The Burning Chambers

by Kate Mosse

  ‘Are you certain that is the man’s name? Michel.’

  ‘Certain as I stand here.’

  Minou frowned. ‘And you say they began searching for the murderer yesterday?’

  She remembered talking to Michel on the threshold of the bookshop as the late afternoon mist came in.

  Bérenger dropped another heavy bar into place. ‘So they say. Mind you, a priest is also missing, which I warrant accounts for all this fuss. From an influential Toulousain family, a guest of the Bishop of Carcassonne. The same villain was seen entering the cathedral yesterday morning, before meeting with this Cazès in the Bastide.’

  Minou shook her head. ‘And what is the name of the man accused of these crime? Do you know that?’

  ‘He has red hair, that’s all we’ve been told. A stranger, not from around here.’

  Minou swallowed hard, remembering Madame Noubel’s description of her lodger. Remembering the touch of a stranger’s hand upon her cheek in the February mist.

  ‘A Huguenot,’ Bérenger said, rubbing a hand over his grey beard. ‘That said, people see treason in everything these days. More likely a quarrel over a debt. Or a woman. Priest found him out, no doubt.’ Bérenger dragged the last of the heavy bolts into place. ‘There. You get off home with Alis, Madomaisèla. They say the villain is dangerous.’

  ‘No, Cécile! I will not tell her,’ Bernard repeated. ‘I cannot.’

  Madame Noubel was sitting at the long table in the kitchen, tracing her fingers on a chalk picture.

  ‘Then you are a fool. If Florence was here—’

  His voice faltered. ‘But she is not here, Cécile. And there’s the pity of it.’

  ‘If Florence was here,’ she said doggedly, ‘she would say it was time to tell Minou the truth. Better that it comes from your lips than those of another.’

  ‘All those who were there are either dead now, or knew nothing of what actually happened.’

  ‘No one? What about Madame Gabignaud? You cannot be sure, Bernard. Servants talk, villagers stand and whisper around the well. Folk guard their tongues at first, then forget what was meant to be secret.’

  ‘It was such a long time ago.’

  ‘What about the Will?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened to it. Florence . . . she took care of everything. We did not talk of it.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Madame Noubel said impatiently. ‘What if the Will does still exist? What if it comes to light? What then?’

  ‘Why should it be found now, after all these years?’

  ‘Bernard, these are uncertain times. War is coming, and we cannot know what secrets will start tumbling out.’

  He waved his hand. ‘They always say war is coming, yet it never does. Nothing changes. One month the Duke of Guise is in the ascendant, the next month fortune smiles on Coligny and Condé. What have our lives to do with any of them?’

  ‘Don’t be naïve,’ Madame Noubel snapped. Then her voice softened. ‘You are a ghost in your own life, Bernard. Can you not see the effect it is having on the whole family? Minou knows there is something amiss. She cares deeply for you and she worries for you. Tell her the truth.’

  ‘I cannot.’

  She sighed. ‘At the very least tell her what befell you in January. She dates your decline from then. Minou is an intelligent young woman with great fortitude.’ Cécile hesitated. ‘She thinks you have withdrawn your affection from her, Bernard, and that saddens her greatly.’

  ‘Withdrawn my affection . . .’ he cried. ‘No! But she is so young, Cécile. I want to spare her this.’

  ‘She is nineteen. She is old enough to run the bookshop in your stead. Old enough to care for Aimeric and Alis. By rights, she should be courting or even married with a family of her own. You insult her by deciding she does not have the strength of character to bear what you have to tell her. Minou has to follow her own path, Bernard. You cannot protect her from the world forever.’

  ‘Please, Cécile, not yet. I cannot bear it.’

  ‘As it is,’ Madame Noubel persisted, ‘you risk putting distance between you and Minou because of your obdurate silence. That is the way to lose her affection. You have made yourself a prisoner in your own home, Bernard, and the whole family suffers. I implore you, tell her the truth.’

  Hearing raised voices, Minou stopped in the passageway. Her fingers rested on the cold metal latch of the kitchen door, but she could not bring herself to enter. She knew she should declare her presence, not stand eavesdropping, but the apparent licence between her father and Madame Noubel gave her pause for thought. She had not considered them more than good neighbours, but they called one another by their given names. And, from time to time, slipped into the old language.

