and respect I deserve.
To mark this, I had devised something a bit special for Damien. An unusual method of punishment, used occasionally to act as a terrible example pour discourager ^les autres. It seems to have been most commonly used in cases of high treason, where men had plotted to kill the king. Appropriate, I thought. For what was Damien if not an integral part of the group that would bring me down if only they could?
The earliest record of this treatment in England was in 1238, when some minor nobleman broke into the royal lodge at Woodstock intent on killing Henry III, there on a hunting trip. To demonstrate to any other potential traitors that the king was serious about attempts on his life, the man was sentenced to be torn limb from limb by horses then beheaded.
Another would-be royal assassin met the same fate in the mid eighteenth century. The aspiring assassin's name just had to be an omen. Francois Damiens stabbed King Louis XV at Versailles. His sentence read that 'his chest, arms, thighs and calves be burned with pincers; his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said attack, burned in sulphur; that boiling oil, melted lead, and rosin and wax mixed with sulphur be poured into his wounds; and after that his body be pulled and dismembered by four horses. "
According to reports of the execution, Damiens's dark- brown hair turned white during the torture. Casanova, that other great lover, reported in his memoirs,
"I watched the dreadful scene for four hours, but was several times obliged to turn my face away and to close my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half the body having been torn away from him."
Obviously, I couldn't get a team of horses down into the cellar, so I'd had to come up with my own arrangement. I'd built a system of ropes and pulleys, attached to floor and ceiling and linked with one of those powered winches that are used on yachts. Each rope ended in a steel shackle that would fasten round wrist or ankle. By adjusting the lengths and tensions on the ropes, I had suspended Damien in midair, his limbs spread in a massive, human X, his pathetic genitals dangling in the middle like something in a butcher's shop.
The chloroform had a worse effect on him than it did on any of the others. As soon as he came round, he vomited violently, not an easy thing to achieve when you're hanging upright four feet above the floor. It was just as well I'd removed his gag, or he'd have choked on his own vomit, which would have cheated me out of my satisfaction in his punishment.
He was completely bewildered. He had no idea why he was there.
"Because I chose you," I told him.
"You were just unlucky enough to choose the wrong job. Now I'm going to question you the way you question your suspects."
While I'd been poking around in Auntie Doris's kitchen, vaguely looking to see if she had anything I might find useful, I'd come across her icing set. I remembered that icing set. Every year, her Christmas cakes were a miracle of artistry that any of Bradfield's bakers would have been hard pressed to equal. Once, she'd been called away by Uncle Henry while she was doing the big cake, and I'd picked up the icing bag, determined to help. I can't have been more than six.
When she came back from whatever disgusting farmyard task she'd been helping with and saw my efforts, she went berserk. She grabbed the weighted leather strop that Uncle Henry used to keep his cut-throat razors sharp and beat me so hard she tore my shirt. Then she locked me in my room without any supper, leaving me there for the best part of twenty-four hours with nothing but a bucket to piss in. I knew I had to find an appropriate use for her treasured icing set.
There was a blow lamp in the cellar which I used to heat up the icing attachments so I could leave my mark on Damien, just as the executioner had on his namesake Damiens two hundred and forty years before. There was something quite beautiful about the way his skin blossomed into scarlet star bursts as the red-hot piping rosettes came into contact with his pale flesh. It was also astonishingly effective. He told me everything I wanted to know and lots of rubbish I didn't give a