I hope he was. I gave him five minutes' start and loosed my dogs on him.

Ah, yes, my memoirs… If I don't start soon the chaplain will claim he feels faint from hunger. So you want to hear about Murder? So you shall. Bloody, horrible deaths. Murder by the garrotte, by the knife, by poison. Murder at the fullness of noon when the devil walks, or in the dark when that sombre angel spreads his eternal black wings. Murder in palaces, Murder in rat-infested hovels, in open country and in crowded market places. Murder in dungeons, assassination in church. Oh, Lord, I have seen the days! I have seen judicial Murder: those who have died at the hangman's hands, strung up, cut down half-alive, thrown on the butcher's block and their steaming bodies hacked open. The heart, entrails and the genitals slashed and plucked out and the rest,

God's creation, quartered and thrown like cold meat into refuse baskets. I have seen women boiled alive in great black vats, and others tied in chains and burnt above roaring fires at Smithfield.

The chaplain leans forward. 'Tell them about the maze,' he whispers.

'What do you mean?' I ask.

'Well,' he squeaks, 'tell them why you dictate your memoirs in the centre of a maze.'

I'd like to tell him to mind his own bloody business but it's a fair comment. You see, at Burpham I have laid out the manor gardens like those I saw at Fontainebleau when I served as fat Henry's spy at the court of the lecherous Francis I. Now mazes have become very popular, although they weren't meant to be: you see, years ago, people took a vow to go on a crusade but, because of lack of money or time, some never reached Outremer. So Holy Mother Church decreed that they could be released from their vows if they travelled a number of times round a subtly devised maze.