The Dance of Death

Sixteen

Thanks to one of the horses throwing a shoe (or whatever it is that horses do with shoes) and also to John Bradshaw being laid up for the best part of a day with stomach cramps — owing, he reckoned, to a bad piece of fish he had eaten — it was late on Friday afternoon before our somewhat bedraggled party of four entered Paris by the Porte Saint-Denis.

November had come in with its usual melancholy weather, and a thin rain had settled, mist-like, over our cloaks and assorted headgear, lowering our spirits even further. Conversation had been minimal for the past two days, decreasing until it was little more than absolute necessity dictated. John, naturally enough, was still suffering from the after-effects of his colic, but he had been sour before that. Something had irritated him and seriously ruffled his temper, but he did not confide in me and I could only guess at the cause. We were at last nearing our destination, and there were so many things that might go wrong. He seemed intent on shouldering the entire responsibility for the success or failure of the mission, in spite of my pointing out to him that he could hardly be blamed, at least in my particular case, for something he knew nothing about.

‘Timothy won’t see it like that,’ he grunted.

‘Don’t pretend you’re afraid of Timothy Plummer!’ I scoffed, but he merely shrugged and terminated the exchange by turning to upbraid Philip for some imagined misdemeanour.

I hadn’t failed to notice his growing exasperation with Philip, demonstrated almost hourly by an angry shout or even, at times, a blow, all of which Philip took with a kind of surly acceptance far more irritating than an angry response would have been. I think there were moments when John would have welcomed a bout of fisticuffs just to relieve the tension between them. I know that I often longed to take my old friend by the scruff of the neck and shake some life into him. My earlier sympathy, indeed my own grief for Jeanne, had been eroded by his behaviour.

As for Eloise, her continuing concern over the missing Raoul d’Harcourt was beginning to stretch my tolerance in another direction. For the first day after our leaving the inn, she had talked of nothing else, wondering, speculating as to his present whereabouts and whether or not some harm had befallen him. A particularly sharp exchange of views the following bedtime had resulted in my dragging pillows and one of the covers off the bed and spending the night on the floor. Since then, we had adhered rigidly to the most commonplace remarks and, on occasion, had even resorted to addressing one another through the medium of a third party. This childish behaviour had naturally enough added to John Bradshaw’s worries and contributed to his increasing bad temper.

By the time the walls of Paris came in view through the murky November twilight, we were all exhibiting the strains and tensions of an ill-assorted party thrown together for days on end and unable to escape one another.

Paris, like London, could be heard and smelled from several miles away, the noise and stench increasing the nearer one got. By the time we passed through the Porte Saint-Denis and proceeded down the Rue Saint-Denis, my senses were reeling, and it was all I could do to remain upright in the saddle.

Eloise, on the other hand, seemed suddenly to revive like someone given a refreshing draught of wine. Her hitherto drooping form straightened up, and her head began to turn this way and that as she looked eagerly about her. This part of the city, she informed me, was known as La Ville. The Town. We were riding south, she went on, towards the Île de la Cité and beyond that, on the far bank of the Seine, was the suburb of the Université, so called for the simple and obvious reason that it was where the various colleges were situated, amidst the surrounding sprawl of houses, fields and churches. As far as she was concerned, she had come home.

I, in contrast, was feeling more and more like a stranger in a strange land — which, of course, I was. But up until then, in the towns and countryside we had passed through, I had not felt too alienated. There had been many similarities to England. Paris, however, was altogether different. The Rue Saint-Denis was packed with people and traffic — ten or eleven carts, I’d swear, to every furlong of road — and everyone jabbering away, nineteen to the dozen, in an incomprehensible language. And not only talking, but also gesticulating wildly. (Why, oh, why do our French neighbours find it so necessary to discourse with their arms as well as their tongues?) And the smell was almost overwhelming.

‘That’s the market,’ Eloise explained, waving a hand vaguely to her right. ‘Les Halles.’ She turned her head. ‘How much further, John?’

‘Keep going,’ he answered roughly, but in a voice weakened by exhaustion. ‘Cross by the Pont aux Meuniers into the Rue de la Barillerie, then wait. Someone should be meeting us there. A house has been rented for us. At least, I hope to God it has and nothing’s gone wrong.’ He crossed himself devoutly. His face looked grey with fatigue, a man at the end of his tether.

