‘Are you really a count?’ I asked, as he worked. For a while he didn’t answer. I could tell the task was costing him considerable effort; it must have been painful to bend his fingers.
‘I had that name once,’ he croaked, when I no longer expected a response. ‘Now I am no one.’
‘Why are you here?’ I was determined to keep up a conversation, though he seemed to find speech difficult. But only this meagre human contact could keep me from despair, I knew, though it was probably too late for him.
Another long silence elapsed; I could not tell if he was ignoring me or merely concentrating.
‘Saint Bartholemew’s,’ he whispered, at last, and his voice cracked as he spoke. At the same time, I felt the rope slacken slightly around my wrists. I tried to pull them apart; he laid his hand on my arm. ‘Patience,’ he murmured, and resumed his plucking at the knot.
‘Saint Bartholemew’s night? You are here because of the massacre?’ I flinched, despite myself.
He remained silent as he eased the rope away from my hands and rubbed at the raw patches on my wrists where the bindings had broken the skin. Gingerly, I raised one arm and touched the back of my head; there was a tender lump where I had been struck, and my hair was crusted with dried blood, but the wound was no longer bleeding. The massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s happened thirteen years ago. Had he been here all this time? My mind baulked at the thought.
‘They came for the wedding,’ he said eventually, in a distant voice. ‘From the south. All Huguenots, you see. They were guests in my house.’
‘Who?’
‘My cousin. His wife. The little girls. They had new gowns for it.’ His voice faltered and his breath hiccupped again. If he had had eyes, they would have been shedding tears. I reached out and through the dark I found his hand. Swallowing down my revulsion, I let him fold those dreadful skeletal fingers around mine and gradually his distress appeared to subside.
No one in France could fail to shiver at the mention of Saint Bartholomew’s night. The twenty-third of August, 1572, when Catholic mobs rampaged through the city, putting every Protestant they could find to the sword. The Seine ran crimson with blood for days after. Catherine de Medici had tried to force an end to the wars of religion by marrying her wild and beautiful daughter Margot to the leader of the Huguenots, the Protestant Henri of Navarre. The marriage was not approved by the Pope, and many devout Catholics were furious at the prospect of such an alliance, but Catherine pushed ahead with the wedding regardless, inviting the most prominent Huguenot nobles in the country to Paris for the celebrations, more extravagant and decadent than any of her famed entertainments. After three days of feasting, dancing and pageantry, the bells of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois rang out at midnight – a prearranged signal for Catholic troops to kill all the Huguenot leaders in Navarre’s entourage, off guard, undefended, many of them in their bedchambers. No one, even now, could say for certain who planned the assassinations or gave the initial command, but the bloodlust spread quickly through the streets; anyone known or suspected to be Protestant was cut down where he stood, or dragged out of bed to be murdered along with his family. Women, children, babies, grandmothers; corpses piled up in the gutters and clogged the river.
I was still in Italy at that time, but my friend Philip Sidney had been living in Paris and told of barricading himself into the English embassy along with Sir Francis Walsingham and his young family as the mob tried to break down the doors. Neither ever forgot the horror of that night: the screaming, the smell of blood, the sight of heads, limbs, entrails scattered in the streets the next morning as if on a battlefield. The shovelling up of corpses, so many that there was not room in Paris to bury them all, the unclaimed dead left to rot along the banks of the Seine. The memory of it drove every decision Walsingham made with regard to the defence of England; he believed the same horrors would come to London if Catholic forces invaded. When King Henri talks of an uprising, it is another Saint Bartholomew’s that he fears – as does every citizen of Paris, Catholic or Protestant. It is a fear that the Catholic League has learned to exploit, as the pamphlet I had found in Joseph’s room made clear.
‘What happened to your cousin?’ I asked the Count.
‘It was her doing,’ he said, with unexpected vehemence, clutching at my hand. I felt his spittle fleck my cheek. ‘The soldiers came, demanding I give them up. I said I had not seen them. But they broke the doors down and ransacked my house. They found them all. Even their servants.’ He paused to draw a rattling breath. ‘I said I had not seen them,’ he repeated, in a hollow voice.
‘So you were punished,’ I murmured, understanding. ‘For not seeing.’
‘He took my eyes. And I thanked God, because then I was spared the sight of the little children lying in their gore. Would he had taken my life too. But he will not let me die. Nor will he let me live. He says he still has a use for me in here.’
‘Who do you mean? Who blinded you?’ I asked.
He heaved a great sigh. ‘You know who. Young Henri.’
‘The King?’ I drew back, staring.
‘No. You are confused, boy. Charles is the king.’ The old man gripped my hand tighter. ‘I mean Henri Le Balafré.’
The Scarface. The popular nickname of Henri, Duke of Guise, on account of his prominent war wound.
‘But you said it was her doing. Whose? Do you mean Catherine?’
It was asserted as fact by many that the Queen Mother had issued the order for the Protestant leaders to be killed, to isolate her new son-in-law and ensure he knew where his loyalties now lay. In her defence, people said, she had not anticipated how the flame of murder would catch and consume the entire city, and spread through France until perhaps seventy thousand Protestants lay slaughtered. But the uncomfortable fact remained that, before the bells rang out at midnight, someone’s agents had slipped silently through Paris, marking every Protestant home with a white cross, ready for the Angel of Death. There were plenty of others, of course, who pointed the finger at Guise.
‘No more now,’ the Count said, his voice drained.
I let go of his hand and felt him slump against the wall beside me. He had been in this pit for so long he had no idea King Charles was dead, and his brother now on the throne. But his memory seemed sharp enough when it came to the terrible events that had brought him to this place. If it was true that he was being kept here by the Duke of Guise, then we must be in a Guise prison, and I had no prospect of sending word to anyone with the influence to save me. Another wave of panic overwhelmed me; I had to stand and pace the limits of that confined space before the pounding in my chest and head would subside. Perhaps after some weeks the King would notice I had disappeared, but would he make the effort to find me? Would he dare to confront Guise for my liberty, if I were still alive by then? I forced myself to cling to the gaoler’s words about food; if I was to be fed, they surely did not mean to kill me immediately. Cotin had said that the Abbé wanted me questioned about Paul Lefèvre; it was no great leap to suppose that it was Guise who was interested in the answers, and that the Abbé had handed me over. Perhaps I was only here as a prelude to interrogation – a thought which did not bring comfort. When I had brought my breathing under control again, I crouched beside the Count.
‘You were at court when Charles was king?’ I asked.
‘Another kind of prison,’ he murmured. It appeared he had not lost all his wits, then.
‘Did you ever hear mention of Circe?’ It was a long shot, I knew; the man had been shut away from the world for thirteen years. Much had changed at court since then, but perhaps not that much.