There was no trace of light from the windows of the library, but the door was unlocked, so I slipped in as quietly as I could and lit my candle. Shadows leapt back and I felt a pulse of affection at the sight that greeted me; Cotin had fallen asleep at his desk with his head on an open book, resting on the crook of his arm, his lamp burned down beside him. I crouched and shook him by the shoulder.
‘Wha-?’ He jerked awake, turning unfocused eyes on me. I motioned for him to be quiet.
‘Where’s Albaric’s cell?’
‘Eh? Dear Lord, what happened to your face?’
‘Not important. I need to look in Albaric’s cell. You have to show me which one it is.’
He levered himself up, wincing at the complaints of his joints. ‘I had hoped not to see you again tonight.’ He eased his neck from side to side.
‘My apologies. We need to hurry.’
‘Why, what hour is it?’
‘No idea. But he could return any moment.’
‘It is him, then? You are sure?’
‘No. But it seems the most likely possibility. He had a key and there was nothing wrong with his hand.’ I ran my tongue along my swollen lip and tasted blood. ‘That’s why I want to see his cell.’
Cotin eyed the statue under my arm, muttered a half-hearted protest and motioned for me to follow. At the door, he blew out my candle, in case the light gave us away to the night watch, and we both pulled our hoods around our faces. Keeping to the shadows against the walls, he led me around the arcades of the cloister and into the courtyard behind. The friars’ dormitory, directly ahead, was a long building of unadorned stone with rows of individual cells on two storeys facing one another across a wide corridor. I followed him up the first flight of stairs to the upper level. From the recess of the staircase, he pointed to the left-hand row of doors and held up four fingers. My eyes had begun to grow accustomed to the dark; I handed him the statue and left him hidden on the stairs while I crept along until I came to the fourth door. I glanced about me to either side before putting my hand to the latch. The atmosphere was oddly silent here, not even the usual snores or grunts you might expect from a house of sleeping men. It was as if every friar were holding his breath in anticipation. All the doors I could see appeared to be closed fast, but in my experience that did not necessarily mean no one was looking.
I let myself into Albaric’s room without a sound, keeping my hood up, and struck my tinder-box until the damp candle caught flame. By its light I saw a plain table against the wall by the door, with a large leather-bound book lying on it. That would be a place to start, at least; letters might be hidden between pages or inside bindings. I picked up the book, trying to hold the candle steady, but the volume was too large to lift with one hand, and as I was shaking it by the spine it slipped from my grasp and landed with a loud slap on the table. I froze, every muscle taut and trembling, eyes fixed on the door as I waited to see if the noise had disturbed anyone.
‘What in Jesu’s name-?’ said a voice behind me.
I whirled around with a gasp, to see Frère Albaric sitting up on the mattress against the far wall, tangled in a woollen blanket. He stared at me, equally amazed, his eyes dazed and puffy with sleep. His hair stood up in tufts around his tonsure; one cheek was marked with a crease from his sheet and I could see that he was wearing a linen nightshift. His face bore the naked vulnerability that comes from being jolted out of deep sleep. I had been so convinced that he must have been the man in the storeroom I had no more than glanced at the bed to register a heap of blankets. I recovered my presence of mind before he did and blew out the candle as I slipped back into the corridor, hoping he had not had a chance to see my face.
A hand shot out from the darkness and grabbed my arm as I emerged; I jumped again, but it was Cotin, pressed up against the wall.
‘Frère Joseph is not in his cell,’ he whispered, pulling me by the sleeve and pointing me to a door on the opposite side, towards the far end. I scuttled along, hoping that Albaric would conclude he had imagined a figure from his nightmares and fall back to sleep without feeling the need to raise an alarm.
I eased the door of Joseph’s cell shut behind me and leaned against it, trying to slow my breathing. When I had managed to light the candle again, I saw that the almoner’s room was laid out much as Albaric’s, though the few furnishings were more obviously expensive: a mattress on a wooden pallet under a small arched window, set high in the wall opposite the door; on the right-hand side, a table and on the left, a wooden trunk. At least this time the bed was empty; from the tumbled sheets it looked as if Joseph had left in a hurry. The table was also bare, save for a branched silver candlestick, but to my relief, the chest was not padlocked. I opened the lid and began to pull out whatever I could find: good quality linen undershirts; a pair of leather shoes; a rosary of amber beads, smooth as glass; a tortoiseshell comb … but nothing more. Not in a trunk open to anyone; I should have realised. I cast around to see where else he might have hidden personal effects. The room held no other furniture, no cupboards, no drawers. Where had I squirrelled away the writings I wanted to keep from prying eyes when I was a friar? My eyes lighted on the mattress.
I fixed my candle into the silver holder on the table and set it down by the bed so that I could grope along the underside of the mattress until I felt a split in the seam, just large enough to slip a hand inside; through the lumps of horsehair my scrabbling fingers closed around a sheaf of papers. I drew them out and untied the ribbon binding them as I brought them closer to the light. The topmost sheet was instantly recognisable; another crude sketch of King Henri mincing in women’s clothes while two sly-looking young men with lascivious pouts wrapped their fists around the sceptre he held erect in his lap, above a set of satirical verses about the Queen Mother’s desperate recourse to witchcraft to secure a Valois heir. The paper beneath was more unusuaclass="underline" it showed a series of drawings depicting a variety of imaginative forms of torture and execution, while a queen looked on, the name ‘Elizabeth’ emblazoned above her head. The text was an impassioned plea, shorn of all ribald jokes, urging the people of France to consider the plight of their fellow Catholics in England, and to rise up and exterminate heresy before they too suffered the same fate at the hands of the Protestants. The writer ended his polemic by calling on true Catholics to finish the work begun on the glorious night of Saint Bartholomew’s – an extraordinary exhortation for which he would certainly be executed, if his authorship could be proved. The style – and I could almost swear the handwriting – were identical to the ones I had found in Paul’s room. That, at least, was evidence of a connection between Frère Joseph and the murdered priest.
But there was another paper beneath, of better quality and written in a different hand. As I read, I felt my eyes widen.
Your fingerprints your mouth your tongue burn my skin long after you are gone. Only you know the secret places of my body, the way I ache for you, in the knowledge I should not. Yet for all the judgement and scorn arrayed against us, for all the punishment that might befall us if it were known, I would not have given up one single hour in your embrace. You consume me. My desire wills me to you like a hawk towards home.
Followed by more in this vein, though it was neither signed nor dated; hot words for a friar who had taken a vow of celibacy. Joseph was running a great risk in keeping such an inflammatory letter, but perhaps his high birth gave him immunity from routine searches. I held the paper up to my face and sniffed it; faint traces of perfume lingered behind the smell of stale horsehair. The writing was distinctive, the letters embellished with elaborate flourishes; an educated hand, but belonging to someone with a taste for ostentation. I decided to keep the note; Joseph de Chartres may be well connected, but proof of a forbidden love affair might make him vulnerable. I was not sure how much could be achieved without a signature to the letter, or any means of identifying his correspondent, but it would surely make him nervous to suspect that someone else had it in their possession, and that might give me leverage.