Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

On the fourth day, Barney had nothing more to do, and he found himself on deck with Jonathan again. They were crossing a bay. The coast was on the port bow, as it had been ever since the Hawk had left the Westerschelde estuary and entered the English Channel. Barney was no expert in navigation, but he thought that by now they should have the English coast on the starboard bow. He frowned. ‘How long do you think it will be before we reach Combe Harbour?’

Jonathan shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

An unpleasant possibility crossed Barney’s mind. ‘We are headed for Combe Harbour, aren’t we?’

‘Eventually, yes.’

Barney’s alarm grew. ‘Eventually?’

‘Captain Bacon doesn’t confide his intentions to me. Nor to anyone else, come to that.’

‘But you seem to think we might not be going home.’

‘I’m looking at the coastline.’

Barney looked harder. Deep in the bay, just off the coast, a small island rose steeply out of the water to a precarious summit where a great church was perched like a giant seagull. It was familiar, and he realized, with dismay, that he had seen it before — twice. It was called Mont St Michel, and he had passed it once on his way to Seville, three years ago, and again on his way back from Spain to the Netherlands two years ago. ‘We’re going to Spain, aren’t we?’ he said to Jonathan.

‘Looks like it.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I didn’t know. And besides, we need a gunner.’

Barney could guess what they needed a gunner for. And that explained why Bacon had hired him when there was so little work for him to do as ship’s blacksmith. ‘So Bacon and you have tricked me into becoming a member of the crew.’

Jonathan shrugged again.

Barney looked north. Combe Harbour was sixty miles in that direction. He turned his gaze to the island church. It was a mile or two away, in waves of at least three feet. He could not swim it, he knew. It would be suicide.

After a long moment, he said: ‘But we’ll come back to Combe Harbour from Seville, won’t we?’

‘Maybe,’ said Jonathan, ‘maybe not.’

While Odette gave birth, painfully and loudly, Pierre planned how to get rid of the baby.

Odette was suffering God’s punishment for her unchastity. She deserved it. There was some justice on earth, after all, Pierre thought.

And as soon as the baby arrived, she would lose it.

He sat downstairs in the small house, leafing through his black leather-bound notebook, while the midwife attended to Odette in the bedroom. The remains of an interrupted breakfast were on the table in front of him: bread, ham and some early radishes. The room was dismal, with bare walls, a flagstone floor, a cold fireplace and one small window on to a narrow, dark street. Pierre hated it.

Normally he left straight after breakfast. He usually went first to the Guise family palace in the Vieille rue du Temple, a place where the floors were marble and the walls were hung with splendid paintings. Most often he spent the day there or at the Louvre palace, in attendance on Cardinal Charles or Duke François. In the late afternoon he frequently had meetings with members of his rapidly growing network of spies, who added to the list of Protestants in the black leather notebook. He rarely returned to the little house in Les Halles until bedtime. Today, however, he was waiting for the baby to come.

It was May 1560, and they had been married five months.

For the first few weeks Odette had tried to cajole him into a normal sexual relationship. She did her best to be coquettish, but it did not come naturally to her, and when she wiggled her broad behind and smiled at him, showing her crooked teeth, he was repelled. Later she began to taunt him with impotence and, as an alternative jibe, homosexuality. Neither arrow struck home — he thought nostalgically of long afternoons in the widow Bauchene’s feather bed — but Odette’s insults were nevertheless irritating.

Their mutual resentment hardened into cold loathing as her belly swelled through the end of a harsh winter and the beginning of a rainy spring. Their conversation shrank to terse exchanges about food, laundry, housekeeping money, and the performance of their sulky adolescent maid, Nath. Pierre found himself festering with rage. Thoughts of his hateful wife poisoned everything. The prospect of having to live, not only with Odette but also with her baby, the child of another man, came to be so odious as to seem impossible.

Perhaps the brat would be stillborn. He hoped so. That would make everything easy.

Odette stopped screaming, and a few moments later Pierre heard the squalling of a baby. He sighed: his wish had not been granted. The little bastard sounded repulsively healthy. Wearily, he rubbed his eyes with his hands. Nothing was easy, nothing ever went the way he hoped. There were always disappointments. Sometimes he wondered if his entire philosophy of life might be faulty.

He put the notebook in a document chest, locked the chest, and slipped the key into his pocket. He could not keep the book at the Guise palace, for he did not have a room of his own there.

He stood up. He had planned what to do next.

He climbed the stairs.

Odette lay in the bed with her eyes closed. She was pale, and bathed in perspiration, but breathing normally, either asleep or resting. Nath, the maid, was rolling up a sheet stained with blood and mucus. The midwife was holding the tiny baby in her left arm and, with her right hand, washing its head and face with a cloth that she dipped into a bowl of water.

It was an ugly thing, red and wrinkled with a mat of dark hair, and it made an irritating noise.

As Pierre watched, the midwife wrapped the baby in a little blue blanket — a gift to Odette, Pierre recalled, from Véronique de Guise.

‘It’s a boy,’ the midwife said.

He had not noticed the baby’s gender, even though he had seen it naked.

Without opening her eyes, Odette said: ‘His name is Alain.’

Pierre could have killed her. Not only was he expected to raise the child, she wanted him to have a daily reminder of Alain de Guise, the pampered young aristocrat who was the real father of the bastard. Well, she had a surprise coming.

‘Here, take him,’ said the midwife, and she handed the bundle to Pierre. He noticed that Véronique’s blanket was made of costly soft wool.

Odette muttered: ‘Don’t give the baby to him.’

But she was too late. Pierre was already holding the child. It weighed next to nothing. For a moment he experienced a strange feeling, a sudden urge to protect this helpless little human being from harm; but he quickly suppressed the impulse. I’m not going to let my life be blighted by this worthless scrap, he thought.

Odette sat up in bed and said: ‘Give me the baby.’

The midwife reached for the bundle, but Pierre withheld it. ‘What did you say its name was, Odette?’ he said in a challenging tone.

‘Never mind, give him here.’ She threw back the covers, evidently intending to get out of bed, but then she cried out, as if at a spasm of pain, and fell back on the pillow.

The midwife looked worried. ‘The baby should suckle now,’ she said.

Pierre saw that the child’s mouth had puckered into a sucking shape, though it was taking in only air. Still he kept it in his arms.

The midwife made a determined attempt to wrest the baby from his grasp. Holding the child in one arm, he slapped the midwife’s face hard with the other hand, and she fell back. Nath screamed. Odette sat up again, white with pain. Pierre went to the door, carrying the child.

‘Come back!’ Odette screamed. ‘Pierre, please don’t take away my baby!’

He went out and slammed the bedroom door.