At 9.15 A.M. the questioning commenced.

Q. What is your name?

A. Father Simeon Woollass.

Q. Where is your dwelling?

A. Where the Lord sends me.

Opposite this in the third column he read:

Insert needle under nail of 1st finger, right hand.

Scream. Prayer (Lat).

Remove needle. 9.20.

Q. What is your name?

A. Father Simeon.

Q. Where is your dwelling?

A. I wander where the Lord sends me.

Needles, 1st and 3rd fingers, r.h.

Screams. Prayers. Face white. Vile blasphemies (Eng.) Babbling. Piss & shit.

Face gray-yellow. Eyes rolling.

Three times the process was repeated, the needles withdrawn, the question re-put, and the unsatisfactory answer followed by more needles in more fingers, always on the same hand. The final ones were recorded as being heated till they glowed scarlet.

At 9.45 A.M. the same questions. But this time the answer was different.

A. Spain. I dwell in Spain. And at Douai in the English College. These are my dwellings. What more can I say?

Now came a pause with the single word Water in Column 3.

Then at 10.00 A.M. the process resumed.

Q. When did you come to England?

A. In the prime of 1588.

Q. Where have you stayed in England?

A. Nowhere. In fields in ditches in sheds.

Now the torture was renewed till finally an answer was given in the form of an address in Gray’s Inn Fields in London which for a brief moment satisfied the interrogator.

Mig looked up. He was feeling Mrs. Appledore’s fried breakfast moving uneasily in his stomach. He met Dunstan’s sympathetic gaze.

“He comes over,” said the old man, “as a most meticulous man. In preparation, in keeping records, in making physical and psychological judgments. You notice the careful note he makes of which fingers the needles are driven into. And he works only on the right hand. Father Simeon, I would guess, was, like most of our family, left-handed. Tyrwhitt would not want to maim the hand that might be needed to sign a confession.”

“You sound almost as if you admire him,” said Mig.

“Admire? No. But appreciate, yes. He was working on behalf of his faith, and I do not doubt that many of the refinements of his techniques were garnered from the annals of our own Church’s long war against heresy.”

“That makes them all right?”

Dunstan shrugged.

“It makes them understandable. When we are judged, Madero, surely our motives will be accepted in mitigation? But I’m interrupting your perusal of the document.”

Mig scanned down. Tyrwhitt’s basic technique of pain and reward, of following innocuous questions which Simeon could answer with more probing questions which he tried to evade, was varied only in the change from time to time of the instruments of torture and the parts of the body he attacked. When the right hand was, as he put it, for the present played out, he shifted his attention to the left foot, then the right eye, then the left ear. But nothing he did was life threatening. And whenever Father Simeon showed signs of escaping into unconsciousness, he received water and a respite from pain.

“Interestingly,” observed Dunstan, “and by contrast with modern techniques practiced by most security agencies, there is no attack on the genitalia. Perhaps through experience Tyrwhitt had discovered that men whose vows of chastity made them, as it were, spiritual eunuchs did not fear in the same degree as the laity the threat of castration.”

Mig ignored him and read on.

As the tortured man’s powers of resistance weakened, the questions became cleverer, subtly implying knowledge already possessed, and inviting Simeon to protect the innocent from the fate he was suffering.

Simeon had been taken on the outskirts of Chester and Tyrwhitt was keen to get him to implicate a certain local Catholic, Sir Edward Ockendon, whose name was familiar to Mig as a recusant. But the pursuivant directed his questions with a clever obliquity, concentrating on the baronet’s sister, as if she were the main object of his interest.

Q. What did the Lady Margery Ockendon say to you when you discussed the question of the Queen’s edicts with her?

A. I never spoke with Lady Margery.

Q. Was Lady Margery ever present when you celebrated Mass in the chapel of her brother’s house in Chester?

A. I tell you, I know not the Lady.

Q. Was the Lady Margery confederate with her brother Sir Edward in the supply of succor and protection to you during your sojourn at Chester?

A. Will you not hear me? I know her not.

Q. Did not the Lady Margery by word and token make clear to you that she still held to the old discredited doctrines of Rome? Did she not regularly attend Mass with her brother in the family chapel? Would she not admit this if we put her to the question? Speak out. You hold her fate in your hands. Come, man, the truth! Or will you make me rip it out of her with pinchers and poignard?

A. I have told you, I never met the Lady Margery. As God is my witness, she was never present at any Mass I held in Chester.

Q. So, if she were not present, who was in attendance beside Sir Edward?

And so the implied admissions came. And with each, the next was easier. But never any mention of the Woollass family until near the end.

Q. Father, because I am satisfied that you have dealt fairly with me, I have no purpose to question you as to the actions and beliefs of any members of your own family, if only you will answer one last question, which is this. I have it on authoritie that you were in company of a notorious agent of the Hispanic king during your time in Lancashire. Do but say where I might lay hands on this enemy of our noble Queen and all is done between us.

A bargain offered. A real bargain. The safety of his own family weighed against the safety of a foreign fugitive, suspected of murder, and seriously injured already.

Eventually, inevitably, the answer came, that this agent lay in a house in Lancaster, waiting till a ship could be found that would bear him home to Spain.

Mig looked up to find Dunstan’s gaze, benign, compassionate, fixed upon him.

Perhaps, he thought, if that answer had not been given, Miguel Madero might have returned home to see his bastard child, leaving Tyrwhitt to visit his wrath on the Woollasses, whose family line might well have been cut short.

In which case the old man wouldn’t be here, and he himself wouldn’t have needed to come here, and…

It was pointless multiplying possibilities, though Sam would no doubt have an equation to cover all eventualities. He recalled her hand squeezing his thigh as she took her leave.

He said briskly, “And was there anything in the rest of the Jolley records that gave a further account of this so-called agent?”

“A note to the effect that a Spanish emissary of King Philip was taken in Lancaster, that he confessed to having been in touch with certain notorious recusants, but died under examination before he could give details or sign a written deposition. This is almost certainly the same episode which my grandfather refers to in his footnote.”

“And you believe this was probably the fugitive youth your family helped – my ancestor, Miguel Madero?”

“Who else? I would guess that, when Simeon finally left Illthwaite, he took the injured boy with him. He must have been a considerable encumbrance to one who was himself a permanent fugitive. Those who provided refuge on their journey into Lancashire probably had their own theories as to the identity of this wounded foreigner. Rumors grow; eventually Tyrwhitt hears that Father Simeon is traveling in company with an Hispanic agent. When he picks up Simeon alone, he is fired by the prospect of a great coup in using him to capture this important Spaniard who by now had been exaggerated into a member of the nobility and a personal emissary of King Philip.”