Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

‘I might keep the place. I’ll need a coal store come September.’

‘Split the difference,’ Fawkes said. ‘One pound ten shillings.’

‘If you could make it two pounds, I’d shake hands on it now.’

‘Oh, very well,’ Fawkes said, and held out his hand.

‘A pleasure, Mr Johnson,’ said the woman.

Fawkes said: ‘I assure you, Mrs Skinner, the pleasure is all mine.’

Ned went to Paris in a desperate attempt to find out what was happening in London.

He continued to hear vague rumours of Catholic plots against King James. And his suspicion had been heightened when Guy Fawkes deftly shook off his surveillance and disappeared. But there was a frustrating lack of detail in the gossip.

Many royal assassination plots had been hatched in Paris, often with the help of the ultra-Catholic Guise family. The Protestants there had maintained the network of spies Sylvie had set up. Ned hoped that one of them, most likely Alain de Guise, might be able to fill the gaps.

After the simultaneous murders of Duke Henri and Pierre Aumande, Ned had feared that Alain would no longer be a source of information on exiled English Catholics; but Alain had picked up some of his stepfather’s wiliness. He had made himself useful to the widow and befriended the new young duke, and so continued to live at the Guise palace in Paris and work for the family. And because the ultra-Catholic Guises were trusted by the English plotters, Alain learned a good deal about their plans, and passed the information to Ned by coded letters sent along well-established secret channels. Much of the exiles’ talk came to nothing, but several times over the years Alain’s tips had led to arrests.

Ned read all his letters, but now he was hoping to learn more by a personal visit. In face-to-face conversation random details could sometimes emerge and turn out to be important.

Worried though he was, the trip to France was nostalgic for him. It put him in mind of himself as a young man; of the great Walsingham, with whom he had worked for two decades; and, most of all, of Sylvie. On his way to meet Alain he went to the rue de la Serpente and stood for a while outside the bookshop that had been Sylvie’s home, remembering the happy day he had been invited to dinner there and had kissed her in the back room, and the terrible day Isabelle had been killed there.

It was a butcher’s shop now.

He crossed the bridge to the Île de la Cité, went into the cathedral, and said a prayer of thanks for Sylvie’s life. The church was Catholic, and Ned was Protestant, but he had long believed that God cared little about such distinctions.

And nowadays the king of France felt the same. Henri IV had signed the Edict of Nantes, giving Protestants religious freedom. The new duke of Guise was still a child, and the Guise family had not been able to undermine the peace this time; and so forty years of civil war had come to an end. Ned thanked God for Henry IV, too. Perhaps France, like England, was slowly fumbling its way towards tolerance.

Protestant services were still discreet, and usually held outside the walls of cities, to avoid inflaming ultra-Catholics. Ned walked south along the rue St Jacques, through the city gate, and out into the suburbs. A man sitting reading at the roadside was the signpost to a track that led through the woods to a hunting lodge. This was the informal church Sylvie had attended before Ned met her. It had been exposed by Pierre Aumande, and the congregation had broken up, but now it was again a place of worship.

Alain was already there, sitting with his wife and children. Also with him was his long-time friend Louise, the dowager marchioness of Nîmes. Both had been at the château of Blois when Duke Henri and Pierre had been murdered, and Ned suspected they had been in on the plot, though no one had dared to investigate either killing because of the presumed involvement of the king. Ned also saw Nath, who had taken over Sylvie’s business in illegal books: she had become a prosperous old lady in a fur hat.

Ned sat next to Alain, but did not speak until the hymns, when everyone was singing too loudly to hear their talk. ‘They all hate this James,’ Alain murmured to Ned, speaking French. ‘They say he broke his promises.’

‘They’re not wrong,’ Ned admitted. ‘All the same I have to stop them killing him. Otherwise the peace and prosperity that Elizabeth won with such a tremendous effort will be shattered by civil war. What else do you hear?’

‘They want to kill the entire royal family, all but the little princess, whom they will declare queen.’

‘The entire family,’ Ned repeated, horrified. ‘Bloodthirsty brutes.’

‘At the same time they will kill all the leading ministers and lords.’

‘They must be planning to burn down a palace, or something. They could do that while everyone was sitting at a banquet, or watching a play.’ He was one of the leading ministers. Suddenly this had become about saving his own life as well as the king’s. He felt a chill. ‘Where will they do it?’ he asked.

‘I have not been able to elucidate that point.’

‘Have you ever heard the name Guy Fawkes?’

Alain shook his head. ‘No. A group came to see the duke, but I don’t know who they were.’

‘No names were mentioned?’

‘No real names.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The only name I heard was a false one.’

‘And what was that?’

‘Jean Langlais,’ said Alain.

Margery was bothered about Rollo. His answers to her questions had all been plausible, but just the same she did not trust him. However, she did not see what she could do about her unease. Of course, she could have told Ned that Rollo was Jean Langlais, but she could not bring herself to condemn her brother to the gallows just because he had muddy stockings.

While Ned was in Paris, Margery decided to take her grandson Jack, the son of Roger, on a visit to New Castle. She felt it was her duty. Whatever Jack ended up doing with his life, he could be helped by his aristocratic relations. He did not have to like them, but he had to know them. Having an earl for an uncle was sometimes better than money. And, when Bartlet died, the next earl would be his son Swifty, who was Jack’s cousin.

Jack was an enquiring, argumentative twelve-year-old. He entered energetically into disputatious conversations with Roger and with Ned, always taking the view opposite to that of the adult he was talking to. Ned said that Jack was exactly like the young Margery, but she could hardly believe she had been so cocky. Jack was small, like Margery, with the same curly dark hair. He was pretty now, but in a year or two he would begin to turn into a man, and then his looks would coarsen. The pleasure and fascination of watching children and grandchildren grow and alter was the great joy of being elderly, for Margery.

Naturally, Jack disagreed with his grandmother about the need for this visit. ‘I want to be an adventurer, like Uncle Barney,’ he said. ‘Noblemen have nothing to do with trade — they just sit back and collect rents from people.’

‘The nobility keep the peace and enforce the rules,’ she argued. ‘You can’t do business without laws and standards. How much silver is there in a penny? How wide is a yard of cloth? What happens when men don’t pay their debts?’

‘They make the rules to suit themselves,’ said Jack. ‘Anyway, the Kingsbridge Guild enforces weights and measures, not the earl.’

She smiled. ‘Perhaps you should be a statesman, like Sir Ned, rather than an adventurer.’

‘Why?’

‘You have such strong ideas about government. You could be the Government. Some of the most powerful men at court used to be clever schoolboys like you.’