A Column of Fire

by Ken Follett

  Sir Reginald Fitzgerald, who had plotted Alice’s ruin, was still mayor of Kingsbridge, and living in Priory Gate, his vast new palace, Jonathan said. However, Bishop Julius had been brought down. Queen Elizabeth had broken all her promises and returned England to Protestantism. She required all priests to take the Oath of Supremacy, swearing allegiance to her as the supreme governor of the Church of England: refusal was treason. Almost all the lower clergy had agreed, but most of the old Catholic bishops had not. They could have been executed, but Elizabeth had vowed not to kill people for their faith, and she was keeping to that – so far. Most of the bishops were merely dismissed from their posts. Julius was living with two or three former monks in a house attached to St Mark’s church in northern Kingsbridge. Jonathan had seen him drunk in the Bell Inn on a Saturday night, telling anyone who would listen that the true Catholic faith would return soon. He made a sad figure, Jonathan said, but Barney thought the malevolent old priest deserved a worse fate.

  Jonathan also explained to Barney the attractions of life at sea. Jonathan was at home on board ship: he was sunburned and wiry, with hard hands and feet, as nimble as a squirrel in the rigging. Towards the end of the war against France, the Hawk had captured a French vessel. The crew had shared the profits with Captain Bacon and Dan Cobley, and Jonathan had got a bonus of sixty pounds on top of his wages. He had bought a house in Kingsbridge for his widowed mother and had rejoined the crew in the hope of more of the same.

  ‘But we’re no longer at war,’ Barney said. ‘If you capture a French ship now, you’re guilty of piracy.’

  Jonathan shrugged. ‘We’ll be at war with someone before too long.’ He tugged at a rope, checking the security of a knot that was evidently as tight as it could be, and Barney guessed that he did not want to be questioned too closely about piracy.

  Barney changed the subject and asked about his brother.

  Ned had come to Kingsbridge for Christmas, wearing an expensive new black coat and looking older than twenty. Jonathan knew that Ned worked with Sir William Cecil, who was Secretary of State, and people in Kingsbridge said Ned was an increasingly powerful figure at court, despite his youth. Jonathan had talked to him in the cathedral on Christmas Day, but had not learned much: Ned had been vague about exactly what he did for the queen, and Jonathan guessed he was involved in the secretive world of international diplomacy.

  ‘I can’t wait to see them,’ Barney said.

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘It should be only a couple of days now.’

  Jonathan checked another rope, then looked away.

  No one expected to get into a fight on the journey along the Channel from Antwerp to Combe Harbour, but Barney felt he ought to work his passage by making sure the Hawk’s armaments were ready for action.

  Merchant ships needed guns as much as any other vessel. Seafaring was a dangerous business. In wartime, ships of one combatant nation could legitimately attack ships of the enemy; and all the major countries were at war as often as they were at peace. In peacetime, the same activity was called piracy, but it went on almost as much. Every ship had to be able to defend itself.

  The Hawk had twelve guns, all bronze minions, small cannons that fired a four-pound shot. The minions were on the gun deck, immediately below the top deck, six on each side. They fired through square holes in the woodwork. Ship design had changed to accommodate this need. In older ships, such gun ports would have seriously weakened the structure. But the Hawk was carvel-built, an internal skeleton of heavy timbers providing its strength, with the planks of the hull fastened to the skeleton like skin over ribs. This type of structure had the additional advantage that enemy cannonballs could make multiple holes in the hull without necessarily sinking the ship.

  Barney cleaned and oiled the guns, making sure they were running freely on their wheels, and made some small repairs, using the tools left behind by the previous smith, who had died. He checked stocks of ammunition: all the guns had the same size barrel and fired interchangeable cast-iron balls.

  His most important job was to keep the gunpowder in good condition. It tended to absorb moisture – especially at sea – and Barney made sure that there were string bags of charcoal hanging from the ceiling on the gun deck to dry the air. The other hazard was that the ingredients of gunpowder – saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur – would separate over time, the heavier saltpetre sinking to the bottom, making the mixture harmless. In the army Barney had learned to turn the barrels upside down once a week.

  He even ranged the guns. He did not want to waste ammunition, but Captain Bacon let him fire a few balls. All cannon barrels rested on trunnions, like handles sticking out both sides, which fitted into grooved supports in the gun carriage, making it easy to tilt the barrel up and down. With the barrel at an angle of forty-five degrees – the attitude for maximum distance – the minions would fire a four-pound ball almost a mile, about one thousand six hundred yards. The angle was changed by propping up the rear end of the barrel with wedges. With the barrel level, the ball splashed into the water about three hundred yards away. That told Barney that each seven degrees of elevation from the horizontal added just over two hundred yards to the range. He had brought with him from the army an iron protractor with a plumb line and a curved scale for measuring angles. With its long arm thrust into the barrel, he could measure the gun’s angle precisely. On land it worked well. At sea, the constant motion of the ship made shooting less accurate.

  On the fourth day, Barney had nothing more to do, and he found himself on deck with Jonathan again. They were crossing a bay. The coast was on the port bow, as it had been ever since the Hawk had left the Westerschelde estuary and entered the English Channel. Barney was no expert in navigation, but he thought that by now they should have the English coast on the starboard bow. He frowned. ‘How long do you think it will be before we reach Combe Harbour?’

  Jonathan shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  An unpleasant possibility crossed Barney’s mind. ‘We are headed for Combe Harbour, aren’t we?’

  ‘Eventually, yes.’

  Barney’s alarm grew. ‘Eventually?’

