In the Presence of Evil

by Tania Bayard

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Tania Bayard

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Tania Bayard

  Novels

  IN THE PRESENCE OF EVIL *

  A MEDIEVAL HOME COMPANION

  SWEET HERBS AND SUNDRY FLOWERS

  * available from Severn House

  IN THE PRESENCE OF EVIL

  Tania Bayard

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY

  This eBook edition first published in 2018 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2018 by Tania Bayard.

  The right of Tania Bayard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8788-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-911-5 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-967-1 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  The Devil is a philosopher. He understands a man’s nature, condition, and inclination, and he knows what vice he is most disposed to – either by temperament or by habit – and that is where he makes his most powerful attack.

  From a book of moral and practical advice for a young wife, Paris, 1393

  PROLOGUE

  As the king led his army forth to subdue the Duke of Brittany, he was overpowered by a grievous illness.

  The Monk of Saint-Denis,

  Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis,

  contenant le règne de Charles VI de 1380 à 1422

  5 August 1392

  When the king rode out with his troops on that hot summer day, he was a robust, good-natured man of twenty-four, sound of body and mind.

  In an instant, he was changed.

  As he led his army across a dry, dusty plain, his page, drowsy in the heat, dropped a lance. It fell against the helmet of another page, and the sharp clang of steel striking steel filled the king with terror. He spurred his horse to a charge and raced at full speed toward those around him. Knights, squires, and men-at-arms scattered in all directions as he wheeled left and right, lashing out with his sword and shouting that his enemies were attacking him. For over an hour the frenzy continued. His troops tried to seize him, but they were forced to flee as he bore down on them. When he finally slumped in his saddle, exhausted and drenched with sweat, four of his men lay dead.

  One of his chamberlains lifted him from his horse, lowered him to the ground, and tried to revive him. But the king lay without speaking or moving, his eyes rolling wildly. He was placed on a litter and taken to a nearby monastery, where he remained senseless for two days.

  Gradually, the king recovered his reason and the use of his limbs, but his mind was shattered. Spells of unreason descended on him for the rest of his life. He lived in fear of those episodes, which he said began with pain like the sting of arrows. During times of affliction, which became more violent as the years went by, he forgot who he was and that he was the king of France. He fled from his wife and denied having any children. He tried to deface his coat of arms, and he often believed he was made of glass. He refused to wash. He soiled his breeches, ripped his surcoats to shreds, and threw his robes into the fire. He destroyed his furniture, tore his tapestries, broke his windows, and smashed his crystal goblets. He ran howling through the palace, dancing and making lewd gestures.

  There were periods of relief when he seemed to be in his right mind, and at those times he was often lethargic and lost in gloom. He said he would rather die than suffer more spells of unreason.

  Some of the king’s doctors said his illness was caused by an excess of hot black bile. Others attributed it to poison, or the heat of that August day, or the strain of preparing for battle. Certain wise men said the king had inherited an unsound mind from his mother.

  The common people knew better. It was sorcery.

  ONE

  Alas! Poor widows who have lost everything! Who will comfort them?

  Christine de Pizan, Ballade, c.1405

  Paris

  January–February 1393

  Christine didn’t believe in omens and signs. But her mother did, and she talked of them all the time. Sometimes the predictions came true, and then Christine was sorry she hadn’t listened. Especially on the morning when she went to the palace and discovered the first murder.

  The day seemed ill-starred from the moment she was startled out of sleep by the sound of her shutters rattling in the wind, long before the bells at the nearby priory of Sainte-Catherine sounded prime. She cried out to her husband. But Étienne wasn’t there beside her, never would be again. She rose from her bed, wrapped herself in a woolen coverlet, lit a taper by holding it against the smoldering embers in her fireplace, and staggered downstairs to the kitchen.

  In the grey half-light, she could barely see her mother’s dark shape kneeling in front of the fireplace, but she heard her call out, ‘You must not go out today, Cristina. It is snowing
. And I saw a blind man in the street yesterday. That is a very bad sign.’

  Christine crept across the room, wincing as her bare feet touched the cold floor, and stood on the warm hearth. ‘I have to go to the palace,’ she said.

