A Column of Fire (50 page)

When the duchess and the next duke came out of the sick room in tears, Pierre said: ‘Coligny killed Duke Scarface,’ and he showed them the confession.

The result exceeded his hopes.

The duchess became vituperative, sputtering: ‘Coligny must die! He must die!’

Pierre told her that Queen Caterina was already making overtures of peace to the Protestants, and Coligny would probably escape punishment as part of any treaty.

At that Henri became nearly hysterical, crying in his boyish treble: ‘I will kill him! I will kill him myself!’

‘I believe you will, one day, Prince Henri,’ Pierre said to him. ‘And when you do, I will be by your side.’

Duke Scarface died the next day.

Cardinal Louis was responsible for the funeral arrangements, but was rarely sober long enough to get much done, and Pierre took charge without difficulty. With Anna’s support he devised a magnificent send-off. The duke’s body would be conveyed first to Paris, where his heart would be interred in the cathedral of Notre Dame. Then the coffin would travel in state across the country to Champagne, where the body would be buried at Joinville. Such grand obsequies were normally only for kings. No doubt Queen Caterina would have preferred less ostentation, but Pierre did not consult her. For her part, Caterina always avoided a quarrel when she could, and she probably figured that Scarface could do no more harm now, even if he did have a royal funeral.

However, Pierre’s scheme to make Coligny a hate figure did not go so smoothly. Once again Caterina showed that she could be as cunning as Pierre. She sent a copy of Poltrot’s confession to Coligny, who had retreated to the Protestant hinterland of Normandy, and asked him to respond to it. She was already planning his rehabilitation.

But the Guises would never forget.

Pierre went to Paris ahead of the duke’s body to finalize arrangements. He had already sent Poltrot there, and imprisoned him in the Conciergerie, at the western tip of the Île de la Cité. Pierre insisted on a heavy guard. The ultra-Catholic people of Paris had worshipped Scarface, and if the mob got hold of Poltrot, they would tear him to pieces.

While the duke’s corpse was on its way to Paris, Coligny made a deposition denying his involvement in the assassination, and sent copies to Queen Caterina and others. It was a vigorous defence, and Pierre had to admit – only to himself, of course – that it carried conviction. Gaspard was a heretic, not a fool, and if he had planned to assassinate Scarface, he would probably have chosen as killer someone better than the unstable Poltrot.

The last part of Gaspard’s deposition was particularly dangerous. He pointed out that in natural justice he had the right to confront his accuser in court, and he begged Queen Caterina to ensure the safety of Poltrot, and make sure he survived to give evidence to a formal investigation.

An unbiased inquiry was the last thing Pierre wanted.

To make matters worse, in the Conciergerie Poltrot retracted his confession.

Pierre had to stop the rot quickly. He went to the supreme court called the Parlement of Paris and proposed that Poltrot should be tried immediately. He pointed out that if the murderer remained unpunished, riots would break out when the hero’s body came to Paris. The judges agreed.

In the early hours of 18 March, the duke’s coffin arrived in the southern suburbs of Paris and was lodged at a monastery.

Next morning, Poltrot was found guilty and sentenced to be dismembered.

The sentence was carried out in the place de Grève in front of a wildly cheering mob. Pierre was there to make sure he died. Poltrot’s arms and legs were tied to four horses facing the four points of the compass, and the horses were whipped into motion. Theoretically, his limbs should have been torn from his torso, leaving the stump of his body to bleed to death. But the executioner botched the knots, and the ropes slipped. Pierre sent for a sword, and the executioner then began to hack off Poltrot’s arms and legs with the blade. The crowd egged him on, but it was an awkward procedure. At some point during the half-hour that it took, Poltrot stopped screaming and lost consciousness. Finally, his head with its distinctive tuft at the front was chopped off and fixed to a post.

Next day the body of Duke Scarface was brought into the city.

*

S
YLVIE
P
ALOT WATCHED
the procession, feeling optimistic.

