‘Oh?’ He brushed raindrops from his cheek and looked at me, surprised. ‘Well, that should give you an advantage, then.’
‘Did you?’
‘What?’
‘Know him? Did he…’ I hesitated, ‘ever correspond with you, perhaps?’
Henri frowned, as if he didn’t understand the question. ‘Of course not. You think I have time to exchange letters with every malicious little shit-flinger?’
‘I only wondered if he might have written to you,’ I said, choosing my words carefully. ‘Urging you to repent, warning you, something of that sort.’
He snorted. ‘I might have given him some credit if he’d had the courage to address me directly. But they’re cowards, these Guise lickspittles. Let’s get out of this rain.’
One of the guards picked up the torch from the wall bracket and they followed us in to the staircase at a respectful distance. Our shadows flickered like giant carnival grotesques over the clammy walls as we spiralled down.
‘He was killed outside Saint-Victor, so I was told,’ Henri said, as we reached the first landing, taking out a key to unlock a small door set into the wall. A secret way back to his chambers, no doubt – this old part of the Louvre was full of hidden passages, as if it had been built expressly for spying and adultery. ‘I’d start there if I were you. I think we can safely say I don’t have many supporters among the religious orders. Those friars are all in Guise’s pocket.’
I nodded, and made a non-committal noise. I still had no idea whether the King was lying to me; I hoped he did not intend to direct my steps throughout. I had accepted a poisoned chalice, however I chose to look at it, and my motives for doing so were precisely the two things that had undone me before – a book and a woman. That woman. I should have been wiser.
Henri held out his hand so that I could bow and kiss his signet ring, a gentle reminder of his power to command. ‘One last thing,’ he said, pausing in the doorway. ‘My mother’s putting on one of her grand entertainments next Friday. Improve morale. If our popularity’s flagging, put on a show – you know what she’s like. Remind people of the old days. You must come.’
‘I thought I couldn’t be seen at court?’
‘Ah, but that’s the beauty of it – you won’t be. It’s a masked ball. Everyone will be in costume, faces hidden, no one will have the faintest idea who you are. Say you’ll come. Her women will perform too, if you need more persuading. I’d wager you don’t see anything like that at Elizabeth’s court.’ He poked the tip of his tongue between his teeth and wiggled it, an impish glitter in his eyes.
I could think of few places I would feel more exposed than the Tuileries palace during a masked ball, but the door had closed behind him and the key turned before I could protest. His departure seemed to suck all the force from the air; I felt my body sag with the weight of my tiredness. If the guards had allowed me, I would have curled up in a corner of the stone staircase and slept right there.
The ghost of Henri’s perfume followed me down the stairs. I left feeling deeply uneasy on several counts, hoping that I had not just made a pact to disguise a murder for my own advantage.
FOUR
I woke late the next morning, opening my eyes to a dusty grey light with a lingering sense of dread. Easing myself on to my elbows, I registered the bruises along my shoulder and hip from my plunge the day before, but it took a moment longer for my mind to struggle through the fog of sleep until I could be sure that I had not dreamed my nocturnal audience with the King and its unwelcome conclusion.
So she had fled to Paris, as I had suspected. Sophia Underhill, the woman I had known in Oxford and Canterbury. The King was right; she had bested me, and the memory of it still burned. Like a fool, I had thought myself proof against the wiles of women; the self-discipline I had learned in thirteen years as a Dominican served me well enough to withstand the cynical and obvious seductresses of the French court, but nothing had prepared me for a woman like Sophia. Educated, spirited, hungry for life, knowledge, independence, she had found herself ceaselessly frustrated by the constraints placed on her by her sex. Life had not been kind to her, and those scars had lent her a lean and wary look, and an edge of ruthlessness in her determination not to be duped. She made it a matter of principle to strike first, before you could touch her; she trusted no one. That was a bitter lesson, and one I had learned too late. I had done my best to excise her from my heart and my memory, but the agitation I now felt at the possibility that she might still be in Paris suggested I had not succeeded. I tore a comb through my hair and examined my face in the glass to judge how much I had aged since she last saw me, all the while cursing her under my breath. Now I would walk every street searching the crowds for her face, despite myself.
Outside, the rain had relented but a thick mist lay over the streets, rising in curlicues from the river; it would not burn off now, with the air so cold and dank. Resting one hand on my dagger beneath my cloak and darting frequent glances over my shoulder, I followed the rue Saint-Jacques north towards the river, picking my way through hoof-churned mud and waterlogged wheel-ruts as the damp seeped through the soles of my boots. A bell tolled sullenly nearby; students hurried between the faculties of the Sorbonne, urgent voices carrying out of the mist before they emerged like rooks, robes
