League of Spies

by Robert Merle

  “Sir,” I cried, prey to an uncontrollable anger, which I was attempting to calm as quickly as I could when Miroul placed his hand on my arm, “what allows you to make this accusation?”

  “Sir,” he hissed, “I affirm that you are a papist wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I can prove it! Wench!” he shouted. “Tell us what you saw around this man’s neck when he disrobed for your inspection!”

  “A medal of the Virgin Mary!” cried she, her charming face twisted in a grimace of hate, and her two hands held heavenwards as if she were reliving the horror of the sight that this idol had inspired.

  This said, she seized a pitcher of water on the table next to her and, brandishing it, threw the water in my face.

  I ducked.

  “Monsieur, our stools!” cried Miroul, seizing his own from under him and holding it out as a shield.

  I did the same, while pitchers, thrown from all sides, flew by and hit the table, the stools and the wall behind us.

  “Monsieur,” said Miroul, “in a moment we’re going to have to fight it out.”

  The din was deafening given the tin pitchers banging about, and the angry shouts of “Traitors!” “Spies!” and even “Regicides!” hurled from every corner of the room. I saw Miroul lean over and check that the knives in his leggings were at the ready, and I checked that my Italian dagger was at hand—and even breathed the Lord’s Prayer to myself, in the certainty that the pack of hounds would soon break free of whatever held them back and hurl themselves at us. Strange to say, however, even though I didn’t doubt I was going to die, I felt no apprehension whatever, but simply a kind of mute astonishment that my medal, which had so often saved my life on St Bartholomew’s day, would now be the certain cause of my death.

  Suddenly, the terrible din ceased and, as I peeked out from behind my stool, I saw, standing in the middle of the room and appearing single-handedly to have ordered this silence, a very tall fellow with flaming red hair, which stood out despite the dense fog of smoke in the room. The man was dressed in a black velvet doublet and yellow leggings, cut quite short, as is the custom in England. He wore a yellow cape, unbuttoned and sleeveless, that fell to his boot tops. I judged him to be a gentleman—not so much because of his dress but because of a certain air of nobility and authority he projected, despite the derisive smile that curled his lips. He wore neither dagger nor sword in his belt and held only a silver-tipped cane, with which he tapped the tabletops around him in such a way as to petrify the entire crowd with fear as he passed among them, looking each man in the eye and calling each of them by name with a menacing smile. And, striding through the room, giving little taps to each table as he went, sowing consternation at each one, he arrived in our corner and greeted us most civilly, begging us to be seated, and assuring us that we would suffer no further molestation.

  After this, he turned to the crowd with the same smile, something that appeared to freeze his audience with fear, and began to tap his left hand with the tip of his cane; then he said, in a perilously calm and polite tone:

  “My masters, how come you to presume to create such a disturbance here? Why, you’re rioting, if I’m not mistaken! Do you think you can pluck the feathers of this French cock while I’m not looking? Is this your version of bear-baiting our French visitors? Throwing pitchers at their heads? Unsheathing your knives? John Hopkins,” he said, addressing the fox-faced leader of the pack, “pick up the knife you dropped under your stool when I came in. Do you presume to take into your knowledgeable hands the queen’s justice? May God save her!” (“God save the queen!” murmured the assembly in pious response.) “My masters, do you pretend to know better than I” (raising his voice on these last three words) “who is a friend of the queen, and who her enemy? Who is a papist and who is not? Who is plotting against her and who is not? Are you policemen? Are you judges? Are you executioners? Who is the law of the land?” (He pronounced this word with a quasi-religious emphasis.) “John Hopkins, what have you to say in your defence before I send you off to jail?”

  “Sir,” stammered John Hopkins as he rose to his feet, “the whole problem is that the innkeeper wasn’t here—”

  “I couldn’t be here,” explained the innkeeper, who was now standing near the door, but stepped forward after this accusation by John Hopkins. “As the law requires, I was making my report to Mr Mundane.”

  At this name, both Miroul and I started, and shot each other looks of utter surprise.

