have done to me?’ Goodluck indicated his bloodied chest. ‘I was charged by Stanley to bring a secret message from him to a gentleman in England, for the señor knew I spoke a little of his filthy tongue. But I was arrested at Sandwich and charged with conspiring with the Queen’s enemies, and then they tortured me. Nor is my ordeal over. Tomorrow I shall be returned to their man Topcliffe, who will all but squeeze the life out of me with his torturing ways before I am taken to be executed.’

  His companion stayed silent, but there was sympathy in his face. Goodluck spoke of more trivial matters after that. The poor food he had been served, more like pig slops than pottage, the cruelty of the English guards, and the stench of human ordure about the place. Eventually Gomez began to relax, even passing a few comments himself.

  ‘So what is your sin, señor?’ Goodluck asked casually. ‘Or is it merely the taint of foreign blood that makes you a criminal? For I recall from my days in Nieuwpoort that you are not Spanish, but Portuguese. These English would hang a man for not speaking their tongue!’

  Gomez muttered, ‘I was to have carried a letter from Flanders to a man here, but I was arrested at the docks. There is nothing else to tell.’

  ‘May the holy Virgin spare you from their interrogator Topcliffe, then. For I have been tortured and scourged, and if I say nothing upon the rack, Topcliffe says I shall be pressed inside a box loaded with spikes. When the lid of this box is shut upon me, the spikes will pierce my skin all over my body. A
nd if it does not pierce my heart and pop my eyeballs out, I shall be dragged behind a cart to their Tyburn Hill, and there strung aloft. But even then my suffering will not be at an end, for I shall be cut down while still alive, then quartered by the executioner, my heart dragged still beating out of my chest, and my severed head stuck on a pike for all men to jeer at.’

  Gomez listened to this horrific description of what lay ahead of him. ‘It was a fearsome chamber,’ he agreed, and there was sweat on his forehead now. ‘That evil man …’

  ‘Topcliffe,’ Goodluck supplied helpfully. He spat on the floor in a venomous manner. ‘He is the Protestant Queen’s chief interrogator. They say Topcliffe hates us Catholics so much, he takes the greatest pleasure in his work and makes us suffer more than other men. Some even say …’ He hesitated, then shook his head. ‘No, I cannot speak of it. It is too horrible.’

  ‘W-what?’ Gomez stammered. ‘Tell me what this horror is, for the love of God.’

  ‘They say he inflicts unnatural practices on Catholics,’ he whispered, looking up and meeting Gomez’s horrified gaze with mock shame. ‘Male or female, it makes no odds to him. So far he has not touched me in that way. I swear to you, if he does that tomorrow, I will beg the fiend for death rather than commit a sin against God.’

  The man was terrified in earnest now. ‘And you say that if we betray our masters … he will not …’

  ‘So they claim.’ Goodluck shrugged. ‘But I have nothing more to tell, so my case is hopeless. You should save yourself the worst, though. There is no shame in begging for mercy. But come, let us pray together.’

  His companion nodded slowly, and raised a hand to cross himself, trembling. ‘Christ have pity on my soul.’

  Goodluck hushed him as a guard passed close by their door, his face suddenly apprehensive. Then he bent his head. ‘Dear Lord in heaven, if I had known I was going to my death when I bore that letter to Senhor Lopez, I swear that—’

  ‘Senhor Lopez?’ his companion repeated, startled into betraying himself by the mention of this name. ‘But that is the very man … That is to say, I was to bear a message to Lopez too.’