"Keep an eye on that fellow," Sidney whispered. "Most likely he is another of the Jesuits, or a supporter, come to give comfort in the last hour. Gilbert marked him out to catch the handkerchief."

"Should we follow him?" I asked anxiously. Sidney shook his head.

"Walsingham will have men in the crowd to shadow all those who dive for relics of his clothes and any other such business." He stopped suddenly; Jerome was being held up while the executioner climbed into the cart and fastened the noose about his neck before attaching it to the crossbeam and checking it was secure. I realised that the two men were still standing either side of him because he could not support himself, and my jaw clenched tight; he must have been racked so severely that his legs were beyond use.

"What have they done to his hands?" I whispered to Sidney, indicating the mass of congealed blood as Jerome lifted a hand feebly to try and push his matted hair from his face.

"Torn out his fingernails," Sidney said, his voice tight, and I could not read anything beneath his outward composure.

A portly man dressed in royal colours stepped onto the scaffold and unfolded a piece of parchment.

"Jerome Gilbert, Jesuit," he declaimed in a clear voice that carried across the silent crowd, "you have been found guilty on four counts of murder and of seducing the people away from the queen's allegiance, of plotting with others in Rheims and Rome to assassinate the queen, and of being privy to plans of foreign invasion. What say you?"

With enormous effort, the noose still slack around his neck, Jerome summoned what little strength was left in his ravaged body, raised his head, and replied in a surprisingly strong voice, "I am guilty only of trying to bring wandering souls back to their Maker. I pray God forgive all those who have been accessory to my death. God save the queen." Here his eye roved the crowd again and came to rest on me; for a moment we held each other's gaze and he added, his solemn voice carrying over the clearing, "One day you will stand where I stand."

"Silence!" called the official, thinking this a threat to the English Protestants, but I was gripped by a terrible shudder; I could not escape the chilling sense that he had been speaking directly to me. I recalled his words in the hide at Hazeley Court: "You and I are similar men…you go to your death defiant, as I will when the appointed time comes." He had been right about himself, at least, I thought; though his beautiful face had been destroyed by the torturers and he could not stand unaided, in these last moments he was magnificently, fiercely defiant.

The official regarded him with distaste as the assembled throng held its breath.

"As a convicted traitor, your sentence is clear. You are to be hanged by the neck and let down alive; your privy parts cut off, for you are unfit to leave any generation after you; your entrails to be taken out and burned in your sight; your head, which imagined the mischief, to be cut off; and your body divided in four parts, to be disposed of at Her Majesty's pleasure. And may God have mercy on your soul."

Jerome flung his head back so that the summer rain, now falling steadily, filled his eyes and mouth as he cried out to the heavens, "In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum!"

And the horses were whipped, and the cart drew away, leaving him writhing on the end of the rope.

He was barely conscious when they cut him down and the two burly men dragged him up the steps to the scaffold. This at least seemed a mercy, I thought, until the executioner flung a pail of cold water into his face and he choked back into a semblance of life, spluttering and flailing wildly as he was lifted to the executioner's table and his clothes stripped from him. As Sidney had predicted, a number of people in the crowd threw themselves forward to try and snatch a piece of the martyr's clothing, and the men with pikes moved in forcibly to push them away from the scaffold.

Like many another man in the crowd, I had to turn away as the executioner raised his knife to slice off Jerome's genitals, but the howl that rent the still air brought tears to my eyes even as the crackle as his severed flesh was thrown into the cauldron made my stomach rise. Yet in that moment, perhaps the most horrific spectacle I had witnessed in my life, I thought of Sophia. "Unfit to leave any generation behind you"-and yet somewhere in Kent a child of his was growing toward the light, a child that would never know the truth about its father but would carry his beauty into the future. I wondered again, for the thousandth time since my return from Oxford, if I had been right to listen to Thomas Allen's frenzied accusations. Would Jerome really have had Sophia killed, or might they both even now be alive and well in France if I had not interfered?

"He would have had you killed, Bruno-remember that," Sidney said in my ear, as if he had read my thoughts. "But he was a damned fine card player," he added, barely audible, and I realised that beneath his professional soldier's demeanour, he too was deeply affected by this death. I nodded heavily, and raising my head at that moment I caught sight of Walsingham, mounted on a black horse on the other side of the crowd, his face set grimly as he watched the butchery on the scaffold. As the executioner plunged his knife into Jerome's breastbone to rip him open, and his dying screams echoed to the blank white sky, Walsingham turned and caught my eye across the heads of the people who stood in terrible, threatening silence. He nodded, once, as if in approbation, then turned his attention back to the scaffold as Jerome's head was held aloft to no other sound than the soft chafing of the wind in the leaves and the persistent drumming of the warm rain.

"TAKE ANOTHER DRINK, Bruno-you look as if you need it." Walsingham reached over and poured me a glass of wine but my throat closed as I lifted it to my face. I could not scour the smell of blood and burning flesh from my nostrils, and though Walsingham's wife had offered us food, I had found myself unable to eat anything.

Now we sat in his private study in his country house at Barn Elms, some miles to the west of London. The sky was still overcast and the room close and gloomy with its dark-wood panelling and narrow windows. Sidney stood looking out over the garden, his hands clasped behind his back. He had been unusually subdued since the execution, and we had ridden down to Mortlake in almost total silence, each wrapped in his own thoughts. Now Walsingham sat opposite me with his chin resting on his hands, studying me carefully.

"You did well, Bruno," he said at length, stretching out his legs in front of him. "The queen has been told of your part in stopping another would-be assassin. It may be that at some time in the future she will feel it appropriate to express her gratitude in person."

"I would be honoured," I said, running my tongue around dry lips.

"Something troubles you," he said gently. I glanced at Sidney but his back was still turned. "You may speak freely here, Bruno," Walsingham prompted, when I did not reply.

"Did you really believe he was guilty of plotting to kill the queen?" I asked.

He looked at me with great heaviness in his eyes for a long time without speaking, and I remembered how he had spoken at our first meeting of the weight of his responsibility to the kingdom.

"No, I did not," he said eventually. I saw Sidney snap his head around and rest himself on the window seat, watching with interest.

"The copy of the Regnans in Excelsis papal bull was old-I do not think Jerome Gilbert brought it with him. Besides, the missionaries do not carry any item that would compromise them, by order of the Jesuit Superior-Gilbert would not have been so careless. It may have belonged to Edmund Allen or one of the other Fellows. It hardly matters now."