‘No, sir.’
‘Would you be willing to undertake a similar mission as Poley and other informants? It would mean living for a time in a Catholic household and finding out what you could – whether there is any treason at work there.’
In astonishment, I stared at him. ‘But . . . I know nothing of how an informant works. I don’t think I could do it.’
‘Kit, how would you feel if one of the great Catholic powers should overrun this country, establish a Catholic monarch on the throne, and introduce the Inquisition here? For make no mistake about it, you and I would both receive their . . . attentions. Could you endure that a second time?’
I could feel the blood drain from my face. My heart began to pound and my hands shook. My tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth and I could not speak.
He did not seem to expect an answer. Instead he rose from his chair and turned away from me to look out of the window.
‘I want to tell you a story. It’s a story you will have heard before, but I was there. I witnessed the horrors myself, and I have never, never forgotten them.’
He paused and looked back at me.
‘How old are you, Kit?’
‘Sixteen, sir.’ I managed to whisper the words.
‘Well, you would have been but two years old at the time, August 1572. You would have been living peacefully in a Portugal that was still an independent nation, before Spain seized control of the country. I was the Queen’s ambassador to the court of the French king Charles IX. He was king, but much of the power lay in the hands of his mother, Catherine de’Medici.’
He paused again and seemed to be looked at something beyond the window. Perhaps he was seeing Paris all those years ago. August 1572. I thought I knew what was coming.
‘We had a house in the Faubourg-Saint-Germain. That’s on the left bank of the Seine, not far from the great cathedral, Notre Dame de Paris. You won’t have been to Paris, of course. I was quite a young married man then and I had my family with me. My daughter Frances was five years old – she’s just three years older than you. My wife was expecting our next child and was feeling the heat of a Paris August, wishing she was at home in England. We had young Philip with us too, Philip Sidney. He would have been about eighteen then. Frances has known him all her life.’
He walked to his desk and straightened a pile of papers that was already straight, then crossed to the window again. He continued to speak with his back to me.
‘I had been involved in delicate negotiations for months with the French. There was a plan that our Queen might possibly marry one of the French princes, though the Catholic church in France was opposed to it and Her Majesty herself was uncertain . . . But whether or not that came to anything, we were trying to forge an Anglo-French alliance to resist the rising power of Spain, which was becoming a threat to all of us. Then that August the wedding was to take place between the French king’s sister (who was Catholic, of course) and Henry of Navarre, who was Protestant. Those of us who had been involved in drawing up the Treaty of Blois between England and France saw this as one more hopeful step on the road to reconciliation between the two countries and the two faiths.’
He sighed deeply and began to pace about the room. I had never seen Sir Francis, always so calm and contained, as agitated as this. I found I was biting my thumbnail and clasped my hands together to stop myself.
‘What we had not allowed for was the sheer evil malignancy of the Guises.’
‘That’s the Scottish queen’s French family, isn’t it?’ I felt I had been sitting silent for too long. Of course I knew it was. The Duke of Guise was behind most of the conspiracies Phelippes and I were tracking.
‘Yes. Because most of the leaders of the French Protestants, the Huguenots, were gathered in Paris for the wedding, the Guise faction saw this as an opportunity to massacre them. First there was a bungled attempt at assassinating Admiral Coligny, one of the prominent Huguenots. That was on the twenty-second of August. We didn’t know of it till later, but the Guises and their party then went to the king and swore there was a Huguenot conspiracy to kill him. He and his mother gave their blessing to the murder of every Protestant in the city.’
He came and sat down opposite me again, fixing me with a fierce look.
‘We were woken in the early hours of the twenty-fourth by the bells of Notre Dame ringing out. They were so close they seemed to be ringing inside our heads. It was a signal. And we could hear gunfire. Coligny was murdered in his lodgings, his body thrown out of the window and mutilated by the crowd below. Then the Catholics of Paris, led by the Guise faction, went on a blood-letting stampede throughout the city. I sent some of my servants out to discover what was happening. Two were slaughtered. The two who came back told us of what they had seen – bodies piled up in the street, houses looted and burning, the gutters running with blood. On the bridges over the Seine, men, women and children were lined up and thrown into the river, then shot as they tried to swim to safety, like sportsmen shooting ducks.’
He grimaced as though he had bitten on something rotten.
‘My wife and little Frances, and all the women, were terrified. We all were. I had the doors and windows barred and sent to the king for protection. He had a small guard posted around the house, but I put little trust in them. Already desperate people were pounding on the door, begging for sanctuary. Not only English citizens but Dutch and German and French. Even a few Italians and Swiss. I took them all in. We lived like a town under siege for days. In the end I was forced to hand over the French Protestants, which has haunted me to this day. I am sure they did not live to see the next dawn.’
He passed a hand over his face, as if it could wipe away the memories.
‘As soon as it was safe, I sent my wife and child home, though two of the men guarding them were recognised as English and beaten. But I had to stay in that filthy city until the following spring, stepping over blood-stained cobbles, past houses still marked with painted white crosses, so the murderers would know they were the homes of Protestants.’
His eyes bored into me, as if he needed to make me understand the full horror of what he was relating.
‘I think the most terrible thing about the whole terrible business was the atmosphere amongst the people of Paris. They treated it like a carnival. They paraded the bodies through the streets, played football with severed heads, butchered their victims and offered the body parts for sale, like meat on a butcher’s slab.’
He shuddered.
’These were their neighbours, their fellow-citizens of Paris, people they had lived beside in peace and friendship for years. They rejoiced. They dressed up in festive clothes. They gave thanks to God. Can you imagine anything more barbaric? More lacking in Christian feeling? Did you know that the Pope commanded the performance of a special Te Deum in celebration? He had a commemorative medal struck, showing an angel – an angel, mark you – flourishing a sword. The inscription read “Huguenots slaughtered”. In the view of the papacy, it was the greatest triumph for the Catholic church since the extermination of the Cathars.’
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then got up and poured us each a glass of wine. As he handed me mine, I saw that his hand was shaking.
For a while neither of us said anything.
‘I am sorry, Kit,’ he said at last. ‘I do not usually speak of it, for the bad memories will haunt my sleep now. Even though she was so small at the time, Frances still has nightmares. My wife has never been able to speak of it since. But I wanted you to understand what we are fighting against. You have endured the Inquisition. I have lived through that massacre. If we let down our guard, both could be repeated here. No one will ever know how many thousands were murdered in France, for the madness spread out from Paris like the plague, infecting the whole country. There was a scramble of frantic refugees coming to England, some in boats so overcrowded that they sank and never reached our shores.’