  “But,” Hopkins insisted, “the problem is also Jane, who got me all upset when she told me that this man who claims to be a Huguenot was wearing a medal of Mary around his neck.”

  “Wench!” growled the gentleman with the cane, “you gossip too much! Innkeeper,” he said, turning to our host, “your chambermaid has too loose a tongue for the public good!”

  “She’s no longer my chambermaid,” replied the innkeeper with some unhappiness, as far as I could judge. “Since her tongue creates public disturbances, she’ll no longer work here tomorrow.”

  “Sir! Sir!” I broke in. “I beg you that there be no such consequence to this business, neither for Jane nor for Hopkins! Neither one could have known that I’m wearing a medal of Mary because my mother, who was a papist, made me swear on her deathbed that I would do so. Sir, once again, I beg you that no one be punished. Jane, pick up your pitchers, which, though dented as they are, can still hold a pint of good French wine, which you’re going to serve everyone here at my expense, in order to drink to the health of Her Gracious Majesty.”

  “Well said and well done, sir!” beamed the gentleman with the cane, who, having made me a deep bow, left so quickly that I wasn’t able to ask the question that was swelling my cheeks.

  Such is the authority of the law in this country (and in those who represent that law, Mr Mundane being manifestly among the latter) that these people who were about to cut me to pieces began praising me to the skies, as soon as they were assured that I was not an enemy of their queen or of their faith.

  It is assuredly a great strength of a country to be able to call on such prompt submission to legitimate authority, a strength that led me to believe that if the armies of Felipe II ever invaded this island, they would have a hard time overcoming the resistance of these English, who are so deeply and fervently committed to their queen. And this is all the more true since they don’t sit around in idleness, as I would have occasion to observe, but are busily and industriously working on their defensive systems in London. They had already replaced the longbow ranges on Tassel Close at Bishopsgate with an artillery range, with earthen ramparts set up as targets. There I was able to observe the cannoneers from the Tower of London performing daily exercises to prepare for an invasion. It’s a strange spectacle to watch these cannon fired in the middle of the city with a degree of precision that, I’ll wager, our French soldiers are far from matching, and those of Spain even further. The noise and disturbance they made every day were proof that England knew that she was now in great peril of being besieged on her island by the enemies of her freedom and her religion.

  Our pints of wine duly downed, scarcely had I regained my room before Jane, having knocked on my door, came in, with an austere and contrite air, to present, as she put it, her “humble apology” for having so grievously maligned me by calling me a papist, and, worse, for having lied. She also wanted to offer me “10,000 million thanks” (a phrase I later learnt was frequently voiced by the queen and therefore repeated by her subjects) for having allowed her to keep her place at the Pope’s Head Tavern, without which she would have been reduced to famine since she had no family to fall back on. I presumed to beg a kiss from her as the sign of our reconciliation, which she gave me gravely and, I would almost say, religiously, since everything she did, she did with great seriousness, even this caress.

  When she’d gone, I threw myself on my bed without bothering to bolt the door, and, exhausted by all the dangers and emotions of the events in the common room, fell quickly to sleep and was prey to a se
ries of calamitous dreams. When I awoke, I was delighted to discover that I was alive, hale and hearty, and only gradually noticed that there was a candle burning on the bedside table that I was quite sure I’d not lit. And then I realized something else, which awakened me completely: sitting comfortably by my bed was an unknown woman, beautifully attired, who, seeing me open my eyes, removed her mask, smiled and, without saying a word, presented her hand, which, when I pressed my lips to it, she pushed hard against my mouth, bruising my lips with her ring—which I recognized.

  “Monsieur,” she said, “I must leave, and have but a few words to say: today is the twenty-second of November. On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, my mistress will receive Monsieur de Bellièvre. And at nightfall on the twenty-eighth, I will come here to fetch you so you can meet him.”

  * “Faith must be obtained by persuasion and not by coercion.”

