‘Catholic or Protestant?’ I demanded, pointing at her.
‘What?’
‘Don’t be alarmed, madame,’ I hissed, cutting a glance over my shoulder. ‘Are you Catholic or Protestant?’
She looked affronted. ‘Catholic, of course.’
‘God be praised. There are two Huguenots after me. In the name of the Blessed Virgin, give me sanctuary.’
She was so startled that she relaxed her hold on the door enough for me to push my way in and slam it behind me. I tumbled into a barely furnished room where two small children sat at a scrubbed wooden table, staring at me with their mouths open. I nodded to them, and looked around.
‘Get in that corner. If they come near my family, I’ll bloody kill you myself,’ she muttered. ‘What do they look like?’
‘I don’t know. One of them might be lame.’ I retreated into the shadows behind a rickety cupboard.
‘Lame? How slow do you run, then?’
One of the children giggled.
‘The other one isn’t. And they’re armed.’
The amused expression vanished; she glanced towards the door, her mouth set tight.
Minutes passed; I heard the children jostling for a place at the window, and a cry from the street. Eventually the woman burst into laughter.
‘Huguenots, you say?’
I stepped out, cautious. ‘Have they gone? Is there something funny?’
‘There were two of them, all right, marching up and down looking for someone. One in a cleric’s robes. The other was a dwarf. Were they the ones?’
‘They were in disguise,’ I said, feeling ridiculous.
She made no effort to hide her smile, but her eyes were gently teasing. ‘The dwarf disguise was very good.’
‘God will reward you for your charity, madame.’
‘I’m sure he will,’ she murmured, eyeing the purse at my belt. I drew out a sou and tossed it to the taller of the children, who caught it deftly and beamed at me through the gap in his teeth. ‘God be with you, monsieur,’ she said, at the door, tucking a strand of hair under her cap. ‘You can always take refuge here if you’re menaced by dwarves again. I’m a widow,’ she added, lowering her voice with a glance at the children, in case her meaning was unclear. I gave a brief nod, embarrassed, and turned towards home, one hand on my dagger, keeping to the centre of the street.
A man in cleric’s robes, the woman had said. An educated, well-born priest, by his voice – a friend of Paul’s, or an enemy? What had they been looking for? Whatever it was, it must be significant; they had immediately jumped to the conclusion that someone else had been looking for it too. ‘Who could possibly know?’ the one dressed as a priest had said; did he mean who would know Paul was dead, or something else? I reached inside my doublet and touched the charred fragment of paper with my fingertips. Was this what they had hoped to find? If so, my resolution not to involve myself further in Paul’s murder was worthless; I was already up to my neck in it.
I returned to the Swan and Cross, still glancing behind to make sure I was not being followed. The fact that I saw no one in the streets made me all the more uneasy. The tavern was crowded now that night covered its patrons’ entrances and exits. Someone had brought out a rebec and struck up a tune; the shrieking of girls and snatches of raucous song carried the length of the street. Gaston spotted me across the room and shoved his way through to intercept me at the door, blocking my view with his wide shoulders.
‘Couple of fellers come round just now asking after you,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘Said they had an urgent message for you. No one told them anything, so far as I know. Thought you should be warned.’
‘A dwarf?’
‘Eh?’
‘Was one of them a dwarf?’
He laughed, and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘What – family, is he?’
It was Gaston’s great joke that all Neapolitans are stunted. This apparently never grew any less entertaining, no matter how often he repeated it – despite the fact that he stood only an inch or two above me himself. ‘Taller’n you, anyway, mate.’ He stopped laughing at the look on my face. He leaned in, his breath hot on my ear. ‘These were soldiers, not dwarves. What’ve you done now, Bruno?’
‘I’m not sure I know, exactly.’
A chill prickled up my spine. Word travelled fast in this city; every faction had eyes and ears everywhere. A dwarf and a priest were one thing; if someone was sending professional soldiers after me, the stakes were already higher than I had imagined, and I had no idea who might have sent them. King Henri had troops of Swiss guards under his command, but the Duke of Guise, leader of the Catholic League, had also mustered private forces of his own. It had become fashionable among the nobility to keep dwarves as servants or jesters, in imitation of the royal court. Both the soldiers and the men in Paul’s rooms could have belonged to anyone.
I stayed at the Swan until late, drinking little, eyes fixed on the door as I lingered over a bowl of mutton stew that Gaston had insisted on adding to my growing bill, though my stomach was so tight with apprehension that I swallowed less than half of it. When, some time after midnight, he bellowed that he was locking up and the company reluctantly began to stir, I borrowed a lantern and drifted down the street in the wake of a group of students I half knew, all of them too poor to go on to a brothel, who invited me to someone’s rooms for cards, eagerly brandishing a bottle of cheap eau de vie one of them had concealed beneath his cloak. I was briefly tempted, if only for the protection
