straps and a kind of winch, and an odd arrangement like a ladder tilted up on trestles, around which stood buckets of water.
Geoffrey noticed mundane details. Channels cut in the floor, leading to drains. A thick oaken door that looked impervious to noise. He felt very cold.
Agnes was made to stand before the table device. A soldier's gloved hand under her chin ensured she saw it.
'Step two,' Ferron said. 'Agnes Wooler, you are being shown these instruments of God's mercy. Do you understand what they are? Repent now and spare yourself this righteous pain.'
Agnes stared dully, but said nothing.
The clerk made another cross in his book, and Ferron said, 'Step three.'
One of the brothers closed his huge fist at the neck of Agnes's shift, and pulled. The filthy cloth ripped easily, and she was left naked, surrounded by men, in the middle of the cold room. She hunched her shoulders against the cold, but did not try to cover herself. Geoffrey knew she was nearly thirty years old, but she was so emaciated she looked like a child, her ribs showing, her legs like saplings. The flesh between her legs was stained with piss, shit and blood, and her back was marked with bloody weals. The brothers leered at her shrivelled dugs, the patch of auburn hair between her legs.
Again Ferron asked her to confess. When she did not speak, Ferron said, 'The fourth step.'
The brothers grabbed her and pushed her onto the table. They took hold of her wrists and ankles, pulled them back so her arms and legs were stretched, and fixed her in place with tight bonds of metal and leather. Agnes did not resist. One brother went to the winch at the top of the table. He tugged it experimentally; the table creaked, and the mechanism under it, a mesh of gears and levers, shuddered as if eager.
Agnes lay passively, her body a white strip of fragile flesh laid over wood and iron.
Ferron stood over her. 'Have pity on yourself, child,' he said. 'You were an anchoress. You don't deserve this. Just tell me the truth.'
She whispered, 'I know only one truth. That my father's love doomed me to this.'
Ferron frowned, clearly wondering what new heresy this was. But Geoffrey knew that the father she spoke of wasn't God.
Ferron ran out of patience. He glanced at the brother at the winch, who spat on his hands.
'Step five.'
The brother hauled. As gears bit and ropes tightened, the wooden tabletop lengthened, creaking. Agnes screamed, the noise huge in the confined room.
But still she would not speak. Ferron ordered the winch turned again, and then again.
Geoffrey forced himself to watch. He heard a ripping, cracking sound. Agnes's knees and elbows turned red and lumpy, and her shoulders were oddly twisted. Of course it would be the joints that would fail first, he thought helplessly, not the bones.
Still she did not talk.
Ferron made a curt gesture. 'Enough. Keep her conscious. We'll try the water.'
The brother at the head of the table released a latch, and let the winch spin loose. The brothers removed the buckles and clasps. Agnes didn't move. One brother slid his arms underneath her and lifted her. When her knees bent and her arms fell forward she was convulsed, and her screams became bestial.
But she was lowered onto the tilted ladder, with her head above her feet. Again she was strapped in place. Her head was pinned down by a metal band around her forehead. Twigs were forced into her nostrils, coated with fat so they plugged her nose.
Guards stood by, one holding a cloth and a bit of metal, the other a bucket of water.
Ferron leaned over Agnes. 'Can you hear me, Agnes? God doesn't want to see you suffer. If you choose to confess, after it begins, then all you have to do is look at me, as you are now. Do you understand? Is there anything you wish to say to me now?'
'He called me his Agnes,' she whispered. 'His precious Agnes. I was no Agnes when he was done with me…'
Geoffrey's heart broke a little more.
Ferron, baffled, irritated, turned away. 'Do it,' he snapped to the brothers.
The one with the cloth stepped up. With casual, brutal strength he grabbed Agnes's cheeks, forced her jaws open and pushed his metal frame through her lips. It was like a funnel, Geoffrey saw, that kept the mouth wide open. Now the brother laid the centre of his cloth over the funnel and stepped back.
Agnes was still, save for her eyes, which flickered back and forth over distorted cheeks.
The other brother stepped up with his bucket of water. With care, he poured a bit of water onto the cloth. The water's weight forced the cloth into Agnes's mouth. The brother kept pouring, and Geoffrey saw that the cloth was drawn deeper into Agnes's throat. At last she swallowed, convulsively, and she coughed and choked, but she could not get the cloth out of her throat. Still the brother poured, and again she gagged, each swallow drawing the cloth deeper down her throat. Soon Geoffrey saw that she was close to panic, her battered body fighting back, immersed in a fear of drowning, of suffocating.
Ferron leaned over her. 'All you have to do is look at me,' he murmured. 'Just look at me and I'll tell them to stop.'
But, though she jerked and thrashed her head against its metal bond, she kept her eyes closed. Ferron nodded for the brothers to continue.
As the brothers poured more water into her, bucket after bucket, and more of the cloth was drawn into her throat and belly, and her stomach began to bloat, a grotesque swelling under her gaunt ribs.
Geoffrey, in torment himself, understood the logic. Ferron, as a man of God, wasn't supposed to draw blood. And nor was he supposed to allow his victims to die. This punishment with water, which would leave no mark, was a method devised with stunning ingenuity to fit this contradictory logic perfectly. It was even cheap, for the cloth and metal frame could be used again.
A full hour after it had begun, still Agnes would not speak. So Ferron nodded to the brothers, who lifted up the ladder, with the girl's broken body still fixed to it, and turned it so her feet were higher than her head. As her bloated belly pressed on her heart and lungs, through her crammed throat Agnes let out an animal roar of pain and terror.
Geoffrey could stand it no more. He lunged at Ferron. 'You monster, Ferron! How can you imagine that this serves the purposes of Christ?…' But a brother grabbed him, pinning his arms.
XXII
On the morning of the execution of Agnes Wooler, Geoffrey Cotesford came early to the place of burning. It was another grim February day.
Eight years after the first auto-da-fe, the burning place outside the walls of Seville had come to be known as the quemadero. A platform had been set down here, with blunt stone pillars, strong and reusable. On the four sides of the platform statues of prophets stood, glaring sternly at those brought here. This morning, wood was piled up around each of the pillars.
From this place hundreds of souls had already been despatched, wisping to heaven or hell like the greasy smoke from their owners' crisping bodies.
As the morning brightened, others gathered for the show, men, women, even some children. Geoffrey had expected that. But the mood among these onlookers was not as he had anticipated. They seemed dull, almost numbed. Perhaps the Inquisition had dug too deep into the vitals of the nation. You came to watch, but not with relish, for you could not be sure you were safe yourself.
At last the procession reached the quemadero. The crowd murmured and shuffled, and some crossed themselves. Led by Ferron and other inquisitors and flanked by soldiers of the Holy Brotherhood, there were perhaps twenty of the condemned. All carried lit candles. The men walked barefoot, and their feet were white from the cold. But the women were stripped naked, and though their bodies were shrivelled from their captivity they had to suffer taunts from the crowd.
