A Column of Fire

by Ken Follett

  ‘But, given the difficulty of attacking an island . . .’

  Charles gave the flick of the fingers that indicated he had lost interest. ‘On to a more immediate topic,’ he said. He handed Pierre a sheet of heavyweight paper with an official seal. ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘The annulment of your marriage.’

  Pierre took the paper gratefully. The grounds were clear – the marriage had never been consummated – but even so it could be difficult to get an annulment. He felt relieved. ‘That was quick.’

  ‘I’m not a cardinal for nothing. And it was gutsy of you to go through with the ceremony.’

  ‘It was worth it.’ Hundreds of Protestants had been arrested all over the city in a co-ordinated series of raids planned by Charles and Pierre. ‘Even if most of them have been let off with fines.’

  ‘If they recant their beliefs we can’t burn them to death – especially if they’re aristocrats, like the marquess of Nîmes and his wife. Pastor Bernard will die – he refused to recant, even under torture. And we found parts of a French Bible in the print shop, so your ex-wife’s father can’t escape punishment by recanting. Giles Palot will burn.’

  ‘All of which makes the Guise family Catholic heroes.’

  ‘Thanks to you.’

  Pierre bowed his head in acknowledgement, glowing with pride. His satisfaction was profound. This was what he had wanted: to be the trusted aide to the most powerful man in the land. It was his moment of triumph. He tried not to show just how exultant he felt.

  Charles said: ‘But there’s another reason why I was in a hurry to get you an annulment.’

  Pierre frowned. What now? Charles was the only man in Paris who was as devious as Pierre himself.

  Charles went on: ‘There’s someone else I want you to marry.’

  ‘Good God!’ Pierre was rocked. He had not been expecting that. His thoughts immediately flew to Véronique de Guise. Had Charles changed his mind about letting Pierre marry her? His heart filled with hope. Was it possible that two dreams could come true?

  Charles said: ‘My nephew Alain, who is only fourteen, has seduced a maid and got her pregnant. He can’t possibly marry her.’

  Pierre’s spirits fell with a painful crash. ‘A maid?’

  ‘Alain will have an arranged political marriage, like all Guise men except those of us who are called to the priesthood. But I’d like to take care of the maid. I feel sure you’ll understand that, having been born in similar circumstances.’

  Pierre felt sick. He had thought the triumph he and Charles had enjoyed might elevate his status closer to that of a member of the family. Instead, he was being reminded of how far below them he really was. ‘You want me to marry a maid?’

  Charles laughed. ‘Don’t speak as if it’s a death sentence!’

  ‘More like life imprisonment.’ What was he going to do about this? Charles did not like to be thwarted. If Pierre refused this demand it could blight his flowering career.

  ‘We’ll give you a pension,’ Charles said. ‘Fifty livres a month—’

  ‘I don’t care about money.’

  Charles raised his eyebrows at the insolence of an interruption. ‘Indeed? What do you care about?’

  Pierre realized there was one reward that might make the sacrifice worthwhile. ‘I want the right to call myself Pierre Aumande de Guise.’

  ‘Marry her, and we’ll see.’

  ‘No.’ Pierre knew he was risking everything now. ‘My name on the marriage certificate must be Pierre Aumande de Guise. Otherwise I will not sign it.’ He had never been this audacious with Charles. He held his breath, waiting for the reaction, dreading an explosion.

  Charles said: ‘You’re a determined little bastard, aren’t you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so useful to you otherwise.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Charles was silent and thoughtful for a minute. Then he said: ‘All right, I’ll agree.’

  Pierre felt weak with relief.

  Charles said: ‘From now on you are Pierre Aumande de Guise.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘The girl is in the next room along the corridor. Go and see her. Get acquainted.’

  Pierre got up and went to the door.

  ‘Be nice to her,’ Charles added. ‘Give her a kiss.’

  Pierre left the room without replying. Outside the door he stood still for a moment, feeling shaky, trying to take it all in. He did not know whether to be elated or dismayed. He had escaped from one unwanted marriage only to fall into another. But he was a Guise!

