Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

‘I understand.’

The baby began to cry. Almost automatically, Mother Ladoix took the bundle from Pierre and rocked the baby. ‘He’s hungry,’ she said.

‘No doubt,’ said Pierre.

‘This blanket is very soft. It must have been costly.’

It was a hint. Pierre took out his purse. He had not prepared for this contingency, but fortunately he had money. He counted out ten gold ecus, worth twenty-five livres, enough to feed a baby for years. ‘The family asked me to offer you ten ecus, and to say they would guarantee the same amount every year that the child is here.’

Mother Ladoix hesitated. Pierre guessed that she did not know how much of his story to believe. But caring for unwanted children was her mission in life. And ten ecus was a lot of money. She took the coins. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘We will take good care of this little boy.’

‘I will pray for him and for you.’

‘And I look forward to seeing you one year from today.’

For a moment Pierre was thrown. Then he realized she expected him to return with another ten ecus, as promised. It would never happen. ‘I will be here,’ he lied. ‘One year from today.’

He opened the door and held it for the nun. She left the room and silently disappeared into the nunnery.

Pierre went out with a light heart and walked away rapidly. He was exultant. He had got rid of the bastard. There would be a thunderstorm when he got home, but that was all right. There was no longer anything to tie him to the repellent Odette. Perhaps he could get rid of her, too.

To postpone the confrontation, he went into a tavern and ordered a celebratory cup of sherry. As he sat alone, sipping the strong, tawny wine, he turned his mind to his work.

It was more difficult now than when he had started. King Francis II had stepped up trials of Protestants, perhaps under the guidance of his Scottish wife, Mary Stuart, but more likely influenced by her Guise uncles. The heightened persecution had made the Protestants more cautious.

Several of Pierre’s spies were Protestants who had been arrested and threatened with torture unless they turned traitor. But the heretics were getting wise to this, and no longer automatically trusted their co-religionists. Nowadays they often knew each other only by first names, not revealing their surnames or addresses. It was like a game in which the Church’s moves were always countered by the heretics. However, Charles was patient, and Pierre was relentless; and it was a game that ended in death.

He finished his wine and walked the rest of the way home.

When he got there, he was shocked to find Cardinal Charles sitting in his living room, in a red silk doublet, waiting for him.

The midwife stood behind the cardinal with her arms folded and her chin raised defiantly.

Without preamble, Charles said: ‘What have you done with the baby?’

Pierre got over his shock rapidly and thought hard. Odette had acted faster than he had anticipated. He had underestimated the resourcefulness of a desperate woman. She must have recovered from childbirth sufficiently to send a message to the cardinal, probably by Nath, pleading for help. Nath had been lucky to find Charles at home and willing to come immediately. The upshot was that Pierre was in trouble. ‘Somewhere safe,’ he said in answer to the cardinal’s question.

‘If you’ve killed a Guise child, by God you’ll die for it, no matter how good you are at catching blasphemers.’

‘The baby is alive and well.’

‘Where?’

There was no point in resistance. Pierre gave in. ‘At the Convent of the Holy Family.’

The midwife looked triumphant. Pierre felt humiliated. He now regretted that slap in the face.

Charles said: ‘Go back and get him.’

Pierre hesitated. He could hardly bring himself to return, but he could not defy the cardinal without ruining everything.

Charles said: ‘You’d better bring him here alive.’

Pierre realized that if the baby should die of natural causes now — as they often did in the first few hours — he would be blamed, and probably executed for murder.

He turned and went to the door.

‘Wait,’ said Charles. ‘Listen to me. You are going to live with Odette, and take care of her and her child for the rest of your life. That is my will.’

Pierre was silent. No one could defy Charles’s will, not even the king.

‘And the child’s name is Alain,’ said Charles.

Pierre nodded assent, and left the house.

Sylvie’s life went well for half a year.

With the proceeds of book sales she and her mother rented a pleasant small house with two bedrooms in the rue de la Serpente, a street in the University district south of the river, and opened a shop in the front parlour. They sold paper, ink and other writing necessities to teachers, students and the literate general public. Sylvie bought the paper in Saint-Marcel, a suburb outside the city wall to the south, where the manufacturers had the unlimited water they needed from the Bièvre river. She made the ink herself using oak galls, the wart-like growths she picked from the bark of trees in the woods. Her father had taught her the recipe. Printing ink was different, made with oil to be more viscous, but she also knew how to prepare a more dilute ink for ordinary writing. The shop did not really make enough money for the two of them to live on, but it served as a plausible cover for their more important business.

Isabelle recovered from her depression, but she had aged. The horror the two women had experienced seemed to have weakened the mother and strengthened the daughter. Sylvie now took the initiative.

Sylvie led a dangerous life as a criminal and a heretic but, paradoxically, she was happy. Reflecting on why this was, she suspected that for the first time in her life she did not have a man telling her what to do. She had decided to open the shop, she had chosen to rejoin the Protestant congregation, she had continued selling banned books. She talked to her mother about everything, but she made the decisions. She was happy because she was free.

She longed for a man to hold at night, but not at the price of her liberty. Most men treated their wives like children, the only difference being that women could work harder. Perhaps there were men somewhere who did not regard wives as property, but she had never met one.

Sylvie had invented new names for them both, so that the authorities would not connect them with the executed heretic Giles Palot. They now called themselves Thérèse and Jacqueline St Quentin. The Protestants understood why and went along with the pretence. The two women had no friends who were not Protestants.

Their aliases had fooled a man from the city government who had visited the shop soon after it opened. He had looked all over the premises and asked a lot of questions. He might even have been one of Pierre Aumande’s informants, Sylvie thought; although any paper shop might have been checked for illegal literature. There were no books in the building, other than notebooks and ledgers, and he had gone away satisfied.

The contraband books were at the warehouse in the rue du Mur, and Sylvie withdrew one only when she had a buyer lined up, so that the incriminating objects were never at the house for more than a few hours. Then, one Sunday morning in the summer of 1560, she went to the warehouse for a French-language Geneva Bible and found that there was only one left in the box.

Checking the other boxes, she discovered that most contained obscure texts, such as the works of Erasmus, which she was able to sell only occasionally, to broad-minded priests or curious university students. She might have guessed: the books were still in the warehouse because they did not sell well. Other than the Bible, the only moderately popular book was John Calvin’s manifesto Institutes of the Christian Religion . That was why her father had been printing more Bibles last September, when the Guises had pounced. But those Bibles, found in the shop and fatally incriminating for Giles, had been burned.