“Look, witch!” Harries pointed to his right. He seemed to be laughing beneath the steel bars of the helmet.

Campion saw the crowd on the hill, a great mass of people through which the road was carved which should have led her to the piled timber and stake that was clearly visible at the hill’s low summit. The noise lashed at the boat, a growl that seemed to spread across the city. The sight made her shiver.

Harries plucked at her cotton shift. “I see you’re dressed for a warm day.” He barked out a laugh. The oarsmen grinned as they leaned forward in unison.

The Customs House hid Tower Hill from her view, though still the baying of the mob came after her. She was shivering uncontrollably now. She had escaped the fire, but for what? What irons and spikes and flames would rend her now?

The oarsmen bent toward her, pulled, and their eyes never seemed to leave her. She was crying, though whether with relief or whether because her ordeal was not to be ended in swift horror but prolonged, she could not tell. Sun glittered on the water. The high houses built on London Bridge loomed ahead.

“Bear Wharf!” Harries growled.

The starboard oarsmen backed water for one stroke, the boat turned, then headed toward a decrepit timber pier on the city bank. A sailor, pouring slops from a Dutch sloop, stared down at the small boat that went beneath his ship’s stern.

“Come on, witch!” Harries hauled her on to the pier, tossed a purse to the stroke oarsman and led her swiftly to a waiting coach. The leather curtains had been nailed shut. A man waited on the driver’s seat and Mason climbed up beside him while Harries pushed Campion into the dark interior. They lurched forward.

She could not tell how long they travelled. It did not seem long. She heard the driver shout at obstructions, felt the swaying turns as the coach negotiated the narrow city streets, and sometimes, as the coach went into the sunlight, she would see the narrow strips of brightness thrown from the slits at the curtains’ nailed edges. She did not know if they went north or south, east or west, she only knew that she was being carried to new torments.

Then a gate slammed on the sounds of the street, she could hear the hooves of the horses loud on stone echoing from walls, and Harries pushed open the door. The coach stopped, swaying on its leather springs. “Out.”

She was in a courtyard of stone. The walls were windowless. A single arched doorway led into a dark interior.

“Inside, witch.”

Campion thought of the book of martyrology she had been given as a child. She knew she would not have the bravery to endure the pincers, fires, claws and racks of truth. She cried.

Harries pushed her down a long, chill passageway. His boots echoed from the stone walls. Campion shrank from the pain that awaited her.