A Column of Fire (41 page)

It was May 1560, and they had been married five months.

For the first few weeks Odette had tried to cajole him into a normal sexual relationship. She did her best to be coquettish, but it did not come naturally to her, and when she wiggled her broad behind and smiled at him, showing her crooked teeth, he was repelled. Later she began to taunt him with impotence and, as an alternative jibe, homosexuality. Neither arrow struck home – he thought nostalgically of long afternoons in the widow Bauchene’s feather bed – but Odette’s insults were nevertheless irritating.

Their mutual resentment hardened into cold loathing as her belly swelled through the end of a harsh winter and the beginning of a rainy spring. Their conversation shrank to terse exchanges about food, laundry, housekeeping money, and the performance of their sulky adolescent maid, Nath. Pierre found himself festering with rage. Thoughts of his hateful wife poisoned everything. The prospect of having to live, not only with Odette but also with her baby, the child of another man, came to be so odious as to seem impossible.

Perhaps the brat would be stillborn. He hoped so. That would make everything easy.

Odette stopped screaming, and a few moments later Pierre heard the squalling of a baby. He sighed: his wish had not been granted. The little bastard sounded repulsively healthy. Wearily, he rubbed his eyes with his hands. Nothing was easy, nothing ever went the way he hoped. There were always disappointments. Sometimes he wondered if his entire philosophy of life might be faulty.

He put the notebook in a document chest, locked the chest, and slipped the key into his pocket. He could not keep the book at the Guise palace, for he did not have a room of his own there.

He stood up. He had planned what to do next.

He climbed the stairs.

Odette lay in the bed with her eyes closed. She was pale, and bathed in perspiration, but breathing normally, either asleep or resting. Nath, the maid, was rolling up a sheet stained with blood and mucus. The midwife was holding the tiny baby in her left arm and, with her right hand, washing its head and face with a cloth that she dipped into a bowl of water.

It was an ugly thing, red and wrinkled with a mat of dark hair, and it made an irritating noise.

As Pierre watched, the midwife wrapped the baby in a little blue blanket – a gift to Odette, Pierre recalled, from Véronique de Guise.

‘It’s a boy,’ the midwife said.

He had not noticed the baby’s gender, even though he had seen it naked.

Without opening her eyes, Odette said: ‘His name is Alain.’

Pierre could have killed her. Not only was he expected to raise the child, she wanted him to have a daily reminder of Alain de Guise, the pampered young aristocrat who was the real father of the bastard. Well, she had a surprise coming.

‘Here, take him,’ said the midwife, and she handed the bundle to Pierre. He noticed that Véronique’s blanket was made of costly soft wool.

Odette muttered: ‘Don’t give the baby to him.’

But she was too late. Pierre was already holding the child. It weighed next to nothing. For a moment he experienced a strange feeling, a sudden urge to protect this helpless little human being from harm; but he quickly suppressed the impulse. I’m not going to let my life be blighted by this worthless scrap, he thought.

Odette sat up in bed and said: ‘Give me the baby.’

The midwife reached for the bundle, but Pierre withheld it. ‘What did you say its name was, Odette?’ he said in a challenging tone.

‘Never mind, give him here.’ She threw back the covers, evidently intending to get out of bed, but then she cried out, as if at a spasm of pain, and fell back on the pillow.

The midwife looked worried. ‘The baby should suckle now,’ she said.

Pierre saw that the child’s mouth had puckered into a sucking shape, though it was taking in only air. Still he kept it in his arms.

The midwife made a determined attempt to wrest the baby from his grasp. Holding the child in one arm, he slapped the midwife’s face hard with the other hand, and she fell back. Nath screamed. Odette sat up again, white with pain. Pierre went to the door, carrying the child.

‘Come back!’ Odette screamed. ‘Pierre, please don’t take away my baby!’

He went out and slammed the bedroom door.

He went down the stairs. The baby cried. It was a mild spring evening, but he threw on a cloak so that he could hide the baby underneath it. Then he left the house.

The baby seemed to like motion: when Pierre started walking steadily, it stopped crying. That came as a relief, and Pierre realized the child’s noise had been bothering him, as if he was supposed to do something about it.

