A Column of Fire

by Ken Follett

  His timing was not quite right. A moment earlier Rasteau had slowed his pace, perhaps suspecting a trap; and he was just out of Ned’s reach. He could not stop, but he was able to swerve and avoid being impaled on Ned’s blade.

  Ned moved fast and lunged, and his point penetrated Rasteau’s side. Momentum carried the man past Ned. The blade came out. Rasteau half turned, stumbled and fell heavily. Without conscious thought, Ned stabbed wildly. Rasteau swung his weapon in a wide sweep and knocked Ned’s sword out of his hand. It flew through the air and fell on a grave.

  Rasteau was up in a flash, moving fast for a big man. Ned glimpsed Sylvie coming out of the doorway and yelled: ‘Run, Sylvie, run!’ Then Rasteau came at him stabbing and slicing. Ned retreated, using his dagger to parry a thrust, then a swing, then another thrust; but he knew he could not keep it up. Rasteau feinted a downward cut then, with surprising agility, changed the stroke into a thrust that dipped under Ned’s guard.

  And then Rasteau stopped still, and the point of a sword came out through the front of his belly. Ned leaped backwards, avoiding Rasteau’s sword, but it was not necessary, for the thrust lost all momentum as Rasteau screamed in agony and fell forward; and Ned saw, behind him, the small form of Sylvie, holding the sword Ned had dropped, pulling it out of Rasteau’s back.

  They did not wait to watch Rasteau die. Ned took Sylvie’s hand and they ran across the place Maubert, past the gallows, to the embassy.

  Two armed guards stood outside the house. They were not embassy employees: Ned had never seen them before. One of them stepped in front of Ned and said: ‘You can’t go in there.’

  Ned said: ‘I am the deputy ambassador and this is my wife. Now get out of my way.’

  From an upstairs window came the authoritative voice of Walsingham. ‘They are under the protection of the king – let them pass!’

  The guard stood aside. Ned and Sylvie went up the steps. The door opened before they reached it.

  They stepped inside to safety.

  *

  I married Sylvie twice: first in the little Catholic church of St-Julien-le-Pauvre, outside which she had killed the man with no nose; and then again in a Protestant service at the chapel in the English embassy.

  Sylvie was a virgin at the age of thirty-one, and as if to recover lost time, we made love every night and every morning for months. When I lay on top of her she clung to me as if I were saving her from drowning, and afterwards she often cried herself to sleep in my arms.

  We never found Isabelle’s body, and that made it harder for Sylvie to mourn. In the end we treated the burned-out shop as a grave, and stood in front of it for a few minutes every Sunday, holding hands and remembering a strong, brave woman.

  Amazingly, the Protestants recovered from St Bartholomew’s Day. Three thousand people had been killed in Paris, and thousands more in copycat massacres elsewhere; but the Huguenots fought back. Towns with Protestant majorities took in crowds of refugees and closed their gates against the representatives of the king. The Guise family, as powerful Catholics on the side of the monarch, were welcomed back into the royal circle once more as civil war broke out again.

  Services were resumed in the loft over the stable and in other clandestine locations all over the country.

  Walsingham was recalled to London, and we went with him. Before we left Paris, Sylvie showed Nath the warehouse in the rue du Mur, and Nath took over the selling of illegal literature to Paris Protestants. However, my wife was not willing to abandon her mission. She announced that she would continue to order the books from Geneva. She would sail across the English Channel to Rouen, meet the shipments there, escort them to Paris, pay the necessary bribes, and deliver the cargo to the rue du Mur.

  I worried about her, but I had learned from Queen Elizabeth that some women could not be ruled by men. Anyway, I’m not sure I would have stopped her if I could. She had a sacred mission, and I could not take that away from her. If she carried on long enough, one day, of course, she would be caught. And then she would die, I knew.

  It was her destiny.

  21

  Rollo stood on the deck of the Petite Fleur as the freighter approached the coast of England. This was the moment of greatest danger.

  The ship, out of Cherbourg, was headed for Combe Harbour carrying barrels of apple brandy, huge rounds of cheese, and eight young priests from the English College at Douai.

  Rollo wore a priest’s robe and a pectoral cross. His hair was thinning on top, but to compensate he had grown a full beard. Over his shoulders was a white cloak, not very priestly: it was a prearranged signal.

  He had made preparations with meticulous care, but too many things could go wrong in practice. He did not even know for sure whether the captain was trustworthy. The man was being paid handsomely for making this stop, but someone else – Ned Willard, or another of Queen Elizabeth’s men – might have offered him a higher fee to betray Rollo.

  He wished he was not relying so heavily on his sister. She was smart and well-organized and fearless, but in the end she was a woman. However, Rollo himself did not want to set foot on English soil, not yet, so he had to use her.

  At dusk the captain dropped anchor in a bay with no name three miles along the coast from his destination. The sea was mercifully calm. In the bay close to the beach a small, round-ended fishing boat with a mast and oars was anchored. Rollo had known the vessel when his father had been Receiver of Customs at Combe Harbour: it had once been the Saint Ava, but was now simply called the Ava. Beyond the beach, in the cleft of a chine, stood a sturdy cottage of pale stone with smoke coming from its chimney.

