The Burning Chambers

by Kate Mosse

  The soldier leapt forward. ‘Yes, Monsignor.’

  ‘This gentleman is leaving. Escort him to the gates of the prison.’

  McCone straightened his clothes. ‘You are making a mistake.’

  Vidal made the sign of the cross and raised his voice. ‘May God go with you,’ he said. ‘Rest assured that I will share your concerns with His Excellency, our noble Bishop of Toulouse, and indeed with our friends at the Parliament.’

  McCone hesitated, then bowed and left the cell, the guards following at a respectful distance behind.

  Vidal held himself erect, listening to their footsteps echoing along the chill corridor that led from this hell into the light. He had expected to be challenged, but not that the challenge would have come from Jasper McCone.

  He realised McCone was in the pay of the arms dealer Delpech, like so many others. And, like Delpech, he was driven by money and a desire for power. But Vidal’s interest lay more in retrieving the Shroud and in his own ambitions to become the next bishop. Moreover, he believed it would strengthen the Catholic position if the Protestant uprising went ahead. Those liberal Catholics, those who still believed compromise was possible, would be forced to retract their support and the city would be cleansed of the Huguenot contagion for good.

  For a moment, he heard his lover’s voice in his mind, and he flushed at the memory of her. When all this was over, Vidal would perhaps permit himself a last visit to the mountains. He would be pleased to know she fared well in her widowhood.

  ‘What do you want us to do with him?’

  The guard’s voice brought Vidal back to the present.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘This prisoner,’ he said, prodding Crompton’s shoulder. Crompton moaned weakly, before slipping back into unconsciousness.

  ‘Will he talk more?’ Vidal asked. ‘He has withstood much.’

  The guard’s eyes were red and worn. In the dim light of the cell, Vidal could see the bloodstains beneath the man’s fingernails. They were loyal servants of God and were as exhausted as he was himself.

  ‘The evil is burnt so deep into this one, he no longer knows truth from false. We would better spend our time elsewhere.’

  ‘In which case, let the river have him,’ Vidal said.

  ‘He no longer has the use of his arms or his legs. He will drown.’

  ‘If the Lord in His mercy sees fit to save this poor sinner, He will do so.’ Vidal made the sign of the cross on Crompton’s forehead. ‘In any case, we will pray for his soul.’

  How much longer am I condemned to wait?

  I continue to believe that Minou Joubert will come. She must. Her devotion to the girl makes it so. When I think of how I might have spared myself the trouble if only I had known that we were but streets apart in Toulouse.

  Does God seek to try me? To punish me? What is it that I have done, or left undone, that He seeks to test my resolve in a such a way? In the city, it would have been simple. A sleeping draught, the blade of an assassin in the dark or my own hands around her neck. The watery embrace of the Garonne.

  The child asks endless questions and will not be mollified by my answers. I reassure her that her sister will come to join us here in the mountains because there is a threat of pestilence in the city. She no longer believes me.

  I must not lose faith. I trust in God, in His guidance and His wisdom. Is it not written in the scriptures that to everything there is a season, a time to reap and a time to sow?

  As for the girl’s belief that her father was headed to Puivert, there have been no reports of a stranger in the village by the name of Joubert. Otherwise, save poachers – an habitual problem at this time of the year – my lands are quiet.

  I have finally been obliged to let out my bodice and add pleats to my skirts. By my reckoning I am some seven months gone. I care nothing for it, any more than I did for the bastard my father sired upon me. But I need this creature growing in my belly to be born and survive long enough to secure what is mine. Then, living or dead, Minou Joubert will no longer matter.

  But, better dead . . .

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  PUIVERT

  Bernard Joubert rubbed the sore skin on his ankle. Tonight, his right leg hurt more than his left. He was shackled by both feet to an iron hoop set in the stone wall, and the heavy cuffs had worn his flesh raw.

