Ahead in the growing light, the road is filling with a tide of people flowing toward them. The horses jitter. Walsingham clings on as people swarm around them.
“Go back!” they shout.
“The Catholics are coming!”
But Walsingham and Fellowes force their way through the swelling crowd and through the first gate. A trap, it must be a trap. Everything within tells him to turn and fly. The road is narrowing between taller houses ahead. Still the bells ring, and still men and women—in the hundreds now—push by. Some are in their finest, some still in nightwear, each clutching whatever they can, infants mostly. They come with heads crooked over shoulders, faces streaked with terror and tears.
“They cut her hands off!” a woman cries. “They cut my mother’s hands off!” She holds up her own, astonished to still have them.
“They are just—butchers!”
“Thieves!”
“Animals!”
Walsingham’s anger is like a physical force, like a gorge. It fills his throat. How can they? These Catholics? How can they turn on their fellow Christians and slaughter them like pigs in autumn? He wishes he were back at home, in England, and far from these papist animals with their insatiable bloodlusts and their ancient, twisted superstitions. He has long feared something like this would happen.
Beside him, Fellowes rides in tense, pale-faced silence.
They smell it before they reach the bridge: blood. It fills every cranny, with a coppery, intimate tang. It makes the horses shy and stamp and toss their heads.
“Come on,” Walsingham encourages his horse—and Fellowes. “We’ve got to get across the bridge before they close it.”
But they are too late. The road ahead empties, and the great gates at the southern end of the Petit Pont are heaved to. The city is sealed off. May the Lord help those trapped within.
Fellowes waits, hoping perhaps Walsingham will turn back, but he will not give up yet.
“We’ll try the river,” he says.
And he leads them eastward along the rue de la Bûcherie where the smell of the old blood between the cobbles is strong enough to mask that of the new.
“In here,” he says, and they dismount, leading the animals into a yard that isn’t too bad. They hobble them to a post and leave the other way, down some steps toward the river’s bank. It is light now, and so they can easily see the men on the Île de la Cité, right under the shadow of the steeple of Notre-Dame, pushing a dead woman’s body into the river. She’s naked and has only one arm. When she’s gone, the men look up and wave the arm at them. They laugh and cheer, then move off, chanting some song, the words of which Walsingham cannot catch. They brandish the arm as if it were a monstrance, and they were beating the bounds in spring, in search of someone else to kill.
Walsingham could gag.
The riverbank is muddy and unkempt hereabouts. They find a boat dragged up out of the river and hidden under a sagging wooden canopy. Its guard has probably run with the rest of them.
There’s an oar and a boat pole, and they haul the boat down into the fast-flowing brown waters.
“Master, are you sure?” Fellowes asks.
“We’ve got to,” Walsingham tells him.
One heave and the boat is in. Walsingham takes the pole, Fellowes the oar, and the boat spins in the current. The water is deep and Walsingham cannot touch the river’s bed with the pole. Fellowes works the oar like a Venetian, but still they drift downstream, westward, toward the bridge. There’s a body in the water. Not a dog. A human. Naked and fat, the skin of his back opened with a whip.
Above them to the right, twenty paces away, the sun shines on the jagged lines of the roofs of the great cathedral and the other houses on the Île de la Cité.
“Come on,” Walsingham urges Fellowes.
By God’s grace, no one sees them from the bridge as they spin through its arches and grind against the huge pillar. In the sudden darkness Walsingham grabs an iron chain cemented in a pillar and they are quickly out of the boat, scrabbling in the ooze. It stinks of shit. They drag the boat out of the current and up into the darkest shadows where they hope to return to find it. Walsingham wishes he had eaten something.
Along the bank, there are some steps up to the cathedral precinct, but before they climb them, Walsingham stops.
“Quick,” he tells Fellowes. “Cut a strip off your shirt.”
He’s seen each of the men wearing armbands, simple white kerchiefs knotted around the muscles above their right elbows, presumably as a signal. They each had a white cross pinned to their caps, too, but there’s nothing Walsingham can do about that. He and Fellowes cut strips off their shirttails and tie them on for each other. When they are finished, they look at each other.
“Do I look Catholic?” Walsingham asks.
Fellowes manages a laugh.
“Enough,” he says. “But sir—”
He touches Walsingham’s arm, and Walsingham knows what he is going to ask and cuts him off.
“I know this seems insane, Oliver, and I would not ask you to do it if… if England’s whole future did not hang in the balance. But it does. If we cannot find our way to the cathedral today, then a great chance to do great good will be gone.”
He grips an imaginary thing, as if it were chance to be seized.
“What is that?” Fellowes presses.
Walsingham knows he owes his intelligencer something more than this vague assurance, but secrecy is his second skin. It is very hard to tell him more, and he must force himself to do so.
“Some information,” he begins, speaking quickly, knowing that if he stops he will never start again. “From the logbook of Admiral DaSilva.”
Fellowes’s eyes sharpen. He is about to repeat the Portuguese admiral’s name aloud in incredulity but stops himself. He looks very boyish, then—just a youth in a borrowed beard.
“Is it… what we have been looking for?” he asks softly.
Walsingham nods, as if not trusting words spoken aloud.
After a moment, Fellowes turns shrewd again.
“Wherever… wherever did you come by it?”
He means two things: How did you come by it without my knowledge? And: Can it be trusted?
“We can talk about this at a later date,” Walsingham says. “But for now we must retrieve it before we leave Paris for good.”
Fellowes is convinced. Good.
“Come on then.”
They start up the steps. Halfway up they meet blood running down, pooling in the worn stone treads before overflowing to the one below. They must step through it. At the top, they find a kind of hell: immediately there is a pile of naked corpses from which seeps the blood, pressed out of those below by the weight of those above. Beyond, between Walsingham and the steps of the cathedral, the precinct is turned into an abattoir where strong-armed men engage in a wild frenzy of slaughter and butchery. They hack at the living and the dead with cleavers, and halberds, and foresters’ axes, parting them limb from limb with a dedicated, competitive ferocity, using both hands, as if this were a saint’s day fair, and they do so to impress their sweethearts.
On the steps, above the worst of the blood, stand the massed ranks of clerics of Notre-Dame cathedral. They are in celebratory red, and they have brought out their monstrances, and while the thurifers swing their censers, the choir sings the “Te Deum,” but you can’t smell the incense for the blood, or hear the singing for the screams.