He pushed open the iron-studded door into his room and saw the lit candle on his table flicker from the draught. Every night kitchen servants laid out his food with a jug of wine and lit the stout candle so that he could retire for the evening with minimum effort. The room was pleasantly warm; the fire replenished by servants. He took a bottle of wine from his cloak’s pocket and tipped the contents of the jug on the table into his chamber pot. The easiest way to drug a man was by poisoning his wine, for that masked the taste of anything untoward. Every evening he would make his way through the kitchens, ignoring the boys turning the spits of meat and bowing at his presence, and then go down into the wine cellar. He would select a dust-encrusted bottle far away from where the kitchen staff would choose wine, close to the kitchen door. It took rare skills to mask the taste of poison in food, so now he sniffed the cold cuts on his plate and placed a small portion of each meat on his tongue. Satisfied that no one had tampered with his food and the crust of freshly baked bread, he uncorked the bottle and poured himself a generous measure.

When he finished eating, he added seasoned logs to the fire for a slow burn through the night and then closed the internal shutters on the window. His room was too high in the tower for an enemy to scale the walls, but spirits condemned to the dark world knew no such barrier. The shutters bore the sign of the cross to ward off such creatures. Such caution had kept him alive so far. Plucking bits of meat from his teeth, he refilled his wine glass and spread out the original of the chart that his clerks had copied for the King – the copy Velasquita had torn in half. He looked again at his prophecy as dictated by the planets. Satisfied that his advice to the King had been correct, he disrobed and climbed naked beneath the sheets and blanket. Tiredness crept over him. He dozed for a while and then stirred himself to blow out the bedside candle. The dull, comforting glow from the fire with its dancing shadows lulled him to sleep. He slipped away into dreams of his youth in the monastery and then the priesthood: fractured images of a life that had been harsh but relieved by a deep sense of wonderment as the buried knowledge slowly surfaced within him. The weight of the blankets embraced him with their warmth.