Stephanie Merritt: Conspiracy

‘I only wondered if he was carrying anything that might suggest why he was attacked. Papers, valuables, that sort of thing.’ I kept my tone mild, but he continued to fix me with the same aggressive stare. His skin had an unpleasant sheen, as if his face were damp with sweat; it gave him a disturbingly amphibious quality.

‘He had nothing about his person when he was brought here,’ the infirmarian said. ‘Just the clothes he was wearing.’

‘Robbed, one presumes,’ Albaric declared. ‘All kinds of lawless types you get, loitering outside the city walls. Waiting for traders coming home with the day’s takings. They’d have stripped him of anything worth having before dumping him in the river, poor fellow.’

‘But he’s obviously a priest, not a trader,’ I objected. ‘Street robbers would hardly expect a priest to carry a full purse.’

Albaric’s eyes narrowed. ‘He might have been carrying alms to give out. Or perhaps he was wearing a particularly lavish crucifix. Some of them do.’

I glanced at his chest; his own ornament was hardly austere. ‘Not Paul. He dislikes ostentation.’ Unless he had changed in that regard too, since joining the Catholic League, but somehow I doubted it, just as I found it hard to believe that he had fallen to some chance street robbery on his way to the abbey. Whoever struck him down had done so with a purpose, I was sure.

‘Huguenots, then. Wouldn’t be the first cleric they’ve assaulted. They’ll take any opportunity to attack the true faith.’ Albaric sniffed and turned back to his vial of chrism, as if the matter was now closed. I did not bother to argue. In case of doubt, blame the Protestants: the Church’s answer to everything. Though I could not help but notice that this Albaric seemed eager to point the finger in all directions at once.

I drew closer to the bed and leaned as near as I could to the dying man’s lips, but found no trace of breath.

‘Paul. It’s Bruno.’ I laid a hand over one of his and almost recoiled; the skin was cold and damp as a filleted fish. ‘I’m here now.’

‘He can’t hear you,’ Albaric pointed out, over my shoulder. Ignoring him, I bent my cheek closer. I remained there for several minutes, listening, willing him to breathe, or speak, to give some sign of life, while the friar shifted from foot to foot behind me, impatient to resume his office. Eventually, I had to concede defeat. I had been in the presence of death often enough to know its particular stillness, its invidious smell. Whatever Paul had wanted to tell me, I had missed it. I straightened my back, head still bowed, and as I did so, I felt the cold fingers under mine twitch almost imperceptibly. Albaric was already moving in with his chrism; I held up a hand to warn him off. Under Paul’s one visible eyelid, the faintest flicker. His fingers closed around my thumb; his chest rose a fraction as he scraped a painful breath, his frame twisting with the effort. His left eye snapped open in a wild gaze that seemed both to fix on me and look straight through me, into the next world. I gripped his hand tight; he gave a violent shiver and exhaled with his death rattle one final, grating word:

‘ Circe .’

I hurried back towards the Porte Saint-Victor through a veil of fine rain as dusk fell, keen to disappear into the warren of narrow streets around the colleges on the Left Bank before anyone noticed I had gone. In the commotion after Paul’s death I had slipped away from the abbey, knowing they would call in the city authorities; life may be cheap in Paris in these turbulent times, but the murder of a priest was still a serious matter, particularly one with Paul’s connections, and I did not want to find myself caught up in their investigation. The friars had asked me, of course, what his urgent last word had been; I told them ‘Jesus’. I don’t know if they believed me. I was not sure what instinct prompted me to lie; only that it seemed prudent not to divulge anything to people I did not know, especially those in holy orders. Paris was so fractured by divided loyalties that the wrong word to the wrong person could ripple outwards with unintended consequences, and my position was too precarious to place myself knowingly at the heart of a political murder – for it seemed to me that Albaric’s first surmise had been correct, that the attack was a direct result of Paul’s eloquent rant against the decadence and corruption of the royal House of Valois from his pulpit the previous Sunday.

‘Circe’, I supposed, must be some kind of code word, intelligible perhaps to his confederates in the Catholic League, but I had no idea what it might mean, or what might be unleashed by repeating it in the wrong ear. Could it be connected to the identity of his killer? Was that what he was trying to tell me? I was not convinced that Paul had even been aware of who I was at the end. Best to keep silent until I could seek the advice of Jacopo Corbinelli, the only man in Paris I dared to trust. Like me, Jacopo was a scholar, an Italian in exile, part of the Florentine entourage that surrounded Catherine de Medici, the widowed Queen Mother. He had been King Henri’s boyhood tutor and continued to serve him as advisor and keeper of his library, though he also remained Catherine’s secretary, and as such he was uniquely placed to speak in my favour at court. He had taken me under his wing when I arrived in Paris for the first time, four years ago; it was he who had heard me give a lecture on my art of memory at the University and recommended me to the King. I became a regular guest among the Italian thinkers, writers and artists who gathered around Jacopo’s supper table in those days and I had hoped, on returning from London, that I might renew the friendship and enjoy again the warmth of that company. But affairs of state kept him busy now between the palaces, or so he told me; I had seen him only twice since I arrived at the beginning of September, and though he had assured me he would persuade the King to grant me an audience, I was still waiting for a word, and it was now almost a month since I had heard anything from him. I decided to send another message to his house and ask to see him urgently. Until then, I would keep my mouth shut regarding Paul’s murder; too much about it made me uneasy.

On impulse, I turned north towards the river before I reached the gate, in the direction of the old fort of La Tournelle which stood a squat sentinel over the Seine and its islands, marking the boundary of the city wall. Here, Paris ended abruptly, bustling streets giving way to ploughed fields and orchards, wide unpaved roads built for ox-carts and canals for goods barges from the surrounding farms – all the arteries that kept money flowing in and out of the city. Huddled in the shadow of the old wall, the Faubourg Saint-Victor offered little to passing visitors besides the great abbey that gave the district its name; only a few scattered cottages and cheap inns along the main road out of the city. Mudbanks sloped down to the river, pockmarked with the tracks of gulls; rickety wooden jetties splayed into the water at intervals, their boards slick with weed and splintered like rotten teeth. I walked slowly back along the bank where the inland channel met the broad expanse of the river, scanning the ground to either side. With that head wound, Paul would not have survived more than a few minutes in the water. The current must have washed him into the shallows of the inlet and on to the bank almost as soon as he was thrown in or he would have drowned, which meant he must have been struck just upriver from the channel – in other words, right under the wall of the abbey. It was hard to imagine that Paul would have had any other destination in this part of town; it was reasonable to assume, too, given that he had asked for me by name on his deathbed, that he had come to the abbey looking for me. But someone else had encountered him first.