Perfect Shadows

chapter 26

On Twelfth Night, Richard had stayed as close to Kryštof ’s side as his menial position allowed. A heavy-set man, with regular features and light-brown close-cropped hair seemed to be watching his every move. Later, catching Richard’s eye, he nodded and smiled, the sweet and innocent smile of a child, and Richard had shuddered, happy to leave for home shortly thereafter. He started to tell Kit about the occurrence, but when he tried to put the thought into words it sounded silly.

In mid-January, while walking through the area around St. Paul’s, Richard was arrested without warning and brought before the Secretary Cecil in his austere office. Richard recognized the man waiting there, standing just inside the door when the guards had shoved him into the room, as the observer at the Twelfth Night’s court. Lord Robert, sitting behind his work table and writing, signed the paper before him, sanded it and sealed it before he glanced up at the young man before him.

“You are Richard Bowen? Yes. And employed as secretary to the man styling himself Prince Kryštof of Sybria? Yes. What is your master’s involvement with the Essex faction?” Richard stared at the small man in amazement but said nothing. Cecil’s glance flicked for a second to the other man, who leapt forward, catching Richard’s arm in his long and beautiful hands, twisting it up until the young man cried out with shock and pain. “I see that you are unwilling to help us,” Cecil said tranquilly, “so we shall have to find means to persuade you.” He motioned the pair from the room with a wave of his hand, and turned back to the papers on his desk.

Deacon jerked the door open and dragged the resisting prisoner out into the passage, where two men waited to aid in the removal. There were a score of witnesses, petitioners hoping to see Lord Robert, but they appeared blind to the struggle before them, conversing in quiet voices as the young man was dragged away, down into the dark and damp second cellars beneath Cecil’s house, where he was thrust into an airless cell and left. The key turned in the lock with the sound of a falling axe.

It was nearly a week later that Cecil made his way down to those cellars to review the progress of this recalcitrant prisoner for himself. He had been called out of the city for a few days, and unable to supervise the interrogation. He had read the regular and unsatisfactory reports, but they had not prepared him for the sight that met his eyes in the little torture chamber that he preferred to call the questioning room. The young man was tied to the wall, his broken and swollen hands raised above his head, and his back no more than bloody strips of skin, flayed by the whip in Deacon’s hand. The blows still fell with a wet, rhythmic sound. Deacon’s eyes were glazed, and his breeches drooped around his knees. Cecil, his gorge rising, saw that the man was fondling himself with his other hand. As his mouth opened to demand that this iniquity cease, Deacon was suddenly plucked backward as though he were pulled by a rope, and over the startled man’s shoulder Cecil saw the face of the one-eyed Sybrian prince, wild and furious in the flickering light, his lips twisted into an animal snarl. Cecil took an involuntary step back against the wall at the sight, as the prince, with a swift and utterly effortless motion, twisted Deacon’s head around entirely backwards on his thick neck, then let him fall, kicking him out of the way as he went to Richard. He broke the manacles holding the victim as if they were made of piecrust and caught the young man as he fell, mercifully unconscious. The prince turned another inarticulate snarl on Cecil where he cowered against the wall, before taking his burden and vanishing up the stairs like a shadow.

When his breathing returned to normal, Cecil called for help. The three answering grooms found him stooping over Deacon’s dead body, and he rose at their approach. The corpse’s breeches were still tangled about its knees. The tiny penis, scarcely bigger than a woman’s little finger, jutted obscenely up from his hairless groin.

“He fell down the stairs,” Cecil snapped, fighting down his nausea to answer the servants’ questions. The men looked doubtfully at the stairway, eighteen feet away and through a door, but nodded when Cecil repeated adamantly that the man had fallen down the stairs. He gave orders for the room to be cleaned, and the equipment it held dismantled. He found the pages that had been written while the prisoner had been yet able to talk, to answer the questions put to him, and retired to his office to study them. He poured himself a draught of wine, considered a moment, then doubled it, before settling down to read.

The next evening, just after he called for the candles to be lit, Cecil realized that he was not alone. He gave a convulsive start and blinked at the long and jagged blot his pen had left on his page.

“I think, my lord Secretary, that we had better deal plainly with one another,” Kryštof said, from his seat in the shadowy corner.

“Yes,” Cecil agreed, gathering his thoughts and facing his uninvited guest. “I think we better had.” He considered a moment, then rapped out, “What business is it that brings you, night after night, to Drury House?”

“The Earl of Southampton,” Kryštof answered carefully, “has a very beautiful wife.” Cecil stifled a wild desire to laugh. Was this all it truly amounted to? A bit of scandal and servant’s gossip? He shuffled through the papers before him, fishing for the report of the bribed servant inside Southampton’s establishment. He flipped the deposition to the top of the pile and scanned it quickly, clucking to himself at the contents, a list of the names of those closeted with the earls. Prince Kryštof’s name was notable by its absence, though prominent enough upon the list of those seen entering. He carefully folded the papers away, tucking them into a small brassbound chest, and removing two or three large and much blotted sheets.

Cecil cleared his throat, wishing that the foreign prince would bring the distasteful subject into the conversation, but he just sat, regarding the little man with his glittering eye. Cecil cleared his throat again, and took the plunge.

“My lord, the questioning of your secretary was never meant to end so. He was to be shown the instruments, and only the boot was to be used, as his hands were valuable to you—” he broke off as the man lunged from his stool, his face a mask of wrath. Cecil snatched at the bell to summon the footmen, but found that it rested in the prince’s hands, its brass gleaming dully in the candlelight. He watched in horror as those long and slender fingers twisted the heavy metal, wadding it as if it were paper, letting it fall with a muffled thump to the carpeted floor. His own hands clutched the papers he held and he made himself smooth them out on the table before continuing. “I am sorry, your grace, and I do hope that the young man may recover. Deacon should not have been allowed so free a hand, I see that now, of course. I did not know that he was mad, and certain matters kept me from overseeing him as thoroughly as I should.” He dragged his eyes from the papers before him to the face of the prince, to find that the man had righted his stool and once again sat across the table from him. He considered the face of his guest for a time before continuing.

“Deacon died of a fall down the cellar steps that broke his neck,” he stated finally. “This is the only copy of the transcript made of Richard Bowen’s questioning, my lord, and I give it to you. He is a courageous young man, perhaps foolishly so. He broke at last, and answered the questions, but not before his mind had given way. The answers he made are meaningless; he seemed to be remembering scenes from his childhood in Wales.” Cecil handed the papers to Kryštof, who took the stained pages, and folded them away without looking at the contents. Cecil’s thin cheeks burned as he remembered the man’s disability, but the prince merely nodded, and left the room. The secretary sat for a moment, considering whether to call his guest back, to receive the other pages the chest held, the ‘confession’ that Percy had wrung from this same Bowen that Twelfth Night several years ago. He made his decision and deftly folded the papers away. One never knew when they might be needed, after all.