Christ, Walsingham thinks, this has gone very badly. They may not live to find out if it was worth the risk. They stop in the apse under the spire, two rose windows on either side, the sun blasting through that to the south, but a breeze coming in from below that in the north. The side door: it is open.
They run toward it.
“Can you swim?” Walsingham asks.
“Not a stroke,” Fellowes admits.
“Nor me,” Walsingham says. “Always promised I’d learn.”
They are both breathless as they emerge into the shadows of the cathedral’s north side. Here, too, is another pile of corpses, this one being picked over by a crowd of women and boys, while two men wait to load them into the bed of a cart. Beyond, fifty paces or so, is a line of houses, and beyond them, the river again.
“Look natural,” Walsingham says.
Fellowes almost laughs. He tries, but it is hard, and their stiff-legged walk only attracts suspicion. It is the boys who look up. Even though both Walsingham and Fellowes have their blades drawn, the boys know weakness when they see it.
Walsingham tugs on his armband, to emphasize its presence.
“Huguenot scum!” he says, nodding at the pile of dead people.
But he can’t help but glance over his shoulder at the cathedral’s side door. The first of the Frenchmen is there now. He looks like the dead man’s older brother.
They start running again.
A street curves to the left, leading them westward. Merchants’ houses, three or four stories high, lean in to greet one another. Ordinarily peaceful enough. Today there is a chain across, manned by five or six men with those white crosses on their hats.
The men are working their way down the street, emptying some houses, leaving others, and right now they are pulling two screaming women and three children from one of the houses—one of the women is clinging to the doorjamb while a man repeatedly punches her—so they do not see Walsingham or Fellowes who slip around the chain and disappear into an open doorway.
Inside they close the door. There is a locking bar, which they drop. In the gloom they look at each other once more. There is nothing to be said.
The back.
They turn and run down the narrow hall. It’s a cloth merchant’s house, and his stock-in-trade is piled in one room along with various coffers as well as lecterns and benches for his apprentices. A low door gives out into a high-walled, brick-floored yard at the end of which: a privy. Two-seater. A drop into the river. Too small for a man to fit through. They are trapped.
Fellowes finally says it: “Fuck.”
He cannot help but look at Walsingham’s doublet, where he knows his master will have tucked the documents. They need to get rid of them. Imagine if the French got hold of them? England would be at her mercy.
But Walsingham shakes his head.
“Not yet,” he says. “Not until we have to.”
The roof.
They run back inside. The French pound on the door. Dust falls from the ceiling and light blinks in the cracks around the doorframe each time they land a blow. Up the steps they go: one, two flights, then it is just ladders for the servants. Up they clamber, Walsingham first. The ceilings are lower, and the windows smaller, and the comfort less, the higher they climb, until finally they are under the eaves, in total darkness. Fellowes pulls the ladder up behind them, using it to smash through the slates, letting the shards crash around their shoulders. Light floods in. Two children are revealed in one corner, hiding behind a mattress: whimpering, huge-eyed, and the room smells of mice and fresh urine.
Neither says a thing.
Walsingham is first out onto the roof. It is turning into a very fine morning, though a fire has started to the south, in Saint-Marceau, and smoke hazes the air. He thinks of his wife and his child, and of the others at the residency. Sir Philip Sidney is capable enough. Walsingham crawls toward the front edge of the roof. Down below the scene is carnage, and while many men are pulling others from their houses—some alive, some dead—many more are waiting below, waiting for those who chased them from the cathedral to break down the door.
“Bring the ladder!” Walsingham instructs.
Fellowes hauls it up through the hole they’ve made, and they use it to climb up a wall onto the roof of an even taller house. From here they can see across to the north bank of the river, to the palaces and the castles, to the church of Saint-Gervais, where the bells still ring, and where down on the riverbank the slaughter continues. Men hunting men. More corpses pile up. Others are being pitched into the water.
There’s a narrow gap above an alleyway that only the most athletic might jump, but they cross it with the ladder—a slender confection of planks and nails more suited to the weight of a house maid, or a boy perhaps—which creaks and sags horribly as each man crawls across the alleyway. Walsingham slips and grabs the riser. He drops his sword. It spins down and bounces on the stones, fifty feet below, where two men sharing a flagon of something start and look up. They shout and go running out into the street to raise the alarm.
On the other side of the alley is a roof on which laundry hangs from a tired old string, and there’s a hatch but it is locked from the inside. The slates are hot under their hands and covered in bird shit. Pigeons erupt from unexpected places. On they go, relieved and even congratulating themselves on their progress, their ingenuity, when they hear the first boom of a gun, and a ball thrums through the warm air overhead. They stop and look at each other, and back, just as there’s another thunderclap, and the wall next to Walsingham cracks, showering them with fragments of
