by Kate Mosse
‘No. She went to Warmoesstraat to fetch something.’
Minou frowned. ‘Without alarming Juffrouw van Raay, go back into the garden and ask her to join me here.’
With a final glance at the dying man, Frans ran back outside.
Minou turned back to her patient. There was a terrible plashing in his chest as he tried to catch his breath. She could see there was no hope.
‘How goes it with you, Burgher van Raay?’ she asked, relieved that his eyes opened at the sound of her voice.
‘Ah, Minou.’ His hand reached out and took hers. ‘A priest … I must confess my sins and take communion. I would see my Lord with my soul shriven.’
‘You’re not going to die, Willem. I won’t allow it.’
He managed to smile. ‘Ah, but I am. And if that is God’s will, then so be it. I have lived a good life. I have done my duty.’
Minou choked back her tears. ‘You have. You are a good man.’
Agnes slipped into the chamber carrying the medicines Minou had asked for. Her eyes also grew wide at the sight of van Raay.
‘They said no one was injured in Plaats.’
‘This happened elsewhere.’ Minou took the bandages from Agnes’s arms, though she knew there was now no point. ‘I need you to go to the Nieuwe Kerk and—’ Minou broke off, suddenly remembering how the priest and his fellow clergy had been among the first to be put on the barges. ‘Go to the nearest cloister and find a priest. Burgher van Raay would have the last rites. Make haste.’
Agnes gave a brief curtsey then left. Seconds later, Minou heard the sound of the front door open and slam shut, then silence. The air seemed to reverberate and echo and then settle again.
Minou dropped a few pearls of valerian on Willem’s lips and then held his hand, listening to the rattling in his chest. She feared the blade had pierced his lung.
‘Father!’ Cornelia cried, rushing into the chamber. ‘What happened?’
‘You need to prepare yourself, Cornelia,’ Minou said softly.
At the sound of his daughter’s voice, Willem’s eyes flickered open. ‘Ah, you are here. I am glad. The priest is coming.’
‘You have no need of a priest,’ Cornelia said desperately. ‘You’re going to be all right. Tell him, Minou.’
Full of pity for her friend, she took Cornelia’s hand. ‘It’s nearly time. I have sent for a priest, but—’
Van Raay’s pupils seemed to grow dark. ‘Is that you, Cornelia?’
She looked wildly at Minou, then seemed to accept the situation. Her voice grew calm, gentle.
‘It’s me, Father. I’m here.’
He coughed, blood pooling in the corner of his mouth.
‘What if we are wrong, Cornelia? What if there is nothing waiting for us on the other side? Only darkness?’
Cornelia shook her head. ‘God is waiting for you. He is waiting to bring you home.’
‘Ah.’ A sigh slipped from his lips, then he smiled. ‘I would see His face. And your dear mother, how I have missed her.’
Cornelia was biting back her tears. ‘You have been both mother and father to me. I have lacked for nothing.’
‘Live a long and happy life, my dear. And when your time comes, we will be waiting for you. Your mother and I. Take care of this fine city of ours.’ He smiled again. ‘Will you pray with me, my dear. One last time.’
Minou stepped back, knowing the moment had come. She watched Cornelia take both of her father’s hands between hers, then she began to pray.
‘Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum…’
And, though for fifteen years, Minou had spoken the words of the Lord’s Prayer in French rather than in Latin, the old words came easily to her lips too: ‘… et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo.’
‘Amen.’ Cornelia, tracing the sign of the cross on her father’s forehead, then leant forward and kissed him.
For a moment, colour seemed to come back into Willem van Raay’s face. He turned his head towards Minou.
‘Tell Piet … I remembered something else Houtman told me.’
Cornelia squeezed his fingers. ‘Hush, Father. Don’t try to speak.’
‘It’s important.’ Willem grasped Minou’s hand more tightly. ‘The relic hunter – the priest, the same –’
‘A priest is coming,’ Cornelia said desperately.
‘No, the French cardinal – Tell Piet that he—’ but his words were lost in another bout of coughing.
