Catherine: One Love is Enough (Catherine Series Book 1) (9 page)

For instance, she witnessed, wide-eyed, the initiation of several new female members into the People of the Dark. When a young girl entered the Beggars’ Kingdom, she was first stripped naked and then made to dance in front of the King to the sound of tambourines. If Mâchefer did not want her for himself, sending her to swell the ranks of an already impressive harem, those who coveted the girl were invited to fight for her, the winner then taking possession of his prize on the spot, in front of everybody …

The first time this happened Catherine covered her eyes and hid her head under the bedclothes. The second time she stayed, peeping out from behind laced fingers. The third time she watched the ceremony from beginning to end.

One night Catherine saw them lead a young girl up to Mâchefer. She might have been a year or so older than herself. When stripped, she revealed a body as slim as a willow-wand, still boyish in outline but for the newly-budded breasts. Heavy chestnut plaits swung on her shoulders. When the girl started to dance, Catherine was seized by a strange fancy. Silhouetted against the glowing brazier, the slender, black form swayed and twisted like a human flame, but with such gaiety and abandon that the watching child felt quite envious. Catherine found herself thinking that it must be nice to dance naked like that in front of a blazing fire. The young dancer looked like a sprite or will-o’-the-wisp. It was all a bit like a strange game.

When the dance ended, the girl stood there panting and Mâchefer made a sign that Catherine had learned to recognise. It meant that he did not want the girl for his harem. The old crone who had brought the girl along shrugged crossly, and made as if to escort her protégée away. Just then a frightening apparition stepped out of the crowd, a dwarfish man so broad across the shoulders as to be almost square. His scarred face owed nothing to the usual tricks and artifices of the beggar fraternity. There was a purple sheen on his red, bulbous nose. His mouth was opened in a soundless laugh, showing teeth like blackened stubs. When he stepped toward the girl, Catherine gave an involuntary shiver of revulsion. What followed was worse still. This time Catherine kept her eyes tight shut as this repulsive creature threw the girl to the ground and took her publicly, there and then. But she could not help hear the beggar girl’s wild scream, and she realised then why Barnaby had forbidden her to so much as show her nose outside the house. When she opened her eyes again, the girl, who had fainted, was being carried away amid cheers and laughter. There was blood on her legs …

Catherine was beginning to grow restless after being shut up for so long. As her strength returned she felt an overpowering urge to run about, breathe in the pure air down by the river and feel the sun’s warm caress on her skin. But Barnaby shook his head.

‘Not till the day you leave Paris, my pretty. Till then it’s dangerous for you to go out by day, and still more so by night.’

Then, one day, Landry, who came almost every day to see Catherine, appeared hotfoot and breathless.

‘I know where Loyse is,’ he shouted as he burst through the door.

While wandering in his usual fashion about the city that afternoon, Landry had visited the Notre-Dame market to buy some tripe his mother wanted for supper. As a keen admirer of Caboche, the lad had gone straight to the shop kept by Mère Caboche, who specialised in offal. She lived in a narrow, dirty house in one of the less savoury alleys thereabouts. The whole of the ground floor reeked sickeningly of tripe. During the day the wares were displayed in front of the house, spilling out of large metal basins. Behind sat Mère Caboche in person, her scales on one side, and a metal fork in one hand, a quivering mound of yellow fat. She was famous throughout the neighbourhood for her ugly temper, which her celebrated son had inherited, and her inordinate fondness for the bottle.

On reaching the shop, Landry had been surprised to find it closed and shuttered. If the door had not been half open he would have thought the place uninhabited. But it so happened that a mendicant friar of the Order of Frères Mineurs, in his grey robe girdled by a triple-knotted rope, was stood in the doorway talking to Mère Caboche, whose frowsty face could be clearly seen.

‘Just a little bread for the brothers, my good woman,’ said the friar, rattling his basket. ‘Today is the Feast of St John. Surely you will not refuse!’

‘The shop is closed, Father,’ retorted Mère Caboche. ‘I am sick and I have only food enough for myself. Go on your way, Father, and pray for my recovery.’

