by Tim Willocks
She pushed the pot back under the bed. She remained on her haunches, wide awake now, as her belly grew hard with a contraction. She had grown familiar with such throngs in recent days, since the babe had shifted down into her pelvis and the shape of her belly had changed. Two days before she had found a show of pink mucus on her nightgown. She hadn’t planned to give birth in Paris, but now it looked likely to be so. She was not alarmed; rather she felt a heady excitement, and relief that the ordeal would soon be over. She wanted to hold him in her arms.
She was well cared for here. Symonne could not have been kinder. The midwife who had delivered Symonne’s four children was ready to attend her at a moment’s notice. A fine surgeon, Monsieur Guillemeau, a protégé of Ambroise Paré, had paid a visit the day before and was prepared to intervene in the event of complications. But as he had pointed out, she was strong, the baby was both strong and well positioned, and she had given birth before without extraordinary difficulties.
Her invitation to perform with Symonne at the Queen’s Ball, which she had thought a delightful idea, had coincided with one of the bursts of energy and elation that had been scattered throughout her pregnancy. Strange as it seemed now, she hadn’t considered refusing. She had expected Mattias to return in time to join her, for the invitation had included him. When he did not return, and when her official escort had arrived – six mounted men at arms under the command of Dominic Le Tellier – courtesy had obliged her to leave without him.
The journey had been staged so as not to overtax her, her accommodations had been generous and the weather fine. She had a passion for riding and being in the saddle had proved more agreeable than standing, sitting or lying. She had enjoyed the trip and felt that her babe, too, had appreciated his first taste of adventure. She had now been in Paris for ten days.
The throng passed and had been mild enough, yet she noticed for the first time that her womb did not completely relax. Soon, then. She was glad. She rose and peeled off her damp nightgown and threw it on the bed. The contraction had woken her babe. Not only could she feel him, she could see him move, the shape of her bump shifting. A foot perhaps, or a shoulder. She laughed. And then she felt alone, for she wished she could have shared the sight with Mattias.
It was hard not to think of Mattias. Whenever she did, she worried for him, but since leaving for Paris she had no longer felt angry with him for not coming home. Such anger had in part provoked her to come here, for she knew his worry would be greater by far than hers. She was ashamed of such pettiness. She had married him well knowing his trade and his venturesome spirit. He had tried for over three years to play the country gentleman, to manage tenants and livestock and orchards and vines, all of which skills he had at first enjoyed learning from her, but all of which turned on a dial so slow she had watched it begin to drive him mad. He was ingrained with the rhythms of commerce and war, not of nature. In the end the spectacle had been so like that of a bear on a chain that, while dreading the long periods they would be parted, she had urged him to follow his ambitions. Even so, his recent absence had hurt her, then angered her, and now scared her. With an effort, she put him from her mind.
She walked to the rear window.
Carla had left both casements open for the air, hoping that the muslin summer drapes would fend off the gnats. Her room was on the third floor. The moon was a day short of full. It hung in the west amid a mass of stars and cast a silvery green light across the dense black blot of the Ville. She wondered if it was true that the full moon made men mad. Staring at it, she felt a tinge of delirium. With sundown, the city as a whole descended into darkness, but here and there in the vast concentration of humanity, pinpoints of yellow glowed.
When she had first arrived, and being used to the countryside, she had sensed the presence of so many as a physical force, even when alone in this room. It was as if their countless and individual psyches formed a single entity, as drops of water a sea. The sense was both exciting and sinister. Would her barque be swamped and wrecked or borne along on the swell? After ten days she felt the presence less strongly. She had been neither wrecked nor borne along, she had been absorbed into the waves.
Paris repelled and fascinated her in near equal measure, fascination emerging triumphant. Within four days she had lost all sense of smell, despite that she had drenched her clothes in perfume. Its people, high and low, lived their lives with a rabid ferocity, as if few expected to see another day. Its vitality thrilled her. Its casual cruelties filled her with dismay. The thought undammed her other source of worry, for Orlandu, her son. He was out there, somewhere in the night, but she knew not where.