  He pulled himself together. He had better take a look at his wife-to-be. She was low-class, obviously. But she might be pretty, given that she had enticed Alain de Guise. On the other hand, it did not take much to win the sexual interest of a boy of fourteen: willingness was the most important attraction.

  He walked along the passage to the next door and went in without knocking.

  A girl sat on the sofa with her head in her hands, weeping. She wore the plain dress of a servant. She was quite plump, Pierre saw, perhaps on account of the pregnancy.

  When he closed the door behind him she looked up.

  He knew her. It was plain Odette, the maid of Véronique. She would forever remind him of the girl he had not been allowed to marry.

  Odette recognized him and smiled bravely through her tears, showing her crooked teeth. ‘Are you my saviour?’ she said.

  ‘God help me,’ said Pierre.

  *

  AFTER GILES PALOT was burned to death, Sylvie’s mother went into a depression.

  For Sylvie this was the most shocking of the traumas she suffered, more seismic than Pierre’s betrayal, even sadder than her father’s execution. In Sylvie’s mind, her mother was a rock that could never crumble, the foundation of her life. Isabelle had put salve on her childish injuries, fed her when she was hungry, and calmed her father’s volcanic temper. But now Isabelle was helpless. She sat in a chair all day. If Sylvie lit a fire, Isabelle would look at it; if Sylvie prepared food, Isabelle would eat it mechanically; if Sylvie did not help her get dressed, Isabelle would spend all day in her underclothes.

  Giles’s fate had been sealed when a stack of newly printed sheets for Bibles in French had been found in the shop. The sheets were ready to be cut into pages and bound into volumes, after which they would have been taken to the secret warehouse in the rue du Mur. But there had not been time to finish them. So Giles was guilty, not just of heresy but of promoting heresy. There had been no mercy for him.

  In the eyes of the Church, the Bible was the most dangerous of all banned books – especially translated into French or English, with marginal notes explaining how certain passages proved the correctness of Protestant teaching. Priests said that ordinary people were unable to rightly interpret God’s word, and needed guidance. Protestants said that the Bible opened men’s eyes to the errors of the priesthood. Both sides saw reading the Bible as the central issue of the religious conflict that had swept Europe.

  Giles’s employees had claimed they knew nothing of these sheets. They had only worked on Latin Bibles and other permitted works, they said; Giles must have printed the others himself, at night, after they had gone home. They had been fined just the same, but had escaped the death penalty.

  When a man was executed for heresy, all his goods were confiscated. This law was applied patchily, and interpretation could vary, but Giles lost everything, and his wife and daughter were left destitute. They managed to escape with the cash in the shop before it was taken over by a rival printer. Later they went back to beg for their clothes and learned they had been sold – there was a big market for second-hand garments. They were now living in one room of a tenement.

  Sylvie was a poor seamstress – she had been raised to sell books, not to make clothes – so she could not even take in sewing, the traditional last resort of the penniless middle-class woman. The only work she could get was doing laundry for Protestant families. Despite the raids, most of them still adhered to the true relig
ion, and after paying their fines they had swiftly restarted their congregations, finding new places to worship in secret. People who knew Sylvie from the old days often paid her more than the usual price for laundry, but still it was not enough to keep two people in food and fuel, and gradually the money they had brought from the shop was spent. It ran out in a bitterly cold December, with an icy wind knifing through the high, narrow Paris streets.

  One day when Sylvie was washing a bedsheet for Jeanne Mauriac in the freezing water of the Seine river, the cold hurting her hands so badly that she could not stop crying, a man passing by offered her five sous to suck his cock.

  She shook her head silently and carried on washing the sheet, and he went away.

  But she could not stop thinking about it. Five sous, sixty pennies, a quarter of a livre. It would buy a load of firewood, a leg of pork and bread for a week. And all she had to do was put a man’s thing in her mouth. How could that be worse than what she was doing now? It would be a sin, of course, but it was hard to care about sin when her hands were in such agony.

