A Column of Fire (81 page)

He searched the house, shining his light into every dead face. To his immense relief Sylvie was not there.

Now he had to find her secret place. If she was not there, he feared the worst.

Before leaving the building he ripped the lace collar off his shirt and tied it around his left arm, so that he would look like one of the militia. There was then a danger that he might be challenged and found out to be an impostor, but on balance he thought it was worth the risk.

He was beginning to feel desperate. In the few weeks he had known her she had come to mean everything to him. I lost Margery; I can’t lose Sylvie, too, he thought. What would I do?

He made his way to the rue du Mur and located a plain brick building with no windows. He went to the door and tapped on the wood. ‘It’s me,’ he said in a low, urgent voice. ‘It’s Ned. Are you there, Sylvie?’

There was silence. His heart seemed to slow down. Then he heard the scrape of a bar and the click of a lock. The door opened and he stepped inside. Sylvie locked it and replaced the bar, then turned to him. He held up the lantern to look at her face. She was distraught, scared and tearful, but she was alive and apparently unhurt.

‘I love you,’ Ned said.

She threw herself into his arms.

*

P
IERRE WAS AWESTRUCK
by the result of his machinations. The Paris militia was carrying out the slaughter of Protestants with even more force and spite than he had hoped.

His cleverness was not really the cause, he knew. Parisians were furious that the wedding had gone ahead, and popular preachers had told them they were right to feel as they did. The city had been ready to explode with hatred, waiting only for someone to ignite the gunpowder. Pierre had merely struck the match.

As dawn broke on Sunday, St Bartholomew’s Day, there were hundreds of dead and dying Huguenots on the streets of the city. It really might be possible to kill all the Protestants in France. He realized, with a sense of triumph mingled with wonder, that this could be the final solution.

Pierre had gathered around him a small squadron of ruffians, promising them that they could steal anything they liked from those they killed. They included Brocard and Rasteau; Biron, his chief spy; and a handful of the street villains Biron used for such tasks as tailing suspects.

Pierre had given his black book to the provost, Le Charron, but he remembered many of the names and addresses. He had been spying on these people for fourteen years.

They went first to the premises of René Duboeuf, the tailor in the rue St Martin. ‘Don’t kill him or his wife until I say so,’ Pierre ordered.

They broke down the door and entered the shop. Some of the men went upstairs.

Pierre pulled open a drawer and found the tailor’s notebook containing the names and addresses of his customers. He had always wanted this. He would make use of it tonight.

The men dragged the Duboeufs downstairs in their nightwear.

René was a small man of about fifty. He had already been bald when Pierre first came across him thirteen years ago. The wife had been young and pretty then, and she was still attractive, even now, looking terrified. Pierre smiled at her. ‘Françoise, if I remember rightly,’ he said. He turned to Rasteau. ‘Cut off her finger.’

Rasteau gave his high-pitched giggle.

While the woman sobbed and the tailor pleaded, a man-at-arms held her left hand flat on the table and Rasteau cut off her little finger and part of her ring finger. Blood spurted over the table, staining a bolt of pale grey wool. She screamed and fainted.

‘Where is your money?’ Pierre asked the tailor.

‘In the commode, behind the chamber pot,’ he said. ‘Please don’t hurt her any more.’

Pierre nodded to Biron, who went upstairs.

Pierre saw that Françoise now had her eyes open. ‘Make her stand up,’ he said.

Biron came back with a leather bag that he emptied onto the table in a puddle of Françoise’s blood. There was a pile of assorted coins.

‘He’s got more money than that,’ Pierre said. ‘Rip off her nightdress.’

She was younger than her husband, and she had a good figure. The men went quiet.

Pierre said to the tailor: ‘Where’s the rest of the money?’

Duboeuf hesitated.

Rasteau said excitedly: ‘Shall I cut her tits off?’

Duboeuf said: ‘In the fireplace, up the chimney. Please leave her alone.’

Biron put his hand up the chimney – cold, in August – and retrieved a locked wooden box. He broke the lock with the point of his sword and tipped the money on the table, a good heap of gold coins.

‘Cut their throats and share out the money,’ Pierre said, and he went back outside without waiting to watch.

