Conspiracy Read online

  ‘Circe.’

  TWO

  I hurried back towards the Porte Saint-Victor through a veil of fine rain as dusk fell, keen to disappear into the warren of narrow streets around the colleges on the Left Bank before anyone noticed I had gone. In the commotion after Paul’s death I had slipped away from the abbey, knowing they would call in the city authorities; life may be cheap in Paris in these turbulent times, but the murder of a priest was still a serious matter, particularly one with Paul’s connections, and I did not want to find myself caught up in their investigation. The friars had asked me, of course, what his urgent last word had been; I told them ‘Jesus’. I don’t know if they believed me. I was not sure what instinct prompted me to lie; only that it seemed prudent not to divulge anything to people I did not know, especially those in holy orders. Paris was so fractured by divided loyalties that the wrong word to the wrong person could ripple outwards with unintended consequences, and my position was too precarious to place myself knowingly at the heart of a political murder – for it seemed to me that Albaric’s first surmise had been correct, that the attack was a direct result of Paul’s eloquent rant against the decadence and corruption of the royal House of Valois from his pulpit the previous Sunday.

  ‘Circe’, I supposed, must be some kind of code word, intelligible perhaps to his confederates in the Catholic League, but I had no idea what it might mean, or what might be unleashed by repeating it in the wrong ear. Could it be connected to the identity of his killer? Was that what he was trying to tell me? I was not convinced that Paul had even been aware of who I was at the end. Best to keep silent until I could seek the advice of Jacopo Corbinelli, the only man in Paris I dared to trust. Like me, Jacopo was a scholar, an Italian in exile, part of the Florentine entourage that surrounded Catherine de Medici, the widowed Queen Mother. He had been King Henri’s boyhood tutor and continued to serve him as advisor and keeper of his library, though he also remained Catherine’s secretary, and as such he was uniquely placed to speak in my favour at court. He had taken me under his wing when I arrived in Paris for the first time, four years ago; it was he who had heard me give a lecture on my art of memory at the University and recommended me to the King. I became a regular guest among the Italian thinkers, writers and artists who gathered around Jacopo’s supper table in those days and I had hoped, on returning from London, that I might renew the friendship and enjoy again the warmth of that company. But affairs of state kept him busy now between the palaces, or so he told me; I had seen him only twice since I arrived at the beginning of September, and though he had assured me he would persuade the King to grant me an audience, I was still waiting for a word, and it was now almost a month since I had heard anything from him. I decided to send another message to his house and ask to see him urgently. Until then, I would keep my mouth shut regarding Paul’s murder; too much about it made me uneasy.

  On impulse, I turned north towards the river before I reached the gate, in the direction of the old fort of La Tournelle which stood a squat sentinel over the Seine and its islands, marking the boundary of the city wall. Here, Paris ended abruptly, bustling streets giving way to ploughed fields and orchards, wide unpaved roads built for ox-carts and canals for goods barges from the surrounding farms – all the arteries that kept money flowing in and out of the city. Huddled in the shadow of the old wall, the Faubourg Saint-Victor offered little to passing visitors besides the great abbey that gave the district its name; only a few scattered cottages and cheap inns along the main road out of the city. Mudbanks sloped down to the river, pockmarked with the tracks of gulls; rickety wooden jetties splayed into the water at intervals, their boards slick with weed and splintered like rotten teeth. I walked slowly back along the bank where the inland channel met the broad expanse of the river, scanning the ground to either side. With that head wound, Paul would not have survived more than a few minutes in the water. The current must have washed him into the shallows of the inlet and on to the bank almost as soon as he was thrown in or he would have drowned, which meant he must have been struck just upriver from the channel – in other words, right under the wall of the abbey. It was hard to imagine that Paul would have had any other destination in this part of town; it was reasonable to assume, too, given that he had asked for me by name on his deathbed, that he had come to the abbey looking for me. But someone else had encountered him first.