Seeing him had filled her with a greater joy than she had known in many months. Far more than the wedding, which had given her both an escort and an excuse, the prospect of throwing her arms around him had been her prime motive in coming to Paris. For a week they had been together for several hours a day. He had spent most nights here at the Hôtel D’Aubray, though, not to be outdone in matters of manfulness, he had insisted on pitching camp in the garden at the rear with Altan Savas.
She had been shocked, almost disappointed, to find how completely Orlandu had become a man. He had been gone almost a year but fending for himself in the capital had worked deeper changes than time. Orlandu had not lost the exuberance that made him shine and which she so loved, yet its light was shadowed, as a candle by stained glass, by some brooding awareness she had not seen before. Survival in Paris might explain the change, though he had been wary of telling her much about his life outside the realm of college and his studies. Perhaps that was normal. She had told her own parents nothing of her inner life. What had disturbed her most was how much like his father, Ludovico, he had become, not merely in his broadening build and obsidian eyes, but in the darkening intensity of his mind.
She had not seen Orlandu since Friday afternoon, yesterday, when he had arrived in some agitation to tell her that Admiral Coligny had been shot and the Queen’s Ball cancelled. She had invited him to keep her company, a prize she preferred to the ball, but he had intimated urgent obligations and promised to return as soon as he could.
Carla put her hands on her hips and arched her back. The baby kicked. Carla smiled, with the quick change of mood that she was now used to. The travails of her elder son would have to wait. She didn’t want to wake anyone else – the children next door or Symonne on the floor below – but she needed exercise. She missed her daily riding, a practice less easily accomplished here. The Hôtel D’Aubray was one large room deep, in the new, spacious style of Monsieur Cerceau, and a second window on the far side of the bedroom overlooked the Rue du Temple. She walked across the room and leaned on the front window sill to ease her loins. Through the gauzy drape a movement across the street caught her eye. She pulled the muslin aside.
A young girl sat cross-legged with her back to the wall of the building opposite. She did not move – her small white face was still – and yet, at the same time, her body appeared to be writhing in a slow convulsion, and her torso appeared to be cast in abnormal dimensions, too large for her head. Carla wondered if this were not some trick of the night, or yet another strange symptom of pregnancy. She looked again. Something detached itself from the girl and scurried away.
Carla turned away with revulsion.
The girl was covered with rats.
Carla’s skin crawled. She put both hands on her belly. The baby seemed unperturbed. She felt compelled to look again. It was true. The writhing was caused by a living coat of rats. To her relief, Carla saw that the girl was not under attack. Rather, she appeared to be quite at peace with the creatures. More than that, her chin was raised in a kind of ecstatic swoon. Her hands slid among the creatures, stroking their rank brown coats as if caressing the hair not of a pet but of a lover. Carla stepped back from the window. She swallowed a surge of bile. She needed a glass of water.
Before she could dwell on the girl further, two men emerged from the alley to the side of the building where th
e girl sat. Carla retreated further and watched.
One man was so huge in the shoulders and head that his gait rolled from side to side as if to stop him losing his balance. He conjured in her mind the Titans of Greek lore, the children of Gaia who had once ruled earth until thrown down by the gods. He wore a yellow shirt and his face was in shadow. The second man was as thin as a reed and wore his hair in a tarred pigtail. Knives hung from their belts.
The manner in which men planned acts of war was particular; it expressed a passion that no other task could rival, not even seduction. It penetrated their muscle and bone. Only surgeons at the slab could compare. Carla had seen men at it hundreds of times – knights, sappers, surgeons – too, during the fabled Siege of Malta.
Neither seemed bothered by the sight of the rat girl.
The girl scrambled to her feet and caused a brief and spectacular flood of vermin, which vanished into nowhere with the speed of an interrupted dream, and left just as strange an aura behind them. The titan spoke to the rat girl and pointed to something in the sky above the Hôtel D’Aubray.
