Rotten at the Heart

by Bartholomew Daniels

  “I know you, Shakespeare,” he said. “For I did see you perform many times when I still had use of my legs.”

  I smiled back. “And how do you rate my performance?”

  “Your finest, sir,” he said. “For I have never before been paid to watch theatre.”

  CHAPTER 29

  “Any news of Mary?” I had met Carey’s coach at the appointed location, and he quizzed me as we made way to Topcliffe’s house.

  Now that I cared more deep for truth, I found its nature more troubling. The truth of Mary was plain enough, and I could relay it easy and in seeming clear conscience. For I had sought that truth in Carey’s service and so did seem to owe it to him in debt to that service, or to his patronage, or even as he had late saved my life. What is more, I believed Carey honourable – or at least a man who made effort to be.

  Yet, now knowing the truth of Mary, I felt the weight of its consequence heavy in my hands. I could share it with Carey plain and hope to convince him that she seemed only a small tool in this plot, already ill-used, and that she deserved no further injury. But I feared that he would have the matter more fully exposed, and that not only Mary but also her small and secret congregation would likely then suffer dire and to no purpose, but, still, at my hands. My mind flashed to the baker and his wife and their happy home and shop, all at peril because I had wandered to their door. I pictured them at Tyburn, the ropes around their necks, them then hoisted high. And I decided quick that such flag of truth as I might serve could not be woven from innocent flesh flapping at the end of a hangman’s ropes.

  “What news I’ve had seems say she is but a girl, and full innocent in nature,” I said. “I fear any attention more toward her is attention away from those hands true stained with guilt.”

  Carey nodded. “Though my company with her was small, that was my sense, too. But the matter of our ill-nosed fellow may have yielded more fruit.”

  “If it be such fruit as we must harvest from Topcliffe, then it is not such fruit as is happy in my diet.”

  Carey nodded. “Topcliffe is like unto a fierce dog that you might trust to savage any that cross unwelcome onto your estate, but a beast whose savaging is a matter of hellish appetites, not of loyal service. And so you employ the beast and feed the beast but never full trust it – that dog never admitted in evening to lie by your fire and keep your company with the steady and loyal affection for which dogs are known. Instead, it is kept chained out of doors, where its dreams are as like to be of your throat as of any other.”

  “And yet we make our way to his kennel,” I said.

  Carey nodded. “As you suggested, I asked some close in congress with the players in this Somerset scheme whether they have knowledge of a man similar in description to our late assailant, making particular note of his much injured nose. They answered unanimous no, but news of my inquiry reached Topcliffe, who sent word we should have his congress on the matter.”

  “Such word being passed to him by some agent in his service?”

  “It seems little happens in London to which he is not quick made privy,” Carey said.

  I watched for a moment out the coach’s door. The city passed at such speed I usually would have envied, making my way most often afoot, but I wished now instead to be on foot so as to slow our progress. Or, in truth, to be in this coach, but headed away from, instead of toward, Topcliffe’s door.

  “To be true,” I said, “I much fear this meeting and could easy have lived happy had Topcliffe never made my company.”

  Carey grunted. “If it makes your mind any more at ease, your name likely is already full known to him – as the Puritans attempting to use the Queen’s instruments to further their religious ends constant seek his inquiry into supposed Papist or Spanish plots they believe are hatched among your kind, theatre being always included in those devilish ills they think put our fair kingdom at Satan’s use. At least now it will be known to him in my service.”

  The coach slowed and then stopped, and I could hear the driver stepping down to come and open our doors.

  “That is not the type of ease my mind imagined,” I said.

  “Are you surprised to find so plain this chamber that is the subject of so much myth?” Topcliffe asked, ushering us into his lair.

  On entering his home, after only quick introduction, he suggested that, as our talk would involve his art, we hold our discussions in that room where his art was practised. He thus ushered us down a narrow stairway to a cellar room. The stones of the room’s walls had been well smoothed and then whitewashed, the floor, too, being stone and smooth. There was no window, but only the door through which we entered: heavy oak, banded with iron, so that, once it was closed, the room was sealed entire. A single chair of heavy but complex construction sat fastened fast to the stone floor in the centre of the room and facing the far wall, along which ran a long table on which sat a series of chests. To the left were three simple chairs and a small table hosting a claret jug, three cups, and a plate of cheeses. Topcliffe motioned theatrically to the chairs.

  Every monster, in our imagining, exceeds its true form. I don’t know how I had pictured Topcliffe – huge and heavily muscled, perhaps. Or maybe lean and pale with a hawkish face. But instead he was short, old, soft, almost feminine in his aspect, an air he seemed conscious to emphasise in his foppish dress and his lisping speech so that, at first, I was some amused to credit him such evil that had haunted my thoughts since I had first learned of this meeting. And yet slow that same manner did begin to feel as a disease, as if it bore some pestilent strength that the healthy could not recognise, as if the sibilance of his talking by some charm eroded my will.

  Us all seated, Topcliffe poured a measure of the wine into each cup and then offered a smile that slithered across his face like Eve’s snake. “I shall let you each choose your vessel, as I find those in my company too oft suspect that I will try by guile to practise on them some vile art.”

