Page 18 of A Column of Fire

He threw on his cloak. What a waste of time this had been. He would have to start all over again tomorrow. But what if he met another of his past victims? He felt sour. It had been a rotten evening. Another shout of ‘Calais française’ went up. To the devil with Calais, Pierre thought. He stepped towards the door.

To his surprise, the man-at-arms with the mutilated ear now got up and blocked the doorway.

Pierre thoughtFor God’s sake, what now?

‘Stand aside,’ Pierre said haughtily. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

The man stayed where he was. ‘I heard you say your name was Pierre Aumande de Guise.’

‘Yes, so you’d better get out of my way, if you don’t want trouble from my family.’

‘The Guise family won’t cause me any trouble,’ the man said, with a quiet confidence that unnerved Pierre. ‘My name is Gaston Le Pin.’

Pierre considered shoving the man aside and making a run for it. He looked Le Pin up and down. The man was about thirty, shorter than Pierre, but broad-shouldered. He had hard blue eyes. The damaged ear suggested he was no stranger to violent action. He would not be shoved aside easily.

Pierre struggled to maintain his tone of superiority. ‘What of it, Le Pin?’

‘I work for the Guise family. I’m head of their household guard.’ Pierre’s heart sank. ‘And I’m arresting you, on behalf of the duke of Guise, for falsely using an aristocratic name.’

Widow Bauchene said: ‘I knew it.’

Pierre said: ‘My good man, I’ll have you know—’

‘Save it for the judge,’ said Le Pin contemptuously. ‘Rasteau, Brocard, hold him.’

Without Pierre’s remarking it, two of the men-at-arms had got up from the table and were standing quietly either side of him, and now they grabbed his arms. Their hands felt like iron bands: Pierre did not bother to struggle. Le Pin nodded to them and they marched Pierre out of the tavern.

Behind him, he heard the widow yell: ‘I hope they hang you!’

It was dark, but the narrow, winding medieval streets were busy with revellers and noisy with patriotic songs and shouts of ‘Long live Scarface’. Rasteau and Brocard walked fast, and Pierre had to hurry to keep up with them and avoid being dragged along the road.

He was terrified to think what punishment might be imposed on him: pretending to be a nobleman was a serious crime. And even if he got off lightly, what was his future? He could find other fools like Bertrand, and married women to seduce, but the more people he cheated, the more likely he was to be called to account. For how much longer could he maintain this way of life?

He looked at his escorts. Rasteau, the older by four or five years, had no nose, just two holes surrounded by scar tissue, no doubt the result of a knife fight. Pierre waited for them to get bored, relax their vigilance and loosen their grip, so that he might break away, dash off, and lose himself in the crowd; but they remained alert, their grip firm.

‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked, but they did not trouble to reply.

Instead, they talked about sword fighting, apparently continuing a conversation they had begun in the tavern. ‘Forget about the heart,’ said Rasteau. ‘Your point can slip over the ribs and give the man nothing worse than a scratch.’

‘What do you aim for? The throat?’

‘Too small a target. I go for the belly. A blade in the guts doesn’t kill a man straight away, but it paralyses him. It hurts so much that he can’t think of anything else.’ He gave a high-pitched giggle, an unexpected sound from such a rough-looking man.

Pierre soon found out where they were going. They turned into the Vieille rue du Temple. Pierre knew that this was where the Guise family had built their new palace, occupying an entire block. He had often dreamed of climbing those polished steps and entering the grand hall. But he was taken to the garden gate and through the kitchen entrance. They went down a staircase into a cheese-smelling basement crowded with barrels and boxes. He was thrust rudely into a room and the door was slammed behind him. He heard a bar drop into a bracket. When he tried the door it would not open.

The cell was cold, and stank like an alehouse privy. A candle in the corridor outside shed a faint light through a barred window in the door. He made out an earth floor and a vaulted ceiling of brick. The only furniture was a chamber pot that had been used but not emptied – hence the smell.

It was amazing how fast his life had turned to shit.

He was here for the night, he assumed. He sat down with his back to the wall. In the morning he would be taken before a judge. He had to think about what he would say. He needed a story to spin to the court. He might still escape serious punishment if he performed well.

But somehow he was too dispirited to dream up a tale. He kept wondering what he would do when this was over. He had enjoyed life as a member of the wealthy set. Losing money betting on dog fights, giving outsize tips to barmaids, buying gloves made from the skins of baby goats – it had all given him a thrill he would never forget. Must he give that up?

The most pleasing thing to him had been the way the others had accepted him. They had no idea that he was a bastard and the son of a bastard. There was no hint of condescension. Indeed, they often called for him on their way to some pleasure outing. If he fell behind the others for some reason, as they walked from one tavern to another in the university quarter, one of them would say: ‘Where’s Aumande?’ and they would stop and wait for him to catch up. Remembering that now, he almost wept.

He pulled his cloak more closely around him. Would he be able to sleep on the cold floor? When he appeared in court he wanted to look as if he might be abona fidemember of the Guise family.

The light in his cell brightened. There was a noise in the corridor. The door was unbarred and flung open. ‘On your feet,’ said a coarse voice.