It should be pointed out that Shakespeare was not entirely nor on every page “modern.” Whether it’s statues coming suddenly to life (The Winter’s Tale), gods descending to arrange marriages (As You Like It), or pirate ships escorting Hamlet around the North Sea, the Bard showed a certain proclivity for the ancient device of deus ex machina.
William did not fare well under torture. That answers that question, he thought. After two turns of the rack, he begged Sir Thomas Lucy to stop. He would tell Sir Thomas Lucy everything he wanted to know.
Sir Thomas Lucy said, “Tell me of Edward Arden and Mary, his wife.”
“I have met them but once, and know little besides their names, not even our exact relation,” William replied, sweating and panting.
The answer seemed not to satisfy Lucy, who nodded to Henry Rogers. Moving forward, Rogers leeringly poured hot wax onto William’s ballocks, and William screamed again. Henry Rogers grinned, and offered to cut them off to alleviate the pain.
In a fountain of words, William told Lucy about his relatives on his mother’s, Mary Arden’s, side. He told him that yes, his mother was certainly born Catholic, though he never saw her worship openly. He told him about the time when he and the family were visiting his grandmother at the stately brick house at Wilmcote, and he and his brother Gilbert were playing hide-and-seek. He had ducked under his grandmother’s bed, and discovered a loose floorboard. Prying it open with a sense of discovery and danger, he had found a carefully polished, gleaming silver crucifix and a set of rosary beads, magical, alluring, and terrifying all at once. He’d slammed the floorboard shut and run to hide in the washtub.
“Now,” said Lucy, “tell me once more about Thomas Cottom.” He nodded slightly to Henry Rogers, who gave the rack the tiniest turn.
But just as William finished his scream, and took a breath to tell Lucy about the locked box, there came a pounding at the door of the chamber. Lucy, annoyed, gestured to Henry Rogers; he, pissed off, left his work to answer it. The moment Henry Rogers unbarred the door and opened it, he stepped back and bowed deeply.
“My lord.”
Sir Thomas Lucy also did his reverence, and stayed there as Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, followed by three of his seconds, strode into the room. William recognized him from the day nine years ago at Kenilworth when Leicester had entertained the Queen and might have come to swordplay with Edward Arden but for the intercession of Lady Magdalen.
Leicester looked much older now, and he coughed.
He looked blankly at William. William suddenly forgot the pain in his shoulders and knees, the biting of the bonds at his wrists and ankles. He only felt how absurd he must look to Leicester, spread-eagle on the rack, his belly hair wet and curled with sweat and his ballocks dripping with comical little candle-drips of wax.
Leicester turned to leave, and as he passed Lucy, muttered, “Let him go.”
Lucy stood upright in shock.
“My lord, this yeoman’s brat is on the point of revealing secret papist enclaves amongst the nobility, in your own Warwickshire. I pray you let the inquisition play its course, and I shall deliver recusants and plotters that threaten the Queen’s very life.”
The Earl of Leicester stopped, and looked over his shoulder at Shakespeare. His lower jaw worked back and forth for an instant. He breathed a short, sharp breath through his nose, like a caged bull. Then he coughed a long, racking cough. Before he was fully recovered from the fit, he choked out, “He is, as you say, but a yeoman’s brat. I said let him go.”
Then he was gone.
“Ay, my lord,” said Lucy, with a bow to the already closed door.
William tried not to look too searchingly at Lucy. There were, he thought, a couple of ways this could go. Either Lucy would do what Leicester had told him to do; or he wouldn’t.