Page 113 of A Column of Fire

Their mutual resentment hardened into cold loathing as her belly swelled through the end of a harsh winter and the beginning of a rainy spring. Their conversation shrank to terse exchanges about food, laundry, housekeeping money, and the performance of their sulky adolescent maid, Nath. Pierre found himself festering with rage. Thoughts of his hateful wife poisoned everything. The prospect of having to live, not only with Odette but also with her baby, the child of another man, came to be so odious as to seem impossible.

Perhaps the brat would be stillborn. He hoped so. That would make everything easy.

Odette stopped screaming, and a few moments later Pierre heard the squalling of a baby. He sighed: his wish had not been granted. The little bastard sounded repulsively healthy. Wearily, he rubbed his eyes with his hands. Nothing was easy, nothing ever went the way he hoped. There were always disappointments. Sometimes he wondered if his entire philosophy of life might be faulty.

He put the notebook in a document chest, locked the chest, and slipped the key into his pocket. He could not keep the book at the Guise palace, for he did not have a room of his own there.

He stood up. He had planned what to do next.

He climbed the stairs.

Odette lay in the bed with her eyes closed. She was pale, and bathed in perspiration, but breathing normally, either asleep or resting. Nath, the maid, was rolling up a sheet stained with blood and mucus. The midwife was holding the tiny baby in her left arm and, with her right hand, washing its head and face with a cloth that she dipped into a bowl of water.

It was an ugly thing, red and wrinkled with a mat of dark hair, and it made an irritating noise.

As Pierre watched, the midwife wrapped the baby in a little blue blanket – a gift to Odette, Pierre recalled, from Véronique de Guise.

‘It’s a boy,’ the midwife said.

He had not noticed the baby’s gender, even though he had seen it naked.

Without opening her eyes, Odette said: ‘His name is Alain.’

Pierre could have killed her. Not only was he expected to raise the child, she wanted him to have a daily reminder of Alain de Guise, the pampered young aristocrat who was the real father of the bastard. Well, she had a surprise coming.

‘Here, take him,’ said the midwife, and she handed the bundle to Pierre. He noticed that Véronique’s blanket was made of costly soft wool.

Odette muttered: ‘Don’t give the baby to him.’

But she was too late. Pierre was already holding the child. It weighed next to nothing. For a moment he experienced a strange feeling, a sudden urge to protect this helpless little human being from harm; but he quickly suppressed the impulse. I’m not going to let my life be blighted by this worthless scrap, he thought.

Odette sat up in bed and said: ‘Give me the baby.’

The midwife reached for the bundle, but Pierre withheld it. ‘What did you say its name was, Odette?’ he said in a challenging tone.

‘Never mind, give him here.’ She threw back the covers, evidently intending to get out of bed, but then she cried out, as if at a spasm of pain, and fell back on the pillow.

The midwife looked worried. ‘The baby should suckle now,’ she said.

Pierre saw that the child’s mouth had puckered into a sucking shape, though it was taking in only air. Still he kept it in his arms.

The midwife made a determined attempt to wrest the baby from his grasp. Holding the child in one arm, he slapped the midwife’s face hard with the other hand, and she fell back. Nath screamed. Odette sat up again, white with pain. Pierre went to the door, carrying the child.

‘Come back!’ Odette screamed. ‘Pierre, please don’t take away my baby!’

He went out and slammed the bedroom door.

He went down the stairs. The baby cried. It was a mild spring evening, but he threw on a cloak so that he could hide the baby underneath it. Then he left the house.

The baby seemed to like motion: when Pierre started walking steadily, it stopped crying. That came as a relief, and Pierre realized the child’s noise had been bothering him, as if he was supposed to do something about it.

He headed for the Île de la Cité. Getting rid of the child would be easy. There was a particular place in the cathedral where people left unwanted babies, at the foot of a statue of St Anne, the mother of Mary and the patron saint of mothers. By custom, the priests would put the abandoned baby in a crib for all to see, and sometimes the child would be adopted by a soft-hearted couple as an act of charity. Otherwise it would be raised by nuns.

The baby moved under his arm, and once again he had to suppress an irrational feeling that he ought to love it and take care of it.

More challenging was the problem of explaining the disappearance of a Guise infant, albeit a bastard; but Pierre had his story ready. As soon as he returned he would dismiss the midwife and the maid. Then he would tell Cardinal Charles that the child had been stillborn, but the trauma had driven Odette mad, and she refused to accept that the baby was dead. Walking along, Pierre invented a few details: she had pretended to suckle the corpse, she had dressed it in new clothes, she had put it in a crib and said it was sleeping.

Charles would be suspicious, but the story was plausible, and there would be no proof of anything. Pierre thought he would get away with it. He had realized, at some point in the last two years, that Charles did not like him and never would, but found him too useful to be discarded. Pierre had taken the lesson to heart: as long as he was indispensable, he was safe.