  A wooden bridge crossed the channel, leading directly to the narrow track that passed along the bank at the back wall of the abbey grounds. A few yards further along I found what I was looking for: a patch of churned-up mud, the dark blotch of bloodstains almost invisible now in the fading light against the wet ground. If the rain continued, they would be gone by morning. A chaos of footprints led away from the scene in all directions; though I could see an imprint that might have indicated where a body was dragged to the water’s edge, it was impossible to see where the tracks led after that. Even so, this scene undermined Albaric’s other theory of street robbers; the route for traders passed in front of the abbey’s main gates. No bandit who knew his business would bother lurking on this isolated path in the hope of grabbing a farmer with a fat purse.

  I turned slowly, surveying both sides of the river. Only yards from the trampled spot where Paul must have been attacked I noticed a low door set into the boundary wall of the abbey; below it, a set of stone steps leading down to the water, with a rusted iron ring for tethering a boat. I tried the handle of the door but it was locked fast. There was no other living soul stirring out here in the gathering dusk, save a heron flapping its stately line across the row of clouds; at my back the river flowed on, grey and implacable, while beyond the wall, the grand spire of the abbey church and a few plumes of smoke from the cottages stood out against the darkening sky. A lonely place, but in daylight there would be enough traffic on the river to mean that anyone standing here would be visible to passing boatmen. The killer had taken a risk; Paul’s death had been a matter of urgency, then. Had his attacker followed him from his lodgings, watching for an opportunity once he realised his target was leaving the city? Or was he already waiting, knowing that Paul would come to the abbey this afternoon?

  A staccato exchange between oarsmen out on the river drifted across on the breeze. I turned and watched as two pinpoints of light wavered towards one another, accompanied by the slow splashing of oars. A gust of laughter rippled out as the wherries passed. The boatmen who found Paul must have missed the killer by a matter of minutes; perhaps their arrival had caused him to take flight before the job was finished. It would not be impossible to track down those men and question them, though I supposed that if they had had anything to tell, they would have mentioned it to the friars. It was also likely that they had gone through the injured man’s clothes in search of valuables before they realised he was still breathing; life was hard for everyone now in Paris, and even honest men were desperate. If they had found anything worth taking, they would not want to answer questions. I could not help thinking – and it was not a thought which did me credit – that if they had only arrived a few minutes later, he would not have been alive to say my name, and I would not have been the one to hear him rasp out his gnomic last word. My life in Paris was dangerous enough without involving myself in a factional murder and I had an uneasy sense that, with his dying breath, Paul had handed me a thread that would, at the slightest tweak, unravel a mystery better left untouched.

  I glanced back at the wall as a new thought occurred; anyone with a key to that door could easily attack a man, push him in the water and disappear again inside the abbey in a matter of minutes. I kicked over the dark stains in the mud and turned towards home.

  * * *

  The gutters along each side of the rue du Cimetière already trickled steadily with the run-off from the roofs, though the rain remained thin and half-hearted. I tilted my head back to look up at the strip of sky between the crooked eaves of houses that leaned in toward one another across the narrow street, like drunks abou
t to fall into each other’s arms. Paris was decaying; the years of religious strife had left no money for the upkeep of the streets, where refuse, ashes and shit of every kind banked up around potholes deep enough to break the legs of horses, while the fabric of the crowded medieval quartiers crumbled around their tenants, who had long ago resigned themselves to cold and foul smells and the ever-present threat of plague. It was a depressing place to take lodgings, inhabited almost entirely by the poorer students from the nearby Sorbonne and the Collège de France, but I had little choice since my return from London unless King Henri was willing to take me back under his patronage, and with France on the brink of civil war, it seemed he had more pressing matters on his mind than the circumstances of one exiled Italian heretic he had once called a friend.

  Hunger, and the desire to delay the gloomy prospect of returning to my rooms alone, drove me to the Swan and Cross at the end of the street, a noisy, amiable tavern where groups of students gathered after the day’s lectures to argue philosophy and politics over a jug of cheap wine and exchange flirtatious insults with the working girls they could not afford. The air inside was thick with a fug of wet wool, roasting meat, tobacco and male sweat, but I was glad of the warmth. I turned at the sound of a whistle, to see a round-faced, cheerful whore I vaguely recognised by sight, perched sideways on a boy’s lap and winking at me while he chatted to his friends as if he had not noticed her.