  10

  MR MUNDANE, who came to see me the next morning, thanked me profusely for saving and healing his brother after Samarcas had wounded him in a sword fight in Paris and begged me to tell him of the circumstances of his death, an account he listened to patiently, his blond lashes batting from time to time over his pale eyes, his lower lip trembling, but with no other sign of emotion.

  “I’m amazed,” he confided when I’d finished, “that, after his duel with John, Samarcas had the mad audacity to stick his nose into affairs in London, where I put spies on his tail—whom, however clever he thought he was, he couldn’t shake. Ultimately, he led us to the Jesuit Ballard, and Ballard led us to Babington. Monsieur, I’m very sorry for your sister-in-law, who was, alas, the tool of this devil, without ever being aware of any of his activities. Her fate is entirely in the hands of Walsingham, whom you’ll meet at the side of the queen on the twenty-eighth. I am not able to say more: my orders seal my lips on this matter.”

  It was then my turn to thank him most warmly for wrenching me from the teeth of the hounds the day before in the common room.

  “Well,” he smiled, “it was nothing. As soon as your innkeeper brought me his ledger and I saw your name, I rushed to your side, fearing the worst. You see, Walsingham had given orders that I spread a rumour about the city that Monsieur de Bellièvre had brought with him to London not only the plague, but a bunch of hired assassins ready to kill the queen. With this we hoped to paralyse, by means of popular hostility, the two or three spies of Guise who managed to insinuate themselves into Bellièvre’s retinue. You were very wise, Monsieur, to part company with them as soon as you’d left the embassy.”

  “Very wise, perhaps,” I agreed, “but very imprudent as well. Of course, my aim was to make myself available, so the queen’s envoy could contact me without raising the suspicions of the Guisard spies you mentioned. But the very fact of having escaped their vigilance will have alerted them to the danger I represent, and I’m afraid that when I return to Paris, I’ll be more suspect than ever to the Guisards.”

  “Yes, I thought of that,” replied Mundane. “What would you think, Monsieur, if I asked you to leave the Pope’s Head and take up lodgings with a beautiful widow, whom people will take for your lover? Our League spies could not fail to see you in her company. Wouldn’t such a beautiful companion be reason enough for you to lodge elsewhere than at their inn?”

  Dear reader, I realize you are smiling, indulgently I hope, though perhaps in disapproval, at seeing me so frequently sleeping in feather beds in the missions and travels of my adventurous life, but I’m happy to report that there were no sequels to this “affair”—not because I can lay claim to any virtue, which is indeed fragile enough, especially when I’m away from home and city, and even more so when I’m abroad, where it seems less of a sin than when at home, as if the divine and human laws that condemn infidelity suddenly lose their power once the border has been crossed. But Lady T., though very beautiful in her maturity, had reached the age when a woman gives off the last sparks of her feminine enchantments, which are all the more alluring in that they seem like the ultimate victory over death. But she paired this particular seductiveness with a nobility of soul that aspires more to an enduring friendship than to a brief and brutal dalliance. And her resolution not to sacrifice friendship to a passing affair was the first thing she told me upon meeting, and she assured me that whatever little attentions her role obliged her to display in public—smiles, looks, hands held too long and other signs of affection—must cease at the threshold of the lodgings where she received me. I assured her she had nothing to worry about in this respect. So we lived these few days together in good and amicable understanding, very chastely within her walls and very amorously without. I must add that I did not have to constrain myself much to surround her with my attentions and caresses, and was quite sure she enjoyed receiving them, since she played her role with such apparent conviction that I couldn’t help feeling she was enjoying the whole thing.

  And so I paraded my dalliance with the beautiful Lady T. in every part of London where we could be seen together by Monsieur de Bellièvre and his gentlemen, in such a way as to make sure that our affair was thought real, and gossiped about in infinitely detailed accounts, whose echoes reached Paris, as I shall recount.