‘But even so …’ the friar insisted. Some passing housewives stopped to place an offering in his basket. One of them said:

‘The place has been shut for two months now, Father. No-one round here can understand it at all. As for being sick, you should just hear the sort of psalms she sings in the evenings. Sick of work more like!’

‘I can do as I please,’ scowled Mère Caboche, making vain efforts to close the door again. The friar’s sandaled foot was now wedged in the crack.

‘How about a little wine then?’ the friar suggested, inspired by the other woman’s comments. At this, Mère Caboche’s face turned red as a beet under her yellow linen coif and she roared at him:

‘I have no wine! To the Dev –’

‘My child!’ the scandalised friar exclaimed, hastily crossing himself.

All the same, he did not remove his foot. People were beginning to collect outside the tripe-seller’s house. The mendicant friar, Brother Eusebius, was well known to be the most persistent alms-seeker in the monastery. He had been ailing latterly and had been unable to make his usual rounds of the city. He was clearly intending to make up for lost time.

Landry was amused by the scene and drew nearer with the rest of the crowd, agog to see whether Mère Caboche’s celebrated miserliness or Brother Eusebius’s equally celebrated persistence would win the day. Most of the onlookers were merely amused, but others began disputing the merits of the case, according to whether they supported the Church or Simon the Skinner. The din that ensued was further aggravated by a man drawing a cart, which got wedged between two houses in the narrow little street.

It was then that Landry, perched on a stone where he had climbed in order to see better, glanced casually upwards and caught sight of a pale face behind the single upstairs window in Mère Caboche’s house. One of the window’s oiled-paper panes was torn just enough for the boy to recognise who it was, the person in question having leant forward to see what all the commotion was about. He waved, and the furtive but unmistakable sign she made in return was enough to convince him that Loyse recognised him as surely as he did her. Then she vanished. Clambering down from his perch and quite forgetful of the tripe he had promised to buy his mother, Landry elbowed his way vigorously through the crowd and didn’t stop running till he reached Cour Saint-Sauveur.

Catherine listened admiringly to Landry’s story. Barnaby looked anxious.

‘I might have guessed,’ he said. ‘Caboche was always after the girl. He must have taken advantage of the attack on the house to capture her and take her back with him. Now the old woman is guarding her. It won’t be easy to get her away from them …’

Jacquette Legoix had collapsed on the hearthstone and was sobbing bitterly with her head in her skirts. Sara bent over her and stroked the thick blonde tresses, still barely streaked with grey, in an attempt to soothe her. But it was no good.

‘My child,’ Jacquette moaned. ‘My gentle lamb who wanted to keep herself pure for the Lord. He has taken her from me … The beast! Monster that he is! Alack, alack!’

Her heart seemed to be literally breaking with grief. Neither Catherine, shocked into silence by the news, nor any of the others, equally distressed though they were, was able at first to think of something consoling to say to her. It was Barnaby who finally persuaded her to raise her head, revealing a pathetic, red, swollen countenance, streaming with tears. Appalled by her mother’s grief and inwardly raging against Caboche, the fiend, Catherine threw her arms round her mother’s neck.

‘Easy or not,’ said Barnaby, ‘we must get Loyse away from Caboche. Heaven only knows what sort of misery the poor girl must be enduring at his hands.’

‘But how do you propose to get her out of there?’ Sara asked.

‘Not single-handed, obviously! Mère Caboche only has to open her mouth to bring a whole crowd of people running to help her – there are all the people who want to win her son’s favour, and all the others who are simply afraid of incurring his displeasure. Mâchefer is our only solution. He is the only man who can help us.’

Sara left Jacquette’s side and went over to where Barnaby stood, propped on one leg, nervously chewing his nails. She murmured something to him in a voice pitched low so as not to be heard by the others, though not quite low enough to escape Catherine’s sharp ears.

‘Isn’t there a risk that Mâchefer might want to be paid … in kind? Especially if the girl is pretty?’

