Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

In the teeming Mediterranean port of Marseilles, Sylvie transferred her cargo from the river barge to an oceangoing merchant ship. It took her through the Strait of Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay where she was miserably seasick, along the English Channel and then up the river Seine as far as Rouen, the most important northern port in France.

The city was one-third Protestant, and Sylvie attended a Sunday service that hardly troubled to hide its nature and took place in a real church. She could have sold all her books here. But the need was greater in Catholic Paris. And prices were higher in Paris too.

It was January, 1561, and in France the news was all good. After King Francis II died his mother, Queen Caterina, had taken charge and dismissed the Guise brothers from some of their political offices. She had issued new regulations that made life easier for Protestants, though these were not yet formally laws. All religious prisoners were to be released, heresy trials were suspended, and the death penalty for heresy was abolished. The Protestants, whom Sylvie now heard referred to by their new nickname of Huguenots, were rejoicing.

However, selling banned books was aggravated heresy, and still a crime.

Sailing upstream on a river boat to Paris, with the hold full of her boxes, she felt hope and fear in equal measure. She arrived on a cold February morning at the quai de la Grève, where dozens of ships and boats were moored along the banks or anchored in midstream.

Sylvie sent a message to her mother that she had arrived, and a note to Luc Mauriac saying she hoped to see him soon to thank him personally for helping her plan her successful trip. Then she walked the short distance to the customs house in the place de Grève. If she was going to have trouble, it would begin here.

She brought with her false receipts, carefully forged with Guillaume’s help, showing that she had bought one hundred and ten boxes of paper from a fictional manufacturer in Fabriano. She also brought her purse, ready to pay the import tax.

She showed the receipts to a clerk. ‘Paper?’ he said. ‘Plain paper, with nothing written or printed on it?’

‘My mother and I sell paper and ink to students,’ she explained.

‘You’ve bought a lot.’

She tried a smile. ‘There are a lot of students in Paris — luckily for me.’

‘And you went a long way to get it. Don’t we have our own paper manufacturers, in Saint-Marcel?’

‘Italian paper is better — and cheaper.’

‘You’ll have to talk to the boss.’ He gave her back her receipts and pointed to a bench. ‘Wait there.’

Sylvie sat down with a sense of inevitable doom. All they had to do was open the boxes and look carefully! She felt as if she had already been found guilty and was awaiting sentence. The tension was hard to bear. She almost wished they would put her in jail and get it over with.

She tried to distract herself by watching the way business was done here, and realized that most of the men who came through the door were known to the clerks. Their papers were handled with casual efficiency and they paid their dues and left. Lucky them.

An agonizing hour later she was shown upstairs to a larger office occupied by the Deputy Receiver of Customs, Claude Ronsard, a sour-looking individual in a brown doublet and a velvet cap. While he was asking her all the same questions, she wondered uneasily whether she was supposed to bribe any of these people. She had not noticed this happening downstairs but it would not be done openly, she supposed.

Eventually Ronsard said: ‘Your cargo must be inspected.’

‘Very well,’ she said, trying to affect a light tone of voice, as if this were a minor inconvenience; but her heart was pounding. She jingled her purse discreetly, hinting at bribery, but Ronsard seemed not to notice. Perhaps he took bribes only from people he knew well. Now she did not know what she had to do to save her cargo — and perhaps her life.

Ronsard stood up and they left his office. Sylvie felt shaky and walked unsteadily, but Ronsard seemed oblivious to any signs of her distress. He summoned the clerk whom Sylvie had spoken to first, and they walked along the quay to the boat.

To Sylvie’s surprise, her mother was there. She had hired a porter with a heavy four-wheeled cart to take the boxes to the warehouse in the rue du Mur. Sylvie explained what was happening, and Isabelle looked frightened.

Ronsard and the clerk went on board and selected a box to be unloaded and inspected. The porter carried it onshore and put it down on the quayside. It was made of light wood, nailed, and on its side were the Italian words: ‘Carta di Fabriano.’

Now, Sylvie thought, they were hardly likely to go to all this trouble without emptying the box — and then they would find inside forty Geneva Bibles in French, complete with inflammatory Protestant comments in the margins.

The porter prised open the box with a crowbar. There, on top, were several packages of plain paper.

At that moment, Luc Mauriac arrived.

‘Ronsard, my friend, I’ve been looking for you,’ he said breezily. He was carrying a bottle. ‘There’s a consignment of wine from Jerez, and I thought you ought to try some, just to make sure it’s, you know, what it should be.’ He winked broadly.

Sylvie could not take her eyes off the box. Just under those reams of paper were the Bibles that would condemn her.

Ronsard shook Luc’s hand warmly, took the bottle, and introduced the clerk. ‘We’re just inspecting the cargo of this person,’ he said, indicating Sylvie.

Luc looked at Sylvie and pretended surprise. ‘Hello, Mademoiselle, are you back? You don’t need to worry about her, Ronsard. I know her well — sells paper and ink to the students on the Left Bank.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes, I’ll vouch for her. Listen, old pal, I’ve just got a cargo of furs from the Baltic, and there’s a blond wolf that would look wonderful on Madame Ronsard. I can just see her hair against that fur collar. If you like it, the captain will give it to you — gesture of goodwill, you know what I mean. Come with me and take a look.’

‘By all means,’ Ronsard said eagerly. He turned to his clerk. ‘Sign her papers.’ He and Luc went off arm in arm.

Sylvie almost fainted with relief.

She paid the customs duty to the clerk. He asked for one gold ecu ‘for ink’, an obvious shakedown, but Sylvie paid without protest, and he went away happy.

Then the porter began to load the boxes onto the cart.

Early in 1561, Ned Willard was given his first international mission for Queen Elizabeth. He was daunted by the weight of responsibility, and desperately keen to succeed.

He was briefed by Sir William Cecil at Cecil’s fine new house in the Strand, sitting in a bay window at the rear that looked over the fields of Covent Garden. ‘We want Mary Stuart to stay in France,’ Cecil said. ‘If she goes to Scotland as queen, there will be trouble. The religious balance there is delicate, and a strongly Catholic monarch will probably start a civil war. And then, if she should defeat the Protestants and win the civil war, she might turn her attention to England.’

Ned understood. Mary Stuart was the rightful queen of England in the eyes of most European leaders. She would be even more of a threat to Elizabeth if she crossed the Channel. He said: ‘And for that same reason, I suppose the Guise family want her in Scotland.’

‘Exactly. So your job will be to persuade her that she’s better off staying where she is.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Ned said, though for the moment he could not imagine how he could do it.

‘We’re sending you with her brother.’

‘She doesn’t have a brother!’ Ned knew that Mary was the only child of King James V of Scotland and his queen, Marie de Guise.