  I could not have wished for a better guide to London than Lady T., for she knew the city’s history and loved it so well that she convinced me to praise it enthusiastically, although I must admit that Aubépine had not been wrong to say that Paris was larger and more populous than its English counterpart. The population of London is about 120,000, whereas our capital counts more than 300,000 inhabitants. Nor did I find London so rich in monuments or, especially, churches, for a large number of them had been destroyed when the monasteries were dissolved and sold by the crown to various rich people, who levelled these gracious chapels to build tennis courts or taverns or simply private houses. It was assuredly a great pity that this iconoclasm reduced churches to rubble and destroyed along with them a great number of works of art.

  Which is not to say that St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey are not magnificent monuments, or that the Tower of London is not impressively spectacular, not to mention the various royal palaces of the queen (who is richer than the French king in this regard, having no less than a good half a dozen lodgings in London alone, as far as I can remember), but they adorn only the western part of the city: the rest, to the east (with the exception of the Tower), is a desert, composed of wooden houses with thatched roofs and sordid slums that have nothing to envy in the wretched abodes of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

  As for the streets, they’re everywhere as dirty and putrid-smelling as those in Paris, channelling down their middles the shit and piss from the houses on either side; and as for the water of the Thames, I doubt it’s any healthier than that of the Seine, given its odour, or less full of rats and dead animals. At the very least, one can credit the Londoners with more cleverness at drawing water from their river, since I saw, attached to one of the arches of London Bridge, a very ingenious wheel, which was turned by the rising tide and filled a reservoir from which the city could draw its water. As for its contents—I’d fear for my safety if I had to taste it, especially since the tide must make it somewhat briny.

  The biggest marvel of the city of London in my opinion is the Thames, which is so wide and deep that great galleons can sail right into the city. This means that the English capital, without having the vulnerability of being a coastal city, nevertheless has every advantage, since it’s both an inland city and a port where ships can drop anchor in total security.

  Parisians cannot imagine how immense the Thames is, next to which the Seine is but a stream, nor the amount of engineering genius that was required to span it with the famous London Bridge, which boasts no less than twenty-two arches, if I remember correctly. And I do not wonder that it required so many, since the current of the river is so furious that ferrymen and sailors must use great skill when passing under the bridge to avoid their boats being dashed against the piles. Lady T. told me that wh
en the queen travels to Greenwich from her palace at Whitehall, she walks down the steps to the Thames, embarks on her great royal barge, but then disembarks at the steps at the Old Swan before walking along Thames Street to Billingsgate, where she rejoins the boat—all of which allows her to avoid passing under the bridge, since the current is so dangerous there and has caused more than one fatality. Like Her Majesty, most of the English lords use the Thames as the Venetians use their canals, at least when travelling from west to east, as to go by river is much easier and faster than trying to make one’s way through the crowded streets.

  As soon as I’d set foot in Lady T.’s house, she ordered her tailor to dress me in the style that was all the rage in London, since my doublet and leggings would have immediately identified me as a Frenchman and exposed me to the peril of being beaten by passers-by, so great is their anger at the plots that Guise and the Jesuits have been hatching against their queen. So, twenty-four hours later, I became English, at least in my attire, and was delighted at Lady T.’s efforts to teach me the gait and the deportment of her compatriots. These lessons recalled the way my “little fly from hell” showed me how to move like a woman, since women enjoy playing mother even to their lovers and fashioning them to their own tastes.

  Lady T. also convinced me to speak quietly and little, since my accent might give me away: a wise precaution, and one that I immediately forgot when, as we were walking along London Bridge, I saw the disembodied heads exposed along the parapets and walls of the Tower.

  “Ah, how horrible!” I exclaimed. “Do they normally display the heads of those they execute?”

  “No certainly not!” replied my Lady T. “Only those who have betrayed the queen. The ones you see there are, no doubt, Babington and his henchmen.”

  I know not what magnet drew me towards them, and as I got nearer I had to place my handkerchief over my mouth and nose so I could examine each of the heads. There were nine in all, and the ninth, clearly recognizable despite the wind and rain that had darkened it, and the work of the crows, was definitely that of Samarcas.