They took me to St Paul’s in the city and they kept me overnight in a prison room with a woman who had been racked so badly that she lay like a rag doll in the corner of the cell, her arm bones and leg bones broken, her spine disjointed, her feet pointing outwards like the hands of a clock showing a quarter to three. From her bloodied lips came a moan like the sigh of the wind. All night she breathed out her pain like a breeze in springtime. With us also was a woman whose nails had been pulled from her fingers. She nursed her broken hands in her lap and did not look up when they turned the key in the door and thrust me inside. She had her mouth pursed in a funny little grimace, then I realised they had cut out her tongue as well.

I hunkered down like a beggar on the threshold, my back to the door. They said nothing to me: the broken moaner and the dumb one without fingernails. In my terror, I said nothing to them. I watched the moonlight stroll across the floor, illuminating first the woman whose body was twisted like a dolly, and then shining on the fingers of the woman who cupped her hands in her lap and pursed her lips. In the silver light her fingertips looked as black as nibs dipped in printers’ ink.

The night passed in the end, though I thought that it would last forever.

In the morning the door swung open and neither woman raised her head. The stillness of the racked woman made her look as if she were dead, perhaps she was. ‘Hannah Verde,’ the voice outside said.

I tried to rise to my feet in obedience but my legs buckled beneath me from sheer terror. I knew that I could not have my fingernails torn out without screaming for mercy, telling everything I knew. I could not be tied to the rack without betraying my lord, Elizabeth, John Dee, every name I had ever heard whispered, names that had never even been mentioned. Since I could not even stand on my own two feet when they summoned me, how would I ever defy them?

The guard scooped me up in his arms, dragged me along, my feet scrabbling like a drunkard’s on the stones behind us. He stank of ale, and a worse smell, smoke and burning fat which clung to his woollen cape. I realised that the smell was from the fires, the smoke from the kindling and the brands, the fat from the bubbling skin of dying men and women. As the realisation came to me I felt my stomach rebel and I choked on vomit.

‘Here, watch out!’ he said irritably, and thrust my head away from him so he banged my face against the stone wall.

He dragged me up some steps, and then across a courtyard.

‘Where?’ I said faintly.

‘Bishop Bonner,’ he said shortly. ‘God help you.’