PARIS
Wednesday, 12 May 1610
In the gardens of the Palais des Tuileries, a butterfly fluttered in the warm spring air. Soaring, turning, dipping, it flew over the formal lawns and beds of red and yellow tulips, past the elms and the holm oaks, before coming to rest in a haze of lavender.
In the pink of the early morning, the formal box hedges lining the alleyways were already alive with sparrows. A blackbird grumbled at her mate. The first swifts gliding home from wintering on the Barbary Coast, a drift of silky wings skimming the still waters of the ornamental lake. Silk worms, the most recent arrivals in this green oasis at the western edge of the city, were spinning their silent story in the white mulberry trees.
Behind the high stone walls, beyond the tranquillity of the gardens, Paris was stirring. The bells of the city marked the passage from night to day. Hawkers dragged their carts towards Les Halles, wheels rattling over the cobbled streets. Merchants of cloth and preserves, pewter and gloves prepared for another day’s business. In boarding houses and attics, the doxies and cutpurses muttered and cussed, waiting for the night to come around again. Kitchen maids held out jugs for deliveries of milk and scrawny boys were sent to buy fresh fish from the Quai de Bourbon. From north to south, within the old medieval footprint of the capital city, everywhere was life.
The coronation was only a day away. Pennants flew blue, red and gold, geraniums blazed in window boxes. Royalists pinned flags to their balconies and boasted of how they had been invited to be in the congregation at the Basilica of Saint Denis tomorrow. After ten years of marriage to the King of France, Marie de’ Medici was finally to be crowned queen in the presence of her husband and the eight-year-old Dauphin. Though the Italian queen was not popular, in taverns, landlords were offering drinks named in her honour – the ‘Marie Punch’, the ‘Medici Malmsey’ and the ‘grosse banquière’. All along the rue Saint-Honoré, the boulangeries were filled with Florentine biscotti and brioches, pâte feuilletée filled with cream and plaits of bread in the shape of a crown.
And in her family’s temporary lodgings in Place Dauphine, at the western end of the Île de la Cité, slept one who had not been invited. Louise Reydon-Joubert was dreaming of Amsterdam: the twenty-fourth day of April in the year 1596. Of deep waters and wide blue skies that promised adventure, of the glory of ocean-going ships.
Night after night, the same dream.
She was ten years old, tall for her age, and remembering being taken out into the IJ for the first time to inspect the ships anchored in the harbour. Smart in her white bonnet and apron, blue dress and clogs.
In her troubled sleep, Louise shifts. Her long brown hair tangles around her throat like a noose. The dream is disconcerting. It is painful to remember how innocent she was, how proud. Holding her grandfather’s hand as they walked over the canals of Amsterdam, knowing her beloved mother would be home the next day.
A red-letter day, marked on the calendar.
Louise dreams of being handed down from the quayside into the barge on Damrak, like a sack of flour, then feels the dip and pull of the oars and the slap of canal water on the bow as they make their way past the wharfs at the backs of houses on Warmoesstraat. Under the bridges, past the spire of the Oude Kerk, then disembarking. Walking along a wooden pontoon, the struts cracking and lurching beneath her feet. Clambering into the ship’s boot, a large rowing boat which would take them out to where the Old Moon was anchored in the deep, shifting water of the harbour. She sees a forest of wood, masts and sails – the most glorious sight – and the noise is overwhelming, terrifying. Shouting, gusts of wind, the scrape of metal. The whistle blowing instructions.
The images swirl and merge. Looking up in wonder at the sails and masts, the lattice of rigging. Looking down at the sea, choppier now, white waves breaking as the oars carve a path through the water making diamonds of green. Remembering her grandfather wiping the salt spray from her face with his handkerchief.
Then, they are alongside, beneath the smooth hull of the Old Moon. The fluyt is bobbing in the swell. Iron nails bleeding red into the timber of the gunwales. Louise sees the polish and shine of a ship almost ready to sail, the chaos of merchants and goods, sailors and civilians. Animals, for trade or food, are being winched up onto the deck.
Strong arms grasp her around her waist, pass her up from hand to hand on the rope ladder, until she, too, is standing on the deck. Her clogs are unsuitable, but Louise quickly finds her balance. She is a natural, they say. Touching the rigging, the polished taffrail, the comforting thickness of the rope. Her grandfather lifts her up to ring the ship’s bell and she runs the length of the deck, stern to bow, without slipping.
Louise claps with delight as the sailors clamber barefoot up ropes and balance on the cross beams, like the pet monkeys in the bar on Zeedijk; the galley in the fo’c’sle with its belch of smoke and soot, the rattle of the metal cauldron hanging in its brick prison; the beak at the bow and the grille through which the sailors do their private business. Though she is only ten, she understands that every man has his task. A ship is a floating republic, with its own laws, its own customs, its own rules.