  She took the sheet home and hung it across the room to dry. The last lot of wood was almost gone: tomorrow she would not be able to dry laundry, and even Protestants would not pay if she delivered their sheets wet.

  She did not sleep much that night. She wondered why anyone would desire her. Even Pierre had only been pretending. She had never thought herself beautiful, and now she was thin and unwashed. Yet the man at the waterside had wanted her, so perhaps others would.

  In the morning, she bought two eggs with the last of her money. She put the remaining fragments of wood on the fire and cooked the eggs, and she and her mother had one each, with the stale remains of last week’s bread. Then they had nothing. They would just starve to death.

  God will provide, the Protestants always said. But he had not.

  Sylvie combed her hair and washed her face. She had no mirror, so she did not know what she looked like. She turned her stockings inside out to hide the dirt. Then she went out.

  She was not sure what to do. She walked along the street, but no one propositioned her. Of course not, why would they? She had to proposition them. She tried smiling at men as they walked by, but none responded. To one she said: ‘I’ll suck your cock for five sous,’ but he just looked embarrassed and hurried on. Perhaps she should show her breasts, but it was cold.

  She saw a young woman in an old red coat hurrying along the street with a well-dressed middle-aged man, holding his arm as if afraid he might escape. The woman gave her a hard look that might have signified recognition of a rival. Sylvie would have liked to speak to her, but the woman seemed intent on going somewhere with the man, and Sylvie heard her say to him: ‘It’s just around the corner, my darling.’ Sylvie realized that if she succeeded in getting a customer she would have nowhere to take him.

  She found herself in the rue du Mur, across the street from the warehouse where the Palot family had stored illegal literature. It was not a busy thoroughfare, but perhaps men would be more willing to deal with prostitutes in back streets. And, sure enough, a man stopped and spoke to her. ‘Nice tits,’ he said.

  Her heart leaped. She knew what she had to say next: I’ll suck your cock for five sous. She felt nauseated. Was she really going to do this? But she was hungry and cold.

  The man said: ‘How much for a fuck?’

  She had not thought about that. She did not know what to say.

  The man was irritated by her hesitation. ‘Where’s your room?’ he said. ‘Nearby?’

  Sylvie could not take him back to where her mother was. ‘I haven’t got a room,’ she said.

  ‘Stupid cow,’ the man said, and he walked away.

  Sylvie could have cried. She was a stupid cow. She had not worked this out.

  Then she looked across the road at the warehouse.

  The illegal books had presumably been burned. The new printer might be using the warehouse, or he might have leased it to someone else.

  But the key might still be behind the loose brick. Perhaps the warehouse could be her ‘room’.

  She crossed the road.

  She pulled out the loose half-brick next to the doorpost and reached inside. The key was there. She took it out and replaced the brick.

  She cleared some rubbish from in front of the warehouse door with her foot. She turned the key in the lock, went inside, closed and barred the door behind her, and lit the lamp.

  The place looked the same. The floor-to-ceiling barrels were still there. Between them and the wall there was enough space to do what Sylvie planned. There was a rough stone floor. This would be her secret room of shame.

  The barrels looked dusty, as if the warehouse was no longer used much. She wondered whether the empty barrels were still in the same place. She tried moving one, and lifted it easily.

  She saw that there were still boxes of books behind the barrels. A bizarre possibility occurred to her.

  She opened a box. It was full of French Bibles.

  How had this happened? She and her mother had assumed the new printer had seized everything. But clearly he had never found out about the warehouse. Sylvie frowned, thinking. Father had always insisted on secrecy. Even the men working for him had not known about the warehouse. And Sylvie had been ordered not to tell Pierre until after they were married.

  Nobody knew except Sylvie and her mother.

  So all the books must still be here – hundreds of them.

  And they were valuable, if she could find people with the courage to buy them.

  Sylvie took out a French Bible. It was worth a lot more than the five sous she had hoped to get on the street.

  As in the past, she wrapped it in a square of coarse linen and tied it up with string. Then she left the warehouse, carefully locking it behind her and hiding the key.

  She walked away full of new hope.