It entered Paris from the south, by the St Michel Gate, and passed through the University district, where Sylvie had her shop. The cortege began with twenty-two town criers dressed in mourning white, ringing solemn handbells and calling upon the grieving citizens to pray for the departed soul of their great hero. Then came priests from every parish in the city, all holding crosses. Two hundred elite citizens were next, carrying blazing torches that sent up a black funeral pall of smoke and darkened the sky. The armies that had followed Scarface to so many victories were represented by six thousand soldiers with lowered banners, playing muffled drums that sounded like faraway gunfire. Then came the city militia with a host of black flags fluttering in the March wind that came off the cold river.

The streets were lined with crowds of mourning Parisians, but Sylvie knew that some of them were like her, secretly elated that Scarface was dead. The assassination had brought peace, at least for now. Within days Queen Caterina had met with Gaspard de Coligny to discuss a new edict of tolerance.

Persecution had increased during the civil war, although Protestants in Sylvie’s circle now had some protection. Sylvie had sat at Pierre’s writing desk one day, when he was away with Scarface and Odette was dining with her girlfriends, and copied out every word of his little black book while Nath played with two-year-old Alain, who could not yet talk well enough to betray the secret of Sylvie’s visit.

Most of the names were not known to her. Many would be false, for the Protestants knew they might be spied upon and often gave made-up names and other misleading information: Sylvie and her mother called themselves Thérèse and Jacqueline, and told no one about their shop. Sylvie had no way of knowing which of the unfamiliar names were real.

However, many in the book were her friends and fellow-worshippers. Those people had been discreetly warned. A few had left the congregation in fear and had become Catholic again; others had moved house and changed their names; several had left Paris and gone to more tolerant cities.

More important in the long term, Nath had become a regular member of the congregation in the attic over the stable, singing the psalms loudly and tunelessly. With her ten gold ecus in her hand she had talked about leaving Pierre’s employment, but Sylvie had persuaded her to stay and continue to spy on him for the Protestants.

The safer atmosphere was good for book sales, and Sylvie was glad to have new stock brought from Geneva by Guillaume. Poor boy, he was still in love with Sylvie. She liked him, and was grateful to have him as an ally, but could not find it in her heart to love him back. Her mother was frustrated by her rejection of an apparently ideal match. He was an intelligent, prosperous, handsome young man who shared her religion and her ideals: what more did she want? Sylvie was as mystified as Isabelle by this question.

At last the coffin came by, draped with a banner displaying the heraldic arms of the Guises, resting on a gun-carriage drawn by six white horses. Sylvie did not pray for the soul of Scarface. Instead she thanked God for ending his life. Now she dared to hope that there would be peace and tolerance.

Behind the coffin rode the widow, Anna, all in white, with ladies-in-waiting either side of her. Finally, there was a pretty-faced boy with fair hair who had to be Scarface’s heir, Henri. Beside him, wearing a white doublet with a pale fur collar, was a handsome man of twenty-five with thick blond hair.

Sylvie was overwhelmed by shock, disgust and horror as she recognized the man at the right hand of the new duke of Guise.

It was Pierre.

12

Barney thought the Caribbean island of Hispaniola must be the hottest place on earth.

In the summer of 1563 he was still master gunner on the
Hawk
, three years after he had boarded the ship in Antwerp wanting to go only as far as Combe Harbour. He longed to go home and see his family but, strangely, he was not very angry about having been tricked into joining the crew. Life at sea was dangerous and often cruel, but there was something about it that suited Barney. He liked waking up in the morning not knowing what the day would bring. More and more, he felt that the sad collapse of his mother’s business had been, for him, an escape.

His main complaint was all-male society. He had always loved the company of women, and they, in turn, often found him attractive. Unlike many crew, he did not resort to dockside whores, who often gave men horrible infections. He yearned just to stroll along a street with a girl at his side, flirting and looking for a chance to snatch a kiss.

The
Hawk
had sailed from Antwerp to Seville, then to the Canary Islands. There followed a series of lucrative round trips, taking knives and ceramic tiles and clothing from Seville to the islands and bringing back barrels of strong Canary wine. It was a peaceful trade, so Barney’s expertise in gunnery had not been required, although he had kept the armaments in constant readiness. The crew had shrunk from fifty to forty through accidents and disease, the hazards of normal life at sea, but there had been no fighting.

