It was a relief to escape the churchyard; the mood of the crowd promised violence before too long. I realised I had not eaten since the night before and my stomach was pinched with hunger. On the corner of rue Saint-Jacques I bought a galette in a greasy paper from a street vendor and demolished it in two bites. The noise from Saint-Séverin carried through the chilly air; the vendor shook his head and began to pack up his wares, anticipating a riot. Over my left shoulder, the façade of Notre Dame gazed downriver towards the Louvre, serene and implacable on its island.
The rabble and its leader clearly held the King responsible for Paul’s death, or were content to use it as an excuse, though I concluded that I had no choice but to proceed as if Henri were telling the truth: that he had nothing to do with the murder and that the Duke of Guise, having encouraged Paul to attack the King in his sermon, had then had him murdered with the sole purpose of inflaming further outrage against the House of Valois. If that were the case, it meant I was looking for evidence that would link the murderer to Guise, who already had more than enough reason to want me dead, if he too suspected that I had been instrumental in disrupting his plans to invade England. Guise had no firm proof that I had intercepted those letters in London, but that hardly mattered; since I was the only known enemy of the Catholic Church living in the French embassy at the time the conspiracy was uncovered, it hardly took advanced powers of reasoning to point the finger in my direction. As I had already observed, Guise was no fool. If the Duke found out I was trying to expose him a second time, he would have my balls roasted on a skewer, while the King looked the other way and studied his manicure. In that light, it became clearer why Henri had asked me to undertake this business and not one of his usual fixers: he considered me expendable.
I passed under the Porte de la Tournelle and paused in the shelter of the tower wall to wipe my forehead where the mist had condensed in cold droplets on my hair and brows. Behind me, under the shadow of the arch, I thought I glimpsed someone else stopping too. I twisted around, but saw only the usual stream of hawkers and goodwives, mules and handcarts, ragged children and dogs, all spattered with mud and weighed down with bales of cloth, coils of rope, barrows of vegetables or baskets of eggs, making their way in and out of the city to barter or beg. No one obviously loitering or watching me; and yet, after nine years of living in exile, one eye always open for anyone who might want to arrest me or knife me in a back alley, I had developed a finely tuned instinct for being followed, and now it quivered like a cat’s whiskers. I pulled up the hood of my cloak and moved on along the road away from the Porte, straining to catch any unexpected movement through the grey air.
The abbey church of Saint-Victor reared up in the distance behind its boundary wall and orchards, its spire a bony finger poking through a shroud of low-lying mist swirling up from the river. A lone crow called into the empty sky, as if announcing my arrival. I shivered, wondering if the night’s rain had washed Paul’s blood away from the track along the bank behind the abbey, by that small door in the back wall. Now there was a man in a friar’s habit to add to the picture, and I wished the curate’s testimony had not pointed me here again.
Saint-Victor – or at least its opulent library – had become a kind of sanctuary for me since my return to Paris. Four years ago, before I left for England, the old abbot had been pleased to grant me free access to the library, despite the misgivings of some of his brothers over my writings, but that was when I had the distinction of being a Reader at the Sorbonne and personal tutor of philosophy to the King, before the rumours of magic trailed after me. The new
