Conspiracy

EIGHT

I returned to the Left Bank, breath clouding in angry puffs around me as I stamped home, as if I might outpace the humiliations of the past hour. My face burned against the cold air, flushed with wine and fury as I counted again all the ways in which I had been a fool. I had lost the papers that would have linked Joseph to Paul Lefèvre; I had set the printer Brinkley on his guard and gained nothing by it, and I had made an enemy of Paget – not that I now supposed him to have been anything else. I did not believe for a moment in his change of heart, his declaration of loyalty to England, nor his surprising willingness to make an ally of me, who he still held responsible for the ill fortunes of his friends and fellow conspirators. And yet part of me had responded when he spoke of the yearning for home with a frankness that struck such a familiar echo in me; I could almost have been duped into trusting him by the desire to believe that he too understood my particular loneliness. But Paget was clever; he had recognised that tender spot and aimed straight for it. At least I had not allowed myself to be flattered into giving him anything useful.

I wondered again who could have confessed to Paul and what they could have said that had made him break the seal of the confessional. It must be this that the Duke of Guise feared he had confided to me. The key surely lay in whoever or whatever Circe might be, but I could think of no one in Paris I trusted enough to ask, except Jacopo Corbinelli. Working as secretary to Catherine de Medici offered him a comprehensive grasp of court intrigue, and he was the only one I could count on to keep a confidence; I had left it too long to share this business with him. I determined to visit him that evening. The decision raised my spirits; at least with Jacopo I could lay out the whole story, rather than the partial truths I had been dealing to Stafford or Paget.

It was dark by the time I reached rue du Cimetière, though still too early to find Jacopo at his home on the rue des Tournelles, even supposing he were to return there today; he usually stayed at the palace until Catherine had taken her supper, and she often called on him for company in the evenings, increasingly these days as she grew more troubled by her son and her gout. Frequently Jacopo stayed in his own rooms near her apartments at the Tuileries in case she summoned him. I would try his house later; in the meantime, I decided to take my filthy clothes to the laundress in the rue Macon who had helped me to hide from the men searching Paul’s lodgings, one of whom I was now certain must have been Frère Joseph de Chartres. It occurred to me that she alone had seen the two men close to, and that, since she had seemed well disposed to me, she might be able to give a more detailed description. I also realised that it would likely take flattery or bribery to persuade any laundress to touch those clothes, such was the general fear of plague or gaol fever, and that as the woman had helped me once she might be convinced to repeat the favour.

She appeared disconcerted when she opened the door to me, but she patted her hair into place and smiled, pulling the door to behind her and wrapping her thin shawl tighter around her shoulders against the night air.

‘Monsieur. Dwarves after you again tonight?’

‘Not this time. I am sorry to disturb you so late, madame, but I have some items here that urgently need washing. They may require more effort than usual,’ I added. ‘For which I will pay extra, of course.’

Lips pursed, she took the sack from my hand and opened it to peer inside; she recoiled, suppressing a slight retch.

‘Mother Mary! Did you fall in a privy?’ From the look on her face, I guessed whatever appeal I might once have held was rapidly diminishing.

‘Something like that.’

She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand; the skin on her fingers was cracked and raw.

‘I will pay well,’ I said, again, wishing now that I had not thrown those gold écus to Paget.

She considered, then gave a brief nod. ‘I’ll need to look at them in daylight. Give me a few days – they won’t dry quick in this weather anyway.’ She hesitated, tucking a loose strand of hair back into her ragged bun, and darted another glance into the house.

‘Thank you. There was something else I wanted to ask you. Those men you saw – the ones who were looking for me. You said one was a cleric.’

She frowned. ‘He wore a black robe. Looked like a religious. I saw him again today.’

‘The same man? You are sure? Where was this?’

‘Here, in the street. Around noon – I was on my way home to give the children their dinner. I wouldn’t have paid any attention but I recognised his face under his hood. He was going into one of the buildings.’

‘Which one?’

‘The house you asked me about before. Where the curé lived, the one from Saint-Séverin.’

I ran a hand through my hair. So Joseph – for it must have been him – had been back to Paul’s lodgings today. He must still be looking for whatever he had come in search of the first time, when he and the dwarf had almost caught me, and it had to be important, for him to risk being seen here again now that he knew he was suspected of Paul’s murder, despite his powerful friends. Some evidence, then, which might connect him with Paul or with a bigger plot. Perhaps he would have left traces behind that might indicate what he needed to find.

‘Did you see him leave again?’

She shook her head. ‘I was out delivering laundry all afternoon. You could ask the old widow who lives downstairs in that building, she might remember.’

