Along the bank, there are some steps up to the cathedral precinct, but before they climb them, Walsingham stops.
“Quick,” he tells Fellowes. “Cut a strip off your shirt.”
He’s seen each of the men wearing armbands, simple white kerchiefs knotted around the muscles above their right elbows, presumably as a signal. They each had a white cross pinned to their caps, too, but there’s nothing Walsingham can do about that. He and Fellowes cut strips off their shirttails and tie them on for each other. When they are finished, they look at each other.
“Do I look Catholic?” Walsingham asks.
Fellowes manages a laugh.
“Enough,” he says. “But sir—”
He touches Walsingham’s arm, and Walsingham knows what he is going to ask and cuts him off.
“I know this seems insane, Oliver, and I would not ask you to do it if… if England’s whole future did not hang in the balance. But it does. If we cannot find our way to the cathedral today, then a great chance to do great good will be gone.”
He grips an imaginary thing, as if it were chance to be seized.
“What is that?” Fellowes presses.
Walsingham knows he owes his intelligencer something more than this vague assurance, but secrecy is his second skin. It is very hard to tell him more, and he must force himself to do so.
“Some information,” he begins, speaking quickly, knowing that if he stops he will never start again. “From the logbook of Admiral DaSilva.”
Fellowes’s eyes sharpen. He is about to repeat the Portuguese admiral’s name aloud in incredulity but stops himself. He looks very boyish, then—just a youth in a borrowed beard.
“Is it… what we have been looking for?” he asks softly.
Walsingham nods, as if not trusting words spoken aloud.
After a moment, Fellowes turns shrewd again.
“Wherever… wherever did you come by it?”
He means two things: How did you come by it without my knowledge? And: Can it be trusted?
“We can talk about this at a later date,” Walsingham says. “But for now we must retrieve it before we leave Paris for good.”
Fellowes is convinced. Good.
“Come on then.”
They start up the steps. Halfway up they meet blood running down, pooling in the worn stone treads before overflowing to the one below. They must step through it. At the top, they find a kind of hell: immediately there is a pile of naked corpses from which seeps the blood, pressed out of those below by the weight of those above. Beyond, between Walsingham and the steps of the cathedral, the precinct is turned into an abattoir where strong-armed men engage in a wild frenzy of slaughter and butchery. They hack at the living and the dead with cleavers, and halberds, and foresters’ axes, parting them limb from limb with a dedicated, competitive ferocity, using both hands, as if this were a saint’s day fair, and they do so to impress their sweethearts.
On the steps, above the worst of the blood, stand the massed ranks of clerics of Notre-Dame cathedral. They are in celebratory red, and they have brought out their monstrances, and while the thurifers swing their censers, the choir sings the “Te Deum,” but you can’t smell the incense for the blood, or hear the singing for the screams.
“Dear God,” Fellowes says, clamping his hand over his mouth.
More victims are dragged in from the surrounding streets by their hair, by their nostrils, by their feet. Some are already dead, some still screaming, retching, wailing, and naked. Spaced around the precinct are more berms of corpses, each leaking its spreading crimson skirt, and Walsingham feels his boots letting moisture in and looks down: he is standing in a great pool of blood.
“Come on,” he says.
They set off, making their way through the frenzy. Walsingham knows that he will never forget the grunts of the butchers and the sound of their cleavers in flesh. He will never forget the faces he sees: both killers and victims. He will never forget the charnel house smell of blood, shit, and sweat.
As they approach the cathedral steps he can hear the choir now, singing their thanks to God. The smell of the incense mingles with blood.
They pass up the steps and into the cathedral not quite unignored. A man—an actual butcher—from the kitchens of the Louvre, has taken a break from his work to refresh himself from a flagon of the thin red wine he likes to drink in the morning, and he sees the two men moving against the flow of all others. He thinks he recognizes the English ambassador from the time he paid court to the king and balked at eating horsemeat. He nudges his mate and picks up his cleaver, its blade blue black with blood, its handle gummy with gore, and they set off across the precinct, tracking bloody prints as they go.
Walsingham and Fellowes enter the cathedral through a smaller door inset in the larger west door. It booms shut behind them, and within the nave they are plunged into sepulchral silence. There is no one about until, suddenly, a priest, or some such, stands before them, with thin lips and a pale, shiny face like the new moon. Walsingham dips his fingers in the holy water and crosses himself in the Catholic style. Fellowes copies him. The priest seems reassured. Walsingham sees Fellowes has left a pink mark on his forehead. The door handle, he thinks. There was blood on the door handle.
He tells the priest he would like to pray in the chapel of Saint-Clotilde.
“It is shut, monsieur,” the priest regrets.
A coin is proffered. The chapel is open, but only very briefly.
The priest guides them to the side chapel on their left. They leave footprints on the flagstones. In the chapel there is a memorial to a long dead canon, and a tall window of fine colored glass. The small altar is covered in a cloth but is otherwise bare.
“What are we doing?” Fellowes whispers again.
The priest lingers to collect his next coin.
“Distract him, will you?” Walsingham asks Fellowes. “Only for