The bridge by which we eventually crossed, leading from the quayside to the Île de la Cité seemed to be one of three — two of stone and the third, ours, built of wood. I did rouse myself sufficiently to enquire of Eloise why all the houses on them had green roofs, to which she replied that they had turned that colour from mould and water vapour off the river. This was not reassuring and almost immediately I started to cough.

My companion laughed unfeelingly. ‘Don’t tell me you’re falling into a consumption,’ she protested, a petty jibe I chose to ignore.

The Rue de la Barillerie was almost a continuation of the Pont aux Meuniers, one of the warren of narrow streets that covered the island and surrounded the great cathedral of Notre-Dame. As we left the quayside — where, in spite of the advanced hour of the afternoon, washerwomen were still down on the strand, pummelling and soaking their washing, calling to one another and shrieking with laughter at the latest ribald joke — and plunged into the gloom between the overhanging houses, a man detached himself from the shadows of a doorway halfway along the street and walked towards us. I recognized him at once as the person I had seen talking to John Bradshaw outside the inn at Calais.

He said something in French and jerked a thumb back across his shoulder, indicating a tall, narrow house, wedged between two similar neighbours, its frontage originally stained red and green, but whose paint had now peeled away, leaving only traces of the colours as a memento of past glory.

‘Journey’s end,’ John Bradshaw said, and never did words fall more kindly on my ears. ‘This house will be our lodging while we are in Paris, and a woman has been hired to wait on us and attend to our needs. Her name’s Marthe; that’s all you need to know. She speaks a little English, but not much, so, Roger, you’ll have to rely on Mistress Eloise and myself to translate for you. Philip!’ He spoke sharply to Philip Lamprey, who was slumped forward in his saddle, the usual picture of dejection. ‘There’s stabling for the horses in the next street. Jules here will lead two of the animals and show you the way.’ John eased himself to the ground with the sigh of a man weary unto death. ‘See them fed and watered and bedded down properly for the night, then return here. Do you understand?’ A brief nod was the only indication that he had been heard. John sighed and turned back, giving his hand to Eloise to help her dismount. ‘You’ll be in need of your supper, my dear,’ he said in the gentler tone he reserved for women, as being delicate creatures in constant need of male strength and reassurance. (It was this attitude that convinced me he had probably never been married and had most certainly never had daughters of his own.)

My memory of that first night in Paris is lost in a haze of lassitude similar to that of our very first night on the road after quitting London. Marthe, contrary to my expectations, turned out to be a jolly, red-faced woman and an excellent cook, who seemed to find it excessively amusing each time I addressed her by the English version of her name. To begin with, I did it simply to annoy Eloise (who was convinced, rightly, of my laziness where trying to speak a foreign language was concerned), but I continued doing so just for the pleasure of watching Marthe shake all over like a jelly whenever I slipped an arm round her ample waist and called her ‘Martha, my lover’ in the best West Country tradition.

Our housekeeper apart, however, nothing remains in my memory except eating and then climbing the stairs to the first-floor bedchamber I was to share with Eloise during our stay in Paris. I don’t recall that she even went through the nightly ritual of undressing behind the bed-curtains, so accustomed had we grown to one another’s company. But I do remember waking in the middle of the night, in a sweat, conscious of a strange city all around me with its odd nocturnal noises, and uncomfortably aware that I must shortly begin my quest to find Robin Gaunt and his wife, a task of impossible proportions with which I should never have been burdened. With which no man should have been burdened, I thought resentfully. But even fear and resentment failed to keep me awake for long, and almost before I knew it, a faint, misty sunlight was rimming the shutters and Marthe was knocking at our bedchamber door with a pitcher of hot water for our morning needs, while the tantalizing smells of hot oatcakes and bacon collops wafted up the stairs.

Shaved, washed, hair combed, teeth cleaned, dressed in brown hose and yellow jerkin, I descended to the small parlour overlooking the street, where John Bradshaw, no longer forced to play the servant, except when we went abroad, joined Eloise and myself at table.

‘Where’s Philip?’ I asked.