  ‘Is it my lucky night tonight, Doctor? You look wet through. Let me warm you up.’

  I offered a mock bow. ‘Forgive me, mademoiselle, but I’m afraid I’m not stopping.’

  She pouted her rouged lips and squeezed her arms together to push up her breasts so that they threatened to spill over her tight bodice. ‘You always say that.’

  ‘Because I am always busy. Besides, you have company.’

  ‘Pfft.’ She waved a hand over the boy’s head. ‘Can’t be good for you. A man needs pleasure in his life, Doctor. Too much of this—’ she tapped the side of her head – ‘and not enough of this—’ she grabbed at her crotch, an exaggerated, masculine gesture. ‘Makes you ill. That’s why you’re getting thin.’

  ‘You could be right,’ I said, almost smiling as I edged by. ‘Maybe next time.’

  She slapped me on the backside as I passed. ‘Well, I won’t wait around for ever. Carpe diem, Doctor.’

  I raised an eyebrow and she grinned.

  ‘I see you’ve got some Latin out of these students.’

  ‘That’s about all I get out of them and their moth-eaten purses, stingy little ballsacks.’ She leaned over the shoulder of the boy she was sitting on and drank deep from his beaker of wine; I took advantage of the outcry to slip through the crowd. I could not afford the girls either, though they did not know this; they looked at me and saw well-cut clothes – good leather boots, black wool breeches and a short doublet of black leather with puffed shoulders, tailored in London in the days when I had a little money to spare, and carefully mended since – assumed an income to match and badgered me accordingly. Not that I was tempted by this one or any of her colleagues; still, I found her diagnosis depressingly accurate.

  Gaston, the square-shouldered proprietor, appeared out of the fray as he always did, with the lock-jawed expression of a pikeman facing down a foe. When he caught sight of me, he elbowed his way through his customers without ceremony, wiping his hands on his apron and holding them out as if I were a nephew returned from a distant war. I submitted to his embrace as he wrapped me in his familiar smell of garlic and cooking fat.

  ‘Gaston,’ I said, finally disentangling myself, ‘do you remember a young theologian called Paul Lefèvre, used to come in here three years back when he was at the Sorbonne? Skinny fellow, reedy voice.’

  Gaston squeezed his eyes shut and cocked his head to one side, as if listening for the answer. ‘That was the lad who went to be priest at Saint-Séverin, no? Adam’s apple like a snake swallowing a rat?’ He tugged the flesh of his neck out to illustrate the point.

  ‘That’s him. He used to take rooms on the rue Macon – do you know if he still had them?’

  ‘Had?’ His eyebrow shot up; no sharper eyes or ears on the Left Bank than Gaston’s, so they said. ‘Why, what’s happened to him?’

  ‘I mean – since I’ve been away,’ I corrected, quickly. I needed to act before Paul’s murder became common knowledge. ‘Was he still living there?’

  He shrugged. ‘Far as I know. We haven’t seen him here for a long time – too holy for the likes of us now.’ He gave a throaty chuckle. ‘I remember him all right – used to sit there on the edge of the group as if he wanted the courage to throw himself into the conversation. Everyone always talked over him. You know he joined the League? Maybe he got more respect from them.’ He sucked in his fleshy cheeks to show what he thought of that. ‘He stopped coming in here after he was ordained priest – this would be after you’d gone to England, Signor Bruno. Turned into quite the hellfire preacher, you know, inflaming his congregation against the King and his appointed heir. Me and the wife changed church because of it, must have been a year back. I don’t go to Mass for a bellyful of politics. Mind you—’ he paused to draw breath, raising a forefinger like a schoolmaster – ‘I’m not saying I’d be happy to see some whoreson Protestant wearing the crown of France, but you have to respect—’

  ‘Thanks, Gaston. I have to go now,’ I said, patting him on the chest as I turned for the door.