Louise loses her heart that day, swept away by the promise of adventure, of freedom. Everyone is charmed by a girl who loves the sea as much as any boy. All the grizzled seamen, who spend their lives away from the civilising company of women and children, clap their hands. Her cheeks are flushed, her hair has come loose, she is happy.
Then, as always, the dream darkens. Always the same shift from exhilaration to despair. The sailors laughing when she says that, one day, she will be the captain of a ship. Not understanding why everyone is laughing, she feels humiliated. Her grandfather bends down to explain that girls cannot go to sea, though there is much they can do on dry land.
And that is how it begins to end.
Louise runs from him and trips, overbalances. She is falling, spinning down into the sea. Not the familiar glinting surface of Damrak, but the deep waters of the IJ reaching up to claim her. So cold. She tries to swim, but her arms will not move, her legs will not move. Her skirt and petticoats are sodden, dragging her under. Louise sees her wooden clogs come loose and float away from her. She will not need them now.
There is no sound save the beating of her own heart as she is embraced by the silken water, held by the choking weed, sinking down to where the fish dart, quicksilver fast, in the depths.
How much simpler everything might have been if she had drowned that day.
‘No!’ Louise shouted, throwing herself bolt upright.
It took a moment for the room to come back into focus. Pale blue curtains rather than wooden shutters. The sounds of workmen arguing in French in the square below, not the cheerful chatter of Dutch bargemen. Louise is not in her chamber in Zeedijk, but in an elegant house in Place Dauphine. No longer a ten-year-old girl learning the limits of her world for the first time, but a woman of almost twenty-five.
Louise Reydon-Joubert let her head fall back against the bedstead and caught her breath. This was Paris not Amsterdam. Yet even here, it seemed, she could not escape the past.
One floor below, Louise’s grandmother, Minou, lay in her bed staring up at the wooden ceiling of her chamber and thought how, of all places, she most hated Paris.
This was the first time she had returned to the capital city since the terrible night of the August massacre that followed the royal wedding of Henri de Navarre to Marguerite de Valois thirty-eight years ago. Minou wished they had not come though, in truth, there had been little choice. If Louise was to claim her inheritance, she had to be present in person tomorrow to sign the documents, and neither Minou nor her husband, Piet, could have let her come to Paris alone.
She was determined to banish the memories of the past, so they had intended to stay until December. It was a chance for them to see their son, Jean-Jacques, who was in the employ of the Duc de Sully, the King’s closest adviser and friend. It would also give her the chance to get to know her Parisian grandchildren, Jean-Jacques’ four-year-old daughter Florence and his new baby son. Now, Minou wasn’t sure.
Feeling every one of her sixty-eight years, she raised herself on one elbow, and gazed at Piet sleeping beside her. His beloved features, grown white with age, were as familiar to her as her own. Against all odds, they had been by one another’s side for nearly fifty years. Together they had faced grief and despair, they had lost their way and been reconciled once more. Blessed with three children and three grandchildren, they had suffered, but kept going. Companions-in-arms, they had stood firm against the vicissitudes of life, the evils of war and the deaths of those they loved. They were old, but they had somehow kept living when those around them stumbled and fell. They had survived.
They would not survive this.
Minou let her eyes briefly close. She could put it off no longer. She had to tell him. She ran the back of her hand down the length of her husband’s arm, hoping to wake him gently. He was still a strong man, though the flesh hung more loosely on his bones. In her memory, she could still see the stranger who had first stood before her outside her father’s house in Carcassonne and called her his ‘lady of the mists’. She had given Piet her heart that night and, though it had been torn and stitched by time, still it beat only for him.
‘Mon coeur,’ she whispered.
Piet grunted in his sleep, but did not stir.
The early morning sun was filtering through the shutters, casting ribbons of light on the wooden floor. Minou thought of other wakeful mornings when they had lain in one another’s arms: in their first home in Puivert, destroyed during the fourth war; of their sanctuary on Zeedijk in Amsterdam, where they’d fled after the massacre that had taken her brother and their eldest daughter, Marta, from them, as well as a thousand other Huguenot souls; of all the places where they had been honoured guests, or homeless refugees, as their fortunes rose and fell, and rose again. She did not want to break the spell. Once she did, nothing would be the same.
‘My love, I would speak with you,’ she said, gathering her courage. She kissed his cheek and breathed in the familiar scent of sandalwood. So vivid, so strong, even after all these years. His eyes opened, for an instant not sure where he was. ‘Piet.’
He turned a morning smile towards her. ‘You sound very sombre.’
