Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

Giles’s fate had been sealed when a stack of newly printed sheets for Bibles in French had been found in the shop. The sheets were ready to be cut into pages and bound into volumes, after which they would have been taken to the secret warehouse in the rue du Mur. But there had not been time to finish them. So Giles was guilty, not just of heresy but of promoting heresy. There had been no mercy for him.

In the eyes of the Church, the Bible was the most dangerous of all banned books — especially translated into French or English, with marginal notes explaining how certain passages proved the correctness of Protestant teaching. Priests said that ordinary people were unable to rightly interpret God’s word, and needed guidance. Protestants said that the Bible opened men’s eyes to the errors of the priesthood. Both sides saw reading the Bible as the central issue of the religious conflict that had swept Europe.

Giles’s employees had claimed they knew nothing of these sheets. They had only worked on Latin Bibles and other permitted works, they said; Giles must have printed the others himself, at night, after they had gone home. They had been fined just the same, but had escaped the death penalty.

When a man was executed for heresy, all his goods were confiscated. This law was applied patchily, and interpretation could vary, but Giles lost everything, and his wife and daughter were left destitute. They managed to escape with the cash in the shop before it was taken over by a rival printer. Later they went back to beg for their clothes and learned they had been sold — there was a big market for second-hand garments. They were now living in one room of a tenement.

Sylvie was a poor seamstress — she had been raised to sell books, not to make clothes — so she could not even take in sewing, the traditional last resort of the penniless middle-class woman. The only work she could get was doing laundry for Protestant families. Despite the raids, most of them still adhered to the true religion, and after paying their fines they had swiftly restarted their congregations, finding new places to worship in secret. People who knew Sylvie from the old days often paid her more than the usual price for laundry, but still it was not enough to keep two people in food and fuel, and gradually the money they had brought from the shop was spent. It ran out in a bitterly cold December, with an icy wind knifing through the high, narrow Paris streets.

One day when Sylvie was washing a bedsheet for Jeanne Mauriac in the freezing water of the Seine river, the cold hurting her hands so badly that she could not stop crying, a man passing by offered her five sous to suck his cock.

She shook her head silently and carried on washing the sheet, and he went away.

But she could not stop thinking about it. Five sous, sixty pennies, a quarter of a livre. It would buy a load of firewood, a leg of pork and bread for a week. And all she had to do was put a man’s thing in her mouth. How could that be worse than what she was doing now? It would be a sin, of course, but it was hard to care about sin when her hands were in such agony.

She took the sheet home and hung it across the room to dry. The last lot of wood was almost gone: tomorrow she would not be able to dry laundry, and even Protestants would not pay if she delivered their sheets wet.

She did not sleep much that night. She wondered why anyone would desire her. Even Pierre had only been pretending. She had never thought herself beautiful, and now she was thin and unwashed. Yet the man at the waterside had wanted her, so perhaps others would.

In the morning, she bought two eggs with the last of her money. She put the remaining fragments of wood on the fire and cooked the eggs, and she and her mother had one each, with the stale remains of last week’s bread. Then they had nothing. They would just starve to death.

God will provide, the Protestants always said. But he had not.

Sylvie combed her hair and washed her face. She had no mirror, so she did not know what she looked like. She turned her stockings inside out to hide the dirt. Then she went out.

She was not sure what to do. She walked along the street, but no one propositioned her. Of course not, why would they? She had to proposition them. She tried smiling at men as they walked by, but none responded. To one she said: ‘I’ll suck your cock for five sous,’ but he just looked embarrassed and hurried on. Perhaps she should show her breasts, but it was cold.

She saw a young woman in an old red coat hurrying along the street with a well-dressed middle-aged man, holding his arm as if afraid he might escape. The woman gave her a hard look that might have signified recognition of a rival. Sylvie would have liked to speak to her, but the woman seemed intent on going somewhere with the man, and Sylvie heard her say to him: ‘It’s just around the corner, my darling.’ Sylvie realized that if she succeeded in getting a customer she would have nowhere to take him.

She found herself in the rue du Mur, across the street from the warehouse where the Palot family had stored illegal literature. It was not a busy thoroughfare, but perhaps men would be more willing to deal with prostitutes in back streets. And, sure enough, a man stopped and spoke to her. ‘Nice tits,’ he said.

Her heart leaped. She knew what she had to say next: I’ll suck your cock for five sous. She felt nauseated. Was she really going to do this? But she was hungry and cold.

The man said: ‘How much for a fuck?’

She had not thought about that. She did not know what to say.

The man was irritated by her hesitation. ‘Where’s your room?’ he said. ‘Nearby?’

Sylvie could not take him back to where her mother was. ‘I haven’t got a room,’ she said.

‘Stupid cow,’ the man said, and he walked away.

Sylvie could have cried. She was a stupid cow. She had not worked this out.

Then she looked across the road at the warehouse.

The illegal books had presumably been burned. The new printer might be using the warehouse, or he might have leased it to someone else.

But the key might still be behind the loose brick. Perhaps the warehouse could be her ‘room’.

She crossed the road.

She pulled out the loose half-brick next to the doorpost and reached inside. The key was there. She took it out and replaced the brick.

She cleared some rubbish from in front of the warehouse door with her foot. She turned the key in the lock, went inside, closed and barred the door behind her, and lit the lamp.

The place looked the same. The floor-to-ceiling barrels were still there. Between them and the wall there was enough space to do what Sylvie planned. There was a rough stone floor. This would be her secret room of shame.

The barrels looked dusty, as if the warehouse was no longer used much. She wondered whether the empty barrels were still in the same place. She tried moving one, and lifted it easily.

She saw that there were still boxes of books behind the barrels. A bizarre possibility occurred to her.

She opened a box. It was full of French Bibles.

How had this happened? She and her mother had assumed the new printer had seized everything. But clearly he had never found out about the warehouse. Sylvie frowned, thinking. Father had always insisted on secrecy. Even the men working for him had not known about the warehouse. And Sylvie had been ordered not to tell Pierre until after they were married.

Nobody knew except Sylvie and her mother.

So all the books must still be here — hundreds of them.

And they were valuable, if she could find people with the courage to buy them.

Sylvie took out a French Bible. It was worth a lot more than the five sous she had hoped to get on the street.

As in the past, she wrapped it in a square of coarse linen and tied it up with string. Then she left the warehouse, carefully locking it behind her and hiding the key.