The Borgia Ring Read Online Free PDF

and the Devil’s vassal, Henry VIII, over half a century ago.
    Throughout Europe, men fight to uphold their vision of God. But the One True Faith, the faith of St Peter, the faith of Christ Himself, will, I know, prevail. Blood has been spilled, plenty of blood. But there is the blood of the faithful, and there is the blood of the heretic, and only the first of these is pure. Only the spilling of this blood is a sin.
    I had been a student at the Venerable English College in Rome for five years, training to be a Jesuit missionary, when, late in May 1588, we received news from Paris that the good Catholic people of the city had risen up against that vile Protestant appeaser King Henri III. He fled and the governing of the city fell to a group of noblemen, the Council of Sixteen. Within days that great French Catholic the Duc de Guise was welcomed back into Paris from exile.
    For a time there was peace there; indeed, Europe enjoyed a calm not experienced for many long years. Then, a few daysafter Christmas, news reached us that, on 23 December, the Duc de Guise and his brother, Cardinal de Guise, had been tricked by the treacherous Henri and slaughtered by the King’s henchmen – stabbed through the heart in the council chambers of the Château de Blois, where they had been summoned to a meeting.
    When I heard this news I knew immediately that my time had come, that I would soon be rewarded for my devotions and offered the chance of martyrdom. For five years I had been imbued with the teachings of the One True Faith and been taught how to teach in my turn, trained to express my heartfelt and soul-deep zeal, so as to convert the waverers and restore stray Catholics to the fold. I was ready.
    I remember the gathering in the great chamber of the college at which the head of my order, Superior General Acquaviva, addressed us all and imparted the news of My Lord Guise’s murder. I remember the hush, the stillness, and how I could feel anger and the bitterness all around me, actually taste these things in my mouth.
    That night any true rest evaded me, and when I did tumble into the oblivion of sleep I could not be sure I was dreaming or simply remembering. For in the dark hours before the dawn unspeakable shadows haunted the corners of my cell and I could no longer separate dreams from the waking world.
    The same images kept returning to torment me. Tyburn Village, to the west of London. A windswept, rain-drenched morning in April five years earlier. The execution of a Jesuit missionary, Henry Wittingham.
    It began with a commotion from the crowd seated in the wooden stands to one side of Tyburn Tree, the three-poster gallows that had been a place of death for so many men and women over the years. The crowd murmurs, and then, as the cart comes into view, some of them begin to cheer and shout.The procession enters the square with the prisoner bound to a hurdle, naked but for a blood-stained loincloth. His face scrapes along the ground. As he is lifted from the dirt, the crowd can see Wittingham’s bloodied, swollen and blackened face. Gusts of rain sweep the scene. The executioner helps the condemned man stand upright on the cart parked beneath the scaffold. A noose is placed over the man’s head and the cart quickly drawn away.
    He dangles and kicks. The crowd scream with excitement. A woman and two men run out to tug at Wittingham’s legs, trying to speed his end, but they are quickly spotted and dragged away by four burly wardens. The gasping man is cut loose and lowered to the ground. Then he is carried to a wooden platform where he is bound at wrist and ankle.
    A hush. Even the sounds of Nature seem to recede; the wind drops, the rain slows. The prisoner’s face is awash with watery blood, his mouth agape. Most of his teeth are smashed. A gag is knotted across his open mouth and the loincloth yanked away and tossed into the mud below the platform. The executioner grabs Wittingham’s genitals and, with a single slice,