by Tony Moyle
“Don’t push, you’ll all get something if there’s time,” said Chambard as he carefully chose the item from his bag that most suited the individual in front of him. Tools and weapons for men of working age, precious items easily traded for food to the women, and warm garments for the children.
Soon the sack was empty and the charity came to an abrupt halt. Phil informed the crowd, who reluctantly dispersed, to see if any other member of the company was equally sympathetic to their cause. Strangely none of them wanted to engage with Annabelle: something unworldly was warding them away. It was only after the crowd dispersed that Phil was aware of her presence.
“Oh it’s you,” he said, greeting her warmly.
“What were you doing?” she asked.
“Helping those less fortunate than us.”
“For free?”
“Did you see any of them carrying purses?”
“No,” said replied, genuinely confused by it all. “What is this place?”
“This place. It has the same name as every town we’ve been through. Poverty. Population decreasing daily.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Then you haven’t seen your own country. This is France. Not the France of privilege and parties. Not the France of hunting for pleasure rather than food. This is the terrible reality of everyday France for everyday people. Real France beyond the fake bubble you’re used to.”
“How do people survive here?”
“They don’t. They die.”
“But why don’t they do something about it?” she said naïvely. “Move somewhere else.”
“They can’t. Those that do find even more problems in the big cities. There are no roads of gold, whatever the fairy tales say.”
“It’s horrendous,” she added, a tear meandering down her cheek. “Why do the nobles allow it?”
“Because they don’t see it. Their eyes are open of course, but their hearts are closed. These aren’t people to them, they’re just livestock. Another commodity of war. We do what we can to help, when we can.”
“But why?”
“Because no one else will,” said Chambard butting in. “Although I should be honest with you, my dear, we look after ourselves before we look after them.”
“Chambard,” said Philibert, “I saw a young girl by the coaches earlier who appeared to be alone. I wonder if you could tend to her needs as I doubt whether any of our gifts will make it in to her hands.”
Chambard nodded and lolloped off in a style uniquely his. Annabelle glided serenely to the wall that held the river back from the town, thoughts racing around her mind like a hound chasing a hare. Here she was, born into wealth and fortune, but oblivious to the misery camped on her own doorstep. And like everyone else in her reality, she’d done nothing. While a man like Phil, who’d escaped these cataclysmic horrors through self-determination and at great personal danger, was compassionately helping others.
“Philibert, how can I help?” she said, turning to find him standing only a fraction behind her. The close proximity unleashed an uncontrollable compulsion to kiss him, irrespective of the dangers of being caught.
Phil lingered for a moment on her lips before pulling away. This kiss contained more than lust. An alarm bell rang in his heart to signal an event not previously experienced. His body shock from the fear of it. He wasn’t ready. There were too many obstacles to overcome. Too many tasks to fulfil. His head and heart broke out in internal conflict for the first time in years. Soon it would rage more turbulently than the religious factions that teetered on the precipice of war.
“Help us, you say,” replied Phil, stepping back. “Do your part. If everyone did a little the future can be shaped differently. But for now you can help me.”
“Of course. Anything.”
“I need to understand more about our Queen, Catherine de Medici.”
“The Queen. Why?”
“Because you already know that I am not what your father thinks I am. If I’m to enter the court I have to play a game with them.”
“What sort of game?”
“A riddle. How well do you know the Queen?”
“Only hearsay really. Rumours, second-hand stories and whispers.”
“Tell me what you can,” said Philibert.
Over the next thirty minutes Annabelle farmed her mind to plough as much knowledge as she could remember. Anything of significance was discussed and sometimes questioned by Phil. Some of it he knew, information that was in the public domain gained from some of the marks he’d swindled over the last decade. Some of it was new and most of it was useful. Annabelle gave him details of the Queen’s upbringing in Italy, her marriage to King Henry, her eight children and her own personal interests.
“There’s something else I have heard about the Queen,” said Annabelle at a much lower volume.
“Go on.”
“Some people believe she’s a witch.”
“A witch! Surely you don’t believe in such things.”
“Certainly. It’s obvious that there is black magic in the world, it’s the only explanation to why some events happen.”
“For example?” asked Phil, who was always sceptical when the supernatural was offered as an answer to the unexplained.
“Well, how would you explain the sudden destruction of crops when the season is fair and conducive to a strong harvest?”
“Probably an aggressive swarm of really small bugs,” said Philibert.
“Oh yeah,” mocked Annabelle. “That’s believable.”
“But a haggard, old crone casting a spell over a field is much more plausible, is it? I mean for a start why would a witch even do that?”
“They don’t need a reason, they’re just satanic.”
“And the Devil’s got a particular intolerance to wheat, has he?”
“It’s not just crops. How do you explain an army with many more soldiers losing a battle against a smaller foe if not because of witchcraft?”
“You’ve not seen many battles, have you?”
She shook her head.
“I’ve been pretty close to one and at no point did I see any black hags circling the scene of the crime, or sitting on the parapets shooting spells from her fingers, or hexing the men with nasty illnesses. However, I did witness a foe who had something that might explain it.”