‘Father!’ Cornelia sobbed. ‘Father!’
At the last, Willem’s eyes widened, as if he had seen something of wonder in the far distance, then a look of great serenity lit his face. ‘He is waiting. He is waiting in the company of His saints.’
Then van Raay’s eyes closed for the last time.
As he took his final breath, Cornelia sank weeping to the ground. Minou put her arms around her friend and held her as she cried. They were still there, in one another’s arms, when the priest arrived from the cloister half an hour later with his rosary and his holy oil.
In the distance, Minou could just make out the roar of the crowd on Plaats and the bright fanfare of trumpets as Amsterdam celebrated its bloodless revolution.
PART FOUR
AMSTERDAM & CHARTRES
July & August 1584
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
Six Years Later
ZEEDIJK, AMSTERDAM
Friday, 13 July 1584
Minou stood in their War Room – as she and Piet had christened the ground-floor chamber they’d made their centre of operations for tracking down Vidal – and stared at the wooden board propped against the white-plaster wall. Papers, missives, documents pinned low to high, there was barely any space remaining.
Minou reached up and added the letter they’d received from Antoine le Maistre to the board, wondering when they would hear more. Piet’s old friend and comrade had promised to write the instant he had further news. After years of searching for Guise’s missing confessor, this was the most promising lead they’d had.
It was a hot afternoon. As Minou leant to open the window to let in a little air she saw her son, Jean-Jacques, in the orchard beyond the terrace, lift one of their newest arrivals onto the wooden swing and begin to push. Gently at first, until the little boy started to trust him and smile. Minou knew it was often the simplest things that helped a war orphan to recover: a spinning top; bright chalks and a slate; a pancake with cinnamon, hot from the pan; apples from the tree.
Russet-haired like his father had been, Jean-Jacques at thirteen years of age was of average height but broad in the shoulder. His appearance spoke to his virtues. He was steadfast and reliable, slow to anger, hard-working and loyal. He never spoke unless he had something of value to say. Few vestiges of his French heritage remained and, though she and Piet still spoke in her mother tongue in the privacy of their own chambers, the language of the hofje was now wholly Dutch. Now that Jean-Jacques had come of age, particularly with the growing anti-French sentiments in Amsterdam, he had taken to using the Dutch form of his name, Johannus. She thanked God every day that he had not yet been called upon to join the Prince of Orange’s army to fight.
Despite the challenges of the past six years – as the Calvinist Revolt against the tyrannical Spanish occupation continued in the Provinces – their lives in Amsterdam had remained relatively peaceful. There was much to be thankful for, not least that she and Piet had remained free.
Minou no longer feared they would be brought to account for the deaths of the hard-line Calvinist leader, Houtman, and his henchman, Wouter, in Sint Antoniespoort. For months after the events in the tower in May 1578, she had lived in dread of soldiers arriving to arrest them.
On the night of the Alteration, there had been widespread looting as churches, cloisters and the few remaining monasteries were ransacked. Days passed, then weeks, and Minou started to wonder if the events in Sint Antoniespoort were to be forgotten in the face of the bigger battles raging elsewhere in the city. Ha
d the deaths of Houtman, Wouter and the two guards been put down to a falling-out amongst thieves? Or a grudge between the Lastage faction and more moderate rebel factions? And the young sentry had either never told anyone of the two men seen leaving the gatehouse that afternoon, or he’d been unable to identify them.
For those last days in May 1578 the streets had been dangerous. Calvinist mobs roamed unchecked. But then, little by little, Amsterdam settled into its new order. A moderate council was formed, consisting of both Protestants and Catholics, though under Calvinist control. The church of Sint Nicolaas was taken over to the Protestant faith, but the Nieuwe Kerk had remained as a place of Catholic worship for some time. A Protestant mob had attacked the Heilige Stede chapel, destroying everything that reminded them of the cult of the Miracle of Amsterdam. But the women of Begijnhof had been left alone, as promised, and granted permission to take over celebrating the Miracle, so it continued to bring many visitors to the city each March, spending their money in the taverns and boarding houses.
