Newton regarded all of these with the suspicion of a Witchfinder-General, and sitting amidst those brawny boozers of the Mint and the Ordnance, whose conduct was a scandal to sobriety and whose faces contained much roguery, I swear he fancied each tankard a coiner’s cool accomplice.
We drank our ale and kept our own counsel until Jonathan Ambrose, a goldsmith contracted to the Mint as a melter and refiner, and already much distrusted by Newton on account of how his cousin had been hanged as a highwayman, approached us with a show of contempt and proceeded to subject my master to a most insulting speech.
“Doctor Newton, sir,” he said, almost sick with intemperance. “I declare, you are not much loved in this place. Indeed, I believe you are the most unpopular man in this Tower.”
“Sit down, Mister Ambrose,” yelled Sergeant Rohan. “And mind your tongue.”
Newton remained seated and ignored Ambrose, seemingly unperturbed; but, sensing some trouble, I got up from our bench to interpose my body between the goldsmith and my master.
“God’s whores, it’s true, I say,” insisted Ambrose. He was a tall fellow with a manner of speech that made me think he spoke side-saddle, for his mouth was all to one side of his nose when he was talking.
“Sit down,” I told Ambrose and gently pushed him away.
“Pox on’t, no,” snarled Ambrose, his mouth a slavering diagonal of distaste. “Why should I?”
“Because you are drunk, Mister Ambrose,” said I, moving him still further away, for he had begun to point most belligerently at Newton, as if his forefinger had been a javelin. “And you are most importunate.”
“Have a care, Doctor,” said Ambrose, craning his neck across my shoulder. “People die in this Tower.”
“I think we’ve had enough out of you, Jonathan Ambrose,” declared the landlord.
It was now that Ambrose aimed a blow at my head. It was easily ducked, but I had a mind to pay him back for his insolence and, aiming at his ear, struck him in the mouth with my fist. I was not much of a man for bare knuckles, but the blow knocked Mister Ambrose off his feet and onto the table in front of Mister Twistleton, which earned me a cheer from the men in The Stone Kitchen, as if we had been in the Bear Garden in Southwark. And while the landlord set about the simplified task of ejecting Ambrose from the tavern, I helped Mister Twistleton to collect his paper from the floor, although this was naught but the jumbled-up alphabets of a child.
“Perhaps,” said Newton, rising to his feet, “we had better be going, too.”
“Sorry about that, gentlemen,” said our landlord. “He’s barred from this moment hence.”
“I think,” replied Newton, “that if every sober man in the Tower should be called to account for the nonsense he speaks in his drink, then you should soon have no customers, Mister Allott. So let’s have no talk of barring anyone, and think no more of this business. Here’s five shillings to buy a drink for all that’s in here.”
“Very generous of you, sir.”
And with that, we took our leave of The Stone Kitchen.
When we were outside again, there was no sign of Mister Ambrose, and Newton let out a breath and smiled at me.
“You are a useful fellow to have around, Ellis,” he said. “I can see I made the right choice. You are quite a Hector.”
“It was nothing,” I said, following him along Water Lane.
“The fellow needed a dry basting. I was glad to do it. He threatened you, sir.”
“No, no,” insisted Newton. “He warned me. That is something very different.”
Instead of proceeding to the Mint, we walked along the south wall of the White Tower, in what was the inmost and oldest ward of the Tower, to the Coldharbour Building and the museum which was there. Inside this place was a splendid collection of mounted armour-clad figures that purported to show the line of Kings upon the throne of England; and a gallery that displayed various instruments of torture and execution. It was these cruel machines and implements that Newton wished to look at now.
I had not seen the rack before, however I had, of course, heard stories of its use, and shuddered as I looked upon it, finding it only too easy to think of myself bound to the two opposite windlasses like some hapless victim of the Holy Inquisition—for it was stated on a nearby placard that all of these instruments had been captured from the wreck of a Spanish Armada ship and had been intended to help in the work of reconverting the people of England to Roman Catholicism.
“God bless Sir Francis Drake,” I murmured. “Or else this rack should have made us all Papists by now.”
On hearing this, Newton laughed. “I hold no candle for Roman Catholics,” he said. “But, mark my words, Rome can teach Englishmen nothing about cruelty.”
“But is the rack not still used in Spain?” I replied.
“It may be so,” admitted Newton. “And would explain why so little science emanates from that country. God knows how many great scientific minds were stunted when Galileo, the greatest mind of the century, was tried for heresy. However, it is not the rack that we have come to see, but this much more portable instrument of torture which, if I am right, was used about six months ago, on poor George Macey.”
Newton pointed at a curious metal implement that was as tall as a man and shaped like a keyhole, with manacle holes for a man’s head, hands and feet. Newton leaned forward to blow away only a light covering of dust from the object, which action he repeated upon the beam of the rack, thereby setting up a veritable cloud of grime.
“Observe, if you will, how much less dusty this instrument of torture is than the rack.”
Now, from his pocket, Newton produced a magnifying glass that he did sometimes use to read, with which he proceeded to examine the black metal surface of the machine most closely.
“But what is it?” I asked. “I cannot fathom the mechanism.”
“This is the Scavenger’s Daughter, also known as Skeffington’s Gyves, or shackles, and invented by a former Lord Lieutenant of this Tower. The Scavenger’s operation is, in all respects, the very opposite action to the rack; for while that draws apart a man’s joints, this, on the contrary, binds a man into a ball, the human body being almost broken by the compression. This torture was more dreadful and more complete than the rack, so that in some extreme cases the box of a man’s chest was burst and death resulted soon thereafter. Also, it is much more portable than the rack since it may be fetched to a prisoner, rather than the other way around.”
“And you believe this is how poor Mister Macey met his end?”
“His injuries are certainly consistent with it having been used,” he said. “Yes.”
Newton was still in possession of Mister Osborne’s knife and used this to scrape something off the manacles onto a piece of paper which he showed to me. “If I am not mistaken, this is dried blood. But we shall examine it under a microscope later on.”
“You have a microscope? I have never seen through a microscope,” I admitted.
“Then you are to be envied. For the first sight of natural phenomena under the microscope is always most breathtaking.”
“If you are right,” said I, “and this is blood, then George Macey must have been privy to information that others wished desperately to know, or else they should not have tortured him so cruelly.”
“Mint workers are always in possession of some secrets,” said Newton, “although I hazard that there’s not one of them, Macey included, who wouldn’t give up what he knows for a few guineas. No, it is more tempting to conclude that Macey was tortured for information he did not possess, otherwise the excruciating pain of this device would surely have persuaded him to talk much earlier on, and certainly before receiving any mortal injuries.”
“That’s a terrible thought,” I said sickly. “To be tortured for information you had would be bad enough. But how much worse it would be with nothing to betray.”
“Your instinct for self-preservation does you a dubious credit,” said Newton, and, folding away the paper with the suspected dried blood, he offered me a wintry smile. “It persuades me that I need not utter another salutary to remain silent about this matter. Whoever killed George Macey would doubtless slit our throats as easily as other men would slice a cucumber.
“Come, let’s away from here, lest some should see us and feel disquiet at our proximity to this machine.”
Leaving the Storehouse, Newton declared his wish to visit my house and use his microscope which, he said, would assist our further enquiry. But outside the door to the Warden’s house we found Mister Kennedy, who was another of the Mint’s informers, and two gentlemen I did not recognise.
Mister Kennedy was a most forbidding-looking fellow, having a false nose made of silver to cover the gaping holes of the nostrils of the one that was lost: from an accident in the mill room, he said; but there were, I knew,