  ‘Why do we not go in?’ Alis whispered. ‘Don’t we have to tell Papa what we saw by the bridge?’

  Minou stepped back from the door and bent down. ‘Petite, you have done so well and you have been brave. Will you do one thing more? Stay on the threshold, but see if you can spot Aimeric and bid him to come inside? You heard what Bérenger said. It is not safe to be out of doors.’ She put her hands upon her sister’s shoulders, turned her around and pointed her in the direction of the door. ‘I will wait here, then we will go in and speak to Papa together, yes?’

  Alis nodded, then ran back down the passageway to the entrance and started calling Aimeric’s name. As soon as she was out of sight, Minou pressed her ear to the door.

  ‘I have taken precautions, Cécile. I have arranged for Minou to accompany Aimeric to Toulouse. Florence’s sister has offered to take him and make a gentleman of him. I have accepted the invitation. Minou will be out of harm’s way there.’

  ‘Living with Monsieur Boussay and his feather-brained wife! You think that is what Florence would want?’

  ‘What else can I do, Cécile?’ he said wearily. ‘I have no other choice. Our money is almost gone. Aimeric will have a chance of advancement if I send him. There is nothing for him here.’

  ‘What if Minou does not want to go to Toulouse?’ Madame Noubel’s voice was sharp with anger. ‘And what’s to become of Alis, deprived of her sister’s care?’

  ‘Do you not think that I have considered all of this, Cécile? It is not a decision I take lightly, but it is all I can do. The best I can do.’

  ‘Well, then there is nothing more to be said.’

  Madame Noubel opened the kitchen door. Caught out, Minou sprang back. Everyone started speaking at once.

  ‘Minou!’

  ‘Madame Noubel, I was—’

  ‘Your father and I . . . Bernard and I were talking.’

  ‘How long have you been there? Were you eavesdropping?’

  ‘Bernard, really!’

  Minou looked from one to the other, caught like conspirators in a painted tableau: her father sitting by the cold hearth, his worn face grey with worry, Madame Noubel, two pink spots on her cheeks, her hand frozen on the latch of the door.

  ‘I have been here long enough to hear you are resolved to send Aimeric to Toulouse and me with him. As for eavesdropping, your voices were so far raised I could hardly fail to hear.’

  Bernard flushed. ‘Forgive me, I spoke hastily.’

  ‘But you do intend for us both to go to Toulouse?’

  Her father gave a long sigh. ‘It is for the best.’

  ‘Bernard believes, wrongly in my opinion, that—’

  ‘Cécile! Allow me to decide what is right for my family.’

  Madame Noubel raised her hands. ‘Have it your own way.’

  Minou sat down on the bench, suddenly exhausted.

  ‘What is it, Daughter?’ her father said, his voice full of concern. ‘Has something happened to you?’

  ‘No.’ Minou traced a pattern on the surface of the table with her fingers, hearing and seeing nothing, until she felt the gentle pressure of Madame Noubel’s hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Minou,’ she said quietly, ‘are you unwell?’

  She gathered herself. There was no
sense wallowing in self-pity and she had to speak with her father before Aimeric and Alis came back.

  ‘Madame, I wonder if you have told my father what happened yesterday in the Bastide?’

  ‘I did, not least your courage in coming to my defence.’

  ‘And of our late-afternoon visitor to the bookshop?’

  ‘I mentioned that a man – Michel – came to call, no more than that.’

  ‘Now I know who he is. His full name is Michel Cazès.’

  Bernard took a deep breath. ‘I remember him.’

  Minou looked at her father. ‘So, he was known to you, Father. I had hoped he was not.’

  ‘Why? What more has happened?’ Madame Noubel asked.

  ‘Michel is dead, murdered,’ she said. ‘I myself saw his body in the river beneath the bridge, but a half-hour past.’

  ‘Michel Cazès,’ Bernard whispered. ‘It is too cruel.’

  ‘Are you sure it was the same man?’ Madame Noubel said. ‘You only saw him for a matter of minutes yesterday, you could be mistaken?’