  Francesca jabbed a stick into the nearly dead ashes. ‘Stupida!’ Christine hoped her mother was referring to their hired girl, who had forgotten to bank the fire the night before. Francesca uncovered some embers, added more sticks and a bit of charred tow, leaned forward, held her long hair away from her face, and blew until sparks caught. Flames leapt, and light swept around the room, setting reflections dancing in copper pots hanging from the ceiling and shiny pewter platters standing on the shelves. Francesca looked up and laughed. She struggled to her feet, nearly falling in her haste, and limped across the room.

  ‘There they are, Cristina!’ she cried. ‘The spirits!’

  ‘Nonsense! It’s just the flames.’

  ‘It is the spirits. They are trying to tell us something. And there is your father!’ Francesca pointed to one of the glinting shapes. Her husband had been dead for six years, yet she found him everywhere. ‘Povera Cristina. I ask myself why she never sees him.’

  Christine glared at her mother, though to be honest about it, she sometimes thought she heard her own husband, dead for several years too, talking to her.

  Francesca glared back at her. ‘Your father is saying to you, do not go to the palace.’

  ‘Blind men in the street! Reflections in the frying pans! How can you believe things like that mean anything?’

  ‘The king did not observe the signs, and demons took his mind away. Therefore, you must not go to the palace. There is evil there. Something terrible will happen to you.’ Francesca smoothed her black dress down over her hips.

  Christine ducked around her mother and stalked into the pantry. There the sweet scent of dried apples and pears soothed her – until she realized that the yellow slices of fruit hanging from the ceiling in long chains reminded her of her father’s wrinkled face as he lay on his deathbed. She had the unhappy thought that perhaps her husband’s face had looked that way, too, when he died, although she would never know, because Étienne had been far away in another part of the country on a mission with the king when he was taken from her. She reached up to the shelf for a cheese tart. A mouse ran across her hand. ‘The devil take Georgette,’ she muttered. Now she, too, was angry with the hired girl, who had left the plate uncovered.

  In a temper, she strode back into the kitchen and found her children, wrapped in their bedclothes, their faces gleaming in the firelight, clustered around their grandmother.

  ‘You woke us up with all your arguing,’ announced Jean, who was nine. He put an arm around his twelve-year-old sister, Marie, but she pushed him away, her prim little face set in a scowl. Thomas, a chubby eight-year-old, snickered. Five-year-old Lisabetta, Christine’s niece, who lived with the family, leaned against her grandmother and started to cry.

  Francesca, large and round in a dress that was a bit too tight for her, drew the little girl close and shook her finger at Christine. ‘See what you have done!’

  Christine, who was small and thin, with none of her mother’s softness, suddenly felt like a child herself. ‘I’m twenty-eight, Mama. You shouldn’t talk to me like that.’ She stalked out of the kitchen and hurried up the stairs to her room, where she sat on her bed, shivering in the cold and listening to Francesca comforting the children in the kitchen. She’s a much better mother than I am, she thought.

  She ate the tart the mouse had tasted first, then rummaged through her clothes for her warmest chemise and a heavy blue wool cotte, which she pulled on even though it had threadbare spots she knew she should have asked her mother to repair. She started to put on a starched linen headdress, then threw it aside and shoved her black hair under a plain grey hood, feeling as she did so a tiny indentation on her cheek, left there by a recent illness. She reached for a small bowl of flour soaked in rosewater and gently applied some of the mixture to the pockmark, thanking God there were not more. By that time, it was light enough to go out. She collected quills, knives, parchment, and an inkhorn from her desk, tossed everything into a large leather pouch, and tiptoed downstairs, where she threw on a much-mended brown cloak, struggled into her boots, and hurried out the door before her mother could accost her with more warnings about the dangers awaiting her at the palace.

  Francesca heard her go, but she said nothing. She waited until the older children left for school, thrust Lisabetta into the arms of the hired girl – who had arrived late, as usual – and limped up to Christine’s room. Ignoring twisted covers on the bed and discarded clothes on the floor, she went straight to her daughter’s desk and searched through the clutter. A small piece of unused parchment was all she needed, and when she found one, she seized it and concealed it in her sleeve. She went downstairs, told Georgette to make sure the fire didn’t go out, and threw on her cloak. Francesca wasn’t going to sit idly at home while Christine walked into danger. She was going out to get something to protect her daughter, something that would have made Christine even angrier than she already was, had she known about it.

  Out in the street, Christine was greeted by falling snow and a fierce wind that seemed to have been waiting there to attack her. Tears stung her eyes – from the wind, and from anger at her mother, anger mingled with shame that she had been so unkind. What Francesca had said was true; the king had lost his mind, and evil seemed to stalk the palace.