‘It is a risk we have to take. I hope we can stop him doing so. Anyway, we must cross our bridges as we come to them. What we have to fear at the moment is not Mâchefer but Caboche. The King of Thune must have almost as many men under him as the Skinner. He should be at his usual place now, outside the King of Sicily’s palace. That’s where he usually begs. Do you know him by sight, Landry?’

The lad frowned and grimaced:

‘You mean the one who calls himself Colin-Beau-Soyant – the man with all the boils?’

‘That’s the one. Go and find him and tell him that Barnaby the Cockleshell Man wants him, and if he makes any trouble tell him I urgently need him to help me
load the dice
. Can you remember that?’

‘Of course.’

Landry pulled his cap down over his ears and hugged Catherine, who was clinging to his hand.

‘I want to go with you,’ she said. ‘It’s so boring down here …’

‘Better not, little one,’ Barnaby interposed. ‘You are much too easily recognised. There isn’t another head of hair like yours in Paris! You would only have to lose your bonnet and that would be the end of everything. Besides, I wouldn’t like Mâchefer to clap eyes on you, out there in the sunlight.’

As Landry ran up the steps and out through the low doorway, Catherine felt a pang of regret as a ray of sunshine flashed briefly on the mildewed steps. It must be so lovely up there on that sunny June day! Barnaby kept promising that they would all leave Paris as soon as Loyse had been found. But that day seemed so slow in coming. Would they succeed in getting Loyse back, to start with?

She felt rage swelling inside her when she thought of Caboche and her older sister. She had only a vague idea of what had been happening to Loyse, but she did know that she hated Caboche with all her heart. He had always been present when something awful happened in her life.

They did not have long to wait. An hour later Catherine saw Landry returning. He was accompanied by a man of such repellent appearance that she had not the slightest desire to leave the place in the chimney-corner, near her mother, where Barnaby had told her to stay. She had often seen Mâchefer at night as he presided over his subjects’ merrymaking, but at those times he had always been surrounded by the half-mocking, half-primitive ceremony that befitted a beggar king. She had never before seen him in his everyday beggar’s role. The man she saw now was fully a head shorter than Barnaby. He leant on two crutches, and the filthy garment he wore was horribly distended behind by an enormous hump, which rose higher than his head itself. One leg, wrapped in pus-stained rags, was twisted under him, and what could be seen of it looked like a running sore. The gleaming, wolfish fangs had been artfully blackened, making it look for all the world as if nothing remained in his mouth but a few rotting stumps. Only one eye sparkled brightly, the other empty socket – Mâchefer’s one genuine deformity – being hidden by a dirty bandage. At the top of the steps, Mâchefer threw aside his crutches, straightened his crooked leg and leapt down the stairs with the agility of a youth. Catherine had to stifle an exclamation of surprise.

‘What is it?’ asked Mâchefer. ‘The boy said you wanted to see me at once.’

‘He spoke the truth. Listen, Mâchefer, we have not always seen eye to eye, you and I, but you are the chief here and you are known as a man who never betrays a friend. You may laugh when I tell you what I want you to help me do … it’s a good deed!’

‘Is this some kind of joke?’

‘No, listen …’

Rapidly Barnaby explained the position to Mâchefer and outlined what he wanted him to do. The other man listened in silence, thoughtfully tearing off his false boils. When Barnaby had finished he merely asked:

‘Is the girl pretty?’

Here Barnaby discreetly squeezed Jacquette’s hand, sensing her to be on the verge of hysterics. But his voice was perfectly steady as he replied:

‘Nothing out of the ordinary. Blonde, but too pale. Not your type. Besides, she doesn’t care for men, only for God. She’s a future nun whom Caboche has kidnapped.’

‘Some of them are quite pretty,’ said Mâchefer meditatively, ‘and Caboche is powerful at the moment. Going against him is a risky business …’

‘Not for you. What have you got to fear from Caboche? Power is notoriously short-lived, as you know.’

‘Perhaps so. But what do I stand to gain from this business besides a beating?’