The people he most wanted as victims were the marquess and marchioness of Nîmes. He would have loved to kill the man in front of his wife. What a revenge that would have been. But they lived outside the walls, in the suburb of St Jacques, and the city gates were locked, so they were safe from Pierre’s wrath, for the moment.

Failing them, Pierre’s mind went to the Palot family.

Isabelle Palot had done worse than insult him, when he had called at the shop a few days ago; she had scared him. And perceptive Sylvie had seen it. Now it was time for them to be punished.

The men were a long time dividing up the money. Pierre guessed they were raping the wife before killing her. He had observed, in the civil war, that when men started to kill they always raped as well. Lifting one prohibition seemed to lift them all.

At last they came out of the shop. Pierre led them south, along the rue St Martin and across the Île de la Cité. He recalled the words Isabelle had used to him:
filth, discharge of an infected prostitute, loathsome stinking corpse
. He would remind her of them as she lay dying.

*

S
YLVIE
’
S STASH OF
books was cleverly concealed, Ned saw. Anyone entering the warehouse would see only barrels stacked floor to ceiling. Most of the barrels were full of sand, but Sylvie had shown Ned that a few were empty and easily moved to reveal the space where the books were stored in boxes. No one had ever discovered her secret, she told him.

They snuffed out the light of Ned’s lamp, for fear that a faint glow might leak through cracks and be seen outside, and sat in the dark, holding hands. The bells rang madly. Sounds of combat came to their ears: screams, the hoarse shouts of men fighting, and occasional gunfire. Sylvie was worried about her mother, but Ned persuaded her that Isabelle was in less danger at her house than Sylvie and he would be on the streets.

They sat for hours, listening and waiting. The street noises began to die away around the time that a faint light appeared around the edges of the door, like a picture frame, indicating dawn; and Sylvie said: ‘We can’t stay here for ever.’

Ned opened the door a few inches, put his head out cautiously, and looked up and down the rue du Mur in the morning light. ‘All clear,’ he said. He stepped out.

Sylvie followed him and locked the door behind her. ‘Perhaps the killing has stopped,’ she said.

‘They might flinch from committing atrocities in broad daylight.’

Sylvie quoted a verse from John’s Gospel: ‘Men loved darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil.’

They set off along the street, side by side, walking quickly. Ned still had on his white armband, for what that might be worth. He placed more reliance on the sword at his side, and walked with a hand on the hilt for reassurance. They headed south, towards the river.

Around the first corner two men lay dead outside a shop selling saddles. Ned was puzzled to see that they were half-naked. The corpses were partly obscured by the figure of a grey-haired old woman in a dirty coat bending over them. After a moment Ned realized she was taking the clothes off the bodies.

Second-hand clothing was valuable: only the rich could buy new. Even worn and filthy underwear could be sold as rags to paper makers. This wretched old woman was stealing the garments of the dead to sell, he realized. She pulled the breeches off the legs of a body then ran away with a bundle under her arm. The nakedness of the stabbed bodies made the sight even more obscene. Ned noticed that Sylvie averted her eyes as they walked past.

They avoided the broad, straight main roads with their long sightlines, and zigzagged through the narrow, tortuous lanes of the neighbourhood called Les Halles. Even in these back streets there were bodies. Most of them had been stripped, and in some places they were piled one on top of another, as if to make room in the road for people to pass. Ned saw the tanned faces of outdoor workers, the soft white hands of rich women, and the slender arms and legs of children. He lost count of how many. It was like a painting of hell in a Catholic church, but this was real and in front of his eyes in one of the great cities of the world. The sense of horror grew like nausea in him, and he would have vomited if his stomach had not been empty. Glancing at Sylvie he saw that her face was pale and set in an expression of grim determination.

There was worse to come.

At the edge of the river, the militia were getting rid of bodies. The dead, and some of the helpless wounded, were being thrown into the Seine with no more ceremony than would have been used for poisoned rats. Some floated off, but others hardly moved, and the shallow edge of the water was already clogged with corpses. A man with a long pole was trying to push the bodies out into midstream to make room for more, but they seemed sluggish, as if reluctant to leave.