John shrugged. ‘Prefers to eat in the kitchen with Marthe. He seems to have taken a fancy to her. Leastways, he appears in a slightly happier mood than he’s been in since we left London, although that ain’t saying much. He’s managed a couple of smiles for her, and she grins and nods at him even though neither can understand a word the other’s saying.’ He took a swig of ale and continued, ‘Now! We’re in luck. Jules tells me that your cousin — ’ he nodded at Eloise — ‘won’t be in Paris until Monday at the earliest. King Louis has delayed sending him until next week. Indeed, there was a rumour that Maître le Daim might not be coming after all. But now the king has changed his mind again, and if all’s well, he’ll be here on Monday, like I said.’

‘Do we know where Cousin Olivier will be lodging?’ Eloise enquired, delicately wiping her lips on the edge of a green, squirrel-trimmed sleeve.

John Bradshaw shook his head. ‘Not yet. Jules will let us know as soon as he finds out. Meantime, I suggest you two get acquainted with the city, and you, Roger, try and look like a haberdasher and hawk around a few of those samples of cloth and other goods you brought with you.’

‘I don’t need to get acquainted,’ Eloise retorted indignantly. ‘I know this city like the back of my hand.’

I grinned nastily. ‘You forget, John, she was here with my lord of Albany earlier this year and last.’

‘We were with the court at Plessis-les-Tours,’ she snapped. ‘I know Paris because it is my mother’s city and I spent part of my childhood here.’

‘Then you’ll be able to show Roger around like the native you are,’ John Bradshaw said, rising to his feet, at the same time indicating to me that I should remain behind when Eloise left the parlour.

I duly lingered over my last oatcake. As she disappeared upstairs to fetch her cloak and gloves, I raised my eyebrows. ‘You wanted to see me?’

He swallowed the dregs of his ale. ‘I just wanted to say, let Mistress Eloise show you the city today, but after that, if you need to wander Paris on your own, give me the wink and I’ll try to find some excuse to detain her indoors or elsewhere.’ Before I could interrupt to thank him, he went on, ‘But as to going on your own, I’m not so sure that’s wise. There are as many footpads and robbers and pickpockets here as in London, and an obvious Englishman like yourself is going to be fair game. Take someone with you. Take Philip.’

‘Philip? What good will he be? He has the same amount of French as me — which is to say none at all — and in his present depressed state far less sense.’

‘Two are more unlikely to be set upon than one man on his own.’ John grinned suddenly. He was looking better this morning: a night’s sleep had refreshed him and his old vigour had returned. ‘And of course three would be even safer, especially if the third’s a Frenchman. Take Jules as well. You needn’t worry about his discretion. He’s a taciturn devil at the best of times, and I shan’t interrogate him as to what you’re up to. I’ve told you already, if the duke don’t want me to know, then I don’t, either. And Jules ain’t interested in the affairs of an English prince.’

‘Then what’s he doing in your pay?’ I demanded sceptically.

‘A personal grudge against the French authorities.’ John laughed. ‘Two of his brothers were counterfeit coiners and had the bad luck to be caught. They were both boiled alive in the great cauldron in the pig market, out beyond the Louvre, towards the Porte Saint-Honoré. A very unpleasant and agonizingly slow form of execution. Malcontents like Jules are always useful, if you can find ’em.’

‘All right,’ I agreed, after a moment or two’s consideration. To have someone who could speak the language and knew the city would make my almost impossible task immeasurably easier. ‘But in that case, I shan’t need Philip.’

John rose from the table as Marthe came in, ready to clear away the breakfast things. ‘Oh, for the Virgin’s sweet sake, take him with you, man! Give him something to do. I’m sick to death of his long, mournful face and his refusal to say more than half a dozen words together. I wish to heaven I’d never brought him with us. There were others I could have employed. I just felt sorry for him, that’s all. An old comrade-in-arms who’d fallen on rough times.’ He straightened his jerkin and said a few words of greeting to Marthe before slapping me on the back. ‘You’d best go. Mistress Eloise will be growing impatient as well as curious by now. Just familiarize yourself today with as much of the city as you can, and if you can give the impression of a prosperous haberdasher with an interest in buying French goods, as well as trying to sell a few of your own, all the better.’

He left the room, exchanging a cheery word with Eloise as she entered, none too pleased at being kept waiting.

‘What on earth have you two been talking about all this time?’ she demanded, throwing my cloak and hat down on the table as she spoke. Without waiting for an answer, she continued, ‘Before we go anywhere else, I want to visit the Quai des Orfèvres.’

The Goldsmiths’ Quay was only a short walk away, along the Rue Barthélemy and turning right at the Pont Saint-Michel, one of the two bridges that crossed to the Université district.