  ‘Captain Bacon doesn’t confide his intentions to me. Nor to anyone else, come to that.’

  ‘But you seem to think we might not be going home.’

  ‘I’m looking at the coastline.’

  Barney looked harder. Deep in the bay, just off the coast, a small island rose steeply out of the water to a precarious summit where a great church was perched like a giant seagull. It was familiar, and he realized, with dismay, that he had seen it before – twice. It was called Mont St Michel, and he had passed it once on his way to Seville, three years ago, and again on his way back from Spain to the Netherlands two years ago. ‘We’re going to Spain, aren’t we?’ he said to Jonathan.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘I didn’t know. And besides, we need a gunner.’

  Barney could guess what they needed a gunner for. And that explained why Bacon had hired him when there was so little work for him to do as ship’s blacksmith. ‘So Bacon and you have tricked me into becoming a member of the crew.’

  Jonathan shrugged again.

  Barney looked north. Combe Harbour was sixty miles in that direction. He turned his gaze to the island church. It was a mile or two away, in waves of at least three feet. He could not swim it, he knew. It would be suicide.

  After a long moment, he said: ‘But we’ll come back to Combe Harbour from Seville, won’t we?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Jonathan, ‘maybe not.’

  11

  While Odette gave birth, painfully and loudly, Pierre planned how to get rid of the baby.

  Odette was suffering God’s punishment for her unchastity. She deserved it. There was some justice on earth, after all, Pierre thought.

  And as soon as the baby arrived, she would lose it.

  He sat downstairs in the small house, leafing through his black le
ather-bound notebook, while the midwife attended to Odette in the bedroom. The remains of an interrupted breakfast were on the table in front of him: bread, ham and some early radishes. The room was dismal, with bare walls, a flagstone floor, a cold fireplace and one small window on to a narrow, dark street. Pierre hated it.

  Normally he left straight after breakfast. He usually went first to the Guise family palace in the Vieille rue du Temple, a place where the floors were marble and the walls were hung with splendid paintings. Most often he spent the day there or at the Louvre palace, in attendance on Cardinal Charles or Duke François. In the late afternoon he frequently had meetings with members of his rapidly growing network of spies, who added to the list of Protestants in the black leather notebook. He rarely returned to the little house in Les Halles until bedtime. Today, however, he was waiting for the baby to come.

  It was May 1560, and they had been married five months.

  For the first few weeks Odette had tried to cajole him into a normal sexual relationship. She did her best to be coquettish, but it did not come naturally to her, and when she wiggled her broad behind and smiled at him, showing her crooked teeth, he was repelled. Later she began to taunt him with impotence and, as an alternative jibe, homosexuality. Neither arrow struck home – he thought nostalgically of long afternoons in the widow Bauchene’s feather bed – but Odette’s insults were nevertheless irritating.

  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.

  The streets were crowded, as always. He passed a tall pile of refuse: ashes, fish bones, night soil, stable sweepings, worn-out shoes. It occurred to him that he could just leave the baby on such a rubbish tip, though he would have to make sure no one saw him. Then he noticed a rat nibbling the face of a dead cat, and he realized the baby would suffer the same fate, but alive. He did not have the stomach for that. He was not a monster.

  He crossed the river by the Notre Dame Bridge and entered the cathedral; but when he reached the nave, he began to have doubts about his plan. As usual, there were people in the great church: priests, worshippers, pilgrims, hucksters and prostitutes. He walked slowly up the nave until he came level with the little side chapel dedicated to St Anne. Could he discreetly put the baby on the floor in front of the statue without being observed? He did not see how. For a destitute woman, perhaps it would hardly matter if she were noticed: no one would know who she was and she might slip away and vanish before anyone had the presence of mind to question her. But it was a different matter for a well-dressed young man. He might get into trouble if the
baby so much as cried. Under his cloak, he pressed the warm body closer to him, hoping to muffle any noise as well as keeping it out of sight. He realized he should have come here late at night or very early in the morning – but what would he have done with the child in the meantime?

  A thin young woman in a red dress caught his eye, and he was inspired. He would offer one of the prostitutes money to take the baby from him and put it into the chapel. Such a woman would not know him, and the baby would remain unidentified. He was about to approach the one in the red dress when, to his shock, he heard a familiar voice. ‘Pierre, my dear chap, how are you?’

  It was his old tutor. ‘Father Moineau!’ he said, horrified. This was calamitous. If the baby cried, how would Pierre explain what he was doing?

  The priest’s square, reddish face was creased with smiles. ‘I’m glad to see you. I hear you’re becoming a man of consequence!’

  ‘Something like that,’ Pierre said. Desperately he added: ‘Which means, unfortunately, that I am pressed for time and must leave you.’

  Moineau looked thunderous at this brush-off. ‘Please, don’t allow me to detain you,’ he said curtly.

  Pierre longed to confess his troubles, but he felt a more urgent need to get himself and the baby out of the cathedral. ‘I do beg your pardon, Father,’ he said. ‘I will call on you before too long.’

  ‘If you have time,’ Moineau said sarcastically.

  ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye!’

  Moineau did not say goodbye, but turned away petulantly.

  Pierre hurried down the nave and out through the west door. He was dismayed to have offended Moineau, the only person in the world he could tell his troubles to. Pierre had his masters and his servants, but he did not cultivate friends; Moineau was the exception. And now he had offended him.

  He put Moineau out of his mind and retraced his steps across the bridge. He wished he could have thrown the baby into the river, but he would have been seen. Anyway, he knew that Father Moineau would not have reassured him that such a murder was God’s will. Sins committed in a good cause might be indulged, but there was a limit.