I thanked her and walked down a few houses to the door of Paul’s lodgings. The bells had not yet struck six but the street was empty; a few windows showed the glow of candlelight through gaps in shutters, and voices carried from inside, the noises of evening meals ending and families settling for the night: a clatter of plates, an infant’s thin wailing, a woman’s voice singing, the words indistinct. Frost crunched under my boots in the ruts left by carts. The houses were sunk in shadow; only a thin rind of moon and a scattering of stars behind drifting clouds offered light and there was no one but the circling gulls to watch me slip my knife into the lock of the street door. At least, so I hoped.

I closed it behind me as soundlessly as I could manage but was certain I caught the click of a latch from inside. The small entrance hall by the stairs was darker than the night outside, but I sensed a tension, as if someone were holding his breath. I could not see if the door into the ground-floor room was open. I paused briefly, wondering if I would do better to knock and speak to this old woman the laundress had mentioned, rather than risk being caught breaking in like a thief, but decided against it; with so many people interested in Paul’s death, it was quite possible she had already been suborned by somebody to report on anyone prowling around the dead priest’s rooms. I climbed the stairs slowly, wincing at every creak and groan of the old wood that echoed around the ceiling. Unless the woman was stone deaf, I might as well have flung the door wide and announced myself.

The door to Paul’s rooms was locked, suggesting that Frère Joseph had been in possession of a key and sufficient time to have conducted his search without being disturbed. I strained to catch any sound but could hear nothing from within the room, and when I peered through the keyhole I saw, to my relief, that the key had not been left in the lock. After some work with my knife, the bolt yielded and I slipped inside the room once more. The air was cold; a sharp draught chased around my legs and the curtain closing off the bedchamber billowed as I closed the door behind me. I rummaged in my bag for a candle stub and tinder-box; once it was alight, I kept it shielded with my hand and turned slowly so that I could take in anything that struck me as different from the last time I had seen this room.

The smell of old woodsmoke still lingered, overlaid with a new scent, delicate and noticeable only in patches, as if it were shifting just out of reach: perfume, spicy and rich, a scent that made me think of Henri and the rarefied air of the court, not the austere rented rooms of a dead priest. Turning towards the desk, I noticed a heap of cloth on the wooden chair. I lifted it to see that it was a linen undershirt and silk hose, folded neatly. I bent and sniffed the shirt; it smelled faintly of sweat, but no trace of perfume. Perhaps Joseph had come here to change clothes; one of his friends or relatives could have arranged to meet him with an outfit less conspicuous than the habit of a religious, and he might have applied the perfume as part of his altered image. This idea brought a jolt of panic; suppose he had changed his appearance in order to leave Paris until someone else was hanged for Paul’s murder and he was no longer under suspicion? Once he was out of the city, the chances of finding him or holding him responsible were as good as non-existent. But if he had swapped clothes, where was his friar’s habit?

The candle flame snapped and shivered in a sudden gust as the curtain across the partition flapped again and I realised that the small casement in the alcove must be open. Had Joseph escaped that way, to avoid being seen in his new disguise? I pulled back the drape and stifled a cry at what I saw in the instant that the wind snuffed out the candle.

A man lay prone on the bed, naked, his face turned away from me, his skin white and disturbingly luminous in the gloom. Though I had sprung back by instinct, in the same moment I knew already that he would not be woken. I reached out a tentative finger to make sure; the flesh was cold and unyielding. I leaned across and pulled the window shut; it took a few moments before I could reignite the tinder-box and steady my breath. The crown of his head was tonsured; I had little doubt that this was Joseph de Chartres, who only the previous night had landed such a forceful punch to my jaw and outrun me through the fog. Now he was lying dead and naked in the bed of the man I supposed him to have murdered.

Attached to the wall above the bed was a fixture for a candle; I fitted the light into the bracket so that I had both hands free to turn the body on to its back, half-dreading what I would find. But there was no blood; his skin had the flawless white sheen of a waxwork, an impression aided by his fair complexion and sparse body hair. I laid him out with as much gentleness as I could manage, given the weight of his body; whatever a man may have done in life, it is a basic human courtesy to treat his corpse with dignity. I lifted his right arm and felt along its length. The time I had spent as a young friar assisting the brother infirmarian at San Domenico had given me a basic knowledge of human anatomy in various states; it had always interested me to note, as we prepared the body of a deceased brother for burial, the different stages of stiffening in the limbs, how quickly the discolouration would appear on the skin. The ability to judge such matters had proved unexpectedly useful more than once over the past few years when confronted with unnatural death. With Joseph the rigidity was only just beginning to set in; I estimated that he had been dead not much more than four or five hours. That fitted with the laundress’s story that she had seen him arrive here around noon.