  ‘I remembered his clothes and, besides, he had the misfortune to be missing two fingers –’

  ‘On his right hand,’ Bernard added.

  ‘Yes. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But there is more,’ Minou continued. ‘His death, at least the timing of it, cannot be as they claim. The tocsin started to ring while Alis and I were down by the bridge where his body lay, from what we observed, undiscovered in the water. Yet when we fled back to La Cité, Bérenger told me the hunt for Michel’s murderer had begun yesterday in the Bastide.’ She turned to Madame Noubel. ‘The description of the murderer they are giving out is of a man with red hair.’

  ‘My lodger, you think?’

  ‘Your lodger?’ Bernard said, looking from face to face. ‘I don’t understand.’

  His words were drowned by the sound of Alis shouting in the passageway.

  ‘Minou! Papa! The soldiers have arrested Aimeric at the Fournier house,’ she cried, running into the kitchen. ‘They say he is a witness to murder!’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Piet pressed himself back into the shadows, waiting for the thunder of boots and leather on the battlements above to pass. All around, like pistol shots, he could hear the clatter of gates large and small being bolted, trapping him inside.

  He exhaled. If Aimeric hadn’t been so sharp – looking out of the window at the precise moment when four soldiers rounded the corner and headed for the exact spot where he had been left drugged – he would have been arrested. He had dispatched the boy to the stables in Trivalle to fetch his horse. Piet hoped he was reliable: he had no choice but to trust him. And still the bells kept ringing.

  All this because of him?

  Crouching beneath the line of the wall, Piet made his way towards the closest of the postern gates, over the straw and mud covering the wide steps. He stumbled over a vagrant slumped asleep, his breath a cloud of stale ale. A chained dog lunged at him and the geese hissed as he invaded their pen, climbing up and over the rotten struts.

  He tried the handle of the postern gate, rattling the small wooden door in its frame, but it did not shift. Might he force the lock? He bent lower and ran his hand along the jamb, looking for a weakness in the hinge, but there was nothing.

  Piet was about to move on to the next tower, when he felt a prickling on the back of his neck. Someone was watching him. He could feel their scrutiny, as sharp as the point of a knife on his skin.

  The harsh notes of the bells ricocheted off every stone and tower, the echo chasing down every alleyway. Minou stared back along rue du Trésau and then across to rue Saint-Jean. There was no sign of Aimeric.

  If he had been arrested, where would they take him?

  The streets were deserted. Even the communal area around the main well, the heart of the quartier most afternoons, was abandoned. A pail swayed slightly above the drop, as if some spirit hand had touched it then vanished.

  Minou ran across to the Fournier house, praying he had done nothing wrong. That he had not been caught. She had seen boys younger than him flogged so viciously, for some trivial offence or another, that they could barely walk for weeks. She hammered on the front door and called Aimeric’s name, but heard only the bolts rattling top and bottom in their cradles. She doubled back to the garden behind the house. A bucket lay on its side and a bulb of fennel lay sliced clean in two beside the step, but that back door was also locked.

  Minou ran out into rue Notre-Dame, at a loss where to look next. Then out of the corner of her eye, she saw something moving in the shadows beneath the battlements.

  ‘Aimeric?’ she whispered.

  Then she saw a man, trying to open a door within the inner walls, and caught her breath.

  It was him.

  Minou stepped forward, and his hand instantly went to his dagger.

  ‘If you try the next postern to your left, Monsieur,’ she said, calling across the space between them, ‘the latch is broken and the soldiers often forget.’

  Slowly, he turned. ‘What?’

  ‘I mean you no harm. I am looking for my brother.’

  He sheathed his sword. ‘I feared it was the soldiers coming back.’

  ‘They will be back. There is a gate in the walls below here. If you can cross the lists without being seen, there’s a path.’

  He took a step towards her. ‘Why would you help me? I am accused of murder. I can hear the soldiers shouting so.’

  ‘The track winds down through orchards beside the barbican and into Trivalle.’

  Piet took another pace closer. ‘Did you not hear me, Mademoiselle? I am accused of murder.’

  ‘I heard you, but you are innocent.’

  ‘Then come with me,’ he said, suddenly smiling. ‘Show me the way, my Lady of the Mists.’

