“Dear God,” Fellowes says, clamping his hand over his mouth.
More victims are dragged in from the surrounding streets by their hair, by their nostrils, by their feet. Some are already dead, some still screaming, retching, wailing, and naked. Spaced around the precinct are more berms of corpses, each leaking its spreading crimson skirt, and Walsingham feels his boots letting moisture in and looks down: he is standing in a great pool of blood.
“Come on,” he says.
They set off, making their way through the frenzy. Walsingham knows that he will never forget the grunts of the butchers and the sound of their cleavers in flesh. He will never forget the faces he sees: both killers and victims. He will never forget the charnel house smell of blood, shit, and sweat.
As they approach the cathedral steps he can hear the choir now, singing their thanks to God. The smell of the incense mingles with blood.
They pass up the steps and into the cathedral not quite unignored. A man—an actual butcher—from the kitchens of the Louvre, has taken a break from his work to refresh himself from a flagon of the thin red wine he likes to drink in the morning, and he sees the two men moving against the flow of all others. He thinks he recognizes the English ambassador from the time he paid court to the king and balked at eating horsemeat. He nudges his mate and picks up his cleaver, its blade blue black with blood, its handle gummy with gore, and they set off across the precinct, tracking bloody prints as they go.
Walsingham and Fellowes enter the cathedral through a smaller door inset in the larger west door. It booms shut behind them, and within the nave they are plunged into sepulchral silence. There is no one about until, suddenly, a priest, or some such, stands before them, with thin lips and a pale, shiny face like the new moon. Walsingham dips his fingers in the holy water and crosses himself in the Catholic style. Fellowes copies him. The priest seems reassured. Walsingham sees Fellowes has left a pink mark on his forehead. The door handle, he thinks. There was blood on the door handle.
He tells the priest he would like to pray in the chapel of Saint-Clotilde.
“It is shut, monsieur,” the priest regrets.
A coin is proffered. The chapel is open, but only very briefly.
The priest guides them to the side chapel on their left. They leave footprints on the flagstones. In the chapel there is a memorial to a long dead canon, and a tall window of fine colored glass. The small altar is covered in a cloth but is otherwise bare.
“What are we doing?” Fellowes whispers again.
The priest lingers to collect his next coin.
“Distract him, will you?” Walsingham asks Fellowes. “Only for a moment, otherwise we will have to kill him.”
They hear the door through which they came boom shut behind someone coming in, or going out.
Fellowes approaches the priest. Both speak Latin, Fellowes not too well.
“Confession?” he asks.
The priest’s eyes light up, and Fellowes follows the priest out of the chapel to be out of Walsingham’s earshot. Before he goes, Fellowes glimpses Walsingham bending to kneel before the altar. A dead-letter drop.
Fellowes kneels before the priest, and remembers the old words, and they come to him now, and when he has recited them the priest blesses him and starts the questioning. Fellowes has not confessed since Queen Mary died, but he can hardly tell the priest that. He makes something up, but the priest hardly cares; he wants to delve into the proper sins, those of which Fellowes is most deeply ashamed and Fellowes is reminded how intrusive the sacrament of confession is.
“Lust, my son?”
He is about to shake his head and deny it when he thinks—my God. Isobel Cochet.
The priest seems to read his thoughts.
“A woman?” he presses.
Fellowes can only nod. What did he expect? He hears footfalls in the church behind him. Stout boots on marble flags.
“Who is she?” the priest persists. Fellowes feels the priest’s breath gusting on his face, garlic and meat and wine. “Is she married?”
“No.” Fellowes laughs. “She’s a widow.”
“A widow?” The priest is disgusted. He does not want to hear of an old lady. But Isobel Cochet could not be less like that. Fellowes wants to proclaim that she is nothing like that. But as soon as he starts to think what she is like, all he can see is the flash of her smile, the curve of her lip, that questioning look in her eye. More than that, though: the shape of her throat, her shoulders, her hips, the way she laughs. The smell of her as she passes. My God, he thinks. He flushes scarlet at the memory of a loose strand of her dark hair in the spring sunshine on the river’s bank. He has only seen her a few times, always with Master Walsingham, always in the Louvre, though, no, once at the residence, in Saint-Marceau, and then once again, that time on the river’s bank. The moment he saw her, his life changed, and from then on, he was always aware that somewhere she was out there, sometimes close, sometimes farther away. A lodestone, if she but knew it, around which he rotated. There must be others besides him, he knows that. A fraternity. He feels no animus.
He wonders if adjusting his clothing will break the seal and sanctity of the sacrament? This is no time for that.
The priest wishes to know if when Fellowes thinks of her he spills his seed, as did Onan in the Bible? Another time Fellowes might laugh.
“Oliver?”
It is Walsingham. Fellowes turns.
“We must go,” he says.
“Wait!” the priest snaps. He claps a surprisingly steely hand on Fellowes’s wrist.
But Fellowes has just seen the two men looming behind Walsingham.
“Master!” he shouts.
Walsingham turns.
Fellowes wrenches his hand free of the priest, sending him sprawling. He draws his sword. In a church? Why not? Walsingham too.
The two men they face are smeared and flecked with blood. One—with the cleaver—wears clogs. The other wears a leathersmith’s apron and carries one of those knives they use in slaughterhouses. Something purposeful with no name. Both have bloodstained rags tied around their right arms.
“I know you!” the clog and cleaver man shouts at Walsingham. Walsingham doesn’t know him, exactly, but can guess enough.
“Sanctuary,” Walsingham tries, reminding them all of their location. It is not clear if he means it, but the cleaver man is confused enough to need to look to the priest for guidance.
“They are English,” the priest says from the floor. He has bloodied his nose in the fall. “Huguenot.”
Fellowes has never cut a man deliberately, let alone killed one. But the clogged man comes at him so fast he has no choice. He leaps back. He flicks the blade from his right knee up across the man’s face. The man is left-handed, and he’d hoped to bring the cleaver down on Fellowes’s head. Instead Fellowes’s blade bites deep into his wrist and the cleaver flies spinning in the air to clatter to the ground well away. The man screams. Fellowes steps aside to let him blunder on a step or two and then he plunges the point of his sword into his liver. The butcher squeals, arches his back, then falls to his knees, nearly pulling the sword from Fellowes’s grasp. The man in the smith’s apron turns and runs.
“Damn you!” Walsingham cries as he sets off after him.
Fellowes joins him, but the man is fast, and running for his life. He cuts this way and that across the nave, nippy as a terrier. He crashes back out of the door into the precinct before they can catch him.