Jean walked through this joy like a phantom, unseen, unseeing. He had attended the war council earlier that day, where 150 men had crowded into a small room in the Palazzo Publico, listened to the speeches, the plans to take the fight back to the enemy. He had kept silent throughout, his head bent, even when his name was mentioned and Blaise de Monluc designated him a commander. He would take the title, because with it came a greater share of the Republic’s bounty and the ability to feed his own. He would find ways to avoid acting his role, in his wife’s sickness and the wound all knew he had sustained. Mostly in his reputation, glossed by his ‘victory’ at Porta San Viene, the Republic’s final defiance in the siege, the story blown like glass, puffed up with the need for good news within the fall.
He knew he was a straw man, without substance, reduced to caring about nothing more than survival. The news of his son’s betrayal, of both himself and the cause of his life, had confirmed that, for in the terrible moment when the Fugger’s words came out, it was not the violation of Anne Boleyn, his Queen he thought about, only the threat to himself. It was Beck’s eyes he sought because he knew he would find his escape in them, his excuse. Some vestige of him, some husk, still wanted his friends’ good opinion, and his love for wife and daughter was the only reason he need give them for not pursuing his cause again.
Now though, walking streets filled with men and women who still believed in something, the memories he’d tried to shove aside came jostling back, fresh-minted through the gap of time. There were years he had felt like this before, straw filled, using his sword to take heads, gain rich purses, only to buy himself yet another flagon of the best wine, another woman, to forget, for a moment of lonely release, his precious first wife and child, his Lysette and Ariel and their plague-smitten bodies laid in the ground. Anne Boleyn had ended that life that was not a life, given him a vision of heaven, a cause, the quest to regain and bury her hand leading him through extraordinary hardship to extraordinary happiness. In the end, he had triumphed, taken his reward of Beck, his children, his life at the Comet. But maybe his son was right, maybe the sins of his life had weighed too heavily in the scales. Torment had followed too brief a joy and he was a straw man again.
When darkness came to the streets, he felt no urge to return to his lodgings, though abundant food awaited him, befitting his new title of Commander. Beck awaited him there too and that was no lure. She might not want him to go, but neither did she especially want him to stay, for when he lay beside her on the bed, Gianni lay between them. Haakon, the Fugger, Erik would be there as full of hope as any Sienese Republican. Anne would have returned, but he knew what he would see in her eyes and he had had enough of disappointment. So he slipped into a crowded tavern, took a flagon of the heavy wine of the region to the darkest corner, away from the boasting and the martial songs and began to drink. Maybe solace could be found near the bottom of his bottle.
It wasn’t there, and only a single gulp had passed in his search through a second when a large shape appeared before his table.
‘Haakon.’ He nodded at an empty chair. ‘Sit, there’s wine enough for both of us.’
The Norseman sniffed at the flagon, shook his head. ‘I’ll wager there’s better at your lodgings, newly delivered … Commander.’ He leaned down. ‘Can I escort your eminence there?’
‘Eminent arseholes. Let’s finish this one first, eh Hawk? And maybe its twin?’
Jean made to pour but a large hand delayed him. ‘It’s our last night, Jean. We leave for Rome at dawn. And Anne …’ He hesitated then went on. ‘Anne has something to tell you. Something of importance.’
Such little effect as the wine had had left him in that instant and he stood, followed Haakon out onto the street. Dread grew with every step he took.
The room was filled with the savour of roasted meat. Erik had turned the hearth’s spit industriously and the results lay on the table: two partridges, a grouse, three pigeons, a skewer of starlings, a brace of rabbits. In the centre, four capons, breast to breast. There was a rib of Chiana beef, glistening with juices, pink meat, thick fat golden around it. A wheel of dense bread that could have supported a cart lay at the table end, bowls of olive oil, thick and green beside it, next to a slab of goat’s cheese, its whiteness bursting through a coat of fine ash.
