Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

She felt profoundly relieved when the spires of Geneva’s Protestant churches appeared in the distance. She was also proud of herself. She had been told it could not be done, but she had done it, with God’s help.

The city stood at the southern tip of the lake of the same name, at the spot where the Rhône river flowed out of the lake on its way to the distant Mediterranean Sea. As she got closer, she saw that it was a small town in comparison to Paris. But every town she had seen was small in comparison to Paris.

The sight was pretty as well as welcome. The lake was clear, the surrounding mountains were blue-and-white, and the sky was a pearly grey.

Before presenting herself at the city gate, Sylvie took off her nun’s cap, hid her pectoral cross under her dress, and wound a yellow scarf around her head and neck, so that she no longer looked like a nun, just a badly dressed laywoman. She was admitted without trouble.

She found lodging at an inn where the landlord was a woman. The next day, she bought a red wool cap. It covered her nun-like cropped hair, and was warmer than the yellow scarf.

A hard, cold wind came from the Rhône valley, lashed the surface of the lake into foaming wavelets, and chilled the city. The people were as cold as the climate, Sylvie found. She wanted to tell them that one did not have to be grumpy to be a Protestant.

The town was full of printers and booksellers. They produced Bibles and other literature in English and German as well as French, and sent their books to be sold all over Europe. She went into a printer’s nearest to her lodging and found a man and his apprentice working at a press with books stacked all around them. She asked the price of a Bible in French.

The printer looked at her coarse dress and said: ‘Too expensive for you.’

The apprentice sniggered.

‘I’m serious,’ she said.

‘You don’t look it,’ the man said. ‘Two livres.’

‘And if I buy a hundred?’

He half turned away to show lack of interest. ‘I don’t have a hundred.’

‘Well, I’m not going to give my business to someone so apathetic,’ she said tartly, and she went out.

But the next printer was the same. It was maddening. She could not understand why they did not want to sell their books. She tried telling them she had come all the way from Paris, but they did not believe her. She said she had a holy mission to bring the Bible to misguided French Catholics, and they laughed.

After a fruitless day she went back to the inn, feeling frustrated and helpless. Had she come all this way for nothing? Tired out, she slept heavily, and woke determined to take a different approach.

She found the College of Pastors, figuring that their mission was to spread the true gospel, and they would surely want to help her. There, in the hall of the modest building, she saw someone she knew. It took her a few moments to figure out that it was the young missionary who had come into her father’s bookshop almost three years ago and said: ‘I am Guillaume of Geneva.’ She greeted him with relief.

For his part, he regarded her sudden appearance in Geneva as some kind of godsend. Having done two tours of missionary duty in France, he was now teaching younger men to follow in his footsteps. In this easier way of life he had lost his intensity, and he was no longer as thin as a sapling: in fact, he looked contentedly plump. And Sylvie’s arrival completed his happiness.

He was shocked to hear of Pierre’s treachery, but he failed to conceal a feeling of satisfaction that his more glamorous rival had turned out to be a fraud. Then tears came to his eyes when she told him of the martyrdom of Giles.

When she related her experiences with Geneva booksellers, he was unsurprised. ‘It’s because you treat them as equals,’ he said.

Sylvie had learned to appear unafraid and in command, as the only way to discourage men from trying to exploit her. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ she said.

‘They expect a woman to be humble.’

‘They like deferential women in Paris, too, but they don’t turn customers away on that account. If a woman has money, and they have goods to sell, they do business.’

‘Paris is different.’

Evidently, she thought.

Guillaume eagerly agreed to help her. He cancelled his lectures for the day and took her to a printer he knew. She stood back and let him do the talking.

She wanted two kinds of Bible: one cheap enough for almost anyone to buy, and a luxury edition, expensively printed and bound, for wealthier customers. Following her instructions, Guillaume bargained hard, and she got both at a price she could treble in Paris. She bought a hundred prestige editions and a thousand cheap ones.

She was excited to see, in the same workshop, copies of the Psalms in the translation by the French poet Clément Marot. This had been a big success for her father and she knew she could sell many more. She bought five hundred.

She felt a thrill as she watched the boxes being brought out from the storeroom at the back of the shop. Her journey was not over yet, but she had succeeded so far. She had refused to abandon her mission, and she had been right. Those books would take the true religion into the hearts of hundreds of people. They would also feed her and her mother for a year or more. It was a triumph.

But first she had to get them to Paris, and that required a degree of deception.

She also bought a hundred reams of paper to sell in the shop on the rue de la Serpente. On her instructions, Guillaume told the printer to cover the books in each box with packages of paper, so that if a box was opened for any reason the contraband books would not be visible immediately. She also had the boxes marked with the Italian words ‘Carta di Fabriano’. The town of Fabriano was famous for high-quality paper. Her deception might satisfy a casual inspection. If her boxes were subjected to a more serious search then, of course, she would be finished.

That evening, Guillaume took her to his parents’ house for supper.

She could not refuse the invitation, for he had been kind, and without his help she might well have failed in her mission. But she was uncomfortable. She knew he had had romantic feelings for her, and he had left Paris abruptly as soon as she had become engaged to Pierre. Clearly those feelings had now returned — or perhaps they had never left him.

He was an only child, and his parents doted on him. They were warm, kind people, and they obviously knew that their son was smitten. Sylvie had to tell again the story of her father’s martyrdom, and how she and her mother had rebuilt their lives. Guillaume’s father, a jeweller, was as proud of Sylvie as if she were already his daughter-in-law. His mother admired her courage, but in her eyes was the knowledge, sad but incontestable, that her son had failed to capture Sylvie’s heart.

They invited her to lodge with them, but she declined, not wanting to encourage false hopes.

That night she wondered why she did not love Guillaume. They had much in common. They came from prosperous middle-class families. They were both committed to spreading the true gospel. Both had experienced the deprivations and hazards of long-distance travel. Both knew danger and had seen violence. Yet she had rejected this brave, intelligent, decent man for a smooth-talking liar and spy. Was there something wrong with her? Perhaps she was just not destined for love and marriage.

Next day, Guillaume took her to the docks and introduced her to a bargee whom he believed to be trustworthy. The man attended the same church as Guillaume, and so did his wife and children. Sylvie thought he could be trusted as far as any man.

She now had a heavy consignment, very difficult to transport overland by cart on country roads, so she had to return to Paris by ship. The barge would take her downstream to Marseilles, where she would transfer her books to an oceangoing vessel bound for Rouen, on the north French coast. From there she would sail upstream to Paris.