The stair arrives on a stone landing at the top of the tower facing three small wooden doors. I don’t want to open the doors, and I don’t want to enter the rooms behind them; but the whisper of my name “Tryphine!” hissing up the stair behind me forces me on. The first door opens with a ring handle that moves under my grip, lifting the latch on the inside of the door. I don’t like to think who might hear this, who might be in there, turning their heads, seeing the latch lifting, but I feel the door yield against my hand and I push it open. I can see the little room by the light of the moon coming in through the narrow window. I can see just enough to make out a piece of machinery taking up the whole length of the room.

I think at first that it is some kind of loom for weaving tapestry. It is a long raised bed with two great rollers at either end, and a lever in the middle. Then I step a little closer and I see that a woman is strapped to it, arms above her head, horribly wrenched out of shape, her feet, strapped to the bottom end, turned out as if her legs are broken. Someone has lashed her hands and feet and hauled on the lever so the rollers turn over and the gulf between them widens. This has dragged her arms out of their sockets and her elbows have popped out of joint, her hips and knees and even her anklebones are torn apart. The agony makes a white mask of her face, but even so, I recognize Anne Askew. I stumble back from the torture room and fall against the next door. That room is empty and silent. I draw a breath in momentary relief at being spared any further horror but then I smell smoke. There is smoke coming from the floorboards, and the boards themselves are getting hotter. And now, in the strange life of the dream, I am myself tied, hands behind my back. I am standing, strapped to a stake, and I am lashed with chains so that I cannot move, and my feet are no longer on floorboards but are shifting anxiously on cords of wood. It is getting hotter and hotter and there is smoke in my eyes and mouth, and I am beginning to cough. I gasp and I feel my throat scorched by the hot smoke. Then I see a little flicker of the first flame from the wood under my feet, and I cough again, flinching away from it. “No,” I say, but I cannot speak for smoke, and as I breathe in, the heat of the smoke burns my throat and I cough and cough...

“Wake!” Nan says. “Wake up! Here.” She presses a cup of ale into my hand. “Wake up!”