A Column of Fire

  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 coreligionists. 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.

  He finished his wine and walked the rest of the way home.

  When he got there he was shocked to find Cardinal Charles sitting in his living room, in a red silk doublet, waiting for him.

  The midwife stood behind the cardinal with her arms folded and her chin raised defiantly.

  Without preamble, Charles said: "What have you done with the baby?"

  Pierre got over his shock rapidly and thought hard. Odette had acted faster than he had anticipated. He had underestimated the resourcefulness of a desperate woman. She must have recovered from childbirth sufficiently to send a message to the cardinal, probably by Nath, pleading for help. Nath had been lucky to find Charles at home and willing to come immediately. The upshot was that Pierre was in trouble. "Somewhere safe," he said in answer to the cardinal's question.

  "If you've killed a Guise child, by God you'll die for it, no matter how good you are at catching blasphemers."

  "The baby is alive and well."

  "Where?"

  There was no point in resistance. Pierre gave in. "At the Convent of the Holy Family."

  The midwife looked triumphant. Pierre felt humiliated. He now regretted that slap in the face.

  Charles said: "Go back and get him."

  Pierre hesitated. He could hardly bring himself to return, but he could not defy the cardinal without ruining everything.

  Charles said: "You'd better bring him here alive."

  Pierre realized that if the baby should die of natural causes now--as they often did in the first few hours--he would be blamed, and probably executed for murder.

  He turned and went to the door.

  "Wait," said Charles. "Listen to me. You are going to live with Odette, and take care of her and her child for the rest of your life. That is my will."

  Pierre was silent. No one could defy Charles's will, not even the king.

  "And the child's name is Alain," said Charles.

  Pierre nodded assent, and left the house.

  Sylvie's life went well for half a year.

  With the proceeds of book sales she and her mother rented a pleasant small house with two bedrooms in the rue de la Serpente, a street in the University district south of the river, and opened a shop in the front parlor. They sold paper, ink, and other writing necessities to teachers, students, and the literate general public. Sylvie bought the paper in St. Marcel, a suburb outside the city wall to the south, where the manufacturers had the unlimited water they needed from the Bievre River. She made the ink herself using oak galls, the wartlike growths she picked from the bark of trees in the woods. Her father had taught her the recipe. Printing ink was different, made with oil to be more viscous, but she also knew how to prepare a more dilute ink for ordinary writing. The shop did not really make enough money for the two of them to live on, but it served as a plausible cover for their more important business.

  Isabelle recovered from her depression, but she had aged. The horror the two women had experienced seemed to have weakened the mother and strengthened the daughter. Sylvie now took the initiative.

  Sylvie led a dangerous life as a criminal and a heretic but, paradoxically, she was happy. Reflecting on why this was, she suspected that for the first time in her life she did not have a man telling her what to do. She had decided to open the shop, she had chosen to rejoin the Protestant congregation, she had continued selling banned books. She talked to her mother about everything, but she made the decisions. She was happy because she was free.

  She longed for a man to hold at night, but not at the price of her liberty. Most men treated their wives like children, the only difference being that women could work harder. Perhaps there were men somewhere who did not regard wives as property, but she had never met one.

  Sylvie had invented new names for them both, so that the authorities would not connect them with the executed heretic Giles Palot. They now called themselves Therese and Jacqueline St. Quentin. The Protestants understood why and went along with the pretense. The two women had no friends who were not Protestants.

  Their aliases had fooled a man from the city government who had visited the shop soon after it opened. He had looked all over the premises and asked a lot of questions. He might even have been one of Pierre Aumande's informants, Sylvie thought; although any paper shop might have been checked for illegal literature. There were no books in the building, other than notebooks and ledgers, and he had gone away satisfied.

  The contraband books were at the warehouse in the rue du Mur, and Sylvie withdrew one only when she had a buyer lined up, so that the incriminating objects were never at the house for more than a few hours. Then, one Sunday morning in the summer of 1560, she went to the warehouse for a French-language Geneva Bible and found that there was only one left in the box.

  Checking the other boxes, she discovered that most contained obscure texts, such as the works of Erasmus, which she was able to sell only occasionally, to broad-minded priests or curious university students. She might have guessed: the books were still in the warehouse because they did not sell well. Other than the Bible, the only moderately popular book was John Calvin's manifesto Institutes of the Christian Religion. That was why her father had been printing more Bibles last September, when the Guises had pounced. But those Bibles, found in the shop and fatally incriminating for Giles, had been burned.

  She realized that she had failed to plan ahead. What was she going to do now? She thought with horror of the profession she had almost taken up back in the winter, when she and her mother had been close to starving. Never again, she vowed.

  On her way home she passed through Les Halles, the district where Pierre lived. Despite her loathing of Pierre, she tried to keep an eye on him. His master, Cardinal Charles, was responsible for the royal crackdown on Paris Protestants, and Sylvie felt sure Pierre must still be involved in finding them. He could no longer be a spy himself, because so many people knew who he was, but he was probably a spymaster.

