Kate Sedley - The Dance of Death

‘I don’t need to get acquainted,’ Eloise retorted indignantly. ‘I know this city like the back of my hand.’

I grinned nastily. ‘You forget, John, she was here with my lord of Albany earlier this year and last.’

‘We were with the court at Plessis-les-Tours,’ she snapped. ‘I know Paris because it is my mother’s city and I spent part of my childhood here.’

‘Then you’ll be able to show Roger around like the native you are,’ John Bradshaw said, rising to his feet, at the same time indicating to me that I should remain behind when Eloise left the parlour.

I duly lingered over my last oatcake. As she disappeared upstairs to fetch her cloak and gloves, I raised my eyebrows. ‘You wanted to see me?’

He swallowed the dregs of his ale. ‘I just wanted to say, let Mistress Eloise show you the city today, but after that, if you need to wander Paris on your own, give me the wink and I’ll try to find some excuse to detain her indoors or elsewhere.’ Before I could interrupt to thank him, he went on, ‘But as to going on your own, I’m not so sure that’s wise. There are as many footpads and robbers and pickpockets here as in London, and an obvious Englishman like yourself is going to be fair game. Take someone with you. Take Philip.’

‘Philip? What good will he be? He has the same amount of French as me — which is to say none at all — and in his present depressed state far less sense.’

‘Two are more unlikely to be set upon than one man on his own.’ John grinned suddenly. He was looking better this morning: a night’s sleep had refreshed him and his old vigour had returned. ‘And of course three would be even safer, especially if the third’s a Frenchman. Take Jules as well. You needn’t worry about his discretion. He’s a taciturn devil at the best of times, and I shan’t interrogate him as to what you’re up to. I’ve told you already, if the duke don’t want me to know, then I don’t, either. And Jules ain’t interested in the affairs of an English prince.’

‘Then what’s he doing in your pay?’ I demanded sceptically.

‘A personal grudge against the French authorities.’ John laughed. ‘Two of his brothers were counterfeit coiners and had the bad luck to be caught. They were both boiled alive in the great cauldron in the pig market, out beyond the Louvre, towards the Porte Saint-Honoré. A very unpleasant and agonizingly slow form of execution. Malcontents like Jules are always useful, if you can find ’em.’

‘All right,’ I agreed, after a moment or two’s consideration. To have someone who could speak the language and knew the city would make my almost impossible task immeasurably easier. ‘But in that case, I shan’t need Philip.’

John rose from the table as Marthe came in, ready to clear away the breakfast things. ‘Oh, for the Virgin’s sweet sake, take him with you, man! Give him something to do. I’m sick to death of his long, mournful face and his refusal to say more than half a dozen words together. I wish to heaven I’d never brought him with us. There were others I could have employed. I just felt sorry for him, that’s all. An old comrade-in-arms who’d fallen on rough times.’ He straightened his jerkin and said a few words of greeting to Marthe before slapping me on the back. ‘You’d best go. Mistress Eloise will be growing impatient as well as curious by now. Just familiarize yourself today with as much of the city as you can, and if you can give the impression of a prosperous haberdasher with an interest in buying French goods, as well as trying to sell a few of your own, all the better.’

He left the room, exchanging a cheery word with Eloise as she entered, none too pleased at being kept waiting.

‘What on earth have you two been talking about all this time?’ she demanded, throwing my cloak and hat down on the table as she spoke. Without waiting for an answer, she continued, ‘Before we go anywhere else, I want to visit the Quai des Orfèvres.’

The Goldsmiths’ Quay was only a short walk away, along the Rue Barthélemy and turning right at the Pont Saint-Michel, one of the two bridges that crossed to the Université district.

‘What are we doing here?’ I grumbled. ‘Do you have money to spend?’

‘Fool!’ she retorted angrily. ‘I’m hoping to locate Monsieur d’Harcourt’s shop. If there’s someone there — and he surely must leave an assistant in charge when he goes away — we might glean some information.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as whether they’ve heard anything from him, or whether they think he’s still on his travels. I’m worried about him, Roger. First, Oliver Cook goes missing and now Raoul. I don’t like it. I feel in my bones that something’s amiss.’

‘And since when have you been calling him by his Christian name?’ I demanded with some heat.

‘Since he asked me to,’ she snapped back. ‘And in any case, I don’t see it’s any business of yours. Once we’ve accomplished what we came to Paris to do and returned to England, there’s no reason why we should ever willingly see one another again.’

‘Good! That’s something to look forward to,’ I said, seizing her elbow and guiding her around a puddle in the road. (Although there were surprisingly few of these, as the Paris roads were in very much better condition than London’s. Eloise told me later that the capital’s streets had been paved centuries earlier on the orders of Philip Augustus, the grandfather of St Louis.)

She made no reply to my ill-natured remark, only shaking off my arm and quickening her pace a little until we came to the goldsmiths’ workshops lining the quayside. But here we drew a blank. A Raoul d’Harcourt certainly owned a shop on the Quai des Orfèvres, but the smiling, portly gentleman who admitted to that name, and who gallantly bowed over Eloise’s extended hand, was certainly not the man we had met for the first time on board The Sea Nymph , or later in Calais, or later again somewhere in the vicinity of Amiens.

We left the shop in some confusion, our previous dispute forgotten.

‘You’re sure he understood who you were enquiring for?’ I asked, once the situation had been explained to me.

‘Oh, don’t be stupider than you really are, Roger!’ Eloise exclaimed angrily. ‘You must have heard me say the name Raoul d’Harcourt yourself. Even you must have understood that much! And that was him, the man I was speaking to. He is Raoul d’Harcourt. And he swears there is no other man of that name on the quay.’

I dragged her out of the way as two carts, one loaded with fish, the other with bales of hay, went past neck and neck, each driver determined to be first into the narrow opening that led to the Rue Barthélemy.

‘Look,’ I said, pulling her round to face me, ‘our man is an impostor, that’s clear. For what reason, and what his game is, there’s no saying. When we get back to the house, I’ll tell John, though I doubt he’ll be able to offer any explanation. The masquerade could well mean his disappearance is voluntary, which, in turn, might mean no harm’s come to him. And that might set your mind at rest, you being so anxious about his welfare.’

Her expression lightened somewhat. ‘That’s true,’ she said, and tucked a hand in my arm. ‘In that case, I’d better do as Master Bradshaw instructed me and show you the city.’ She thought for a minute, then nodded. ‘Of course!’ She smiled mischievously. ‘I promised you, didn’t I, that you should see the original of The Dance of Death ?’

So we returned through the rabbit warren of streets that make up most of the Île de la Cité, to recross the Pont aux Meuniers and make our way again up the Rue Saint-Denis.

The Cemetery of the Innocents was to the left some few hundred yards along the street, and its cloister walls were indeed decorated with the same grinning skeletons as adorned the north cloister of St Paul’s. I felt a shiver go down my spine, and I thought of the Frenchman Jules’s two brothers, boiled alive in the pig market in front of a jeering crowd. Of course I knew that criminals had to be punished, and the more horrible the death, the more it deterred others from doing the same, but I had never been one for public executions or made of them the sort of holiday that others did, with regular eating and drinking and neighbourly gossip through the victims’ screams. Had I been less well able to defend myself, I suspect that I should often have been accused of an effeminate squeamishness by more robust friends and acquaintances who enjoyed watching a felon dancing on air at the end of a rope, or being sliced open while still alive and his entrails burned before his eyes.