  ‘Got any money for me?’ He made it sound good-humoured, but I was stung by guilt; he had given me too many suppers on credit lately, and the bill was mounting.

  ‘I will have it for you very soon, I swear. I just need to – get my affairs in order. Any day now.’ By which I meant, whenever the King deigns to send for me.

  ‘Ah, I’m only messing, lad – go on, what’ll you have? Put some meat on your bones. You look hungry.’

  ‘Thank you – perhaps later.’

  ‘You say that to all the girls,’ he called after me as I ducked between wildly gesturing students to escape, smiling to myself at the way he still thought of me as one of his boys, though at thirty-seven I was probably only a few years behind him. At least the whores and publicans of Paris were pleased to see me back.

  The buildings took on a greyish pallor in the deepening shadows as the rain fell harder. The days were shortening towards midwinter; when the sky was overcast it felt as if night was falling by early afternoon. I wrapped my cloak around my shoulders and pulled the hood close to hide my face as I trudged back towards the river through rutted streets ankle-deep in filth. At the corner of rue Saint-Jacques, I felt a hand reach out and clutch at my sleeve; I whipped around, dagger half-drawn, but it was only a beggar-child, filthy and hollow-cheeked, with staring eyes. I would have thrown him a coin, but he caught sight of the knife and streaked away into an impossible gap between two houses quick as a fish. Paris was full of the dispossessed now; that was another change for the worse. Failing harvests and the constant three-way skirmishes between the Protestant Huguenot forces, the beleaguered royal armies and the swelling numbers of Catholic League troops further south had driven bedraggled flocks of refugees towards the capital, where they begged, stole, sold themselves, or starved to death on the streets.

  It was growing harder to resist the melancholy that had crept over me since my enforced return from London. In Paris, as the chill and dark of autumn edged towards winter, I had begun to experience a gnawing homesickness for the blue skies and green slopes of my native Nola, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, made keener by the knowledge that I might never return. For perhaps the first time since I had abandoned the religious life nine years ago, I was truly coming to understand what exile meant. This rootlessness – living out of a travelling bag, arriving in every town with one eye on the road out – no longer felt like freedom. Now, more than ever, it felt like the reverse. I had thought, for a while, that I might come to call London home, but that did not work out as I had hoped. I had left behind the few peop
le I thought of as friends, and arrived in Paris to find those who had once opened their doors to me turning away, embarrassed. My reputation was becoming a problem, one I entrenched further with each new book I wilfully published. Though every fibre of my being bridled at the forced humiliation, I had no choice but to beg to have this excommunication lifted. At twenty-eight, I had worn it as the proud badge of a free-thinker. Now, at thirty-seven, I was obliged to view it in a different light: as an impediment to any offer of patronage. A man like me could not live without a patron, and no Catholic with a care for his honour will sponsor a known heretic; it was for this alone that I had approached Paul. For now, I belonged nowhere, and it was hard to shake that sense of exclusion.

  I clenched my teeth and sheathed my dagger: no more of that. Courage, Bruno, I told myself, as I walked on towards the rue Macon. You have been in worse straits than this and talked your way out and up; you can do so again. I needed to see Jacopo Corbinelli. But first, I had to make sure I could not be further connected with Paul Lefèvre. If he had been carrying letters, they must have been taken from him before he was thrown in the river, but his lodgings would certainly be searched; if there was any correspondence that mentioned me or the favour I had asked of him, I wanted to be the one to find it. I knew too well how it might be used against me. There were those among the extreme Catholic faction here in Paris who knew, or guessed at, my activities in England. If they thought I desired the Church’s goodwill again, they would not miss the chance to use it as leverage. Reconciliation in exchange for information – and that was a bargain I was not prepared to strike. I still felt some loyalty to England, even if she appeared to have forgotten me. Beyond that, I had no intention of involving myself in Paul’s murder. We had been acquaintances, not friends; I was sorry that he had met such a brutal death, but he would have known he was courting danger when he decided to tangle with religious politics. Besides, I had a good idea that the cynical Frère Albaric had not been far wrong in his surmise about the Louvre, and that was a truth I preferred to leave for others to uncover.