  Back at the tenement, Isabelle was staring into a cold fire.

  Books were costly, but to whom could Sylvie sell? Only Protestants, of course. Her eye fell on the sheet she had washed yesterday. It belonged to Jeanne Mauriac, a member of the congregation that used to worship at the hunting lodge in the suburb of St Jacques. Her husband, Luc, was a cargo broker, whatever that meant. She had not previously sold him a Bible, she thought, though he could certainly afford one. But would he dare, only six months after Cardinal Charles’s raids?

  The sheet was dry. She made her mother help her fold it. Then she wrapped it around the book and took the package to the Mauriac house.

  She timed her visit so that she would catch the family at the midday meal. The maid looked at her shabby dress and told her to wait in the kitchen, but Sylvie was too desperate to be thwarted by a maid. She pushed her way into the dining room. The smell of pork cutlets made her stomach hurt.

  Luc and Jeanne were at the table with Georges, their son. Luc greeted Sylvie cheerily: he was always lively. Jeanne looked wary. She was the anchor of the family, and often seemed pained by the humorous banter of her husband and son. Young Georges had once been an admirer of Sylvie’s, but now he could hardly bring himself to look at her. She was no longer the well-dressed daughter of a prosperous printer: she was a grubby pauper.

  Sylvie unwrapped the sheet and showed the book to Luc, who, she reckoned, was most likely to buy. ‘As I recall, you don’t have a Bible in French yet,’ she said. ‘This is a particularly beautiful edition. My father was proud of it. Take it, have a look.’ She had learned long ago that a customer was more likely to buy once he had held the book in his hands.

  Luc leafed through the volume admiringly. ‘We should have a French Bible,’ he said to his wife.

  Sylvie smiled at Jeanne and said: ‘It would surely please the Lord.’

  Jeanne said: ‘It’s against the law.’

  ‘It’s against the law to be Protestant,’ her husband said. ‘We can hide the book.’ He looked at Sylvie. ‘How much is it?’

  ‘My father used to sell this for six livres,’ she s
aid.

  Jeanne made a sound of disapprobation, as if the price was far too high.

  Sylvie said: ‘Because of my circumstances, I can let you have it for five.’ She held her breath.

  Luc looked dubious. ‘If you could say four . . .’

  ‘Done,’ Sylvie said. ‘The book is yours, and may God bless it to your heart.’

  Luc took out his purse and counted eight of the silver coins called testons, each worth ten sous, half a livre.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sylvie. ‘And ten pennies for the sheet.’ She no longer needed the pennies, but she remembered how her hands had hurt washing it, and she felt the money was hers.

  Luc smiled and gave her a small coin called a dixain, worth ten pennies.

  Luc opened the book again. ‘When my partner Radiguet sees this, he’ll be envious.’

  ‘I don’t have any more,’ Sylvie said quickly. The rarity of Protestant books kept the price high, and her father had taught her never to let people know there were plenty. ‘If I come across another one, I’ll go and see Radiguet.’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘But don’t tell him how cheaply you got it!’

  Luc smiled conspiratorially. ‘Not until after he’s paid you, anyhow.’

  Sylvie thanked him and left.

  She was so weak with relief that she could not find the energy to feel exultant. She went into the next tavern she saw and ordered a tankard of beer. She drank it quickly. It eased the pain of hunger. She left feeling light-headed.

  Closer to home she bought a ham, cheese, butter, bread and apples, and a small jar of wine. She also bought a sack of firewood and paid a boy ten pennies to carry it for her.

  When she entered the tenement room, her mother gazed in astonishment at her purchases.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ Sylvie said. ‘Our troubles are over.’

  *

  IN A MONUMENTAL sulk, Pierre got married for the second time three days after Christmas, 1559.

  He was determined that the wedding would be a perfunctory affair: he was not going to pretend to celebrate. He invited no guests and planned no wedding breakfast. He did not want to look like a poor man, so he wore his new dark grey coat, which was appropriately sombre, fitting his mood. He arrived at the parish church as the clock was striking the appointed hour.