Five people sat around the table. All of them had spent the last months living on a handful of barley floating in thin gruel, flavoured with whatever rank and salted meat had survived the winter. Their mouths filled and emptied with saliva as the scents assailed them, yet not one reached forward to the feast. Their hands lay idle in their laps, their eyes fixed on a sixth person standing there, their minds filled only with her visions.
Anne related what she had seen in the world beyond the world, told it simply, neither dwelling on nor diminishing any part of it. She had begun with eyes closed, partly back in that land of memory, but found that she needed sight as she went on, that seeing was part of the way forward. She needed the eyes of the listener, to search them for understanding. Yet only one of the people she most needed returned her gaze and the strength challenging her almost caused her to falter. She stuck to her tale, however, concluding it with simple words.
‘That is all I saw, the first to the last of it. Help me with it now.’
They all waited. All knew to whom the appeal was directed and it was he who had to answer. He knew too, and the man who had avoided her eyes finally looked up and met them.
‘There is no other interpretation?’
‘I can see no other, Father. The sixth-fingered hand, if it remains unburied, will bring this harm.’
There was a harsh intake of breath.
‘Well, I am no visionary, but even I can see another here.’ Beck’s wound pallor was stark in the candlelight as she leaned into it. ‘Maybe the land will be all the fairer for its purging, as woods are cleared of their dead timber by a gale, only for the whole to grow stronger. As a sick body mends when it is purged of blood – even if you don’t even believe in that, daughter, though all the world does.’
‘I don’t. But, Mother, it is the feeling behind the vision that is as important. When have I ever got that wrong?’ Off her mother’s silence she continued. ‘When I saw the failure of the harvest, we husbanded our plenty for the next year, saved ourselves and many others. When the plague was far off, I took us to the hills. And when Gianni was sick, I already had the herbs planted that kept him alive.’
‘So your vision is limited!’ Beck’s voice was bitter. ‘Why save he who will be about such evil? Surely better for all to have let him die then.’
‘No. Because this story was not written then. It is made by everything that has happened since. Every path chosen.’
‘And Gianni’s path? Do you deny him his choice?’
‘No.’ Anne’s voice was as calm as her mother’s was harsh. ‘But I know I have to try to stop him on mine.’
‘You? A girl of eighteen?’
‘The daughter of a woman who, at eighteen, rescued her father from a sorcerer’s cell, her husband from a torturer, who married him even when her father forbade it. The daughter of a man who followed his own vision to the borders of death and back.’ She smiled. ‘Would you have me deny my lineage?’
Erik thumped the table, said, ‘Well-spoken, Anne.’ He had always been a little afraid of her, her certainty, her far-seeing eyes. But he had always admired her courage.
Beck went on as if no one had interrupted. ‘I would have you obey us. I forbid you to journey into such great danger for a cause long dead, one that has nothing to do with you. Your father forbids it. If he will not pick up his sword for this cause, then you will not. And as we all know – Jean Rombaud’s sword sleeps in its scabbard.’
They were out, the words no one wanted to hear, and Beck wanted them back the moment they were gone. Not only for their cruelty, retaliation for his words at the bastion in Siena, but also for the challenge implicit in them. Haakon and the Fugger shifted uneasily; Er
ik turned away, poked at the embers in the hearth. Jean flushed, the heat bringing sweat to his forehead, chilling the moment it appeared.
‘Does it, Father?’ Anne’s soft voice felt like a stick beating him. ‘Even after all I have told you, will you let it sleep still?’
He had to look at her. ‘If I forbid you to go, will you obey me?’
There was only a flicker of hesitation. ‘I have never gone against your wishes. Yet I cannot deny my vision. I was raised by people who never denied theirs.’
‘Then it seems I have no choice.’ He forced his voice to go hard, somehow stopped the shaking in his hand enough to touch the hilt of his sword at the table’s end. ‘Time to awake, old friend.’