  Rollo waited anxiously, watching the cottage, looking for a sign. His hope was so intense that it made his whole body taut and he almost felt he might throw up with fear of failure. This was the beginning of the end. The young men he was escorting were secret agents for God. They were a small advance party, but they would be followed by more. One day soon the dark years would come to an end, England would give up foolish notions of religious freedom, and once again the great mass of ignorant peasants and labourers would happily bow to the authority of the one true Church. The Fitzgerald family would be restored to its rightful position – if not better: Rollo might become a bishop, and his brother-in-law Bart a duke. In Kingsbridge there would be a purge of Puritans like the one in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Day – though Rollo had to keep that part of his dream secret from Margery, who would have refused to take part if she had known what violence he had in mind.

  At last he saw the agreed response to his white cloak: a white sheet was waved from an upstairs window.

  It could have been a trick. Mal Roper, the staunch Catholic fisherman who lived in the cottage, might have been arrested by Ned Willard and tortured for information, and the white sheet could be the bait of a trap. But there was nothing Rollo could do about that. He and those with him were risking their lives, and they all knew it.

  As the sky darkened, Rollo assembled the priests on deck, each with a bag containing his personal effects plus the items he would need to bring the sacraments to deprived English families: wafers, wine, oil for confirmation, and holy water. ‘Complete silence until you reach the house,’ he instructed them in a whisper. ‘Even low voices carry across water. This bay is normally deserted except for the fisherman’s family, but you never know, and your mission could end before you reach England.’ One of the priests was the ebullient Lenny Price, the first man he had met at the college in Douai, and the oldest in this group. ‘Lenny, you’re in charge once you’re on land.’

  The captain lowered a boat and it splashed into the sea. The priests clambered down a rope ladder, Rollo last. Two sailors grasped the oars. The boat shushed through the waves. On the beach Rollo could faintly discern the figure of a small woman with a dog: Margery. He breathed more easily.

  The boat bumped the slope of the beach. The priests jumped out into the shallows. Margery greeted them with a handshake, saying nothing. Her well-trained dog wa
s equally silent.

  Rollo remained in the boat. Margery looked at him, caught his eye, grinned, and touched her chin as if stroking a beard: she had not seen him like this before. Fool! he thought, and quickly turned away. The priests must not find out that Rollo was Margery’s brother: they knew him only as Jean Langlais.

  The sailors pushed off the beach and began to row back to the Petite Fleur. Rollo looked astern from the boat and watched Margery lead the priests stumbling across the pebbles, then into the cottage. They crowded through the front door and were lost from sight.

  *

  MAL ROPER, his wife Peg, and their three strapping sons knelt on the stone floor of the single downstairs room of the cottage while Lenny Price said Mass. Margery almost wept to see the joy of these simple believers as they received the sacraments. If she lost her life for the sake of this moment, she thought, it would be worth it.

  She often thought of her great-aunt, Sister Joan, now dead. The troubled young Margery, sixteen-year-old bride, had climbed to the top floor of her father’s house, where old Joan had turned two little rooms into a monastic cell and a chapel. There Joan had told her that God had a purpose for her, but she must just wait for him to reveal it. Well, Joan had been right. Margery had waited, and God had revealed his purpose, and this was it.

  The demand for Catholic priests was huge. Margery talked to aristocratic and wealthy Catholics in London whenever Bart attended Parliament. Discreetly, she sounded them out, and soon found that many were desperate for the sacraments. In London Margery was careful to stay away from the French and Spanish embassies, to avoid the suspicion of conspiracy. She had persuaded Bart to be equally chary. He supported her mission. He hated Protestantism, but in middle age he had become lazy and passive, and he was happy to let her do all the work as long as she let him feel like a hero. Margery did not mind.

  After the service, Peg Roper served them all a hearty fish stew in wooden bowls with coarse home-baked bread. Margery was glad to see the priests tucking in: they had a long way to go before daybreak.

  The Ropers were not rich, but Mal refused money. ‘I thank you, my lady, but we don’t need payment to do God’s will,’ he said. Margery saw that he was proud to say this, and she accepted his refusal.

  It was midnight when they left.

  Margery had two lanterns. She led the way with one, and Lenny brought up the rear with the other. She headed due north along a familiar road. She urged silence on the men every time they approached a village or farmhouse, for she did not want them to be heard or seen. A group of nine people walking at night would arouse suspicion and hostility in the mind of anyone who saw them. Margery was particularly cautious near larger manor houses, where there might be men-at-arms who could be sent out with torches to question the travellers.

  The night was mild and the road was dry. All the same, Margery found the walking hard. Ever since the birth of her second child, Roger, she had suffered occasional backache, especially when she had to walk a long distance. She just had to grit her teeth and bear it.

  Every two or three hours she stopped at a preselected spot, far from human habitation, where they rested, drank water from a stream, ate some of the bread Peg Roper had given them for their journey, and relieved themselves before setting off again.

  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 BEEN looking 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 mig
ht 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.