The Dance of Death (27 page)

‘Monsieur d'Harcourt,' Eloise said, ‘has been telling me of a terrible winter, at the beginning of this century, when icebergs floated down the Seine and even the ink froze solid on the quill. And less than fifty years ago, wolves got into the city and killed and ate more than a dozen people in the market gardens and scavenged the dead bodies from the great gibbet at Montfaucon.' She gave a crow of laughter at my look of disgust and added triumphantly, ‘And the Seine has overflowed its banks more then twenty-seven times. Once, it brought the entire city to a standstill for more than six weeks.'

‘Dear God!' I murmured, crossing myself.

The Frenchman's eyes twinkled. ‘Ah, madame,' he said, ‘you have forgotten the outbreaks of mumps and scarlet fever and smallpox, and the thirty-six outbreaks of plague during the past thirty-two years.'

‘Enough!' I exclaimed, flinging up a hand. ‘I didn't think there could be an unhealthier spot on earth than London, but it seems I was wrong. We shall be starting at sun-up, as usual, my dear,' I added, addressing Eloise, then bowed stiffly to Raoul d'Harcourt. ‘If you still wish to join us, monsieur, you are welcome, as I told you earlier.' He inclined his head graciously and murmured something in French, which I ignored. ‘And now I'm for my bed.'

I stalked to the door, but unfortunately tripped over one of my own feet as I made what should have been a dignified exit. I heard Eloise's gurgle of mirth and shut the door with unnecessary force behind me.

When she followed me up to our bedchamber some time later – how much later I wasn't sure – I pretended to be sleeping.

Once again, I had a restless night, but I was growing used to it. My slumbers were broken by dreams without any rhyme or reason; farragos of nonsense that had no shape and melted away like dew in the sun almost as soon as I regained full consciousness. Awake, staring up at the bed-tester, moving aside the curtains a little to stare into the shadowy depths of one strange bedchamber after another, I was always acutely aware of Eloise beside me, of the soft murmurs she made while she slept, of the curve of her body and the scent of her hair. That particular night, she had once again curled into my side, one hand resting lightly on my right thigh, and it took every ounce of my moral strength not to rouse her and make love to her there and then. I was thoroughly roused myself, and was sweating with desire, lust, whatever you like to call it, cursing Duke Richard and Timothy Plummer for sending me on this mission to Paris with a woman who was not my wife. I don't know how long I lay struggling with my emotions, listening to the sounds of the night from beyond the closed shutters – the hooting of an owl, the neigh of a horse, the barking of a dog – until my better self gained the upper hand and I fell at last into a sleep of exhaustion.

It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Eloise was up, washed, dressed and had descended to the inn parlour for breakfast before I was even out of bed. As it was, I cut myself shaving, scrambled into the first clothes that came to hand (blue hose, green jerkin, a dirty shirt and my old patched boots), failed to comb my hair or brush my teeth and, judging by Eloise's glare of disapproval, arrived at table looking the wreck I felt. But it was with relief that I saw Raoul d'Harcourt was not yet present. Perhaps he, too, had suffered a disturbed night.

As I sipped my beaker of small beer and swallowed a basinful of gruel – at least, I think that's what it was meant to be – I remarked smugly on his absence. ‘He heard me say sun-up,' I said.

The innkeeper entering the parlour at that moment, Eloise turned and addressed him in rapid French. There was a good deal of Gallic shrugging of shoulders and spreading of hands – the usual waste of time – before mine host trundled off to look into the matter. He returned, after a wait of some minutes, to say that the gentleman had gone. He was not in his bedchamber or anywhere else in the inn. Even I could understand that much.

There was yet another rapid exchange between Eloise and the landlord – it sounded like an explosion of hailstones on a tiled roof – before she told me, looking nonplussed, ‘It seems that although Monsieur d'Harcourt is nowhere to be found, his baggage is still in his room.'

‘Gone for a walk?' I suggested. The French were so excitable!

Eloise regarded me scornfully. ‘Hardly! With his boots and his cloak still in his room? It's raining like the Great Flood out there, or are you still so drugged with sleep you haven't noticed?'

As a matter of fact, I hadn't, but now she mentioned it, I was suddenly aware of the sound of heavy rain spattering on the roof and the street cobbles.

‘Maybe he likes walking in the rain,' I argued. ‘Maybe he has a spare pair of boots and another cloak. He looks rich enough to have two of everything. What about his horse?' I added with a flash of inspiration. ‘Is it still in the stables?'

Investigation proved that it was.

‘There you are, then! He's gone for a stroll. Some people enjoy walking in the wet. But I think it's the end of his riding with us. John won't wait on his fits and starts. He wants us on the road now, if not sooner. He's determined we'll be in Paris by Thursday.'

And so it proved. John Bradshaw was indifferent as to what had become of the Frenchman. Perhaps relieved, really, that it would be just the four of us without any need for play-acting.

‘It's his own fault if he's not ready to go with us,' he said flatly. ‘I'll tell Philip to bring round the horses.' He noticed Eloise's troubled expression and frowned. ‘Don't worry about him, mistress,' he said curtly. ‘I doubt he's come to any harm. And now we're nearly at our journey's end, we've worries enough of our own.'

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.