There was instantly a lot of noise. The other three men exhaled as one, and Haakon was up in an instant, slapping his friend on his back. Erik took the opportunity to grab a rabbit, his teeth swiftly severing the meat from the bone. Anne simply closed her eyes and smiled. It was a moment before anyone realized that Beck was speaking.
‘So you have chosen once again. Your cause over your family. This queen, whom you barely knew, who nearly robbed you of your life, over me. You have chosen not only to drive our son away, but to pursue him with your enmity.’
Jean said, ‘Beck …’
‘My name is Rebecca bat Abraham. And I was told what would happen when I married outside my people. My father begged me to think on our traditions, but my love for you blinded me. For a while we were happy, for a while …’ Her voice cracked and they could all see the struggle as she tried to centre it again. ‘No matter. Now I am punished for my sins.’
She was moving toward the door now, every step painful.
‘Mother, where are you going?’
‘There are members of my tribe here, even in this place. I know some of them, have always denied them my greeting. Maybe I can begin to atone.’
Anne was beside her, a hand placed on Beck’s arm. ‘You can’t …’
‘Can’t?’ Beck rounded in fury. ‘You try to command me? You have proved you can disobey, but I think commands are yet beyond even you. Let me go!’
The hand dropped and Beck, after a struggle, opened the door. On the threshold, she paused, looked back.
‘I do not need Anne’s gifts to see this future, Jean Rombaud. It is clear as if the hand of God had written it on the sky. If you try to thwart him in this, our son will kill you – and I will not wait here for that news. I will not …’
Finally her voice did break, and she was gone, leaving curse and prophecy hovering in the air. It was the Fugger who finally cut through it.
‘I will see her safe.’
Anne gathered some things, though she was having difficulty seeing. A cloak, the last of her cordial, some of the food were all shoved into a sack and the Fugger departed. Closing the door behind him, Anne turned back.
‘Father …’ she began, but Jean held up a hand. Silently, stiffly, he rose from his seat, shuffled over to the bed.
‘We leave with the others at dawn, Anne. Will you see to it?’
Haakon stood at the table end, his face contorted with emotion. ‘Jean,’ he said, ‘she will not keep to this. She’ll understand that this is what you must do. She …’
The gruff voice trailed off as Jean passed close to the Norseman, giving no indication that he heard him. Lying on the bed, he drew the blankets around him. Beck’s scent, her sickness, herself, entered him. He turned his face to the wall, so no one could see his tears.
NINE
CROSSROADS
Rain fell in huge drops, thudding into cloaks long since saturated, deafening within the hoods. Streams found gaps, carving channels over chilled skin. Thick mud sucked at their boots, a sticky bond formed with every step, and wind drove against them. Jean longed to mount the horse he led forward, but they had ridden all day and he’d need the horse’s strength to ride away from whatever lay ahead. The final stage of any journey always seemed the longest, but never had it proved itself more so than this evening’s march toward the crossroads at Pont St Just.
He’d been thinking of the last time he had approached it, how then he’d had hope, broken in body though he’d been. An end was promised, at least, either in the fulfilment of his vow, or in his death. This time his hope was confined to such a tiny chance, that the hand was still there, they had somehow travelled the faster and his son had not violated its resting place. Then it could be buried again somewhere safe and he could turn back. Yet he did not need Anne’s long sight to sense that even such a little hope was futile, that the crossroads ahead held no end for him, only the beginning of another, even harder journey. A crossroads of the mind as of the earth.
He turned to the figure beside him, cloaked and bent just as he was, pushing into the water and wind. Anne had tried to keep his spirits up in the two weeks they had been on this chase, through storms at sea, fleeing brigand ambush in the mountains, via all the flea-infested inns if they were lucky, the roadside ditches if they were not. Now, he could see that even her store of faith was nearly spent, her body sustained only by her will, driven by the visions that tormented her.
As he studied her weariness she looked up, summoned by his gaze. She raised eyebrows and he glanced around, mouthed, ‘Not far,’ though his glance had told him nothing; the weather and the dark wiped out even the edges of the forest to his poor eyesight. There was mud a pace ahead of him and the pace after that. They could be hours from their goal or one minute away.