  All the same, the chains were long enough to allow him to stand up and move about the cell, some three paces in all directions – and though his left hand was also chained, his captors had allowed his right hand to be free. This prison, inhospitable as it was, was not the oubliettes. All the same, sometimes he still thought he heard the nightmare screaming of dying, tortured men. He feared he always would.

  With a nail retrieved from beneath the straw covering the beaten earth floor, Bernard had been scratching the days of his captivity on the wall. A calendar to mark the passing of time, he hoped it would not make another month.

  By this reckoning, he had been held in the tower for some five weeks. Passiontide had come and gone. Now it was May. The river Blau would be flowing in the valley and the hillside below the castle dotted with hundreds of tiny meadow flowers, pink and yellow and white, and the air would carry the scent of wild garlic. There had been one year – perhaps their first as man and wife – when Florence had woven a garland of springtime blooms and worn it in her hair. Bernard smiled, remembering how her black curls had tumbled, unbound, around her face and how he thought his heart would burst with joy at the sight of her.

  When recollections of Florence became too painful, he imagined himself instead in the comfortable lodgings he always used on the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam. He thought of Rokin and his favourite herring house behind the Oude Kerk, where the sound of the rigging on the tall ships moored on the Amstel, snapping against the masts when the wind was high, filled the chamber.

  Joubert heard the cell door being unlocked. He opened his eyes as a young soldier put down his daily dish of black bread and ale on the straw. Some of the guards felt the need to taunt him, to boost their own courage. This boy was not one of those.

  ‘Thank you,’ Bernard said.

  The soldier looked over his shoulder, to check he was unobserved, then stepped a little further into the damp cell.

  ‘Is it true you understand the French writing?’ he whispered in Occitan.

  ‘I do,’ Bernard replied. ‘Is there something you would like me to read to you?’

  The boy began to walk away, but stopped half in and half out of the cell, undecided.

  ‘I often do this service for soldiers in my home town. There are many men like you who never had the gift of schooling.’ He beckoned the boy to come closer. ‘No one need know of it.’

  The guard hesitated, then took a burning sconce from the tower wall and stepped inside again. The flame sent shadows dancing up the dripping walls and Bernard saw how violently the boy’s hand was shaking.

  ‘Will you tell me your name?’

  A pause, then, ‘Guilhem Lizier.’

  ‘That’s an honest name,’ Bernard said, remembering the old man he’d met outside the midwife’s house.

  ‘My family is from Puivert.’

  Bernard held up his chained left arm. ‘There is no need to fear me. I can do you no harm.’ He held the boy’s gaze. ‘But to make sure, you can put the letter on the floor and push it towards me, then I can read it aloud for you. It is a letter, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  Guilhem produced a creased and battered paper from within his clothes, and did as Bernard suggested. Gently, so as not to startle the boy, he shook the letter open, smoothed it on the rough ground, and read. Then he went over it again, to be sure in the dim light he had not misread the words, then handed it back.

  ‘It is bad news,’ the boy said, his face collapsing. ‘I knew it.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘From your face, Monsieur. I have lain awake these pas
t days, knowing that it was, and—’

  ‘No, Guilhem,’ Bernard said gently. ‘This is good news, the news you hoped for. Your offer is accepted. Her father gives his permission. I congratulate you.’

  ‘He gives his permission,’ Guilhem repeated, then sank to his haunches with his head in his hands.

  Bernard smiled. ‘I have a son, a few years younger than you as yet, but I hope he will find someone he loves as much as you clearly love your girl.’ He paused. ‘I must ask, how comes it that you should have written to –’

  ‘Jeannette?’

  ‘How did you write to Jeannette’s father to ask for her hand, but yet cannot read the answer received?’

  ‘I wrote in Occitan,’ Guilhem explained, ‘but he wishes the family position to rise. He believes that only peasants speak the old language. He wants his daughter to have a better life.’

  ‘So you can read and write?’

  ‘A little, Sénher, but not French. I can speak well enough, but I was never taught from a book, so I –’

  ‘You asked someone to write to him on your behalf,’ Bernard said.