Carla’s stomach dropped inside her.
The object of their campaign was the building in which she stood.
The rat girl looked up – at a point so directly above Carla that she almost looked up herself. The girl shook her head with vehemence and said no. The pigtailed man stooped to yell in her face then slapped her with such violence that she fell to the ground. Carla flinched. She flinched again as the titan grabbed the man by his pigtail and rammed his face into the wall. Had he not held him upright, pigtail, too, would have fallen. The titan muttered in his ear and let him go.
The rat girl got up and listened to the titan’s instructions, and this time she nodded. She took a small knife from a belt around her waist and handed it over. Pigtail took her by a stick-thin arm and they walked south down the street.
The titan looked over at the Hôtel D’Aubray. Carla could not make out his features, only the huge clean-shaven rim of his lower jaw. He raised his face. For a moment she had the impression he was looking straight at her. She took a third step backwards. The titan turned and rolled away down the alley.
The street was once more empty but for moonlight, yet the titan had left in his wake that uncanniest of all guests: not mere fear, but the premonition of disaster.
Carla paced the room, naked. She called on her reserves of calm. She asked herself if what she had seen was just another bizarre incident in the life of the turbulent city. But the titan had not merely looked at the Hôtel D’Aubray; he had studied it. She hurried to the rear window and looked down.
She had been accompanied from La Penautier by Altan Savas. He was a Serb by birth, a galley slave whom Mattias had bought from the Knights in Malta four years before. Like Mattias, he had once been a janissary of the Grande Turke and he enjoyed her husband’s absolute confidence, an honour bestowed on so few she could not name another who was still alive. Despite the three-week journey from the south, Carla felt she hardly knew Altan Savas. He lived in a world unto himself. He prayed to Allah, though he let few know it. She rarely heard him speak French, though he and Mattias would talk for hours in Turkish. Altan, at his own request, had been bivouacked on a palliasse in the garden. If she had understood his explanation, a mixture of word and mime, it had been, ‘If the lion sleeps indoors, he cannot smell his prey.’
As she looked down she saw that the palliasse was empty.
Carla put on a gown of pale gold linen tailored to accommodate her state. Her heart was beating so fast she could hardly think. To slow it, and in one of those irresistible whims that characterised this pregnancy more than her others, she took the time to braid her hair. The chore soothed her and the braid made her feel stronger; she didn’t know why. And since, on a similar whim, she had not cut her hair since learning she was expecting, it fell almost down to her waist in long waves.
She went to the door and stepped out into the upper hallway. Windows lit the stairwell from the front and the rear. A ladder led up to the cramped attic bedroom of the housekeeper and her husband, poorer in-laws of Symonne, Denise and Didier. Across the hallway was the children’s room. Carla opened the door and peeked inside. The four D’Aubray children – Martin, Lucien, Charité and Antoinette – were asleep in two beds. Martin and Lucien had vacated their room to make way for Carla.
Carla closed the door. Another contraction began. She leaned on the wall and breathed. The contraction was the strongest yet. She questioned the alarm bubbling in her stomach. It was the dead of night, when all things seem strange. She had seen some peculiar characters in the street. In Paris such figures were legion. Should she wake Symonne on the floor below and frighten her? Where was Altan Savas? The contraction passed but left her feeling faint.
She returned to her room and closed the door. She drank some water. She went once more to the front window. The Rue du Temple was empty. She made up her mind to go down to the garden. As she turned she heard a sound – a dulled clattering – as if from behind the gable wall. Carla started for the door. A muffled squeal, of fear marbled with fury, stopped her. Cinder fragments tumbled into the fireplace followed by a billow of soot. A moment later a pair of arms appeared, and coils of hair, then a head. A small, scrawny body slithered from the chimney, naked from waist to feet.
Carla stared at the rat girl.
