Paul Doherty - The Grail Murders

Somewhere a single drum began to beat. The yeoman began to push the crowd back, allowing us a better view of what was to happen. Buckingham once more knelt at the feet of the priest. The executioner then knelt to him, asking the Duke for the usual pardon as well as the customary fee. (I can never understand that! How can someone say they are sorry, then cut your bloody head off and, at the same time, ask to be paid for it? Many years later, when I was taken to the block, I told the bastard to piss off and do his worst!)

At last Buckingham knelt down before the block. A servant bound his hair up but the Duke shook his head when a blindfold was offered. He bowed and slightly turned his head, his hands spread out, moving them once like a stricken bird before it falls. The drum beat grew louder, the two-headed axe rose in a brilliant arc and fell with a thud which sounded like a clap of thunder. A bright spurt of blood shot up. The crowd, hitherto deathly silent, gave a collective sigh at the blood letting and the dwarfs beneath the scaffold became busy. The executioner held up Buckingham's head and came to the edge of the scaffold. 'So die all traitors!' he shouted. I looked away. Benjamin had his back turned. 'So die all traitors!' the executioner repeated. 'Oh, piss off!' a voice shouted.

'You've got the wrong bloody head,' another bellowed. 'It should be the butcher's son's!'

Raucous jeers mounted as the scaffold began to be pelted with rotten fruit and offal. Soldiers began to move in and the crowd broke up. 'Come on, Agrippa!' Benjamin hissed. The magician shook himself and looked around. 'Yes, yes, it's time we went.'

We forced our way down Tower Hill following the wall until we entered the fortress by the Water Gate. (Ah, my chaplain interrupts. Yes, yes, my little sweet is correct. Later generations call this 'Traitors' Gate' – and what a procession went through it! Anne Boleyn, defiant to the last; Thomas More cracking jokes; John Fisher praying; Catherine Howard jeering at Henry's sexual prowess. Oh, by the way, she was right, it wasn't much! I danced between the sheets with young Kate and we roared with laughter at Henry's antics. She was killed and I went to the block but that's another story.)

Inside the Tower soldiers and yeomen were now standing down, having manned the walls and gathered behind the sally ports just in case there was a riot. Led by Agrippa, we wound down between the different towers until we reached the Wakefield – what the popular voice now calls the 'Bloody Tower'. 'Come!' Agrippa ordered.

We opened an iron-studded door at the basement of the Bloody Tower and walked into a windowless chamber lit only by smoking cressets wedged between the bricks. At first I couldn't see clearly and all I could hear was the murmur of voices and the creaking of ropes, but then my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. I heard my master gasp and, peering through the gloom, made out the sweat-soaked, half-naked figures of the torturers, grouped round the 'Duke of Exeter's Daughter', a popular name for the rack ever since the Duke of Exeter introduced it into England as a means of loosening tongues and getting to the truth – as politicians so aptly put it.

The poor man stretched there was naked except for a loin cloth. I glimpsed wispy white hair and a thin, emaciated figure stretched out on this bed of pain, a foot and a hand being tied at each corner. The torturers manned a wheel and, when they turned this, the bed stretched, cracking bone, muscle and sinew.

Agrippa, hidden in the shadows, beckoned the master torturer across. The fellow, greasy-haired and with a straggly beard, lumbered over like some great bear. His naked torso glistening with sweat, his threadbare hose pushed into boots were similarly soaked. Nevertheless, he was a man who obviously loved his job for he smiled cheerily through his tangle of beard. 'No news yet, Master.' 'Nothing new?' Agrippa asked. 'Only what he said before.'

'How long will he last?' Agrippa asked, still keeping well 4n the shadows whilst Benjamin and I stared fearfully at this dreadful scene. Believe me, if you wish to see hell on earth then watch a man being racked till his arms and legs pop out of their sockets, the torso grows longer and the privy parts become ruptured. Once I was forced to watch the torture of Nicholas Owen, the poor Jesuit lay brother who built the priest's hole in my house and others up and down the kingdom. A crafty, subtle carpenter was poor Owen. He was racked until his body fell apart; they had to hold it together with steel plates so that they could take him out and hang him. Lord, what a cruel world we live in! I fainted at the torture inflicted on Owen but, when I saw Master Hopkins, I stood like a rabbit terrified by a stoat.

'Do you think,' Agrippa asked quietly, 'Master Hopkins knows anything?'

'Yes and no,' the torturer replied. 'But he won't tell us. He is near death, Master. There's not much time left now.' Agrippa led us back into the daylight. 'Stay here!' he ordered.

He went up the main steps of the Bloody Tower and came back with a bundle of clothes in his hand, afterwards re-entering the torture chamber. Benjamin and I stood like two school boys dismissed from their classroom. 'What now, Master?' I asked.

'Hush!' he whispered. 'All we are being shown, Roger, are the opening scenes. I am sure sweetest Uncle will tell us the plot of the play.' He waved a hand at the door to the torture chamber. 'I cannot abide such cruelty! Hopkins may well be a traitor but there's no need for this.'

The grass was still wet after the rainstorm so he led me across to a wooden bench next to a small paved square.

'Do you know, Roger,' he muttered when we took our seats, 'common law in England forbids such torture?'

(Well, I could have burst out laughing, and still do at the memory, for Fat Henry, the evil bastard, believed in torturing everyone. When he wanted to send his second queen to the scaffold, the musician Mark Smeaton was tortured until he confessed to adultery with her, being promised a swift death if he implicated poor Anne.)

I looked at the square pavement beside me and noticed a small dull stain in the centre. 'What is this, Master?'

Benjamin shuffled his feet. 'This is where princes die, Roger,' he murmured. 'When the person is too important to be a spectacle for the mob, a scaffold's set up here and the head lopped off.'

Strange, isn't it? There was I sitting next to the place where Anne Boleyn, who hired her own executioner from Calais, later put her neck on the block, as did poor Catherine Howard who spent the night before her death practising her poise for the execution stroke. Here died poor Tom More, old Fisher, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury and her three sons. Ah, well!

Benjamin was lost in his own thoughts so I gazed round, half-wondering what might happen to us, when a cart entered the inner bailey bearing a plain wooden coffin. The two waggoners were cursing and laughing between themselves. 'What do you carry, friends?' I asked. The men smiled at each other, got down and hobbled the horses.

'Half the Earl of Stafford!' one of them quipped. He saw the look of stupefaction on my face. 'Well, the head's on London Bridge!' the fellow continued. 'And the rest-' He gestured towards the small, grey stone church of St Peter ad Vincula, the Tower chapel. 'The rest will go beneath the stones like all the others.'

He turned away as an officer and a group of soldiers hurried up to carry the loose-lidded coffin out of the cart and along the gravel path into the darkening chapel. A strange place, St Peter's! All the corpses of men and women executed on Tower Hill or Tower Green lie buried there. Now few people know this but, beneath the chapel, runs a secret passageway or gallery and, years later, I had to hide there. What a dreadful sight! The floor under the chapel awash with headless bodies, all dressed in the glittering rags in which they died. The coffins were simple and soon fell apart so I crawled across the skeletons of Lord Hastings, Anne Boleyn, the de la Poles, Catherine Howard and Thomas Cromwell. (A cunning bastard! I was one of those who arrested him after he had dinner in the Tower.)