‘It is a matter of some importance.’
He laughed. ‘There is no need to frown, madomaisèla. There is nothing you could say that I would not be glad to hear.’
‘Madomaisèla, ha! You are in need of a pair of spectacles.’
‘I do not need an eye glass to know you are beautiful.’
Minou rested her hand against his cheek. ‘You are a flatterer, my lord.’
‘Speak, for the sooner you do, the sooner we might take breakfast.’ He grinned, the lines on his weathered face creasing his pale Northern skin. ‘I find I have an appetite this morning.’ Seeing her hesitate, he reassured her. ‘You can tell me anything, Minou, you know you can.’
‘Of course.’ She pushed her long hair, the colour of snow now, back from her face. ‘It is this. I want to go home.’
Piet sat up and leant back against the bedstead. ‘Well, I confess that was not what I was expecting. This does not seem to me so very serious. I admit the timing will need to be the subject of some discussion, given Jean-Jacques is so well-established here. And there is Louise to consider. Once the papers have been signed, I assume she intends to stay on with us in Paris, but I might be wrong. And, of course, Bernarda and Frans are not expecting us back in Amsterdam until the eve of Sint Nicolaas.’
She put her hand on his arm to stem the tide of words. ‘No, not Amsterdam.’
Piet frowned. ‘Then where?’
For the first time, Minou smiled. ‘To Carcassonne. The time has come to go home.’
Louise tiptoed past her grandparents’ closed door, down the wide staircase and out into the early morning. Her blood was restless, as it always was when she was plagued with bad dreams, and the only way to calm herself was to walk. Walk, and not think. Walk, and not speak.
For a moment, she stood in the centre of Place Dauphine and looked back at the building that, for three weeks, had been their home. Named for Henri IV’s eldest son and heir, it was the second of the King’s newly designed open spaces for the citizens of Paris and was not yet completed. The sound of hammering and construction had filled every waking hour since they’d arrived in April, save for the Sabbath. It was enough to drive anyone out of their mind.
Of course, Louise knew it wasn’t the noise in Place Dauphine that unsettled her. Her mind was too full. This was her first visit to Paris. It was here, in the year 1572, that her mother, Marta, had gone missing as a child. Louise’s fingers went to her pocket, where her mother’s locket lay wrapped in a scrap of cotton. A talisman, or a good luck charm, she was never without it.
Try not to think.
Louise walked through the square and leant on a stone parapet, looking down over the river Seine. Even before she had been old enough to be told the story of how her mother had been lost two days before the massacre – and not reunited with her family for twelve years – Louise had sensed that Marta did not fit within the Reydon-Joubert household in Amsterdam. It was those missing years, as the adopted daughter of a mercenary and soldier, that had shaped her, not the fortune of her birth.
Throughout Louise’s childhood, her mother would often vanish from Amsterdam for months on end and no one would tell her where Marta had gone, or if she was coming back. When she did reappear at the busy house on Zeedijk, she brought Louise lavish presents and told tantalising stories of the places she had seen. Marta was charming to her little daughter, pleasant enough to her brother Jean-Jacques, and civil to her younger sister Bernarda, but with little more warmth than she would offer a passing acquaintance. Only Louise’s grandmother, Minou, had ever commanded Marta’s unquestioning affection.
But, from time to time, on long, hot summer evenings – when Marta had taken a little wine and was in a mood to reminisce – she would gather Louise to her on the bench in the orchard of the house on the corner, and tell her stories. They always started the same way: ‘Once upon a time, there was a little girl, a quick-witted and courageous girl…’
She remembered her mother as a glamorous and elegant woman, who had made no attempt to hide her disdain for Dutch society. Louise had her mother’s colouring – and the distinctive mismatched eyes of the Reydon-Joubert women, one blue and one brown – but she was broad for a woman and with strong features, at odds with Parisian ideas of female beauty. She had seen her father only once, but knew that she resembled him in build and height. She hated that.
Then two days after that morning in April when Louise had fallen from the Old Moon and nearly drowned, her mother was dead and there were no more stories.
No sense looking back.
As the bells of the Sainte-Chapelle rang the half-hour, Louise pulled her thoughts back to the soft Parisian morning. Her homesick heart was craving familiar sights and smells – the sound of gulls trailing the fishing boats, the slick movements of the stevedores, the swagger of sailors.
She decided to go down to the port. She had noticed one small ship flying the colours of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, waiting to depart on the morning’s tide. Just the sight of it would help her feel less out of sorts.
