Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  ‘Horror, perhaps. But humiliation? Shame? Disgust at the sound of your own heartbeat?’

  ‘Yes, yes and three times yes.’ Her own anger flared. ‘I’ve known them all.’

  Grymonde’s lips curled and she saw the immense pain and violence within him.

  ‘You were not born to be a whipped dog.’

  ‘Perhaps not. Yet I have been one. If you want my pity, it’s yours, take it. But I will not bear your scorn. You know nothing of me. Nothing beyond that which you have seen. My shame is my own. So, too, is my pride, so let your scorpions do their worst. I am ready to face our Maker, and so is my child. Are you?’

  Carla put her arms around her belly. Her first born, Orlandu, had been taken from between her thighs, his cord cut, and his yelling, struggling figure stolen from her before she’d even seen his face. She had been sixteen years old. She had not found the courage to even try to find him for twelve years more. Mattias had found him for her, in a sea of blood and tears, and at the cost of the only close friend of her life, Amparo.

  She looked full into Grymonde’s eyes. She didn’t speak.

  The rage in his shoulders eased.

  ‘We will say no more on this.’

  She doubted it, for his pain was too keen. Somehow, she understood.

  ‘Take me to a surgeon. My word is good, and I swear on my child’s life that I will see you richly rewarded when I can do so.’

  ‘Among whipped dogs we have a saying. When the surgeon is called to a woman giving birth, only one will leave the room alive.’

  ‘You would also earn the gratitude of my husband, a man whose loyalty is beyond price.’

  ‘Where is this loyal husband?’

  She didn’t react to this sting, though it struck deep.

  ‘A midwife, then.’

  ‘If you wish I will leave you here, in the street, with your mattress, your pillows, your fiddle and your Huguenot daughter, and even with a share of our gold to pay your way, a bigger share than any of these poor scoundrels will see. Say it and it will be done. I will set you free.’

  She knew he meant it. Reason screamed that she accept his offer.

  But the wild horse was running.

  ‘I am already free.’

  Carla and Grymonde studied each other.

  At length Grymonde raised his hands above the backboard. He held them out.

  ‘Give me your hands. That you might trust me.’

  Carla leaned back on her heels. She sensed nothing seductive in his gesture. Despite his intense maleness, she sensed no element of desire in him, not merely for her but for anything. She had lived among men, fighting men, in the closest proximity; she knew that emanation – that look – no matter how well masked by piety or courtesy, or even by impending oblivion. She had watched the faces of men who had never known a woman as they took their last breath, watching her; and even then she had sensed the ghost of their yearning, not for her but for that knowledge. She had known, too, men who loved only men. But Grymonde was like a rose that had no scent. He bewildered her. He terrified her. Yet the trust he asked for sat inside her, waiting to be affirmed, as heavy as her womb. She wondered if her child knew something she did not.

  She kept her left hand on her belly, to connect her son to her heart, and offered Grymonde her right. He took it in both of his. They were strong yet soft, padded with flesh. She thought of Mattias’s hands, which were strong but as calloused as hooves.

  ‘I am a king of rapists and murderers and liars and thieves, yes. Of the wicked, but not of the worst. Such is our world and as such we both know it.’

  ‘As above so below.’

  ‘As above so below. But there’s a difference. Down here, if the wind is blowing right, you get told the truth. So here is the truth. If not for your child the flies would be crawling on your eyes with the others, for I was paid a fine price to see it done. Instead, I take you to a woman who’s delivered more sturdy babes than all the surgeons of Paris.’

  ‘May I know her name?’

  ‘Her name is Alice. She is my mother.’

  The cart pulled out and turned into a much wider cross street, which Carla believed was Saint-Martin. It ran south towards the bridge and she was surprised to see not a soul. Grymonde held up a hand to halt the carts coming behind them and strode forward past Carla. She heard him mutter instructions to Bigot and Papin, who lowered the shafts and followed him. She shifted around on the mattress. As she watched Grymonde’s rolling, top-heavy gait, arms swinging wide from his vast shoulders, his huge head, she saw why Estelle had called Grymonde ‘the Infant’. From behind he looked like a giant child who had only recently learned how to walk.

