They hear the door through which they came boom shut behind someone coming in, or going out.
Fellowes approaches the priest. Both speak Latin, Fellowes not too well.
“Confession?” he asks.
The priest’s eyes light up, and Fellowes follows the priest out of the chapel to be out of Walsingham’s earshot. Before he goes, Fellowes glimpses Walsingham bending to kneel before the altar. A dead-letter drop.
Fellowes kneels before the priest, and remembers the old words, and they come to him now, and when he has recited them the priest blesses him and starts the questioning. Fellowes has not confessed since Queen Mary died, but he can hardly tell the priest that. He makes something up, but the priest hardly cares; he wants to delve into the proper sins, those of which Fellowes is most deeply ashamed and Fellowes is reminded how intrusive the sacrament of confession is.
“Lust, my son?”
He is about to shake his head and deny it when he thinks—my God. Isobel Cochet.
The priest seems to read his thoughts.
“A woman?” he presses.
Fellowes can only nod. What did he expect? He hears footfalls in the church behind him. Stout boots on marble flags.
“Who is she?” the priest persists. Fellowes feels the priest’s breath gusting on his face, garlic and meat and wine. “Is she married?”
“No.” Fellowes laughs. “She’s a widow.”
“A widow?” The priest is disgusted. He does not want to hear of an old lady. But Isobel Cochet could not be less like that. Fellowes wants to proclaim that she is nothing like that. But as soon as he starts to think what she is like, all he can see is the flash of her smile, the curve of her lip, that questioning look in her eye. More than that, though: the shape of her throat, her shoulders, her hips, the way she laughs. The smell of her as she passes. My God, he thinks. He flushes scarlet at the memory of a loose strand of her dark hair in the spring sunshine on the river’s bank. He has only seen her a few times, always with Master Walsingham, always in the Louvre, though, no, once at the residence, in Saint-Marceau, and then once again, that time on the river’s bank. The moment he saw her, his life changed, and from then on, he was always aware that somewhere she was out there, sometimes close, sometimes farther away. A lodestone, if she but knew it, around which he rotated. There must be others besides him, he knows that. A fraternity. He feels no animus.
He wonders if adjusting his clothing will break the seal and sanctity of the sacrament? This is no time for that.
The priest wishes to know if when Fellowes thinks of her he spills his seed, as did Onan in the Bible? Another time Fellowes might laugh.
“Oliver?”
It is Walsingham. Fellowes turns.
“We must go,” he says.
“Wait!” the priest snaps. He claps a surprisingly steely hand on Fellowes’s wrist.
But Fellowes has just seen the two men looming behind Walsingham.
“Master!” he shouts.
Walsingham turns.
Fellowes wrenches his hand free of the priest, sending him sprawling. He draws his sword. In a church? Why not? Walsingham too.
The two men they face are smeared and flecked with blood. One—with the cleaver—wears clogs. The other wears a leathersmith’s apron and carries one of those knives they use in slaughterhouses. Something purposeful with no name. Both have bloodstained rags tied around their right arms.
“I know you!” the clog and cleaver man shouts at Walsingham. Walsingham doesn’t know him, exactly, but can guess enough.
“Sanctuary,” Walsingham tries, reminding them all of their location. It is not clear if he means it, but the cleaver man is confused enough to need to look to the priest for guidance.
“They are English,” the priest says from the floor. He has bloodied his nose in the fall. “Huguenot.”
Fellowes has never cut a man deliberately, let alone killed one. But the clogged man comes at him so fast he has no choice. He leaps back. He flicks the blade from his right knee up across the man’s face. The man is left-handed, and he’d hoped to bring the cleaver down on Fellowes’s head. Instead Fellowes’s blade bites deep into his wrist and the cleaver flies spinning in the air to clatter to the ground well away. The man screams. Fellowes steps aside to let him blunder on a step or two and then he plunges the point of his sword into his liver. The butcher squeals, arches his back, then falls to his knees, nearly pulling the sword from Fellowes’s grasp. The man in the smith’s apron turns and runs.
“Damn you!” Walsingham cries as he sets off after him.
Fellowes joins him, but the man is fast, and running for his life. He cuts this way and that across the nave, nippy as a terrier. He crashes back out of the door into the precinct before they can catch him.
Fellowes and Walsingham crash against it. They exchange a look.
“Did you get it? What we came for?” Fellowes ask.
Walsingham pats his doublet and nods.
“Let’s go, then.”
“Not this way.”
“No.”
They start back from the western end, running toward the altar. By now the priest is screaming and shouting. Most of the clerics are outside, watching the bloodshed, but there are still enough to come running to find the cause of the disturbance.
“We can’t kill him, can we?” Fellowes wonders. He has developed a taste for it.
“You may have to,” Walsingham says. “I am Her Majesty’s ambassador to the court of King Charles. If I am caught like this—”
It doesn’t bear thinking about.
“That’ll be the least of our worries,” Fellowes says, glancing over his shoulder. The west door is being opened, and men are forging through, and they can hear a great hubbub of voices without.
“Jesus.”
They both start sprinting. There must be a way out through the sacristy or one of the side doors in the transepts.
They hear a shout behind them and a great charging scuffle of feet as the crowd of Frenchmen