He headed for the Île de la Cité. Getting rid of the child would be easy. There was a particular place in the cathedral where people left unwanted babies, at the foot of a statue of St Anne, the mother of Mary and the patron saint of mothers. By custom, the priests would put the abandoned baby in a crib for all to see, and sometimes the child would be adopted by a soft-hearted couple as an act of charity. Otherwise it would be raised by nuns.

The baby moved under his arm, and once again he had to suppress an irrational feeling that he ought to love it and take care of it.

More challenging was the problem of explaining the disappearance of a Guise infant, albeit a bastard; but Pierre had his story ready. As soon as he returned he would dismiss the midwife and the maid. Then he would tell Cardinal Charles that the child had been stillborn, but the trauma had driven Odette mad, and she refused to accept that the baby was dead. Walking along, Pierre invented a few details: she had pretended to suckle the corpse, she had dressed it in new clothes, she had put it in a crib and said it was sleeping.

Charles would be suspicious, but the story was plausible, and there would be no proof of anything. Pierre thought he would get away with it. He had realized, at some point in the last two years, that Charles did not like him and never would, but found him too useful to be discarded. Pierre had taken the lesson to heart: as long as he was indispensable, he was safe.

The streets were crowded, as always. He passed a tall pile of refuse: ashes, fish bones, night soil, stable sweepings, worn-out shoes. It occurred to him that he could just leave the baby on such a rubbish tip, though he would have to make sure no one saw him. Then he noticed a rat nibbling the face of a dead cat, and he realized the baby would suffer the same fate, but alive. He did not have the stomach for that. He was not a monster.

He crossed the river by the Notre Dame Bridge and entered the cathedral; but when he reached the nave, he began to have doubts about his plan. As usual, there were people in the great church: priests, worshippers, pilgrims, hucksters and prostitutes. He walked slowly up the nave until he came level with the little side chapel dedicated to St Anne. Could he discreetly put the baby on the floor in front of the statue without being observed? He did not see how. For a destitute woman, perhaps it would hardly matter if she were noticed: no one would know who she was and she might slip away and vanish before anyone had the presence of mind to question her. But it was a different matter for a well-dressed young man. He might get into trouble if the baby so much as cried. Under his cloak, he pressed the warm body closer to him, hoping to muffle any noise as well as keeping it out of sight. He realized he should have come here late at night or very early in the morning – but what would he have done with the child in the meantime?

A thin young woman in a red dress caught his eye, and he was inspired. He would offer one of the prostitutes money to take the baby from him and put it into the chapel. Such a woman would not know him, and the baby would remain unidentified. He was about to approach the one in the red dress when, to his shock, he heard a familiar voice. ‘Pierre, my dear chap, how are you?’

It was his old tutor. ‘Father Moineau!’ he said, horrified. This was calamitous. If the baby cried, how would Pierre explain what he was doing?

The priest’s square, reddish face was creased with smiles. ‘I’m glad to see you. I hear you’re becoming a man of consequence!’

‘Something like that,’ Pierre said. Desperately he added: ‘Which means, unfortunately, that I am pressed for time and must leave you.’

Moineau looked thunderous at this brush-off. ‘Please, don’t allow me to detain you,’ he said curtly.

Pierre longed to confess his troubles, but he felt a more urgent need to get himself and the baby out of the cathedral. ‘I do beg your pardon, Father,’ he said. ‘I will call on you before too long.’

‘If you have time,’ Moineau said sarcastically.

‘I’m sorry. Goodbye!’

Moineau did not say goodbye, but turned away petulantly.

Pierre hurried down the nave and out through the west door. He was dismayed to have offended Moineau, the only person in the world he could tell his troubles to. Pierre had his masters and his servants, but he did not cultivate friends; Moineau was the exception. And now he had offended him.

He put Moineau out of his mind and retraced his steps across the bridge. He wished he could have thrown the baby into the river, but he would have been seen. Anyway, he knew that Father Moineau would not have reassured him that such a murder was God’s will. Sins committed in a good cause might be indulged, but there was a limit.

If he could not leave the baby in the cathedral, he would take it directly to the nuns. He knew one of the convents that acted as an orphanage: it was in the affluent east of the city, not far from the Guise family palace. He turned in that direction. He probably should have chosen this plan in the first place: the cathedral had been a mistake.