Then Captain Bacon had decided that the big money was in slaves. At Tenerife he had found a Portuguese pilot called Duarte who was familiar with both the African coast and the transatlantic crossing. The crew had become restive at this dangerous prospect, especially after so long at sea; so Bacon had promised that they would return home after one trip, and get a bonus.

Slavery was a major industry in West Africa. Since before anyone could remember, the kings and chieftains of the region had sold their fellow men to Arab buyers who took them to the slave markets of the Middle East. The new European traders horned in on an existing business.

Bacon bought three hundred and twenty men, women and children in Sierra Leone. Then the
Hawk
headed west across the Atlantic Ocean to the vast unmapped territory called New Spain.

The crew did not like the slave business. The wretched victims were crammed together in the hold, chained up in filthy conditions. Everyone could hear the children crying and the women wailing. Sometimes they sang sad songs to keep up their spirits, and that was even worse. Every few days one of them would die, and the body would be thrown overboard with no ceremony. ‘They’re just cattle,’ Bacon said, if anyone complained; but cattle did not sing laments.

The first Europeans to cross the Atlantic had thought, when they made landfall, that they were in India, so they had called these islands the West Indies. They knew better now that Magellan and Elcano had circumnavigated the globe, but the name stuck.

Hispaniola was the most developed of many islands, few of which were even named. Its capital, Santo Domingo, was the first European city in New Spain, and even had a cathedral, but to his disappointment Barney did not get to see it. The pilot Duarte directed the
Hawk
away from the city because what the ship was doing was illegal. Hispaniola was governed by the king of Spain, and English merchants were forbidden to trade there. So Duarte advised Captain Bacon to head for the northern coast, as far away as possible from the forces of law and order.

The sugar planters were desperate for labour. Barney had heard that something like half of all Europeans who migrated to the West Indies died within two years, and the death rate was almost as bad among Africans, who seemed resistant to some but not all the diseases of New Spain. As a result, the planters did not scruple to buy from illicit English traders, and the day after the
Hawk
docked at a little place with no name, Bacon sold eighty slaves, taking payment in gold, pearls and hides.

Jonathan Greenland, the first mate, bought supplies in the town and the crew enjoyed their first fresh food in two months.

The following morning Barney was standing in the waist, the low, middle part of the deck, talking anxiously to Jonathan. From where they were, they could see most of the small town where they had at last made landfall. A wooden jetty led to a little beach, beyond which was a square. All the buildings were of wood but one, a small palace built of pale-gold coral limestone.

‘I don’t like the illegality of this,’ Barney said quietly to Jonathan. ‘We could end up in a Spanish jail, and who knows how long it would take to get out?’

‘And all for nothing,’ Jonathan said. The crew did not share in the profits of regular trading, just the prize money from captured ships, and he was disappointed that the voyage had been peaceful.

As they talked, a young man in clerical black came out of the main door of the palace and walked, looking important, across the square, down the beach and along the jetty. Coming to the gangplank he hesitated, then stepped onto it and crossed to the deck.

In Spanish he said: ‘I must speak to your master.’

Barney replied in the same language. ‘Captain Bacon is in his cabin. Who are you?’

The man looked offended to be questioned. ‘Father Ignacio, and I bring a message from Don Alfonso.’

Barney guessed that Alfonso was the local representative of authority, and Ignacio was his secretary. ‘Give me the message, and I’ll make sure the captain gets it.’

‘Don Alfonso summons your captain to see him immediately.’

Barney was keen to avoid offending the local authorities, so he pretended not to notice Ignacio’s arrogance. Mildly he said: ‘Then I’m sure my captain will come. If you’ll wait a moment, I’ll find him.’

Barney went to Bacon’s cabin. The captain was dressed and eating fried plantains with fresh bread. Barney gave him the message. ‘You can come with me,’ Bacon said. ‘Your Spanish is better than mine.’

A few minutes later they stepped off the ship onto the jetty. Barney felt the warmth of the rising sun on his face: today would be very hot again. They followed Ignacio up the beach. A few early-rising townspeople stared at them with lively interest: clearly strangers were rare enough here to be fascinating.