Fellowes leans over the edge and feels sick with dizziness.
It is easily fifty feet to their deaths on the road below.
“We have to break in,” Walsingham says, and they start ripping at the tiles, prying them up. Fellowes cuts his hand, a deep gash across the palm. He curses but carries on.
The sun beats down, and even up here they can smell the blood from the street below. Or maybe it’s Fellowes’s. They keep pulling at the tiles, but each is held in place by the one above it. Fellowes makes a small hole, smashing it with his heel. There is another gunshot from the advancing Frenchmen. They duck but don’t see where the ball goes. Now suddenly there is a riot of men’s voices, much closer. They’ve come up through one of the other houses: the one with the laundry.
But now there is just enough of a hole to slither through into the baking darkness of the attic below.
Fellowes tells Walsingham to go first.
“I will hold them off,” he says. “They can only come in one by one.”
It is a good idea, but Walsingham will not allow it.
“You go first.”
Fellowes does, slithering through the hole they’ve made, feeling his way among the smoke-blackened rafters. He can hear rats squealing in alarm in the eaves and behind the wainscoting. He drops down onto the bare boards of the attic: straw and horsehair beds, a broken pot, a single shoe, and pigeons escaping through an unshuttered window. A moment later, Walsingham drops behind him and staggers a few paces.
“I’m getting too old for this,” he says.
Down they go. Fellowes leading the way. Fellowes knocks the ladder to the floor. This is the house of a well-to-do man of law—featherbeds and painted hangings on the walls, even this far up the steps—and the family are present, but they are pressed to gaps in the shuttered windows, watching the scenes below. Each turns and screams when they see the filthy, blood-smeared men in armbands, one carrying a sword. But Walsingham raises his hand to placate them. He and Fellowes hardly pause as they run stamping down the stairs.
The ground floor is given over entirely to an office, with one wall of shelves completely filled with rolls of paper; the shutters are drawn, and two men in sober suits are pressed to the door, looking very tense. Neither have armbands, but both have weapons: one a fine but useless sword, the other a rough but ready kitchen knife. Walsingham holds up his hands in peace. The men turn and stare openmouthed.
For some reason, Fellowes thinks they might have gotten away with it, and that if they somehow exit the back, say, and onto the road, they may yet return to the little boat and make it across the river, or float downstream to Issy, to safety. But then he hears a crash somewhere in the fabric of the house above, several guttural screams, and the thunder of footsteps down the stairs.
He turns and runs toward the back of the house. Walsingham follows. They run through a smaller study, where a shrill lapdog barks fiercely, and then a deserted kitchen that smells of bacon. A door out into the yard, and against one brick-built wall: a wood stack. Fellowes clambers up it, sending loose logs skittering below. Walsingham swears as one catches his shin.
Fellowes hauls himself up to straddle the top of the wall. There is a flow of men, walking to and from the bridge to the north bank. Some stop to watch. He indicates his armband.
“Huguenot scum!” he says, aping Walsingham.
The men are unconvinced. They still stand and watch. They are armed and very dangerous, looking for someone else to kill.
“Oliver!”
It’s Walsingham, below, still in the garden with his arm upstretched.
The running footsteps in the house are accompanied by bellowed shouts and desks screeching across the floors. They are coming through the house, this way. Fellowes leans down to haul Walsingham up. His cut hand throbs with pain, all the way up to his elbow. Walsingham scrambles up and over the wall. He lands in the street below just as the man they’d chased in the cathedral comes hurtling out of the house. He sees Fellowes on the wall and cuts that way. He is bellowing with rage and hate, his ax raised, and he’s followed by many others.
Fellowes swings his leg over and drops down beside Walsingham. Together they face about ten curious French Catholics, each with a band around his arm, and a cross on his hat. Each with a weapon. They have, naturally perhaps, formed a semicircle around the two Englishmen, pressing them to the wall. But they are not even the real danger. The real danger comes from behind the wall.
“Master Walsingham?” Fellowes says. “I think we had best say our prayers.”
“Oliver,” Walsingham starts, “I am sorry I have gotten you into this. There was no need—”
Just then the Frenchman from the cathedral appears on top of the wall. He is bellowing with rage, lunging at them with his newfound ax. Fellowes ducks and turns. If I can kill one more man, he thinks, let it be this one.
But before he can move, there is a boom, and the Frenchman’s head rocks back, and the ax spins from his grasp. When his head rocks forward again, there is what looks like a third eye in the very middle of his forehead. The man disappears behind the wall.
Walsingham and Fellowes turn back to the bridge. There is a closed caroche, fifty yards away, at the head of the bridge, and perhaps twenty men on horseback. A man stands upright by the coach’s driver, and the puff of pale smoke identifies him as the marksman. The crowd in the street gasp in awe and back away, while those in the courtyard behind are shouting and arguing to see who should next put his head over the parapet. The horsemen come riding forward, and the rioters scatter out of their way.
“Thank God!” says a relieved Walsingham.
They are King Charles’s personal bodyguard, in extravagant blue-and-yellow livery, well-armored with helmets, breastplates, pikes, halberds, and guns. Their captain is shouting and gesturing, commanding everyone to move away from Walsingham and Fellowes. Fellowes might weep with gratitude. He has never been so pleased to see anyone his entire life.
“But what in God’s name are they doing here?” he asks as they descend to the courtyard. “And why do they wish to save us? How do they even know who we are?”
“M’sieur,” the captain greets Walsingham with a lazy touch of the brim of his helmet.
“I am indebted to you, sir,” Walsingham says. “And especially your markman.”
Fellowes can feel his entire body trembling with relief.
“Don’t thank me, m’sieur,” the captain says. “Thank her.”
He indicates the caroche.
“Her?”
Fellowes peers. A window is lowered and a red-sleeved arm waves. It is not a summoning gesture, as he might have expected, but one of pleasure, of glee even, and the arm is long and slender and belongs to a woman.
Fellowes and Walsingham turn to each other.
“Great God in heaven,” Fellowes breathes.
It is Isobel Cochet.
CHAPTER TWO
Paris, same day, August 24, 1572
Mistress Cochet pulls back her hood to reveal she has lost her cap, and that her hair—dark with a tinge of red—has escaped its confines. Fellowes feels his mouth go dry, for her beauty is the sort to make any man—and woman, and child, and horse, and dog even—stop and stare: to open and turn toward her like a daisy to the sun. They wait to be warmed by her smile, to be lost in her brown-eyed gaze, to be lifted up by just a moment’s attention, and here is Fellowes sitting on a bench in a caroche, with his knee touching hers. Though there is another man in the cabin with them, and though all are turned to the window, struck by the horror unfolding in the streets, a little part of Fellowes is concentrated fiercely on his kneecap.