At every step, the priority of the new council had been the expansion of the city and its trade. Within months, the harbour around Lastage was enlarged – its workers building bigger bleaching houses, vast warehouses and elegant new guild halls. The city defences were strengthened with the Nieuwe Gracht in the east and, little by little, even the Catholic burghers started to creep back from their exile in Haarlem and Leiden.
Outside the city walls, on the wide expanses of green plains and fields, new communities were springing up, too. More Huguenots arrived from France and settled in the west. Marrano and Sephardic Jews, escaping the horrors of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, settled on land beyond Sint Antoniespoort to the east.
Ships began to sail into the harbour again. Amsterdam was open for business, welcoming refugees from Ghent and Bruges, Brussels and Antwerp. Merchants, musicians, artisans, artists, bankers, lawyers – people of education and skill – seeking safety and a place to lay their heads. Such a lot had changed in six years.
Minou closed the window, to keep out the flies that plagued the city in the summer, and caught sight of her reflection in the glass: an elegant woman in her middle years, her brown hair still thick and untouched by grey, a few lines around her eyes. Minou did not regret the loss of her youth. Her face told a story of the life she had lived: the love and the loss, the happiness and the grief, all the emotions that gave the world its colour.
Minou looked again at Antoine le Maistre’s letter in its place on the noticeboard, and prayed they would receive confirmation from him soon. Over the years, she and Piet had learnt never to hope – they’d had too many false alarms – but now? This news had the ring of truth about it.
Since discovering what Mariken’s package contained – the letter from Piet’s mother and the testament of her marriage to Philippe du Plessis – Minou and Piet had put all their spare time and limited resources into trying to find Vidal. Working on the assumption he was still alive – the common gossip about the Duke of Guise’s attempts to hunt him down confirmed it – they followed every lead, but the mass displacement of people in the continuing sequence of religious wars, and the looting and destruction of records in French towns and cities, meant they’d had little to go on. Du Plessis’ estates outside the town of Redon in Brittany had been sold and his only relative, a nephew, had been the sole beneficiary. No one resembling Vidal had been seen in the area since his uncle’s illness and death in March 1572, and there had been no talk of a legitimate son born to a Dutchwoman in Amsterdam many years before.
Because Vidal’s survival depended on disappearing from Guise’s omnipresent spies, Minou was convinced he would have taken on another identity altogether. So they’d turned their attention to the only other clue they had, tenuous as it was, namely Willem van Raay’s dying words that the French cardinal was now a relic hunter.
Cornelia had found nothing in her father’s papers to explain his words, nor any indication as to what information Wouter might have had to trade. But, from their previous history with Vidal, Minou had thought it was a route worth pursuing. Since the very beginning of the religious wars in 1562, sacred objects looted from monasteries and convents circulated freely within France, and the trade in relics was particularly lucrative. Many of the most significant Catholic sites were now guarded around the clock and information about attempted thefts was circulated. Aunt Salvadora, still ensconced in her widow’s weeds in the house in the rue du Taur in Toulouse, had never forgotten Vidal’s cruelty – and what evil he had done to acquire the Shroud of Antioch – so she did everything in her power to try to help them.
But, until le Maistre’s letter, nothing had come of anything.
Minou turned to the oak table in the middle of the chamber, which was covered by a huge map of France. It was marked with black crosses, each indicating a place in the past six years where a relic hunter answering Vidal’s description had been sighted: Saint-Antonin, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Reims, Vassy, Rouen, Nantes, Amiens. Minou picked up a piece of charcoal and drew a fresh cross against the city of Chartres.
A sudden sound roused Minou from her reflections. She looked up to see her daughter in the doorway to the terrace shuffling from foot to foot.
‘Bernarda, you surprised me!’
‘Het spijt me.’
Now eleven years old, her freckled skin and copper hair clearly marking her as Johannus’ sister, she was also of average height and sturdy build. Born and bred in Amsterdam, she was Dutch through-and-through. She spoke French hesitantly and with a blunt Amsterdammer accent.
Minou waved her hand. ‘Don’t just stand there, child. Come in.’
