‘Liberty,’ Benoît said, in a voice loaded with scorn. At that moment a serving girl arrived with a steaming plate of beef stew and a roll of fresh bread; the smell rising from it made my stomach lurch and I tore into the food with my fingers, barely raising my head to mumble farewell to Benoît as he took his leave.
The bells were striking three as I finished my meal. I left some coins on the table for Gaston, guilt sitting uncomfortably heavy in my stomach along with the stew. I had been able to eat well today thanks to Paget, I had my freedom thanks to his purse, and I could not shake the feeling that I was already compromised by taking his money. Not that he had given me any choice in the matter, but I needed to extricate myself from that debt as soon as possible, before he demanded something in return, and my only hope of doing so was to find this Frère Joseph de Chartres and hand him over to the King. With Stafford’s information about Brinkley, it seemed most likely that a rendezvous was scheduled at the printer’s shop for four o’clock this afternoon, and there was a chance that Joseph might turn up, or that I might catch a glimpse of whoever he was intending to meet. It was worth a try, at least; I had no other paths to follow.
A sharp wind had whisked away the mist and cloud of the previous day, revealing a pale wintry sky. The surface of the river whipped into small peaks crested with foam on the mud-coloured water as I crossed the Pont Saint-Michel. I kept my cloak tight around me but my hood down, alert for any movement at the edge of sight. Paget’s criticism – that I did not look over my shoulder as often I should – had stung me, though it had also sounded like a subtle warning. I had believed myself to have developed some skill at this shadowy craft over the past three years, but he had made me feel like a boy playing at soldiers. Perhaps that was how he saw me. ‘Born to double-dealing’, Walsingham had said, and it was not just a figure of speech; I knew that Charles’s father, Lord Paget, had been spymaster for King Henry VIII of England. His sons had swallowed intrigue with their mother’s milk. It irritated me that Paget now occupied so much of my thinking, but I could not escape the sense that he was toying with me, and that I needed to raise my game if I were to spar with him as an equal.
As the round white towers of the Palais de Justice rose into view behind the houses of the bridge, I tried to order my unruly thoughts. My guess was that Frère Joseph authored the pamphlets against the King while Paul Lefèvre collected and delivered them to the printer. I had assumed in my ignorance that Paul had come to Saint-Victor on the day he was killed looking for me, but the propaganda leaflets offered a new interpretation; if he had a regular rendezvous with Joseph at the abbey, it would have been an easy business for the almoner to arrange to meet him outside the back gate as usual, attack him while he was off guard and push his body in the river. If Joseph had returned to the abbey by now, he would have learned that the draft pamphlets had been taken from his cell. There was no knowing whether he would take the risk of turning up at the printer’s to explain, but I had the papers tucked inside my doublet; if Joseph did not show his face, I could pretend he had sent me in his stead. It was a gamble, but I could learn much, if I could gain the printer’s trust.
The Palais looked elegant, if shabby, in the grey light; a maze of spires and towers in white stone, some three hundred years old, occupying the western-most tip of the island. Inside, the business of governing France was conducted at the highest level: the Parlement, the Chambre des Comptes, the Cour des Aides and the Cour des Monnaies. Outside, all around the buildings and courtyards, ramshackle shops and stalls filled every available space, reminding me of the yard around Saint Paul’s church in London. Some were no more than market barrows, with coloured canvas awnings snapping in the wind; others were substantial wooden workshops with painted shutters built against the stone walls of the Palais. Here you could find merchants and printers of all varieties; stationers; book-binders; food stalls selling sausage, bread, pies, roast chestnuts; letter-writers; poets and troubadours for hire; working women, parading self-consciously in their high wooden shoes, waiting for the clerks and officials to finish work; errand boys, beggars, pickpockets, skinny dogs and feral children, who would stare at you with wild, ravenous eyes.
Soldiers in royal colours guarded the doors into the Palais; others patrolled the courtyards in pairs, chatting, hands resting casually on sword hilts, eyes raking the crowds for any signs of trouble. The whole place buzzed with activity and purpose. Just as in London, people gathered in the aisle of Saint Paul’s to meet, gossip, barter, flirt and argue, so here in the Grande Salle, with its vast marble columns, the citizens of Paris congregated, overseen by the ranked statues of long-dead kings. It was hard to believe that somewhere beneath all this bustle and life and colour there could exist an oubliette as dark and silent as the one I had found myself in last night. I thought of the Count, slowly losing his mind down there in his own filth for thirteen years, for the crime of trying to protect his family, and my fists bunched at my
