Page 105 of A Column of Fire

‘Please do.’

‘But don’t tell him how cheaply you got it!’

Luc smiled conspiratorially. ‘Not until after he’s paid you, anyhow.’

Sylvie thanked him and left.

She was so weak with relief that she could not find the energy to feel exultant. She went into the next tavern she saw and ordered a tankard of beer. She drank it quickly. It eased the pain of hunger. She left feeling light-headed.

Closer to home she bought a ham, cheese, butter, bread and apples, and a small jar of wine. She also bought a sack of firewood and paid a boy ten pennies to carry it for her.

When she entered the tenement room, her mother gazed in astonishment at her purchases.

‘Hello, Mother,’ Sylvie said. ‘Our troubles are over.’

*

IN A MONUMENTALsulk, Pierre got married for the second time three days after Christmas, 1559.

He was determined that the wedding would be a perfunctory affair: he was not going to pretend to celebrate. He invited no guests and planned no wedding breakfast. He did not want to look like a poor man, so he wore his new dark grey coat, which was appropriately sombre, fitting his mood. He arrived at the parish church as the clock was striking the appointed hour.

To his horror, Véronique de Guise was there.

She was sitting at the back of the little church with half a dozen Guise maids, presumably friends of Odette’s.

Nothing could be worse, to Pierre, than for Véronique to witness his humiliation. She was the woman he really wanted to marry. He had talked to her, charmed her, and done his best to give her the impression that they were on the same social level. This had been a fantasy, as Cardinal Charles had made brutally clear. But for Véronique to actually see Pierre marrying her maid was too excruciatingly painful. He wanted to walk out of the church.

Then he thought of his reward. At the end of this ordeal he would sign the register with his new name, Pierre Aumande de Guise. It was his dearest wish. He would be a recognized member of the lofty Guise family, and no one would be able to take that away from him. He would be married to an ugly maid who was pregnant with someone else’s child, but he would be a Guise.

He gritted his teeth and vowed to bear the pain.

The ceremony was short, the priest having been paid the minimum fee. Véronique and the other girls giggled during the service. Pierre did not know what was so funny, but he could not help feeling that they were laughing at him. Odette kept looking back over her shoulder at them and grinning, showing her crooked teeth, tombstones in an old graveyard, tightly packed and tilting in all directions.

When it was over, she looked proud to be walking out of the church on the arm of a handsome and ambitious bridegroom. She seemed to have forgotten that she had been foisted on him against his will. Did she pretend to herself that she had somehow won his love and affection?

As if that were possible.

They walked from the church to the modest house Cardinal Charles had provided for them. It was near the tavern of St Étienne in the neighbourhood of Les Halles, where Parisians did their everyday shopping: meat, wine and the second-hand clothes that all but the wealthy wore. Without invitation, Véronique and the maids followed. One of them had a bottle of wine, and they insisted on entering the house and drinking the health of the bride and groom.

At last they left, with many crude jokes about the couple being in a hurry to do what bridal couples are expected to do on the wedding night.

Pierre and Odette went upstairs. There was one bedroom and one bed. Until this moment, Pierre had not confronted the question of whether he would have normal sexual relations with his wife.

Odette lay down. ‘Oh, well, we’re married now,’ she said. She threw up her dress to reveal her nakedness. ‘Come on, let’s make the best of it.’

Pierre was utterly revolted. The sheer vulgarity of her pose disgusted him beyond measure. He was appalled.

At that moment he knew he could not have sex with her, today or ever.

10

Barney Willard hated being in the army. The food was disgusting, he was cold all the time except when he was too hot, and for long periods the only women he saw were camp-following prostitutes, desperate and sad. The captain in charge of Barney’s company, Gómez, was a big, vicious bully who enjoyed using his iron hand to punish breaches of discipline. Worst of all, no one had been paid for months.

Barney could not understand how King Felipe of Spain could have money troubles. He was the richest man in the world, yet he was always broke. Barney had seen the galleons loaded with silver from Peru sail into the harbour at Seville. Where did it all go? Not to the troops.

After leaving Seville, two years earlier, theJosé y Maríahad sailed to a place called the Netherlands, a loose federation of seventeen provinces on the north coast of Europe between France and Germany. For historical reasons that Barney had never quite untangled, the Netherlands was ruled by the Spanish king. Felipe’s army stationed here had fought in Spain’s war against France.

Barney, Carlos and Ebrima were expert metalworkers, and so they had been made gunners, maintaining and firing the big artillery pieces. Although they had seen some action, gunners did not usually become involved in hand-to-hand fighting, and all three had survived the war without suffering injury.