The girl took a single step into the room and stood with her hands folded neatly in front of her. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’
‘I was only thinking.’
Since Bernarda was a child blessed with a lack of curiosity, she accepted the comment at face value.
Minou sighed. ‘What can I do for you, Bernarda?’
‘Might I go to see Aunt Alis? She promised me a book and I have run out of things to read to the children.’
‘That is kind of you. Of course, you may go. Ask Johannus to accompany you to Warmoesstraat.’
‘I don’t need a chaperone,’ she mumbled.
‘I don’t want you going on your own. Take your brother as I ask.’
The girl looked at her feet. It made for an easier household, but Minou sometimes wished Bernarda would show a little more spirit. And as so often, even now, she could not help comparing her very Dutch daughter to the French daughter she had lost.
Marta’s loss was now a permanent ache, always there but less sharp with each passing year. Twelve winters and summers had passed since she’d last seen her mercurial, spirited daughter, and though she fanned the tiniest flame of hope in her heart that Marta had somehow survived, in truth, Minou no longer believed it.
She tried to keep her memory alive in the life of the household. The tapestry of the Joubert-Reydon family Alis had smuggled away from Puivert hung in the main family living chamber, and Minou had always made a point about talking to Johannus and Bernarda about their older sister, with her blue dress and her mismatched eyes, one blue and one brown. But Minou knew Marta meant nothing to them. She was just the girl in the tapestry.
‘I don’t want you walking through the streets alone, Bernarda.’
‘As you wish, Mother.’
Feeling guilty for finding her obedience so vexing, Minou put her arm around her shoulders and hugged her a little too tightly.
‘You are a good girl,’ she said. ‘Take Agnes with you, if you prefer. Give my best regards to Alis and to Cornelia, and ask them to dine with us this evening. Would you like that?’
Bernarda shrugged. ‘I don’t mind.’
Minou sighed again. ‘Then ask them to come at six o’clock.’
As Bernarda took her leave through the garden, Minou went to her bureau and took out her journal, then settled down to write. Doing s
omething was better than simply waiting for further word to arrive from le Maistre. It could be days, it might be weeks.
In the years between their flight from Paris and Alis’s arrival in Amsterdam, her ink and quill had sat untouched in her drawer. It was Alis who had encouraged her to begin again. With Alis’s passionate support, Minou began to write every day, driven to make sure that the voices of ordinary women like her were not lost, filling journal after journal with how this one family had survived the wars, describing what it was to have to flee your home and build a new life in a faraway city.
Now writing was as necessary to her as breathing. A necessity, a responsibility. Her journals were no longer a history of her own hopes and fears, but rather the story of what it meant to be a refugee, a person displaced, a witness to the death of an old world and the birth of a new. Minou knew that it was only ever the lives of the kings and generals and popes which were recorded. Their prejudices, actions and ambitions were taken to be the only truth of history.
Minou picked up her quill and dipped it in the ink, but got no further than writing the date when she heard the front door slamming shut.
She looked up. Neither the children nor the servants were permitted to enter that way – they all went through the gate in the garden directly onto Zeedijk – and at this time of day Piet was usually at the van Raay warehouse. He and Cornelia, with Alis’s help, had taken over the running of her father’s business some years ago.
‘Piet? Is that you?’
He strode into the War Room, his handsome face alive with news. Minou leapt to her feet. ‘What is it? Has a second letter from le Maistre come?’
‘The Prince of Orange is dead. Assassinated three days ago in his headquarters in Delft.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
THE RELIQUARY
CHARTRES
Lord Evreux sat in the middle of the chamber, his thin fingers grasping the carved arms of the cathedra, his bishop’s throne.
The wicks on the tall silver candelabra, which stood either side of the altar, were lit, though there was no need. The summer’s afternoon shone rich and bright through the glass lantern skylight set in the white plaster ceiling, flooding the heart of the chamber with light. The corners and walls were in shadow, protecting the exquisite frescoes of the Stations of the Cross and the caskets in front of them, from the force of the sun.