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caught his words faintly. 'Before the hour is out, I shall meet my maker face to face, but I am innocent!' He pointed directly at Agrippa. 'Remember that!'
    Somewhere a single drum began to beat. The yeoman began to push the crowd back, allowing us a better view of what was to happen. Buckingham once more knelt at the feet of the priest. The executioner then knelt to him, asking the Duke for the usual pardon as well as the customary fee. (I can never understand that! How can someone say they are sorry, then cut your bloody head off and, at the same time, ask to be paid for it? Many years later, when I was taken to the block, I told the bastard to piss off and do his worst!)
    At last Buckingham knelt down before the block. A servant bound his hair up but the Duke shook his head when a blindfold was offered. He bowed and slightly turned his head, his hands spread out, moving them once like a stricken bird before it falls. The drum beat grew louder, the two-headed axe rose in a brilliant arc and fell with a thud which sounded like a clap of thunder. A bright spurt of blood shot up. The crowd, hitherto deathly silent, gave a collective sigh at the blood letting and the dwarfs beneath the scaffold became busy. The executioner held up Buckingham's head and came to the edge of the scaffold. 'So die all traitors!' he shouted. I looked away. Benjamin had his back turned. 'So die all traitors!' the executioner repeated. 'Oh, piss off!' a voice shouted.
    'You've got the wrong bloody head,' another bellowed. 'It should be the butcher's son's!'
    Raucous jeers mounted as the scaffold began to be pelted with rotten fruit and offal. Soldiers began to move in and the crowd broke up. 'Come on, Agrippa!' Benjamin hissed. The magician shook himself and looked around. 'Yes, yes, it's time we went.'
    We forced our way down Tower Hill following the wall until we entered the fortress by the Water Gate. (Ah, my chaplain interrupts. Yes, yes, my little sweet is correct. Later generations call this 'Traitors' Gate' – and what a procession went through it! Anne Boleyn, defiant to the last; Thomas More cracking jokes; John Fisher praying; Catherine Howard jeering at Henry's sexual prowess. Oh, by the way, she was right, it wasn't much! I danced between the sheets with young Kate and we roared with laughter at Henry's antics. She was killed and I went to the block but that's another story.)
    Inside the Tower soldiers and yeomen were now standing down, having manned the walls and gathered behind the sally ports just in case there was a riot. Led by Agrippa, we wound down between the different towers until we reached the Wakefield – what the popular voice now calls the 'Bloody Tower'. 'Come!' Agrippa ordered.
    We opened an iron-studded door at the basement of the Bloody Tower and walked into a windowless chamber lit only by smoking cressets wedged between the bricks. At first I couldn't see clearly and all I could hear was the murmur of voices and the creaking of ropes, but then my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. I heard my master gasp and, peering through the gloom, made out the sweat-soaked, half-naked figures of the torturers, grouped round the 'Duke of Exeter's Daughter', a popular name for the rack ever since the Duke of Exeter introduced it into England as a means of loosening tongues and getting to the truth – as politicians so aptly put it.
    The poor man stretched there was naked except for a loin cloth. I glimpsed wispy white hair and a thin, emaciated figure stretched out on this bed of pain, a foot and a hand being tied at each corner. The torturers manned a wheel and, when they turned this, the bed stretched, cracking bone, muscle and sinew.
    Agrippa, hidden in the shadows, beckoned the master torturer across. The fellow, greasy-haired and with a straggly beard, lumbered over like some great bear. His naked torso glistening with sweat, his threadbare hose pushed into boots were similarly soaked. Nevertheless, he was a man who