‘What are we doing here?’ I grumbled. ‘Do you have money to spend?’

‘Fool!’ she retorted angrily. ‘I’m hoping to locate Monsieur d’Harcourt’s shop. If there’s someone there — and he surely must leave an assistant in charge when he goes away — we might glean some information.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as whether they’ve heard anything from him, or whether they think he’s still on his travels. I’m worried about him, Roger. First, Oliver Cook goes missing and now Raoul. I don’t like it. I feel in my bones that something’s amiss.’

‘And since when have you been calling him by his Christian name?’ I demanded with some heat.

‘Since he asked me to,’ she snapped back. ‘And in any case, I don’t see it’s any business of yours. Once we’ve accomplished what we came to Paris to do and returned to England, there’s no reason why we should ever willingly see one another again.’

‘Good! That’s something to look forward to,’ I said, seizing her elbow and guiding her around a puddle in the road. (Although there were surprisingly few of these, as the Paris roads were in very much better condition than London’s. Eloise told me later that the capital’s streets had been paved centuries earlier on the orders of Philip Augustus, the grandfather of St Louis.)

She made no reply to my ill-natured remark, only shaking off my arm and quickening her pace a little until we came to the goldsmiths’ workshops lining the quayside. But here we drew a blank. A Raoul d’Harcourt certainly owned a shop on the Quai des Orfèvres, but the smiling, portly gentleman who admitted to that name, and who gallantly bowed over Eloise’s extended hand, was certainly not the man we had met for the first time on board The Sea Nymph, or later in Calais, or later again somewhere in the vicinity of Amiens.

We left the shop in some confusion, our previous dispute forgotten.

‘You’re sure he understood who you were enquiring for?’ I asked, once the situation had been explained to me.

‘Oh, don’t be stupider than you really are, Roger!’ Eloise exclaimed angrily. ‘You must have heard me say the name Raoul d’Harcourt yourself. Even you must have understood that much! And that was him, the man I was speaking to. He is Raoul d’Harcourt. And he swears there is no other man of that name on the quay.’

I dragged her out of the way as two carts, one loaded with fish, the other with bales of hay, went past neck and neck, each driver determined to be first into the narrow opening that led to the Rue Barthélemy.

‘Look,’ I said, pulling her round to face me, ‘our man is an impostor, that’s clear. For what reason, and what his game is, there’s no saying. When we get back to the house, I’ll tell John, though I doubt he’ll be able to offer any explanation. The masquerade could well mean his disappearance is voluntary, which, in turn, might mean no harm’s come to him. And that might set your mind at rest, you being so anxious about his welfare.’

Her expression lightened somewhat. ‘That’s true,’ she said, and tucked a hand in my arm. ‘In that case, I’d better do as Master Bradshaw instructed me and show you the city.’ She thought for a minute, then nodded. ‘Of course!’ She smiled mischievously. ‘I promised you, didn’t I, that you should see the original of The Dance of Death?’

So we returned through the rabbit warren of streets that make up most of the Île de la Cité, to recross the Pont aux Meuniers and make our way again up the Rue Saint-Denis.

The Cemetery of the Innocents was to the left some few hundred yards along the street, and its cloister walls were indeed decorated with the same grinning skeletons as adorned the north cloister of St Paul’s. I felt a shiver go down my spine, and I thought of the Frenchman Jules’s two brothers, boiled alive in the pig market in front of a jeering crowd. Of course I knew that criminals had to be punished, and the more horrible the death, the more it deterred others from doing the same, but I had never been one for public executions or made of them the sort of holiday that others did, with regular eating and drinking and neighbourly gossip through the victims’ screams. Had I been less well able to defend myself, I suspect that I should often have been accused of an effeminate squeamishness by more robust friends and acquaintances who enjoyed watching a felon dancing on air at the end of a rope, or being sliced open while still alive and his entrails burned before his eyes.

Eloise’s voice rescued me from my grim thoughts. ‘La Danse Macabre,’ she said slowly and, like me, suddenly shivered, clutching at my arm again for comfort. ‘I don’t know why it is,’ she went on, ‘but until now I’ve always thought it slightly humorous, all those dancing bones and grinning skulls. Yet today they strike me as sinister. What’s the reason, do you think, Roger?’