  Sylvie had discreetly watched Pierre's house, and talked to people in the nearby tavern of St. Etienne. Members of the Guise household guard often drank there, and she sometimes picked up useful chatter about what the family was up to. She had also learned that Pierre had remarried quickly after the annulment. He now had a wife called Odette, a baby boy called Alain, and a maid called Nath: the tavern gossip was that both Odette and Nath hated Pierre. Sylvie had not yet spoken to Odette or Nath, but she was on nodding terms, and she hoped they might one day be persuaded to betray his secrets. Meanwhile, Pierre was watched at court
by the young marchioness of Nimes, who kept a note of the people she saw him talking to. So far her only moderately interesting identification had been Gaston Le Pin, the captain of the Guise family guard, who was too well-known to have a clandestine role.

  When she got home and told her mother they were out of Bibles, Isabelle said: "We could forget about the books, and just sell stationery."

  "The stationery doesn't make enough money," Sylvie said. "Anyway, I don't want to spend my life selling paper and ink. We have a mission to enable our fellow men and women to read God's word for themselves, and find their way to the true gospel. I want to go on doing that."

  Her mother smiled. "Good girl."

  "But how will I get the books? We can't print them. Father's machinery belongs to someone else now."

  "There must be other Protestant printers in Paris."

  "There are--I've seen their books in customers' homes. And we've got plenty of money from past sales to buy new stock. But I can't find out where the printers are--it's a secret, obviously. Anyway, they can sell the books themselves, so why would they need me?"

  "There's only one place where it's possible to buy large quantities of Protestant books, and that's Geneva." Isabelle said it as if Geneva were as remote as the moon.

  But Sylvie was not easily discouraged. "How far is it?"

  "You can't go! It's a long way, and a dangerous journey. And you've never traveled farther than the outskirts of Paris."

  Sylvie pretended to be less daunted than she felt. "Other people do it. Remember Guillaume?"

  "Of course I remember him. You should have married him."

  "I should never have married anyone. How do people get from Paris to Geneva?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Maybe Luc Mauriac will know." Sylvie knew the Mauriac family well.

  Isabelle nodded. "He's a cargo broker."

  "I've never understood exactly what a cargo broker does."

  "Imagine that a captain comes from Bordeaux and up the Seine River to Paris with a cargo of wine. Then he gets a shipment of cloth to take back to Bordeaux, but it fills only half of his hold. He doesn't want to wait around, he needs another half cargo as soon as possible. So he goes to Luc, who knows every merchant in Paris and every port in Europe. Luc will find the captain a load of coal, or leather, or fashionable hats, that someone in Bordeaux wants."

  "So Luc knows how to go everywhere, including Geneva."

  "He'll tell you that a young woman can't possibly do it."

  "The days of men telling me what I can and can't do are over."

  Isabelle stared at her. To Sylvie's astonishment, tears came to her mother's eyes. "You're so brave," Isabelle said. "I can hardly believe you came from me."

  Sylvie was moved by her mother's emotion. She managed to say: "But I'm just like you."

  Isabelle shook her head. "As the cathedral is like the parish church, perhaps."

  Sylvie was not sure how to respond to Isabelle. A parent was not supposed to look up to a child: it should be the other way around. After an awkward moment she said: "It's time to go to the service."

  The congregation from the hunting lodge had found a new location for what they sometimes called their temple. Sylvie and Isabelle entered a large yard where horses and carriages could be hired. They were wearing drab clothes so that they did not look dressed up for church. The business, owned by a Protestant, was closed today, Sunday, but the doors were not locked. They entered the stable, a big stone building. A burly young groom was combing a horse's mane. He looked hard at them, ready to challenge them, then recognized them and stepped aside to let them pass.

  At the back of the stable a door opened on a concealed staircase leading up to a large attic. This was where the group worshipped. As always, the room was bare of pictures or statues, and furnished simply with chairs and benches. One great advantage here was that there were no windows, so the room was soundproof. Sylvie had stood outside in the street while the congregation sang at the tops of their voices and had not been able to hear anything more than a distant strain of music that might have come from any one of several nearby religious buildings: the parish church, a monastery, or a college.

  Everyone in the room knew Sylvie. She was a pivotal member of the congregation because of her role as the bookseller. In addition, during the discussion sessions that they called fellowship she often expressed trenchant views, especially on the emotive subject of tolerance. Her views, like her singing voice, could not go unnoticed. She would never be an elder, for that role was reserved to men, but nevertheless she was treated as one of the leaders.

  She and her mother took front-row seats. Sylvie loved Protestant services--although, unlike many of her co-worshippers, she did not despise the Catholic rites: she understood that for many people the whiff of incense, the Latin words, and the eerie singing of a choir were part of the spiritual experience. However, she was moved by other things: plain language, logical beliefs, and hymns that she could sing herself.