  ‘The priest, but he has been arrested since and taken away.’

  ‘I see.’

  The boy frowned. ‘My intended father-in-law has a smallholding, some two leagues south of Chalabre on the banks of the Blau. He swore on the Bible that, if I was released from my service here, he would sign over the farm – that is, bequeath it to Jeannette and her future husband – provided he might make his home with us.’ His voice dropped. ‘But there are accounts to be settled, the ledger of livestock, and Jeannette is not one for letters. He wants her to take a husband who can write.’

  Bernard’s heart went out to the boy. He would not be the first, so much in love, to promise more than he could deliver.

  ‘It says here that the marriage is set to be the fifteenth day of August.’

  ‘Assumption Day is much celebrated in Chalabre,’ Guilhem explained. ‘Jeannette’s father is a devout Catholic. I thought he would approve the choice of the date.’

  ‘Assumption,’ Bernard muttered. He prayed he would not still be imprisoned by the time August showed her face.

  He looked at Guilhem. The boy seemed sharp and it would help to pass the unforgiving hours. ‘If you would like it, I could teach you to read and write. In time for your marriage.’

  Lizier’s expression lightened for a moment, then he remembered himself.

  ‘We are not allowed to talk to prisoners.’

  ‘No one will know,’ Bernard reassured him. ‘This is what we shall do. On days where you are dispatched to watch over me, I will show you how to shape letters and how to read them. Enough, at least, for you to persuade your father-in-law to allow the marriage to go ahead.’

  Guilhem stared at him. ‘Why would you do this, Monsieur? I am your gaoler, your enemy.’

  Bernard shook his head. ‘You and I are not enemies, Guilhem. Ordinary men like us, we are cut from the same cloth. It is those whom we serve who set us against one another.’ He held the young man’s gaze. ‘Tell me, do you wish to stay in service here? Do you love your mistress? Did you love your late master?’

  Guilhem hesitated, then dropped to his knees in front of Bernard. ‘God forgive me, I hated him and, though I know she is what he made her – and what her father made her in turn, if the rumours are true – I cannot feel any love for her. They say she talks to God, but she is cruel. I would be free of my service to Puivert if I could.’

  ‘Does the lady know I am here?’ Bernard asked, hoping to gain a scrap of information now the boy’s guard was down.

  ‘When first she returned some three weeks ago –’

  ‘Three weeks . . .’ Bernard murmured.

  ‘Yes, Sénher, at the end of April. Then, our commander was summoned to make his report. He told her some poachers were being held in the dungeons awaiting her orders.’

  Bernard smiled. ‘I am taken for a poacher?’

  Guilhem flushed. ‘You are not the only one, Monsieur, who took advantage of her absence to trespass on her lands.’ He hesitated. ‘The maids say she is with child. Some months along. Also, that she has brought some changeling back from Toulouse with her, whom she keeps out of sight in the old house. The keep is being prepared for other visitors, the linens bleached, the upper rooms turned out.’ He looked down at Bernard with hopeful eyes. ‘But do you think you might help me to read?’

  Bernard smiled. ‘When next you are sent to guard me, conceal a board and piece of charcoal beneath your surcoat. We will have you writing and ready to wed your Jeannette before the month of May is out.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  TOULOUSE

  ‘What are you intending to do, Aimeric?’ Minou asked again, full of misgivings.

  ‘What you asked of me,’ he said innocently. ‘To create a diversion, so you can leave the house without anyone noticing.’

  ‘But not in such a way as to put yourself in trouble,’ she said.

  He grinned, then shot off down the passageway towards the kitchen yard. A moment later, Minou heard a wild squawking of hens and the cook bellowing. Shutting her ears to the commotion, she slipped across the courtyard and out into rue du Taur.

  She gave a coin to the old woman selling violets on the steps of the church then, when she was sure she was unobserved, slipped inside just as the bells began to strike four.

  ‘Catch it!’ Madame Montfort was shouting, waving her arms.