Then, as if an unseen hand had suddenly stopped pumping, the rain slackened and, in the next instant, ceased. A little light came upon them, as the waxing moon peeked through shreds of cloud. They halted, threw their hoods back, their horses nudging into them. The wind had changed, blowing a little warmer from behind them now, up from the sea they’d long left behind. They turned their faces to it, grateful to absorb it for a moment.
Without opening his eyes, Jean said, ‘Shall we rest here, beneath the trees? Dry out and then go on at dawn?’
He hoped she’d say yes, delay the inevitable that awaited them. He knew she wouldn’t.
‘I think we should keep going, Father. And did you not say there was an inn at Pont St Just?’
‘There was.’ A memory came, of wielded blades, men dying, a first glimpse of a dangerous enemy. ‘It may not still be there.’
‘Let us hope it is. A double reason to go on, then.’
‘Aye. But let’s ride at the least. These horses have rested enough.’
The mud sucked at their hooves, but the rain had stopped and the wind now pushed them forward. The forest started to thin, some trees were coppiced, or had been reduced to stumps, the trunks for building or fuel. They passed a rough hut, its side walls bulging outwards, a thin straw roof that must have been less protection even than his hood. There was movement from the side of it, and a pig rose from the mud within its pen, sniffed at them, lay down again. Jean thought he saw human eyes peer at them from a doorway, only to dart swiftly away. He had been raised in similar country himself, also in the Loire, knew the terror their passing such a lonely place would have caused. Travellers were rare at the best of times there. On such a foul night, they could only be the Devil’s messengers.
The road twisted between two banks, curved around almost on itself, then broke sharply northwards again. Within the glimpses of the moon he was able to see up ahead, to a line of blackthorn at his left, another at his right. The road led to the gap between them, a last twist and corner concealing that gap until they were upon it.
Jean was not sure if he reined in or his horse halted of its own will, but they stopped just as the moon cleared a bank of cloud, dappling the crossroads, glinting off the gibbet beam and the scrap of metal that swung from it. The cage of his memory was mostly gone; only the headpiece remained, rusted, split, yet still retaining the vague form of a man’s face, curved out for nose, lips, chin; hanging like heads that had hung from his hands on scaffolds across Europe, raised by the hair to screaming crow
ds.
‘By the wounds!’ Jean swayed, felt a hand reach out to steady him, too late, as he slipped from the horse, sliding down its flanks, his legs giving way and dropping him onto the ground. He sat there, in the red mud, and stared up at the mask he’d once stared out from and the years collapsed in on themselves, he looked again through slats, tasted again of that horror, felt, in every tortured bone and ravaged joint, the hurts inflicted on him since the time he last fell to this ground from that cage, each of them flaring within him.
Anne was beside him in a moment, supporting him, helping him to stand and lean against his horse, pressing a rope-wrapped bottle of wine against his lips. He drank, choked, drank again, his eyes gradually clearing till they could focus on the face before him. Strangely, she was smiling.
‘Wrong crossroads then?’ She spoke like a child and as if she had been promised some treat at their destination. She had that from him, the scaffold humour.
‘Happily not.’ He managed a half-smile, shook his head, trying to clear it, looked down – and all humour was snatched away. Where he’d landed, at the very centre of the crossroads, there was a pile of disturbed earth, crumbling into a shallow pool. Someone had dug there and recently, for not even the rain had managed to obliterate the trace of it.
He fell again, thrust one arm into the dank water, up to the shoulder, fingers flailing at the edges of the hole. He couldn’t believe he encountered the bottom of it so soon. The casket, with its treasure, had been buried far deeper, deep as any grave. Here, there was nothing but mud, water, loose stones. No hardness to give him hope.
He felt Anne’s hands on him again, under his shoulders, and he let himself be lifted till he was once more leaning against his horse.