“What?”
“Guns.”
“Yeah, but who gave them the guns, tell me that.”
It seemed unlikely that Phil was going to win the argument. A belief in witches went hand in hand with a belief in God. If you had faith in one you almost had to accept the existence of the other. Someone had to be responsible for all the disappointment in people’s lives and clearly it couldn’t be God’s fault. Much easier to blame the old woman next door who had recently asked where she could find good quality newts.
Witches were extremely popular in the Middle Ages. All in all, just in France alone, more than forty thousand women had been killed for being one. It became an easy excuse for anyone in a jam. If a wife walked in on her husband in bed with another woman shouting pleasurably, ‘You’re so much better at this than Carol,’ the simplest excuse was to say the woman down the road cursed you. If you built a house from grass and your own saliva and it collapsed on the first day, there was no way you could blame shoddy workmanship. That suspicious-looking woman with the sinister wart on her nose was a much more likely culprit.
They got the blame for everything, but there was never any evidence or eyewitnesses to their crimes. The way to prove a woman was a witch was simply to set her on fire, throw her off a cliff or drown her. If they were witches they’d survive and after a successful trial the angry mob could punish them by burning them, pushing them off a cliff, or drowning them. That was the logic at least. No one seemed to acknowledge that every one of the forty thousand deaths failed to result in any of those women flying off on broomsticks cackling their threats of vengeance.
“Anyway, what evidenc
e is there that Catherine is a witch?” asked Phil, trying to bring the conversation back on a sensible footing.
“She didn’t have children for the first ten years of her marriage.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. As I understand it, King Henry was a randy bugger who’d make love to anything that moved. Maybe they weren’t intimate with each other.”
“I don’t think that’s true. You have to be if you’re the King, you need an heir to keep your line going. And how do you explain that after the first ten years she went on to have eight children. Clearly black magic.”
“Clearly,” Phil chuckled, finding Annabelle’s innocence rather endearing.
“She has a cat, too.”
“A cat! Well, that’s enough proof for me. Call the witch hunters immediately.”
“Don’t mock me,” replied Annabelle, seeing the lighter side of his sarcasm.
Night-time was fast approaching and these stolen moments would soon end. The horses were being bridled to their coaches and the men were leaving the inn, including Jacques whose mood was always more erratic after hitting the booze.
“I must go before he sees us together,” said Annabelle, pointing towards the convoy and becoming noticeably less light of tone.
“One more thing. Do you have any connections in the court? Someone who can arrange safe passage for an audience with the Queen.”
“There are still some working in the court who have kept their religious beliefs to themselves. They call themselves the politiques, more interested in the well-being of the state than their own personal freedoms.”
“And is there anyone you can trust?” asked Phil.
“Michel de l’Hôpital, he was based in Nice until he became the Queen’s Chancellor. He was often a guest of my father’s.”
“Tell him I have important news for the Queen and it’s essential that she meets me if she wants to ensure a continuing peace between the factions. Leave the rest to me.”
As the company pulled away from the desperate town of Nemours under the cover of darkness, Phil and Annabelle set about writing. Philibert had learnt enough from their conversation to put together the appropriate prophecy which would, if all went well, satisfy Catherine of his importance and gain her favour. Montmorency’s ring would add an authenticity to the story and his connection to Nostradamus would help validate his skills in proclaiming the future. If they got that far.
Annabelle, on the other hand, had offered to write a letter to her contact l’Hôpital seeking an endorsement of Phil. The letter, complete with her official seal, included the pretence that Phil offered some advice to keep the increasingly religious tensions from flaring up. Which, of course, he didn’t. In truth he didn’t really understand the principles of either religion and felt everyone would be better served just getting on with each other. Once the letter was written, Chambard would do the rest.
At their next available stop the old wanderer would sneak out of their coach, pick up the letter from Annabelle and disappear into the night. It was then down to him to find a faster route to Paris and return to the coach before anyone noticed his absence. Jacques had shown little interest in checking on their activities during the four weeks of their journey, only occasionally sending one of his henchmen to provide them with food or eavesdrop on their conversations.
Phil wasn’t concerned how Chambard managed it, but he was certain it wouldn’t involve horses. It didn’t bother him how. Reliability was one of Chambard’s greatest qualities. It was one of the reasons Phil had followed him for so long. After the psychological shock of losing his family, which later evolved into anger that they’d left him to fend for himself, what he’d needed was someone he could trust. And Chambard had never failed him on that front. He was more of a father to him than any genetic relative. If Chambard said he’d do something, that was enough reassurance.
- Chapter 21-
Mr. Wang’s Hypnotherapy Clinic
If friendship were a Venn diagram, each circle would contain the relative interests of each person. Those common interests that overlapped in the middle would indicate the level of friendship that might be achieved. If both people were in agreement on almost everything it wouldn’t look much like a Venn diagram at all. Rather just a big circle.