Louise picked up her step. Even before she had set foot on the Old Moon, all she had ever wanted was to go to sea. She had made herself a nuisance, forever begging her great-aunt Alis and her companion, Cornelia van Raay, to take her with them to see the tall ships come in. The pennants and the flags, the tiny boats bobbing around the bigger ships like flies around a docile mare. Though she was bored by her lessons, she had no trouble memorising the names of different kinds of rigging and sails, nor how to trace a voyage on the lacquered globe that sat on the table in the entrance hall of the Van Raay house in Warmoesstraat. Louise smiled. Her fingers were always getting trapped in the wooden struts as she spun the world round and round, entranced by the sea monsters and shipwrecks and the terra incognita.
The Van Raay fleet was one of the smallest operating under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company in Amsterdam, and the only one owned and run entirely by a woman. Louise helped Cornelia, but hated being restricted because of her sex. She tracked cargo, noted the running repairs, paid the captains and crew. It was important work, but it was not enough. To be on dry land, dreaming of adventures happening elsewhere, was not enough.
Tomorrow, all this might change.
Louise stepped down off the Pont au Change. After the quiet of the Île de la Cité, it was busier and noisier on the right bank. Carts and carriages jostled to pass, people bellowed, the smell of horse dung mixed with fried meats from the vendors who set up their stalls in the Place de Grève on days when there was to be an execution.
There was a permanent gibbet set in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Louise saw a crowd had gathered and her heart sank. She thought public hangings barbaric, and would have avoided the square if she could, but there was no other way down to the port.
Already soldiers were patrolling the square, pikes in hand, looking for signs of trouble. Children were running around, women pushing with sharp elbows and the stiff corners of their willow paniers, everyone trying to reach the palings first. Louise had little choice but to follow the crowd.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, trying to squeeze through. ‘S’il vous plaît.’
Lifting the hem of her cloak clear of the muck, Louise made her way as best she could. Then, the crowd roared as the cart bringing the prisoners from the Bastille rumbled into the square, and she realised she was trapped.
Close by, a tall man stood shivering despite the warmth of the morning, his red hair marking him out. He nursed a soiled hessian bag to his chest like a baby.
The voices in his head were loud today, telling him what he had to do. He was a fool, an outsider, someone of no account. They hissed at him, telling him the Huguenot malignancy was still spreading, infecting Paris and every one of the great cities of France. The nation would never become great again until every last heretic had been extirpated. It was his purpose. It was God’s purpose through him. The voices told him so.
Those around him gave him a wide berth, he saw that, but he did not care. Was it not always so when a prophet walked among the common people? They would have cause to praise him soon enough. They would fall on their knees to give thanks that the humble saviour of France had graced them with his presence. He was an instrument of God. He would rid France of the cancer of heresy and be blessed for it. Then they would have to believe him.
He kept marching on the spot, his filthy feet uncertain on the cobbled ground. The noises in his head were growing louder. Buzzing, whispering, jeering, mocking.
‘You are nothing, François Ravaillac, nothing at all.’
He clutched the bag closer to him. The tip of its hidden blade pierced the hessian weave, leaving spots of blood on his shirt.
‘What is wrong with him?’
Louise looked down at the little boy who had appeared beside her.
‘Are you lost?’
The child pointed. ‘Look. He’s bleeding.’
She turned to see a ragged man, tall and unkempt, with russet hair, standing in the shadow of the town hall clutching a bag to his chest. He was clearly afflicted with some malady of mind or spirit. His eyes darted to and fro, as if he feared he was being spied upon, and he seemed to be talking to himself. Then, as if feeling her watching him, he turned and stared directly at her with dark, burning, hate-filled eyes.
‘Come away,’ she said quickly, taking the boy by the hand. ‘Where is your mother?’
‘I came with my father.’
‘All right, your father. Where did you last see him?’
The child shrugged, his bravado deserting him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in a small voice.
In the centre of the square, another roar went up. Above the heads of the crowd, Louise could see four prisoners being hauled up on to the gibbet. One was barely more than a boy himself.
Who would let a child so young wander off on their own?
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Jacques. I’m four.’
‘Well, I would have thought you at least six,’ Louise said brightly, trying to divert his attention from what was going on behind them. ‘My uncle’s name is Jacques, too. Well, Jean-Jacques. He has a little girl, Florence, about the same age as you and a son, also, but he’s only a baby. Do you live nearby?’
His bottom lip began to quiver. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Now, there’s no need for tears. We’ll find your father.’
In truth, Louise didn’t know where to start – there were so many people, all pressing forward. Such ugly expressions on their faces. This was not justice, but sport.
A woman in a filthy shawl pushed her arm. ‘You’re blocking my view.’
‘Do you know this boy’s father?’
‘Get out of my way.’
Another roar as the cart was rolled away and the four men dropped, legs twitching and spasming in the air. Three of them were lucky enough to die quickly, ...
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