I covered the little hand tucked into the crook of my elbow with one of my own. ‘You’re overtired and nervous,’ I said, ‘and strange things have been happening during the past week.’ I grinned weakly. ‘And I don’t suppose having to pretend to be my wife has made matters any easier.’

‘Oh, that,’ she said, and gave a half-laugh, half-sob. Turning to look at her, I was amazed to see what could have been tears sparkling on the ends of her lashes, but before I could say anything more, she swung on her heel, taking me with her. ‘Enough of this dismal conversation!’ She squeezed my arm. ‘You wanted to see Paris, and Paris you shall see.’

I can’t remember how far we walked, but I know that by dinnertime my legs were aching as they had never ached before. Eloise was an indefatigable and informative guide to a city she plainly loved with all her heart, and dragged me from place to place with an enthusiasm that seemed completely to have supplanted her earlier malaise, so much so that I could not help suspecting that it was a little spurious. But I said nothing, applying myself instead to taking note of my surroundings so that I could, if necessary, find my way around on my own. Relieved as I was to follow John Bradshaw’s advice and take Philip and the Frenchman, Jules, with me, I could foresee times when it might be essential to be alone.

One of the things that puzzled me were the fragments of old, ivy-covered wall and broken gateways that stood sentinel among the crowding houses and gardens, until Eloise explained that these were the remains of the original city wall erected at the command of Philip Augustus in the thirteenth century. It had never properly been demolished when, over a hundred and fifty years later, Charles V had ordered a new wall to be built, the one that now surrounded La Ville. The old wall still did for La Université on the south bank of the Seine, but the great palaces and churches of La Ville had to be afforded better protection.

By the time we eventually paused for refreshment in the Rue Saint-Antoine, close to a group of menacing black towers, enclosed by a circular moat, drawbridge raised, portcullis lowered, which Eloise named as La Bastille, I was more than ready to leave any further knowledge of Paris to my own wanderings.

‘Weakling!’ Eloise scoffed. ‘We haven’t seen a quarter of even La Ville.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I said, tucking in to an eel pie, washed down with a rough red wine that made my head spin after only one or two gulps. (I noticed it had no such similar effect on my companion.) But it generated a warm glow against the chill of the November morning. I began to feel more relaxed.

A man entering by the nearby Porte Saint-Antoine reminded me of John Bradshaw: middle-aged, well-fleshed, square of face with a thatch of brown hair, English-looking.

‘Did you know,’ I asked Eloise, suddenly recalling a surprising fact, ‘that John had a French grandmother?’ She shook her head. ‘So he told me,’ I went on. ‘You wouldn’t think it, would you, to look at him?’

She wiped her mouth daintily on the back of her hand. ‘Poor man,’ she murmured ironically. ‘A French grandmother! What a cross for him to bear!’

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ I answered stiffly.

‘Didn’t you? You English think you’re only one step down from God.’

I could see that we were on the brink of another of our pointless disputes. I said, ‘She came from Clervaux. John’s grandmother, that is.’

Eloise raised her eyebrows. ‘From Clairvaux or Clervaux?’ she asked.

‘What sort of question is that?’ I barked irritably. ‘I warn you, I’m in no mood for playing games.’

‘You’re so ignorant,’ she replied coldly. ‘I’m not playing games. Did John Bradshaw’s grandmother come from C–L-A-I-R-vaux or from C–L-E-R-vaux? The first is in Champagne, where St Bernard founded his great monastery. The second is in the Grand Duchy.’

‘Grand Duchy?’

She sighed wearily, a well-travelled woman dealing with an ignorant stay-at-home. ‘Luxembourg.’

I had to admit that I didn’t know the answer, nor had I realized that there was any question to be asked in the first place. I suggested austerely that we go back to the Île de la Cité and the Rue de la Barillerie. Eloise agreed with a rather superior smile, which annoyed me even further.

We returned by the Pont Notre-Dame, eventually emerging into the square in front of the cathedral, where three streets converged on a space that was overhung on one side by the frontage of what my companion informed me was the Hôtel Dieu, a strange building whose roof looked as though it had suffered a very nasty rash of pustules and warts. I was just about to ask Eloise the reason for this architectural aberration when a fist smote my shoulder and a familiar voice addressed us in English.

‘Master Chapman! Mistress Chapman! What a pleasure to see you both again!’

It was William Lackpenny.