  Some twenty paces ahead the Rue Saint-Martin was blocked by a chain strung at waist height between iron hooks bored into the walls of the buildings on either side. Midway along this side of the chain a guard stood leaning on a spear. He wore a white band around his arm and a white cross pinned to his cap. His mouth gaped as Grymonde walked towards him. He lifted the spear across his chest, as one who didn’t know what to do with it. He tried to conceal his terror. Grymonde held up his right palm and spoke some greeting she couldn’t hear, but the man was not reassured.

  Bigot headed for the farther end of the chain and Papin to the nearer. The guard glanced at both and thought he read their intention, but still could do no more than gawp at the monstrous figure rolling towards him. He didn’t dare level the spear and he’d left it too late to run. Grymonde skipped forward and as he landed he punched the guard in the stomach and plucked the spear from his hands and tossed it aside. He shoved the winded man to his knees and grabbed the chain as Bigot and Papin unhooked it at either end.

  Antoinette raised her head above the rim of the cart. Carla put an arm around her and pulled her face into her skirts. She didn’t look away. She wanted to absorb all she could of Grymonde.

  Grymonde looped a turn of the chain around the guard’s neck and, with a wave of his hand, stepped back. Bigot and Papin took up some slack and each threw his weight backwards like men engaged in a contest of strength. The chain sprang taut and the guard was lifted from his knees as his throat was crushed, yet his arms barely fluttered. He hung there, limp as washing. The youths seemed to take his failure to struggle as proof of some failure of their own, for with oaths and grunts they doubled their efforts. The guard’s skull canted over one shoulder and his cap fell off, and his face turned a darker shade of blue, but he remained as dead as before.

  Carla felt nothing for him. She had nothing to spare.

  Grymonde took the chain and gestured, and the lads eased off and dropped the chain on the ground. Grymonde unwrapped the iron noose and let the guard fall. He picked up the cap and the spear and returned to the cart. Bigot and Papin took the corpse by the ankles and dragged it behind them.

  ‘Take his clothes, if he hasn’t beshitted himself – they’re not bad quality – and dump him in yonder cesspit. When you come back, make sure you hook up the chain.’

  Grymonde put the spear in the cart, taking pains to conceal the blade beneath the baggage where it would not harm the passengers. He examined the inside of the dead man’s cap, as if looking for lice. Finding none, he looked at Carla.

  ‘No hangman could’ve done it neater.’

  ‘That must take a great weight off your conscience.’

  He laughed with such coarse gusto that Carla couldn’t help but smile.

  ‘Who is this errant husband of yours? If he’s not very rich, he must be very gallant to deserve you.’

  ‘I’m not sure Mattias would own to being gallant, though by instinct, and by fate, he is the most gallant man I’ve ever known. While he seeks riches, he does not count them the measure of a man, nor of woman nor child. I have seen him cast all he had into the flames, without hesitation or regret, to serve a friend. He is at heart a gambler, and life is both his game and his wager.’

  She found her voice trembling and stopped.

  ‘Then you’re well matched,’
said Grymonde.

  ‘I don’t know why he didn’t come home. I don’t even know if he’s alive.’

  ‘You were that friend, for whom he cast all into the fire.’

  Carla swallowed. She nodded.

  ‘At least that gamble he won,’ said Grymonde.

  Carla started crying.

  She lowered her head and shielded her eyes with one hand. She fought the tears, for she thought them weak and unseemly when she needed to be strong. Yet still they came. Her yearning for Mattias tore through her. He was no longer near. She no longer felt his essence reaching out to her. She felt utterly alone.