  Christine was no stranger to the court. She’d lived there as a child, for her family had moved from Italy to Paris after her father, the renowned physician and astrologer, Thomas de Pizan, had become an adviser to the present monarch’s father, King Charles the Fifth. Everyone at the court had doted on her then. But when the old king died, things changed. His son Charles the Sixth was only twelve, and the government fell into the hands of his uncles, greedy, power-hungry men who had little use of the old king’s advisers. By the time Thomas de Pizan died several years later, he had lost much of his influence at the court, and even Christine’s husband, who was well established as one of the royal secretaries, had found his salary reduced. And then Étienne died, too, and Christine was left a widow with little source of income. To support her family, she’d become a scribe. She was occasionally called to the palace to work as a copyist, when the royal secretaries had too much to do, but she dreaded those times, because everyone there lived in fear of the king’s attacks of unreason and distrust of the charlatans who prowled around claiming they could cure him with vile potions and spells.

  The wind blew her cloak open and nearly succeeded in pushing her off her feet. She shook her fist at it. A snowstorm like this was unusual for Paris, and she was annoyed that she had to be out in it. A few years earlier, it wouldn’t have been necessary. Now worries about money troubled her constantly, for she was responsible for her three children, her mother, and her niece Lisabetta, whose mother had died and whose father was away in Italy. To make matters worse, she’d been ill and had only recently been able to work again. The royal librarian, Gilles Malet, who’d been a friend of her husband’s, had learned of her troubles, and he’d spoken to the queen, who wanted a copy of a book to give one of her ladies-in-waiting as a wedding present. Christine was glad to have the job, but it meant that she had to go to the palace, no matter how apprehensive she was about the perils lurking there.

  Bent over against the wind, she trudged along the street where she and her family lived, in a marshy section of Paris between the old city wall and the new one King Charles the Fifth had built farther out into the countryside. It was a district with only a few houses and many open spaces planted with market gardens. She loved those gardens in summer, when they were lush with vegetables, fertile and warm like the rich farmlands around Bologna, where she’d lived until she was four. Now the gardens were nothing but barren furrows, rapidly turning white. Shriveled leaves fluttered over the frozen ground, and there were a few dry weeds wit
h heavy seed pods bent down by the snow; they made her think of her children, who would have said they looked like little goblins wearing white caps.

  Suddenly a gust of wind burst out of a garden, and with it, as if one of those goblins had sprung to life, came a tiny white dog, fleeing from a pack of hounds. With a crooked tail, a muzzle covered with long, bristly hairs, and ears flapping like rags, the little dog was such a comical sight that Christine started to laugh. But he was about to be mauled. She leaned down, scooped him up, and stuffed him under her cloak, all the while shouting abuse at his tormenters. The hounds turned and fled, their tails between their legs.

  Bracing herself against the wind, she walked on, holding the dog close and keeping her head down to escape the cruel blasts. She passed the enormous hôtel built by the King of Sicily, its innumerable gables and turrets hidden behind a veil of swirling snowflakes, and turned down the rue Saint-Antoine, the broad, paved street that led to the king’s palace. This street was usually alive with the clatter of hoofs and the babble of voices – knights prancing by on horseback, couriers scurrying along with messages for the king, merchants driving mules laden with supplies for the court, street vendors hawking their wares. On this day, however, as she stumbled along through the wind and snow, her sense of foreboding increasing with every step, the street was deserted and silent. She looked in vain for the gawky man who cried the virtues of his crispy meat pasties and the snaggletooth crone who always managed to thrust one of her fragrant honey cakes right under her nose so she couldn’t resist buying it. Bells chiming tierce at the priory of Sainte-Catherine reassured her, until the wind stole their intonations and smothered them with its own dismal song. The air tasted like metal. She felt comforted when the little dog reached a soft paw out from under her cloak and touched her cheek.

  But when she came to the cemetery next to the church of Saint-Pol, the dog began to twist and turn in her arms. Wild dogs roamed the gloomy burial ground, and she sensed that he felt their presence. Then she remembered her mother’s beliefs about the loup-garou, a werewolf said to prowl around the city, feasting on the flesh of children and drinking the blood of dead men. What nonsense, she thought. She clutched the dog tighter and started to run.