The place he was thinking of was called the Convent of the Holy Family. As well as an orphanage, the nuns ran a school for girls and small boys. As Pierre approached he heard the unmistakable sound of children at play. He went up the front steps to a tall carved door and stepped into a cool, quiet hall with a stone floor.

He took the baby from under his cloak. Its eyes were closed but it was still breathing. It waved its tiny fists in front of its face as if trying to get its thumb in its mouth.

After a few moments a young nun glided silently into the hall. She stared at the baby.

Pierre used his most authoritative voice. ‘I must speak with your Mother Superior immediately.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the nun. She was polite but not intimidated: a man with a baby in his arms cannot be fearsome, Pierre realized. The nun said: ‘May I ask who wishes to see her?’

Pierre had anticipated this question. ‘My name is Doctor Jean de la Rochelle, and I am attached to the College of the Holy Trinity at the university.’

The nun opened a door. ‘Please be so kind as to wait in here.’

Pierre went into a pleasant small room with a painted wooden sculpture of Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus. The only other furniture was a bench, but Pierre did not sit down.

An older nun came in a few minutes later. ‘Doctor Roche?’ she said.

‘De la Rochelle,’ Pierre corrected her. It was just possible that her mistake with his name was a deliberate error intended to test him.

‘Forgive me. I am Mother Ladoix.’

Pierre said dramatically: ‘The mother of this boy child is possessed by the devil.’

Mother Ladoix was as shocked as he intended. She crossed herself and said: ‘May God protect us all.’

‘The mother cannot possibly raise the baby. It would die.’

‘And the family?’

‘The child is illegitimate.’

Mother Ladoix began to recover from her shock and looked at Pierre with a touch of scepticism. ‘And the father?’

‘Not me, I assure you, in case that was what you were thinking,’ he said haughtily.

She looked embarrassed. ‘Certainly not.’

‘However, he is a very young nobleman. I am the family’s physician. Naturally, I cannot reveal their name.’

‘I understand.’

The baby began to cry. Almost automatically, Mother Ladoix took the bundle from Pierre and rocked the baby. ‘He’s hungry,’ she said.

‘No doubt,’ said Pierre.

‘This blanket is very soft. It must have been costly.’

It was a hint. Pierre took out his purse. He had not prepared for this contingency, but fortunately he had money. He counted out ten gold ecus, worth twenty-five livres, enough to feed a baby for years. ‘The family asked me to offer you ten ecus, and to say they would guarantee the same amount every year that the child is here.’

Mother Ladoix hesitated. Pierre guessed that she did not know how much of his story to believe. But caring for unwanted children was her mission in life. And ten ecus was a lot of money. She took the coins. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘We will take good care of this little boy.’

‘I will pray for him and for you.’

‘And I look forward to seeing you one year from today.’

For a moment Pierre was thrown. Then he realized she expected him to return with another ten ecus, as promised. It would never happen. ‘I will be here,’ he lied. ‘One year from today.’

He opened the door and held it for the nun. She left the room and silently disappeared into the nunnery.

Pierre went out with a light heart and walked away rapidly. He was exultant. He had got rid of the bastard. There would be a thunderstorm when he got home, but that was all right. There was no longer anything to tie him to the repellent Odette. Perhaps he could get rid of her, too.

To postpone the confrontation, he went into a tavern and ordered a celebratory cup of sherry. As he sat alone, sipping the strong, tawny wine, he turned his mind to his work.

It was more difficult now than when he had started. King Francis II had stepped up trials of Protestants, perhaps under the guidance of his Scottish wife, Mary Stuart, but more likely influenced by her Guise uncles. The heightened persecution had made the Protestants more cautious.

Several of Pierre’s spies were Protestants who had been arrested and threatened with torture unless they turned traitor. But the heretics were getting wise to this, and no longer automatically trusted their co-religionists. Nowadays they often knew each other only by first names, not revealing their surnames or addresses. It was like a game in which the Church’s moves were always countered by the heretics. However, Charles was patient, and Pierre was relentless; and it was a game that ended in death.