  She knew the feeling well enough. It had never really left her. It had dominated her youth and young adulthood. In youth her only companions had been music and the deserted shores of Malta, and the sea. Later, in her exile, there had been Amparo and more music; and then Mattias and her son, Orlandu, whom she had lost and in some ways never found, and who now was lost again. Inside her lay her baby, walled off since the last contraction by her own body. She could feel his head, bearing down through her pelvis, stretching her very bones, but she couldn’t feel him, not as she had come to feel him and know him these last months. Only now did she see how deep and marvellous that strange companionship had been, and how much she treasured it now that it, too, was gone.

  And yet in her power of loneliness, in the knowledge it had brought her of her self, she felt her greatest strength. In her power to be alone, to be utterly alone, lay her freedom. She dried her eyes on her skirts. She looked at Grymonde. He was twisting the cap in his enormous hands but had kept his peace, and for that she was grateful. She smiled.

  ‘The price of belonging is high. I’ve never been good at paying it.’

  He did not know quite what she meant, but did not enquire. He leaned into the cart and put the cap on Antoinette’s head, and, though it was too big, he arranged it at so charming an angle, one would hardly know it. The cap was of dark blue serge, the sort an artisan might wear. The white cross was made of strips of paper.

  ‘Today the price of belonging is death,’ said Grymonde. ‘But not if you belong with me. They won’t mistake us for Huguenots. We’re poor.’

  ‘The decree is true, then.’

  ‘The bourgeois militia muster in the Place de Grève. The Huguenot grandees are massacred already, down at the Louvre, but they entrusted that job to the Swiss.’

  ‘They can’t murder every Huguenot in Paris,’ said Carla.

  ‘They can try.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Why?’ asked Grymonde. ‘Do you care for that crowd of hypocrites? Or do you only think you should?’

  ‘I’d be a fool to argue moral distinctions with a butcher of women and children, and it’s a fool who’d expect me to do so. I will say I care for the company I’m forced to keep.’

  ‘I kill only for profit and to keep what’s mine. Does that make you feel better?’

  ‘Slightly.’

  ‘Splendid. Now we must move. We’ve work to do, and you more than any.’

  He beckoned the waiting plunder train and went to stand between the shafts of Carla’s cart and took one in either hand. The cart rolled forward a good deal faster than before. Carla felt a rising pang and braced herself on the timbers.

  They stopped again at Rue Saint-Denis and Grymonde fell into a parley with two sergents à verge. Money was exchanged. One of the sergents studied Carla, her hair and fine gown. Should she ask them for help? Their corruption was plain enough. What help, at best, could they offer? An escort to the Louvre? Or a church? Her only contacts at the court were Christian Picart and Dominic Le Tellier. She had warmed to neither, yet could think of no reason they would refuse her; if she could find them. Surely there was some gentleman there on whose mercy she could throw herself. But the Louvre was the scene of a bloodbath and at any moment she might find herself laid low. She didn’t know where to find Orlandu; in any case, he knew naught of childbirth or anyone who might. Would Grymonde let her go, as he had said he would, knowing she was witness to his crimes? The panic she most feared flickered to life.

  Grymonde stepped away from the sergents and walked back along the caravan giving instructions. Papin and Bigot returned from their errand, the latter carrying a bundle of clothes, which he tossed into one of the carts. Two of the carts peeled away. One of the sergents went with them. Concealed in the last cart, she knew, were the bodies of those Altan Savas had killed. Grymonde came up to her.

  ‘Carla, your thoughts are plain to see. Swear on your child that you’ll not betray my name or this –’ he swept a hand across his features ‘– and I’ll tell Sergent Rody to take you where you will. Your baggage, too.’

  The choice deepened her panic. She wished he had not offered it.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ Grymonde pursed cherubic lips. ‘A king is entitled to his whims.’ He hesitated. ‘And perhaps because, even from the beginning, this –’ again he gestured to his face ‘– did not appal you.’

  ‘How would you choose?’

  ‘My choice would favour the babe, which would mean my mother.’

  Carla struggled. To choose as her refuge a den of beggars and thieves where, by all accounts, even the King’s Guard dared not tread, seemed an act of madness. Yet inside her panic sat the trust she had already invested in this man, this grotesque Infant. Her fear was of abandoning that trust in exchange for the unknown.