  Minou shook her head. ‘Go. You will see us both hanged if you tarry longer. If the soldiers find us together, they will arrest us both.’

  ‘Will you at least tell me your name, Mademoiselle? I would keep it close. A keepsake, if you will.’

  She hesitated, then held out her hand. ‘Very well, for it costs me nothing to give you my name, I am Minou, the eldest daughter of Bernard Joubert, bookseller, of rue du Marché.’

  He raised her hand to his lips. ‘Mademoiselle Joubert. I saw you in the Bastide yesterday. Just before noon. You helped my landlady out of harm’s way while the villains were inside ransacking my rooms.’

  ‘Ah. Which is why you behaved as if you knew me.’

  ‘I do know you,’ he said. ‘The sort of person you are, at least. It took courage to stand against the soldiers.’

  ‘Madame Noubel is a dear neighbour,’ she said, slowly withdrawing her hand. ‘Monsieur, will you tell me your name in return? A fair exchange.’

  ‘Indeed it is.’ Piet touched her cheek. ‘My name is Piet Reydon. If God is with me and I make it safely back to Toulouse – la ville rose – my door will be forever open to you for this kindness. I have lodgings there in the university quarter, close to the Eglise Saint-Taur.’

  Bewildered by the turn of the conversation, Minou held his gaze.

  ‘God speed, Monsieur Reydon.’

  He nodded, as if a bargain had been struck. Then, as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone. Minou listened for the sound of the latch of the gate to know he was safely through, then breathed out.

  ‘La ville rose,’ she whispered.

  The sound of the guards shouting behind her immediately banished all thoughts of Piet and Toulouse, and in their place came guilt. She had forgotten all about Aimeric! How could she have been so neglectful?

  Minou hurried back up rue Notre-Dame only to come face to face with Bérenger and another soldier coming from the opposite direction.

  ‘You should not be out of doors, Madomaisèla!’ Bérenger said, lowering his sword. ‘There’s a curfew. Can you not hear the tocsin?’

  Minou blushed. ‘I know it, but I am searching for my brother. Alis said he h
ad been arrested and, though I cannot believe it to be true, Aimeric has such gift for getting into trouble, I thought to fetch him home. Have you seen him, my friend?’

  Bérenger’s expression lightened. ‘I saw him some half an hour past, skulking about near the Fournier house. He was telling some tall tale, claiming to have spied the murderer and broken in.’ He gestured behind him. ‘It is boarded up, as it has been all winter. I sent him home with a flea in his ear.’

  ‘Thank you, dear Bérenger,’ Minou said, though the knot in her stomach was still there. It was a relief to know the soldiers hadn’t punished him, but he had not yet arrived back at the house. Where was he?

  ‘Never mind that,’ the other soldier said, pushing Bérenger aside. ‘Has anyone passed this way?’

  ‘No one,’ she said calmly.

  ‘A man with red hair? Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh. A man matching that description did come this way, but that was some time past.’

  ‘Which way did he go?’

  ‘That way,’ she lied. ‘Towards the Château Comtal.’

  They turned and ran, Bérenger calling back over his shoulder.

  ‘Go back indoors, Madomaisèla Minou. The villain has killed at least one man, maybe more. Take yourself out of harm’s way.’

  Minou watched them go. Only when they had vanished did she realise she had been holding her breath.

  What had she done?

  Not only helped an accused murderer escape, but also given false information to the Seneschal’s men. What was the penalty for that? It hardly mattered. She knew she would do the same again.

  ‘My Lady of the Mists.’

  Standing in the pale winter’s afternoon, Minou momentarily felt everything fade away: the never-ending threat of wars that never came, the daily struggle to make ends meet, the secrets her father was keeping and her worries for her brother and sister. For a moment, the world was suddenly and dazzlingly vivid, full of promise.

  As she started for home, an idea started to take shape in her mind. Minou shivered at the possibility of it. How she would, without delay, tell her father she had changed her mind and that she was prepared, after all, to accompany Aimeric to Toulouse as soon as the arrangements could be put in place. She had no idea where her brother was, but since he had not been arrested, she had no doubt he would reappear as soon as the soldiers had gone.