“What’s happening?” he asks.
“You are to take command of the residency,” Walsingham tells him. “Oliver and I will be perhaps an hour, two at the most. You will know what to do if we are longer.”
Burn everything and evacuate the residence. Yes. Yes. He knows. But concern creases his handsome face.
“Can I not go in your place?” he asks, knowing the answer.
Walsingham mounts up.
“Good of you, Sir Philip, but this is…”
He trails off.
They all three know.
“Ready?” he asks Fellowes.
Fellowes nods.
When they open the gates, it is still dark, but the sky to the east is blood red, limned with green, and every bell in Paris is ringing. Off they set, up the road toward the Petit Pont, with the gates closing behind.
Saint-Marceau is a modest, mostly Reformed area, all Walsingham can afford on his daily diet, and all along the wayside, worried householders have come out to stand before their doors, pale linen gleaming in the gloom, listening to the bells, asking for news.
It comes soon enough; before Walsingham and Fellowes have ridden a hundred paces: a single rider, coming too fast and scattering the watch on the Porte Saint-Marcel.
“They’ve killed Coligny!” he shouts. “The Catholics! They threw him out of a window! Now they’re coming this way, killing everyone! Run! Run! For the love of God! They’ll kill you all!”
He doesn’t stop, but thunders past, and there is much screaming and shouting, and Walsingham’s neighbors scatter back into their houses.
Walsingham heels his horse onward toward the bridge, Fellowes at his elbow.
“Where are we going, sir?” he asks. “What are we doing?”
“To Notre-Dame,” Walsingham tells him, “to see a priest.”
Ahead in the growing light, the road is filling with a tide of people flowing toward them. The horses jitter. Walsingham clings on as people swarm around them.
“Go back!” they shout.
“The Catholics are coming!”
But Walsingham and Fellowes force their way through the swelling crowd and through the first gate. A trap, it must be a trap. Everything within tells him to turn and fly. The road is narrowing between taller houses ahead. Still the bells ring, and still men and women—in the hundreds now—push by. Some are in their finest, some still in nightwear, each clutching whatever they can, infants mostly. They come with heads crooked over shoulders, faces streaked with terror and tears.
“They cut her hands off!” a woman cries. “They cut my mother’s hands off!” She holds up her own, astonished to still have them.
“They are just—butchers!”
“Thieves!”
“Animals!”
Walsingham’s anger is like a physical force, like a gorge. It fills his throat. How can they? These Catholics? How can they turn on their fellow Christians and slaughter them like pigs in autumn? He wishes he were back at home, in England, and far from these papist animals with their insatiable bloodlusts and their ancient, twisted superstitions. He has long feared something like this would happen.
Beside him, Fellowes rides in tense, pale-faced silence.
They smell it before they reach the bridge: blood. It fills every cranny, with a coppery, intimate tang. It makes the horses shy and stamp and toss their heads.
“Come on,” Walsingham encourages his horse—and Fellowes. “We’ve got to get across the bridge before they close it.”
But they are too late. The road ahead empties, and the great gates at the southern end of the Petit Pont are heaved to. The city is sealed off. May the Lord help those trapped within.
Fellowes waits, hoping perhaps Walsingham will turn back, but he will not give up yet.
“We’ll try the river,” he says.
And he leads them eastward along the rue de la Bûcherie where the smell of the old blood between the cobbles is strong enough to mask that of the new.
“In here,” he says, and they dismount, leading the animals into a yard that isn’t too bad. They hobble them to a post and leave the other way, down some steps toward the river’s bank. It is light now, and so they can easily see the men on the Île de la Cité, right under the shadow of the steeple of Notre-Dame, pushing a dead woman’s body into the river. She’s naked and has only one arm. When she’s gone, the men look up and wave the arm at them. They laugh and cheer, then move off, chanting some song, the words of which Walsingham cannot catch. They brandish the arm as if it were a monstrance, and they were beating the bounds in spring, in search of someone else to kill.
Walsingham could gag.
The riverbank is muddy and unkempt hereabouts. They find a boat dragged up out of the river and hidden under a sagging wooden canopy. Its guard has probably run with the rest of them.
There’s an oar and a boat pole, and they haul the boat down into the fast-flowing brown waters.
“Master, are you sure?” Fellowes asks.
“We’ve got to,” Walsingham tells him.
One heave and the boat is in. Walsingham takes the pole, Fellowes the oar, and the boat spins in the current. The water is deep and Walsingham cannot touch the river’s bed with the pole. Fellowes works the oar like a Venetian, but still they drift downstream, westward, toward the bridge. There’s a body in the water. Not a dog. A human. Naked and fat, the skin of his back opened with a whip.
Above them to the right, twenty paces away, the sun shines on the jagged lines of the roofs of the great cathedral and the other houses on the Île de la Cité.
“Come on,” Walsingham urges Fellowes.
By God’s grace, no one sees them from the bridge as they spin through its arches and grind against the huge pillar. In the sudden darkness Walsingham grabs an iron chain cemented in a pillar and they are quickly out of the boat, scrabbling in the ooze. It stinks of shit. They drag the boat out of the current and up into the darkest shadows where they hope to return to find it. Walsingham wishes he had