  Smothering a laugh, Aimeric ducked down onto the steps below the loggia. He had kidnapped a chicken from the coop and tied a wooden spoon to its leg, before setting it loose in the main courtyard. The chaos was everything he had hoped.

  ‘Do something!’

  The hen was blundering around, knocking things over with the spoon. Now it had got itself trapped behind the wheels of the butcher’s delivery trap.

  Madame Montfort waved her arms. ‘Drive it into the corner, fool!’

  A kitchen boy descended upon the hen, sending the creature flapping in the opposite direction. A groom tried to sweep the bewildered bird up into his arms, but failed to notice the full pail of water until he stumbled over it and fell, soaking Madame Montfort’s skirts.

  ‘Idiot,’ she shouted. ‘You dolt! Throw something over it. A blanket, a cloak!’

  Aimeric looked up through the green canopy of ivy and the turn of the wall beneath the loggia. Most of the household was now either outside, or watching from the balconies and windows. Aware he had to keep the diversion going until Minou reappeared, he reached up and prodded the chicken with the broom handle, to set it flapping back into the courtyard again.

  Minou and Piet were standing close together in the shadows of the smallest of the side chapels of the Eglise Saint-Taur.

  ‘I cannot stay for long,’ she said, taking back her hand.

  ‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘I wish you had brought Aimeric with you to keep watch.’

  ‘I could not. I had to ask him to create a diversion so I could leave the house unobserved. Monsieur Boussay has come home unexpectedly, and the household is anxious and watchful because of it.’

  ‘I am grateful you came,’ Piet said quickly.

  It was the first time they had been alone since their strange interlude in the maison de charité on the day of the riot, and Minou could see how he had changed. Though his beard and hair were not returned to the colour nature intended, his face was freckled from the sun, and there was a new sense of purpose in his eyes. A resolve.

  ‘I want you and Aimeric to leave Toulouse tonight,’ he said.

  His words momentarily stole her breath from her. ‘Would you not grieve for the lack of me?’ she teased, then she marked the expression on his face and became sombre. ‘Why now? The streets are quieter than they have been for some days.’

  ‘Tonight . . .’ Piet began, then stopped.

  ‘You should know that you can trust me.’

  ‘I do know, though they would hang me if they knew I was w
arning someone like you.’

  Minou narrowed her eyes. ‘Someone like me? A Catholic, do you mean? I have ever been so, and that has not mattered before.’

  Piet ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Not just any Catholic – Boussay’s niece,’ he said. ‘Your uncle, who is so deeply involved in this matter, and who is one of the chief persecutors of Huguenots within Toulouse.’

  Minou considered the ill-tempered, corpulent man who was so rarely at home. She disliked him, thought him boorish and unpleasant, but had never before thought of him as dangerous. Someone to be feared.

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘He is in the pay of Monsieur Delpech, Toulouse’s most powerful dealer of arms and men. He is also known to have associates within the cathedral, factions allied to the Duke of Guise, people who do not even bother to hide the fact that they want to expel all Huguenots from Toulouse. From France.’

  Minou thought of the barrels of powder and shot in the cellar and the many visitors who came and went at night. Then she spoke quietly.

  ‘There is a churchman who often comes to the house. Red robes, a tall man and young for his office. Distinctive, black hair with a white streak.’ Minou watched Piet’s eyes sharpen and his face set rigid.

  ‘You know him.’

  ‘Yes.’ He ran his hands through his hair again. ‘He was once my dearest friend. His name is Vidal. We were students here together in Toulouse, as close as brothers once. It was with him I spent that evening in Carcassonne.’

  ‘Oh,’ Minou said gently, seeing how the mention of Vidal had pained him. ‘And now? You are no longer friends?’

  ‘No. That night he said things I chose not to hear. Yet, I still believed it was possible for us to have taken different paths to God, and to remain friends. I was naive. I realized that when I saw him in the negotiating chamber as the truce was being decided in the company of your uncle and Delpech. Then, finally I knew.’