It was accurate to say that Ally circle wasn’t brimming with hobbies in the first place, so the chances of them being shared with other people’s were fairly remote. If she found a person who liked, very expensive red wine, the works of Proust, coffee, cryptic crosswords, insulting employees who delivered poor service experiences, Aran jumpers, languages, more coffee, and nineteenth-century typewriters, it still didn’t offer much of a foundation to build a friendship on.
Antoine wasn’t her friend, but at least they did share a speck of common ground. They were both interested in the arts, history and more specifically their need for answers about the prophecy. It created a relationship which was civil if not exactly close. And after all of this blew over it was highly unlikely they’d ever see each other again. When it came to Gabriel, however, it wasn’t so much a Venn diagram as two circles of interest divided by a chasm of disagreement.
As far as Ally was concerned, Gabriel was an overprivileged, dim-witted flunky who was more interested in how she looked than how others perceived her. She liked pop music, make-up, a quick buck, instant gratification, boots, eyelashes, Prosecco, glossy magazines with lots of pictures, and vain boys with big muscles and stubbly chins. It was a combination that didn’t make for a stimulating atmosphere.
The journey time from Limonest to Mâcon would normally be less than an hour. It was connected by a good-quality motorway from start to finish and it was definitely not rush hour, despite it being the right time of the morning for it. But since merging onto the double-lane highway from the quiet backroads they’d not seen a single car. Given Gabriel’s unorthodox driving style, a lack of opposition partly explained why they were all still alive.
The car weaved through the lines on the road as if they were nothing more than a vague suggestion of where someone should aim. Road signs were routinely ignored and as for speed limits, Ally wondered if Gabriel thought the numbers were measured in light speed rather than kilometres per hour. The poor Renault, flashing along like a turd fired from a missile launcher, screeched its disapproval and echoed the unspoken sentiments of the other terrified passengers.
“There’s no rush, you know,” said Antoine from the back seat, where he perched on a pile of fast-food litter that had been jettisoned from the front seat possibly several decades ago if the smell was anything to go by.
“Believe me, this isn’t fast at all,” she replied as a wing mirror rattled out of its holding and bounced with a crack on the road behind them. “I wonder where all the cars are today?”
“Maybe they declared a state of emergency when they saw us coming,” Ally muttered to herself.
“Normally you can’t move for traffic, very strange.”
“I would have thought the reason was obvious…forgive me…I forgot who I was talking to,” replied Ally, turning the sarcasm up to maximum. “The cities are in lockdown, and the rest of humanity is avoiding contact with other people for fear of catching flu. Which is ridiculous really.”
“Aren’t you worried about catching N1G13?” Gabriel asked.
“No. A little flu isn’t going to stop me. And anyway you’ll probably kill us before I get the chance.”
“But everyone who’s caught it has died,” added Gabriel, ignoring the criticism of her driving in the same way she ignored all criticism.
“So?” replied Ally.
“What if your family became infected?” asked Antoine.
“I don’t have any family,” added Ally.
“I have a big family,” replied Gabriel, hijacking the conversation and focusing on her own world as she always did. “Actually my grandpapa was a famous racing driver.”
“Died in a horrific, high-speed fireball, I expect,” replied Ally, clinging fir
mly to the door handle.
“What’s you grandfather got to do with the flu?” asked Antoine.
“Nothing. I just got bored and moved on to a more interesting subject. Remind me, why are we going to Mâcon?”
“To find Bernard Baptiste,” replied Antoine.
“And he’s got coffee right?”
“No, he’s got a coffer, it’s a piece of furniture.”
“There’s an excellent furniture shop in Lyon, really cheap if you’re interested.”
“This is a very special one. It has something inside it that we need.”
“What’s that?”
“We don’t know,” said Ally gruffly.
“It might have some answers for us about the prophecy.”
“And the coffer’s in Mâcon, is it?”
“It is, but we won’t be. You’ve just missed the motorway exit,” said Antoine patiently.
The car was immediately placed into an emergency stop, causing it to skid fifty feet down the road, permanently scarring the tarmac with black rubber marks. The Renault gave a painful jolt as the gearstick carved a new reverse gear in the metal next to the original one.
“Stop!” shouted Ally as the car travelled backwards almost as quickly as it had done going forward. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not? There’s no one on the roads.”
“Rules are rules.”
“Blah, rules aren’t for everyone.”
“They really are, you know.”
They left the motorway only partly via tarmac and followed the signs for Mâcon. The minor roads were just as quiet as the motorway, although thankfully there was no sign of the police roadblocks being reported in most built-up areas. Personally, Ally was furious that the authorities had decided to implement such draconian methods to keep the flu from spreading. It didn’t work with the plague back in the Middle Ages and it wouldn’t work now. Containing something you can’t see that moves at ease through the wind was nonsensical. All that the roadblocks would achieve was more uncertainty, a redirection of valuable resources, and restrict access for those who wanted to get on with life whatever the consequences. Mâcon was one of the few towns that had so far escaped this measure, and it had to be assumed N1G13 itself.