Page 235 of A Column of Fire

Margery listened hard as she walked along, alert for the sounds of other people on the road. In a city there would have been people skulking along the lanes, usually about some criminal business, but here in the countryside there was little to steal and therefore fewer criminals. All the same she remained cautious.

Margery had cried for a whole day when she heard about the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. All those people murdered by Catholics! It was much worse than a battle, in which soldiers killed soldiers. In Paris the citizens had slaughtered defenceless women and children in their thousands. How could God permit it? And then, to make it worse, the Pope had sent a letter of congratulation to the king of France. That could not be God’s will. Hard though it was to believe, the Pope had done wrong.

Margery had known that Ned was in Paris at the time, and she had feared for his life, but then it was announced that everyone in the English embassy had survived. Hard on the heels of that came the news that Ned had married a French girl. It made Margery sad – quite unreasonably, she felt. She had had the chance to run away with him and she had refused. He could not spend his life yearning for her. He wanted a wife and a family. She should be glad that he had found happiness without her. But she could not bring herself to rejoice.

She wondered what the new Mrs Willard was like. People said that French women were terribly sophisticated. Would she be beautifully dressed and dripping with jewellery? Margery found herself hoping that the girl was an empty-headed flibbertigibbet who would quickly bore Ned. What an unworthy hope, she thought. I should wish him happiness. I do.

A faint light was visible in the east as they approached New Castle, and she was able to make out the battlements against the sky. A feeling of weary relief came over her: it had been a long walk.

The road led directly to the entrance. As always, the rooks on the walls jeered at the visitors.

Margery hammered on the gate. A face appeared briefly at an arrow-slit window in the gatehouse, and a minute later a sleepy sentry hauled open the heavy wooden door. They went in, and the door was barred behind them. At last Margery felt safe.

She led her charges across the courtyard and ushered them into the chapel. ‘In a few minutes the castle servants will bring you breakfast and bedding,’ she told them. ‘Then you can sleep – all day and all night, if you wish. But remember the need for secrecy. The people here are all Catholics, but even so, you should not ask their names, nor tell them yours. Don’t ask questions about where you are or who owns the castle. What you don’t know, you can’t reveal – even under torture.’ They had been told all this before by Rollo, but it could hardly be repeated too often.

Tomorrow she would take them out in pairs and set them on the roads for their different destinations. Two were going west to Exeter, two north to Wells, two north-east to Salisbury, and two east to Arundel. When she said goodbye they would be on their own.

She left the church and crossed the courtyard to the house. The arrival of the priests had already caused a flurry of activity, and the servants were up and busy. She went upstairs to the boys’ room. They were asleep in side-by-side beds. She leaned over Bartlet, now seven, big for his age, and kissed his head. Then she moved to little Roger, not yet two, with fair hair. She kissed his soft cheek.

Roger opened his eyes. They were golden brown. The same as Ned’s.

*

SYLVIE HAD BEENlooking forward to her first visit to Kingsbridge. This was the town that had made the man she loved. They had been married less than a year and she felt there was still much to be learned about Ned. She knew that he was brave and kind and clever. She knew every inch of his body, and cherished it all, and when they made love she felt as if she was in his head, and knew everything he was thinking. But there were gaps in her knowledge, topics he did not say much about, times in his life he rarely referred to. He talked a lot about Kingsbridge, and she was eager to see it. Most of all she wanted to meet the people who had been important to him, people he loved and hated; especially the woman in the little painting that had stood beside his shaving mirror in his room in Paris.

They were prompted to visit by a letter from Ned’s brother, Barney. He had come home to Kingsbridge, he said, with his son.

‘I didn’t know he had a son,’ Ned said, reading the letter in the parlour of the small house they had rented near St Paul’s Cathedral.

Sylvie said: ‘Does he have a wife?’

‘I presume so. You can’t have children otherwise. But it’s odd that he doesn’t mention her.’

‘Can you get Walsingham’s permission to leave London?’ Sylvie knew that Ned and Walsingham were busy enlarging Queen Elizabeth’s secret intelligence service, making lists of men who might conspire to overthrow the queen and replace her with Mary Stuart.

‘Yes,’ Ned said. ‘He’ll want me to make a few discreet inquiries about Catholics in the county of Shiring, especially Earl Bart, but I can manage that easily.’

They went from London to Kingsbridge on horseback, taking a relaxed five days for the journey. Sylvie was not yet pregnant, so there was no danger to her from horseback riding. She was disappointed that it was taking her so long to conceive, but happily Ned had not complained.

Sylvie was used to capital cities: she had always lived in Paris until she married Ned, and since coming to England they had lived in London. Provincial towns felt safer, more tranquil, less frenetic. She liked Kingsbridge immediately.

She was struck by the stone angel on top of the cathedral spire. Ned told her that, according to legend, the angel had the face of Caris, the nun who had founded the hospital. Sylvie wondered disapprovingly why the statue had not been beheaded like all the other idolatrous images of saints and angels. ‘They can’t reach it,’ Ned explained. ‘They’d need to build scaffolding.’ He spoke lightly: he was somewhat lax about such matters. He added: ‘But you should go up the tower one day. The view over the town is magnificent.’

Kingsbridge reminded her of Rouen, with its riverside docks and the great cathedral at its heart. It had the same air of lively prosperity. Thinking of Rouen turned her mind to her plan to continue smuggling Protestant literature into Paris. She had received one letter from Nath, forwarded by the English embassy. It had been an enthusiastic missive: Nath was thriving as a clandestine bookseller, but for now she had plenty of stock, and she would write to Sylvie as soon as she began to run low.

Meanwhile, Sylvie had come up with another plan to run parallel with the first. There were thousands of Huguenot refugees in London, many of them struggling to learn English, and she thought she could sell them books in French. A foreigner would not be allowed to open a bookshop within the city of London, Ned told her, so she was looking for premises outside the walls, perhaps in the suburb of Southwark, where many of the refugees lived.

Sylvie liked Barney immediately: most women did, Ned told her with a smile. Barney wore a sailor’s baggy breeches with tightly laced shoes and a fur hat. His red beard was luxuriant, covering most of his weather-beaten face. He had a rapscallion grin that Sylvie guessed would make many girls go weak at the knees. When they arrived at the house opposite the cathedral, he embraced Ned warmly and kissed Sylvie a little more enthusiastically than was quite appropriate.

Both Ned and Sylvie were expecting his son to be a baby, but Alfo was nine years old. He was dressed in a miniature version of Barney’s seafaring outfit, including the fur hat. The child had light-brown skin, curly red hair like Barney’s, and the same green eyes. He was obviously African, and even more obviously Barney’s son.

Sylvie crouched down to talk to him. ‘What’s your name?’ she said.

‘I am Barnardo Alfonso Willard.’

Barney said: ‘We call him Alfo.’

Sylvie said: ‘Hello, Alfo, I am your Aunt Sylvie.’