  ‘I can’t say what other allies you might call on,’ said Grymonde, ‘or how close you hold them, but whoever they are – especially if they’re at the palace – I’d think twice.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Someone hired me to kill you and he knew where you could be found.’

  Besides Captain Le Tellier and Petit Christian, there must have been a dozen people in the Louvre who had known where to find her; others could have found out.

  She said, ‘The Louvre.’

  ‘This morning they slaughtered two hundred people after treating them to silk sheets and dinner with the Queen. My caution is well advised.’

  ‘I don’t dispute it. I’ve been too distracted to reason it out.’

  She felt another contraction loom and tried to fend it off by an act of will.

  ‘Who hired you?’

  She pressed on her belly with both hands.

  ‘Villains from the higher orders act through go-betweens, often several, so they’ll not be held to account. I know the man who hired me – and I’ll take an oath he holds nothing against you – but not who hired him.’

  She wanted to know more but the pang was unstoppable.

  She submitted to the pain.

  ‘Take me with you.’

  Their way led through a maze of alleys barely wide enough to take the carts. Even had she tried, Carla could not have remembered the way back.

  She had entered the Yards.

  She was, perhaps, the first of her rank, man or woman, ever to do so.

  The Yards were a fabled land, known only by the myths that walled it off from the rest of the world. Myths of depravity and violence, of diseased and feral children, of licentiousness without bounds, a place where a man might be killed for the feather in his hat. Wealthy Parisians loved to boast of these benighted lairs, as if their notoriety somehow enhanced their own prestige, despite that they’d never dared explore even their borders.

  As Symonne herself had declared, ‘We have the vilest beggars in Christendom.’

  The houses were built with no logic beyond the need to create more space in which to shelter from the rain. Each successive storey looked newer than the one below, though all were decrepit, each structure saved from ruin only by means of sagging against its neighbours. Some were absolute hovels, unfit for goats, made out of mud and turf. All stank of the humanity living as tight as bees inside them.

  Bigot and Papin pulled while Grymonde walked ahead, driving away flocks of curious children. They climbed a hill. Here and there the alleys opened onto cou
rtyards, and men walked out to stand with fists on hips as the carts rolled by. Their eyes lingered on the booty, and with something close to disbelief on Carla, and she saw Grymonde loosen his shoulders, as if trouble were afoot. He nodded curtly to this man and that, and hailed two of the more sinister by name, who hailed him back, though with little warmth. At length they passed them all without serious challenge.

  They descended the hill.

  In what seemed like the depths of the labyrinth but which, for all Carla knew, could have been its outermost edge, they swung into another yard and Grymonde stopped.

  ‘Welcome to Cockaigne.’

  In general this court was similar to the others, except for an odd house crammed into one far corner. The buildings surrounding the yard were four storeys high, but this one boasted seven, at least of sorts. The upper three floors, if such they could be called, were newer than the rest by centuries, and incomplete. The walls and frames had been thrown together from haphazard lengths of timber purloined from diverse sources. Their windows were glassless, irregular in size, and compressed into eccentric quadrangles by shifts in the structure. The whole of this new edifice had twisted and lurched forward at an alarming angle, prevented from collapse by a cable wound around its middle and anchored out of view, and additionally by a beam, cut from a ship’s mast, wedged steeply across the angle to the roof adjoining. It looked as if a summer breeze would send it toppling. In a different circumstance Carla might have laughed at it.

  ‘The tower needs a little work,’ admitted Grymonde, though not without pride. ‘But you won’t be lodged up there.’ He lowered the backboard. ‘Let me help you.’

  ‘Gladly. I felt like a felon en route to the block.’

  ‘Perhaps next time I’ll make you walk.’

  ‘In truth I would have preferred to.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘You had just murdered four adults and three children. I was your prisoner.’

  ‘That hasn’t stopped you flouting me whenever it took your fancy.’

  His massive hands took her beneath the armpits and lifted her down.