  All the same, today she found herself impatient for the service to end. Luc Mauriac was in the congregation, with his family, and she was eager to question him.

  She did not forget business. Immediately after the final amen, she gave her last French Bible to Francoise Duboeuf, the tailor's young wife, and took five livres in payment.

  Then she was approached by Louise, the young marchioness of Nimes. "The court is moving to Orleans," Louise said.

  It was normal for the king and his entourage to move around the country from time to time. "Perhaps there will be a respite for Parisian Protestants," Sylvie said hopefully. "What's happening in Orleans?"

  "The king has called a meeting of the Estates-General there." This was a traditional national assembly. "Cardinal Charles and Pierre Aumande are going with the court."

  Sylvie frowned. "I wonder what new mischief those two devils are planning."

  "Whatever it is, it won't be good for us."

  "Lord protect us."

  "Amen."

  Sylvie left Louise and sought out Luc. "I need to go to Geneva," she said.

  Luc was a small man with a jolly manner, but he frowned disapprovingly. "May I ask why, Sylvie? Or Therese, I should say."

  "We've sold all our French Bibles and I have to buy more."

  "God bless you," he said. "I do admire your guts."

  For the second time this morning, Sylvie was thrown off balance by unexpected admiration. She was not brave, she was scared. "I just do what has to be done," she said.

  "But you can't do this," Luc said. "There's no safe route, and you're a young woman who can't afford a bodyguard of men-at-arms to protect you from bandits, thieving tavern keepers, and randy peasants armed with wooden shovels."

  Sylvie frowned at the image of randy peasants. Why did men so often speak of rape as if it were a joke? But she refused to be distracted. "Humor me," she said. "How do people get to Geneva?"

  "The quickest way is to go up the Seine from here as far as Montereau, which is about sixty miles. The rest of the journey, another two hundred and fifty miles or so, is mostly overland, all right if you have no goods to transport. Two to three weeks, with no serious delays, although there are always delays. Your mother will go with you, of course."

  "No. She needs to stay here and keep the shop open."

  "Seriously, Sylvie, you can't do this alone."

  "I may have to."

  "Then you must attach yourself to a large party at every stage of the journey. Families are safest. Avoid all-male groups, for obvious reasons."

  "Of course." All this was new to Sylvie. The prospect was terrifying. She felt foolish for having spoken glibly of going to Geneva. "I still want to do it," she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt.

  "In that case, what's your story?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You'll be in company. Travelers have nothing to do but talk. They will ask you questions. You're not going to admit that you're on your way to Geneva to buy illegal
books. In fact, you'd better not say you're going to Geneva at all, since everyone knows it's the world capital of heresy. You need a story."

  Sylvie was stumped. "I'll think of something."

  He looked thoughtful. "You could say you're on a pilgrimage."

  "To where?"

  "Vezelay, which is halfway to Geneva. The abbey has relics of Mary Magdalene. Women often go there."

  "Perfect."

  "When do you want to go?"

  "Soon." She did not want to spend too long worrying about the trip. "This week."

  "I'll find a trustworthy captain to take you to Montereau. At least you'll get that far safely. Then just keep your wits about you."

  "Thank you." She hesitated, thinking she should say something polite after picking his brains. "How is Georges? I haven't seen him for a while."

  "Fine, thank you, and opening a branch of our business at Rouen now."

  "He was always clever."

  Luc smiled wryly. "I love my son dearly, but he was never a match for you, Sylvie."

  That was true, but embarrassing, so Sylvie let it pass without comment, and said: "Thank you for your help. I'll call at your office tomorrow, if I may."

  "Come on Tuesday morning. By then I will have found you a captain."

  Sylvie extracted her mother from a group of women. She was impatient to get home and start making preparations.

  On the way back to the rue de la Serpente she found a cheap draper's store and bought a length of coarse gray cloth, ugly but hard wearing. "When we get home, I need you to sew me a nun's costume," she said to her mother.

  "Of course, though I'm almost as bad a seamstress as you."

  "That's fine. The cruder the better, as long as it doesn't fall apart."

  "All right."

  "But first I need you to cut off my hair. All of it. It must be less than an inch long all over."

  "You're going to look hideous."

  "Exactly," said Sylvie. "That's what I want."

  In Orleans, Pierre was planning a murder.

  He would not wield the knife himself, but he would make it happen.

  Cardinal Charles had brought him to Orleans for that purpose. Charles was still angry with Pierre over his attempt to get rid of Odette's baby, but as Pierre had calculated, his usefulness saved him.

  In other circumstances he would have drawn the line at murder. He had never committed such a terrible sin, though he had come close: he had been sorely tempted to kill baby Alain, but had not seen how he could get away with it. He had been responsible for many deaths, including that of Giles Palot, but they were all legitimate executions. He knew he was about to cross a dreadful line.