The girl crawled into the hearth and coughed on her hands and knees. Her rough woollen smock had slipped up past her hips, which bore fresh grazes. She was filthy, though perhaps not much more so than was usual for her. The descent had grazed her elbows, too. Her long, corkscrew hair was so matted with grease that the soot had hardly gained purchase. The ringlets looked dark red but it was hard to be sure. She recovered with remarkable speed, as would a wild animal, and hawked black spittle onto the rug.
She looked up and saw Carla.
Wild grey eyes glittered in a soot-smeared face.
Inspired by the girl’s example, Carla recovered quickly.
‘Are you hurt?’
The rat girl didn’t answer. She scrambled to her feet. She was all skin and bone, poorly nourished, but rather older than Carla had imagined, perhaps nine or ten. Perhaps street life had aged her beyond her years. She coughed again. Carla went to the table and poured a glass of water. She stepped forward and offered it to the girl. With quick glances the girl took in Carla, the room, the glass.
‘If you try to stop me, I’ll kill your baby.’
‘I won’t try to stop you.’
The girl grabbed the glass and drained it. She gave it back to Carla.
‘You came down the chimney head-first?’
‘Gobbo pushed me down head-first, so I couldn’t climb back out.’
The rat girl went to the window. She seemed scared, but not of Carla.
‘I’m in the wrong room.’
The chimney stack on this side of the house served the fireplaces in Carla’s bedroom, the parlour below, and the business office on the ground floor. None had seen use during the summer. The second stack, on the southern gable, served the children’s room, Symonne’s bedchamber and the kitchen stove. Carla wondered how much so small a thief had expected to steal. Then she realised.
‘You were sent down the chimney to open the front door for your friends.’
‘The back door.’
‘Is Gobbo the big man?’
‘No. That’s Grymonde, the Infant of Cockaigne.’
She recited this bogus title with a fierce solemnity, as if she expected Carla to tremble. When she didn’t, the girl bared her teeth and clawed her fingers and growled. Without meaning to, Carla laughed. There was something elvish about the girl, elvish in spirit, and Carla couldn’t help but be charmed by it. The spite in the girl’s threats reflected the world she lived in.
‘Don’t laugh at me. You won’t laugh when Grymonde comes.’
‘I didn’t mean to be unkind. If you look in my mirror I think you’d laugh too.’
‘You have a m
irror?’
‘You can use it if you tell me your name. My name is Carla.’
‘Estelle.’
‘I love that name. It’s one of the prettiest of all names.’
‘Grymonde calls me La Rossa. Because he loves my hair.’
‘I’m sure it’s beautiful when it’s clean. Why don’t you stay with me, Estelle? I can help you wash your hair and find you some clean clothes. Then we can eat breakfast if you’re hungry.’
Estelle considered this, with a mixture of innocence and guile. Fear won out over hunger. She shook her head. ‘I have to go. Don’t try to stop me.’
There was a hard knock on the door. An accented voice said, ‘Madame?’
‘Come in, Altan.’
Estelle glanced about in panic. Her eyes fell back on the fireplace.
‘No. Don’t be afraid,’ said Carla. ‘I won’t let you come to any harm.’
The door swung open. Altan Savas took in Estelle as he bowed to Carla. His sword was sheathed but he held a dagger tight along his forearm. Estelle bolted for the fireplace. Altan sheathed the dagger as he strode across the room.
‘Your pardon, madame.’
‘Don’t hurt her.’
Estelle was scrambling back up the chimney when Altan seized her by the waist and dragged her down. She struggled. Altan slapped her face. Estelle’s eyes rolled up.
‘Altan, no.’
Altan held the girl’s wrists behind her back in one hand. He wore a thick black moustache in the style of the janissaries, which he smoothed with finger and thumb.
‘I find a man.’ He searched for words and failed. He indicated the roof then raised two wriggling fingers through the air to illustrate someone climbing up, then climbing down. Then Altan flipped his hand down flat, palm upwards.