I looked more closely at the face. He would have been an attractive man in life; now his lips had taken on a bluish tinge and he stared at the canopy of the bed from glassy eyes. I lifted the candle down for better light. Though it was cheap tallow and the flame coughed out an oily smoke, I could see in the dim light that the whites of his eyes were flecked with scarlet pinpricks. I clenched my jaw, fought down my distaste and prised open his mouth to find the tongue swollen, the inside of his mouth darkened with discoloured patches, all signs suggesting that he had been strangled. A faint brown mark ran across his throat, almost too indistinct to suggest a ligature. Soft material, then, whatever the killer had used; not a rope. Leaning in, I noticed livid scratches down the side of his neck where the skin had been gouged. I checked his right hand again. Three of the fingers were slightly misshapen – perhaps this was the source of his claim to have a crippled hand. It had not hampered him from hitting me; I could see bruises across the top of the knuckles where he had made contact. More significantly, I found traces of dried blood under the fingernails. He must have been scrabbling against the ligature as it tightened; the killer had taken him by surprise. How, though? Had he been waiting here to ambush Joseph, knowing he would come back eventually, or was it someone he had arranged to meet – someone he knew and trusted, but who needed to dispose of him now that his part in Paul’s death was suspected? But that still did not explain why Joseph was naked. I shone the candle along the length of his body and stopped when I reached the shrunken penis in its furze of pale hair. The light picked out a faint pearly sheen across the crease of his groin. Reluctantly, I looked more closely, touching a fingertip to the skin, where a dried film cracked and peeled. So he had ejaculated recently; this could happen to a hanged man at the point of death, I knew, but I was not certain if the same occurred with strangulation. Or was there another, more obvious explanation – that he had met the lover Benoît mentioned and been killed while he was off guard?

I fixed the candle back in the wall bracket and rolled Joseph on to his side once more to examine his back. There I found what I had missed at first: two bruises between his shoulder blades, suggesting that someone had knelt on his back to hold him down while they tightened the ligature. With the force of their own body weight bearing down and a strong cord or tie, even a weaker person – a dwarf, or a woman – might easily subdue a bigger man while he was prone once the ligature was around his neck. It occurred to me that I should speak to the old widow downstairs after all; if she had been watching me, she would likely also have seen anyone who had entered the building earlier.

I crouched with the candle to look under the bed in case anything else had been taken. The small chest containing the grisly martyr’s relics was still there. As I reached in to check whether the contents had been disturbed, my hand brushed against a hard object just under the edge of the bed that had half slipped between the floorboards. I lifted it into the light and saw that it was a slim penknife, the kind used to sharpen quills, about six inches long, the handle made of solid silver and decorated with a delicate tracery of vines and leaves. I drew it from the sheath and pressed the blade against my finger. It was sharp enough, though small and neat; it would hardly be much use as a weapon. But it had not been here the last time I searched under this bed, so it was likely that Joseph or his killer had dropped it. The friar had not been cut anywhere, as far as I could see. Had he grabbed for it in self-defence? I peered at the blade as the candlelight danced along its edge. One side was engraved; at the top, just below the handle, a maker’s mark stamped in the shape of a single crenellated tower. An expert would know what this emblem signified – where the knife came from and which guild the silversmith belonged to – but it meant nothing to me.

I tucked the penknife into the pocket in my doublet. For now I needed to make sure I left the building unseen while I decided who to inform about Joseph’s murder. I supposed that the King ought to know before anyone; he would not be happy. To have come so close to taking the man who could have explained the reasons for Paul Lefèvre’s death, and then to lose his confession at the last minute, would strike Henri as a gross failure on my part, I had no doubt. Now there was another murderer to find, higher up the chain, and I might well find myself charged with that task too, as a punishment. I rolled the body back to its original position, glad that I could no longer see those bulging eyes with their wild death stare. It seemed I had won Paget’s challenge to see who would find Joseph first, I thought, as I reached to pull the curtain across, and the realisation made me freeze in the act.

He had been so certain that Joseph would not turn up at the printer’s shop this afternoon. I closed my eyes and tried to recall the tone, the expression on his face, as he speculated on which of us would track down the missing friar first. All I could picture was a mischievous twist of a smile, an impish suggestion of mockery behind the words, but perhaps I was imposing imagination on memory. Even so, I could not ignore the question: had Paget known what had happened to Joseph all along?

I let my hand fall to my side and remained at the bedside, staring at the corpse, running through everything Paget had said to me that afternoon. I was still lost in thought when I heard a creak of boards, the click of the latch. In one motion I blew out the candle, leapt up on to the bed beside the body and crouched in a corner behind the drape. I dared not attempt to draw it across lest the movement attract attention. As silently as possible, I slid my dagger out of its sheath. The door closed and footsteps – one pair – advanced a few paces across the floor as the wavering light of a lantern lurched along the far wall. I leaned forward, muscles tensed, ready to spring with the knife as a tall figure came into view and the light was held aloft. From behind its glare a familiar, aristocratic voice spoke in carefully enunciated English.

‘Good Lord, Bruno. I’m not sure even I can get you out of this one.’