  Carey reached direct for the cup closest him, took it and drank a long measure, and in doing so partly broke that spell Topcliffe seemed so easy to cast on me. I did the same and Topcliffe, making his serpent’s smile, reached toward his own cup, but then instead took a piece of cheese.

  “We are here at your invitation, sir,” Carey said, “as your note indicated you might offer some insight into the matter of this man by whom we were late attacked.”

  “In good time,” Topcliffe said. “I so rarely have chance to entertain guests save those who make use of that other chair,” he nodded toward the construction in the middle of the room, “and so I’m afraid I will impose on your good graces first to converse.” He finished his cheese and then drank from his cup, and looked at me direct. “You never answered my question.”

  “Question?” I asked.

  “Concerning the room. Are you surprised at its nature?”

  “I am,” I answered. “I did picture it arrayed with larger engines of your art, of varied and horrible design.”

  “A rack at least, I would have thought,” said Carey.

  Topcliffe drew his hands together in a soft clap, and then squeezed them, beaming. “Precisely,” he said with some excitement. “And so the room seems less horrible than you imagined?”

  “Much less,” said Carey.

  “And so enters in hope,” Topcliffe answered. “It is hope, and not pain, that is the lever of truth.” He turned toward me. “Shakespeare, you could not know this – as I do keep my activities secret so to serve the common fears that I might be anywhere at any time – but I make pains to attend the theatre, and think you and I have similar knowings in our divergent arts.”

  “How so, sir?”

  “When you tell a tale, does it serve your art well to tell it direct so that its object and endings are in plain but distant sight from the first, merely growing closer and clearer as the story progresses?”

  I shook my head. “That idea suits the human mind, for it is our desire always to have clear known to us what we may. Bu
t stories must learn from nature’s way of things. The way a river will, at its start, its power being small, meander in the path that least resists it. It becomes some straighter as it gathers its waters and their force but even so being subject to some turning. In the end, it will to the sea, as all rivers must, but I will have the audience take that full journey before the story finds its home.”

  “Exactly,” Topcliffe said, seeming pleased with my answer. “And what do I do in this room but help others to tell their stories? Just as every river must to the sea, every story here must, eventually, to the truth. But my authors hold jealous their truths and would have me believe other, and so I must, too, take them through such meandering journeys by which they understand the primal nature that controls the flow of their story so that the water of their truth might final be reunited with its brethren. For is not all truth of God’s sea and in his service? And so I collect for God such truths as have wandered into the use of the Papists and his other enemies.”

  Topcliffe got up and walked to the elaborate chair in the room’s centre. “Some men come subject to my ministrations having in their own imaginings made such horrors that I need only ask and all is revealed.” He turned back to me. “And so, Shakespeare, men such as you with minds that can ready create do usually resist my efforts least, as they have the wit to discern the story’s inevitable end and have already in their own minds suffered such twists and turns in it as are beyond even my capacity to create. They do my work for me in advance in the nightmares of their own beds and reach my company full ripe.

  “But there are others,” he turned now to Carey, “who are blessed not with a creative mind, but instead one hard in will and courage. Them I must lead on this full journey so that they can see that such truths as they think their own are not theirs to possess, but rather waters from God’s sea of truth that were theirs to carry for some time only and that they must now release into the river of my story so that these truths may again find their righteous home.”

  “I had not imagined so much philosophy in your arts,” said Carey. “I had supposed it a simple thing to cause a man pain.”

  Topcliffe shook his head as though a master disappointed in his pupil. “As I told you, my instrument is hope, not pain.”

  Carey looked about the plain stone room. “I see no hope here.”

  Topcliffe raised a finger. “But you forget your expectations. You had said you did expect a rack at least. So, what if you were now here, but as my prisoner and not as my guest? While you do not have Shakespeare’s gift for imagining, you would of course have contemplated on such that you might expect at my hands. And so your mind would turn to those instruments common ascribed to this practice – the rack, the wheel, perhaps some boiling cauldron. And you would attach your fears to those objects and so have steeled yourself to resist them. But arriving here, you would see none of them. None of those things of which you had been most afraid. And in that moment, you would have hope. And you would be strapped into this chair feeling stronger than you had been even at the door to this room.”

  Topcliffe pulled down on the back of the chair, and through some elaborate design of hinges and joints, the chair became instead a kind of table – now lying flat at the height of Topcliffe’s waist, the wings of the chair to which the victim’s arms would be secured having swung out so that any strapped to it would now lay supine and spread beneath him.

  “This would be your first lesson,” Topcliffe said. “That which you thought a chair – in which, while bound, you might at least sit in something like dignity – is instead the table on which you will suffer, full spread, any indignity I might inflict. And you understand even in that instant, there being no pain in it, that nothing in this room is what it seems, but is instead what I will it to be. And so I do offer first the false hope that this room holds fewer terrors than my subjects imagine, and then replace that hope with the knowledge that it holds whatever evils I might conjure.”

