PART | ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Saint-Marceau, Paris, August 24, 1572
It starts with a bell in the night, just as he always knew it would.
“Oh, what is it now, for the love of all that is holy?” his wife says, sighing. “I’ve not slept a wink and already it is dawn.”
“Shhhh,” he whispers. “It’s not yet daybreak. Go back to sleep. It’ll soon stop.”
But it doesn’t. The bell rings on, dismal and insistent, and after a while Francis Walsingham leaves his wife, very hot and already grown overlarge with child, in the bed, and he makes his way to the window. He lowers the shutter and looks north, over his neighbors’ modest rooftops, toward the city itself, whence comes the bell’s toll.
“It’s Saint Germain’s,” his daughter tells him. She is awake in her truckle bed, by the side of the big bed, down by his ankle.
“You have good ears,” he whispers.
“What’s happening?” she asks. “I have been having bad dreams.”
He soothes her with some vague words and fumbles for his doublet.
“Francis?” his wife asks.
“I will be back by dawn,” he tells her.
He goes out into the corridor where he finds Oliver Fellowes, his intelligencer, already awake in doublet and breeches, with a candle lit. He is a young man—the son of Walsingham’s old friend John Fellowes—twenty to Walsingham’s forty, handsome, with reddish hair and a neatly barbered beard.
“Well met, Oliver,” Walsingham starts. “Are you just up from down, or in from out?”
Despite the anxiety the bell is causing, Fellowes laughs.
“Working, sir,” he lies.
Walsingham laughs too.
It is the last time he will do so for many days.
“What do you think it is?” Fellowes asks.
“Nothing good.”
They descend the narrow steps where the porter—a stocky Frenchman of the Reformed faith—waits with a bull’s-eye lamp, ready to unbar the door. When they meet the warm August air of the courtyard, all three stare into the star-speckled darkness over Paris.
“Is no fire,” the porter says. “A fire, you see from many leagues at night, and smell, too.”
“What then?” Fellowes asks. “Some saint’s day?”
“Is Bartholomew’s in the morning,” the porter tells them. “But no, is not that.”
Then Fellowes speaks quietly.
“It cannot be Coligny, can it?” he asks. “Not so soon?”
That had been Walsingham’s first fear too: that Gaspard de Coligny—the leader of France’s Protestant Huguenots—had died of his wounds. Someone had tried to kill him two days ago, with an arquebus, from an upstairs window, but had only managed to cap Coligny’s elbow and blow off his finger. Unless and until the wound became infected, he was not thought likely to die.
Unless now he has?
And if so, then there is no knowing what will happen. Will the Huguenots seek revenge against the Catholics? Or will the Catholics preempt the Huguenots and come for them? Paris is a tinderbox. France is a tinderbox. The whole of Christendom is a tinderbox.
“No,” Walsingham tells Fellowes. “Listen: my daughter is right. That bell: it is Saint Germain’s, the king’s chapel. The Catholics would never mourn Coligny.”
Fellowes agrees, but knowing what it isn’t doesn’t help them with what it is.
Just then another bell joins it, then another a moment later.
Oh by Christ, Walsingham thinks, they are passing a signal.
His guts roil. This is it. This is what they most feared would happen.
“Send someone to rouse Sir Philip, will you?” he tells the porter. “As well as Tewlis and the rest of his men. Have them keep the fires covered and the women within.”
The porter grunts and sets off to wake Sir Philip Sidney, Walsingham’s secretary, and Tewlis, the commander of his guards. Walsingham turns back to Fellowes.
“Oliver,” he confides, “before this turns ugly, we need to perform a little task. Can you dig up a couple of swords—and anything else if you have it—and meet me at the stables as soon as you can?”
Fellowes raises a brow.
“Shall I summon a troop of guards?”
“No,” Walsingham tells him. “This had best be just the two of us. No undue attention.”
Fellowes looks sharp.
“Is it Mistress Cochet?” he asks.
Walsingham almost smiles. Ah, he thinks, another of us enslaved by Isobel Cochet’s charms.
“No,” he says. “She remains at the Louvre palace, I hope. She will be safe there, whatever happens.”
Yes, Isobel Cochet will be safe wherever she goes and whatever happens, he thinks. Or hopes: it was he, after all, who sent her into the Louvre to be his ear to the door, his eye to the keyhole, so if anything has befallen her, then it will be him, Francis Walsingham, who will have to face her daughter—who must be what, six, by now?—to tell her that her mother is dead, just as he had once had to face Isobel herself to tell her that her husband had been killed in his service.
Not long later he meets Fellowes at the torch-lit stables behind the residency, watched over by a doubtful ostler. Walsingham straps on the unaccustomed sword belt and loosens the blade in its scabbard. Then he leads the horse out into the yard, with Fellowes behind.
Sir Philip Sidney is up, no cap, hair a little on end, standing in the yard.
“What’s happening?” he asks.
“You are to take command of the residency,” Walsingham tells him. “Oliver and I will be perhaps an hour, two at the most. You will know what to do if we are longer.”
Burn everything and evacuate the residence. Yes. Yes. He knows. But concern creases his handsome face.
“Can I not go in your place?” he asks, knowing the answer.
Walsingham mounts up.
“Good of you, Sir Philip, but this is…”
He trails off.
They all three know.
“Ready?” he asks Fellowes.
Fellowes nods.
When they open the gates, it is still dark, but the sky to the east is blood red, limned with green, and every bell in Paris is ringing. Off they set, up the road toward the Petit Pont, with the gates closing behind.
Saint-Marceau is a modest, mostly Reformed area, all Walsingham can afford on his daily diet, and all along the wayside, worried householders have come out to stand before their doors, pale linen gleaming in the gloom, listening to the bells, asking for news.
It comes soon enough; before Walsingham and Fellowes have ridden a hundred paces: a single rider, coming too fast and scattering the watch on the Porte Saint-Marcel.
“They’ve killed Coligny!” he shouts. “The Catholics! They threw him out of a window! Now they’re coming this way, killing everyone! Run! Run! For the love of God! They’ll kill you all!”
He doesn’t stop, but thunders past, and there is much screaming and shouting, and Walsingham’s neighbors scatter back into their houses.
Walsingham heels his horse onward toward the bridge, Fellowes at his elbow.
“Where are we going, sir?” he asks. “What are we doing?”
“To Notre-Dame,” Walsingham tells him, “to see a priest.”