The men were too preoccupied to notice Ned and Sylvie, who hurried past and headed across the bridge.

*

P
IERRE
’
S EXCITEMENT
grew as he approached the little stationery shop in the rue de la Serpente.

He wondered whether to encourage the men to rape Isabelle. That would be a suitable punishment. Then he had a better idea: let them rape Sylvie in front of her mother. People felt more pain when their children suffered: he had learned that from his wife, Odette. It crossed his mind to rape Sylvie himself, but that might diminish his authority in the eyes of his men. Let them do the dirty work.

He did not knock at the door of the shop. No one in Paris was answering callers now. A knock only gave people time to arm themselves. Pierre’s men smashed open the door with sledgehammers, taking only a few seconds, then rushed in.

As Pierre entered he heard a shot. That shocked him. His men did not have guns: they were expensive, and normally only the aristocracy had personal firearms. A moment later he saw Isabelle standing at the back of the shop. One of Pierre’s men lay at her feet, apparently dead. As Pierre watched, she raised a second pistol and carefully aimed it at Pierre. Before he had time to move, another of his men ran her through with his sword. She fell without firing the second gun.

Pierre cursed. He had planned a more elaborate revenge. But there was still Sylvie. ‘There’s another woman,’ he shouted to the men. ‘Search the house.’

It did not take long. Biron ran upstairs and came down a minute later. ‘There’s no one else here,’ he said.

Pierre looked at Isabelle. In the gloom he could not see whether she was alive or dead. ‘Drag her outside,’ he ordered.

In the light of day he saw that Isabelle was pumping blood from a deep wound in her shoulder. He knelt over her and yelled angrily: ‘Where is Sylvie? Tell me, bitch!’

She must have been in agony, but she gave him a twisted smile. ‘You devil,’ she whispered. ‘Go to hell, where you belong.’

Pierre roared with anger. He stood up and kicked her wounded shoulder. But it was pointless: she had stopped breathing, and her eyes stared up at him sightlessly.

She had escaped.

He went back inside. His men were searching for the money. The shop was full of paper goods of all kinds. He went around pulling ledgers off shelves and emptying cupboards and drawers, piling paper up in the middle of the floor. Then he snatched a lantern from Brocard, opened it, and touched the flame to the paper. It caught immediately and flared up.

*

N
ED FELT THAT
he and Sylvie had been lucky to reach the left bank without getting accosted. By and large the militia were not attacking people at random: they seemed to be using the names and addresses they had undoubtedly got from Pierre. All the same, Ned had been stopped and interrogated once, when he was with Aphrodite Beaulieu, and it could easily happen again, with unpredictable results. So it was with a sense of relief that he turned into the rue de la Serpente, with Sylvie at his side, and hurried towards the shop.

He saw the body on the street, and had a dreadful feeling he knew who it was. Sylvie did too, and she let out a sob and broke into a run. A moment later they both bent over the still form on the bloody cobblestones. Ned knew right away that Isabelle was dead. He touched her face: she was still warm. She had not been dead long, which explained why her clothes had not yet been stolen.

Sylvie, weeping, said: ‘Can you carry her?’

‘Yes,’ Ned said, ‘if you just help get her over my shoulder.’ She would be heavy, but the embassy was not far away. And it occurred to him that he would look like a militiaman disposing of a corpse, and consequently would be less likely to be questioned.

He had his hands under Isabelle’s lifeless arms when he smelled smoke and hesitated. He looked towards the shop and saw movement inside. Was there a fire in there? A flame flared up and lit the interior, and he saw men moving about with an air of purpose, as if looking for something; valuables, perhaps. ‘They’re still here!’ he said to Sylvie.

At that moment, Ned saw two men step through the doorway. One had a mutilated face, his nose just two holes surrounded by puckered white scar tissue. The other man had thick blond hair and a pointed beard, and Ned recognized Pierre.

Ned said: ‘We have to leave her – come on!’

Sylvie hesitated for one grief-stricken moment, then broke into a run. Ned ran after her, but they had been recognized. He heard Pierre shout: ‘There she is! Go after her, Rasteau!’