  Carey scoffed. “Such tricks might play hard on a mind as supple as dear Shakespeare’s, but I’m afraid you would find me little moved. Coming here, I would have steeled myself for torture, not for tricks with your furnishings.”

  “Little moved to be sure,” Topcliffe said. “But little is all I need. You mentioned the rack. You know how this works, of course? The victim placed upon it, both wrists and ankles bound to its engine, and then the cranks turned so that he is stretched, first to his normal limits, and then beyond them to his pain, and in final to such degree as his joints are sundered?”

  Carey nodded. “I know of it.”

  “You are a soldier, yes?”

  “I am.”

  “And so you have seen such horrors as might befall a man in battle?”

  “I have.”

  “And who suffers more? A man so cleaved as has no chance to live, but instead spends whatever few minutes his mortal wound takes to claim him, or a man more lightly injured, perhaps pierced through but in such location as may not prove fatal, or perhaps slashed deep but not mortally?”

  “The less injured man usually suffers more, for such wounds as prove mortal often seem to shock the body into a kind of stupor. Methinks, perhaps, it is a small grace God grants to those so afflicted so that they can keep their wits sufficient to make their final peace instead of being mad with pain.”

  “And yet consider the rack,” Topcliffe said. “There are sure long moments of suffering as the victim is held in its embrace, but the pain is constant and of the same nature, and the body does adjust. And when the victim is stretched final to that point where the joints give way, often he is suffused in that stupor you have seen befall those most serious injured in battle.”

  Topcliffe now turned back to me. “Shakespeare, you are no soldier, but I have late learned you are some schooled in the art of seduction.”

  He paused, clear expecting an answer. When I did not give one, he raised his eyebrows in question, and so I nodded.

  “And in such pursuits, does it profit a man to ask a woman outright to surrender her virtue immediate?”

  I shook my head, not wanting to speak words on this matter in this room, which seemed the fouler the longer I was in it, and full closer to evil than any I had encountered. Not wanting, too, to long reflect on what similarities there might be in such wiles as I had used on women and those evil arts Topcliffe had used on his victims.

  “Of course not,” Topcliffe said. “Carey thinks as a soldier, and wants to bludgeon his foe immediate into surrender. But even in wars, surrenders are most usual won through a series of small victories. As Shakespeare well knows, virtue is surrendered in pieces, the first seeming innocent beyond consequence. But it is through those little surrenders that he can drive a girl first to his bed and then to her grave.”

  Topcliffe now scurried to the far wall and the table lined with chests, opening each. The chests opened such that their tops swung up, their fronts folded down, and then a panel on the inside tilted upward so that the various instruments secured to those panels could be easy seen by any strapped to that table. The chests held knives of varying sizes and shapes, hooks of some kinds, awls and needles and many other instruments of unknown nature that seemed almost more sinister as their purpose could not ready be discerned.

  His smile at me now was most cruel, and his eyes shone with a light much like lust.

  “And so, with this or this or this,” Topcliffe snatched varied instruments from his chests, first a pointed awl, then a curved blade, then what looked like a bird’s talons, “I can extract through little injuries – that, in their small natures, do not so offend the body that it seeks stupor to still its suffering – some small surrenders, little truths the victim thinks of no matter, the first meanderings on our journey. But with each surrender, the force of the river builds until its ending in the sea is inevitable. It is hope I use. For with each change in instrument, the victim hopes the next will be less terrible. But I have studied long on my art and know full how to build on the effect of eac
h insult, how a small injury here makes more raw some nerve there so that the pain suffered is worse, always worse, the suffering growing just as Shakespeare’s plays build to a climax. Until finally, such false hopes as I have offered having been all put out, hope itself is full extinguished.”

  He turned to face us, almost like an actor at a play’s end facing the audience to receive its applause. “I kill hope, gentlemen, not bodies. For in hope’s death dies every man’s last strength and leaves unguarded his truth.”

  It was not our applause he received, but instead our silence.

  “I could never be so sure of any cause that I could, in its name, kill so fine a thing as hope,” I said finally, “for to quash it even once in error would, I think, leave me damned.”

  Topcliffe looked hard at me, that curious light burning the brighter in his eyes. “Certainty is more precious than any tool in my chests,” he said, “for stood I not certain that my work be God’s will, I would have no stomach for it. But if there be treason, then I will have it out. For I know Satan to be at the root of it, and the Pope and his minions and his allies in Spain and France to be at the heart of it. I am called Priest Hunter by some, and I relish the name as I would have every Papist in England dead, their confessions first secured at my hands and at the price of such suffering as will make them greet welcome their eternity in hell. Cruelty is not sin in God’s service, but rather his avenging fire making clean this nation that alone he has clutched to his bosom and called to his greatness.”

  Another silence.

  “If you had us here only to tutor us in your art and your theology, then we thank you for the foul lesson and will be gone,” Carey said at last. “But I had been led to expect some assistance in the matter of our mysterious assailant.”

  Topcliffe sighed like a singer who finds his song falling on deaf ears. “Yes, yes, yes. The matter of the nose.” He returned to his chair in our midst at his small table and nibbled at another piece of his cheese, took another sip of his wine. “Could you explain in detail the nature of its injury?”