‘So,’ he said, in a brisker tone, ‘why don’t you thank me for sparing you the Duke’s methods by telling me what Paul Lefèvre confided to you before he died? That is what everyone wishes to know.’
I turned my cup between my hands, nodding slowly. ‘So you can pass the information to Guise? Though you now say you are working for England’s interests.’
‘It is in England’s interest.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Let us say rather it is a question of trading information with Guise. I am only of use to England so long as Guise and his people have confidence in me. Just as your value to Walsingham lies in your intimacy with Henri. This is all one great game, Bruno – all of us playing one another off against the others. The trick is choosing which cards to hold and which to show. I should not have to explain that to you.’
He sat back and tipped the dregs of the jug into his own cup, watching me with an expression that hovered between amusement and anticipation. Born to double-dealing, murmured Walsingham’s voice in my ear.
‘Paul said nothing intelligible. I already told the friars that.’
His face tightened, all traces of humour vanished. ‘Of course you told the friars that. I want you to tell me the truth. You are doing yourself no favours.’
‘There is nothing to tell.’ I looked him in the eye as I drained my cup and stood. I never had the patience for the gaming table, to Sidney’s enduring disappointment, but I did at least have the face for it. Paget was furious, I could see, though he too was trying to show nothing; it was concentrated in the way he pressed his nails into the wood of the table, the ends of his fingers white. I threw down the gold écus on the table. ‘There is a downpayment on your trouble. I will bring the rest as soon as I possibly can. Then I will be out of your debt.’
Paget laid a hand over the coins and contemplated this. ‘I wish it were that simple, Bruno. Very well then – but you cannot complain later that I did not ask you nicely. I wonder which of us will find Frère Joseph first?’ He made it sound as if he were declaring a contest. I offered him the briefest bow and turned my back, though I could swear I heard him chuckling as I left. Somehow he always managed to give the impression that I had behaved exactly as he had predicted, that I was playing a part he had written for me in advance.
EIGHT
I returned to the Left Bank, breath clouding in angry puffs around me as I stamped home, as if I might outpace the humiliations of the past hour. My face burned against the cold air, flushed with wine and fury as I counted again all the ways in which I had been a fool. I had lost the papers that would have linked Joseph to Paul Lefèvre; I had set the printer Brinkley on his guard and gained nothing by it, and I had made an enemy of Paget – not that I now supposed him to have been anything else. I did not believe for a moment in his change of heart, his declaration of loyalty to England, nor his surprising willingness to make an ally of me, who he still held responsible for the ill fortunes of his friends and fellow conspirators. And yet part of me had responded when he spoke of the yearning for home with a frankness that struck such a familiar echo in me; I could almost have been duped into trusting him by the desire to believe that he too understood my particular loneliness. But Paget was clever; he had recognised that tender spot and aimed straight for it. At least I had not allowed myself to be flattered into giving him anything useful.
I wondered again who could have confessed to Paul and what they could have said that had made him break the seal of the confessional. It must be this that the Duke of Guise feared he had confided to me. The key surely lay in whoever or whatever Circe might be, but I could think of no one in Paris I trusted enough to ask, except Jacopo Corbinelli. Working as secretary to Catherine de Medici offered him a comprehensive grasp of court intrigue, and he was the only one I could count on to keep a confidence; I had left it too long to share this business with him. I determined to visit him that evening. The decision raised my spirits; at least with Jacopo I could lay out the whole story, rather than the partial truths I had been dealing to Stafford or Paget.
It was dark by the time I reached rue du Cimetière, though still too early to find Jacopo at his home on the rue des Tournelles, even supposing he were to return there today; he usually stayed at the palace until Catherine had taken her supper, and she often called on him for company in the evenings, increasingly so these days as she grew more troubled by her son and her gout. Frequently Jacopo stayed in his own rooms near her apartments at the Tuileries in case she summoned him. I would try his house later; in the meantime, I decided to take my filthy clothes to the laundress in the rue Macon who had helped me to hide from the men searching Paul’s lodgings, one of whom I was now certain must have been Frère Joseph de Chartres. It occurred to me that she alone had seen the two men close to, and that, since she had seemed well
