The ground was hard and they made good time for the first few miles. If the roads were not too rutted, they might reach Saint-Denis ahead of schedule, and could press on another few miles to the next village. Leave first thing in the morning, they would be in and out of Gilbert de Nemours’s chatelet before the prior was halfway there. Then return to Paris via a more circuitous route.
But Lucrezia hadn’t counted on the snow. Protected within the carriage, the first thing she noticed was their pace slowing. Within half an hour, Martin was cursing, whipping, and the carriage was sliding along the road whenever they turned. Martin hunched forward, his head and shoulders like a great snowy mane. Snow thickened the air, left the lanterns twin pinpricks of swirling light, unable to illuminate the road. The landscape ahead was like a white sheet. Fields and road blended together. The road was a slight indentation, quickly disappearing beneath the onslaught.
“Martin!” she cried, suddenly terrified. “We have to turn around.”
The storm had caught them out in the open. She’d ignored that hint of snow in the air as they left the city. It was rare to see more than a few inches in Paris and she meant to fight through it. But she could feel a change in the air. This storm was only now drawing its strength.
He flicked his whip at the horses and shouted over his shoulder. “It’s too late. We have to press on.”
“But Martin!”
“Another mile. There’s a way station for pilgrims at a monastery up ahead. We’ll seek refuge for the night.”
As Lucrezia fell back into the carriage, Tullia lifted her head. A rumble started deep in her chest, like the sound of distant thunder. Her ear cocked to one side.
“What is it, girl?”
A growl this time. Her ears twitched side to side and she turned her head as if to get a better angle on whatever she heard. The growl grew and Tullia drew back her lips.
And then Lucrezia heard what had caught the mastiff’s attention. In the distance, a sound to curdle milk in a babe’s belly.
It was the long, wailing howl of a wolf.
Chapter Eight
When morning came at the monastery of Saint-Jacques, the chapel bells ringing for matins, Lorenzo moaned and struggled to a sitting position. The cold ached to his bones, and he kept the blanket around his shoulders as he groped to the other side of the cell in search of the chamber pot. His feet throbbed at every step. When he’d finished passing water, he sank back to the straw mat with a groan.
They’d chained his hands and winched him off the floor by his wrists. When his feet were dangling above the stone floor, a bent old friar took a cane and beat the soles of his feet. From there, the cursed old bastard worked his way up the bare calves, thighs, and all the way to the naked flesh on Lorenzo’s buttocks. The blows were steady, methodical, pitiless, delivered with all the passion of a peasant threshing wheat. But with his measured pace, the old man didn’t tire. He went on and on and on, until Lorenzo couldn’t stop the groans, until he was begging for mercy. The old man never answered. Maybe he was deaf.
Beaten by Methuselah. Then forced to pass around the frozen monastery wearing nothing but rags on his feet and a loin cloth, carrying a beam of wood like Christ on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. Then he’d crawled into the chapel on hands and knees—he couldn’t have walked any more anyway—and prayed in front of the shrine of the Holy Virgin until late into the night. Three hours of sleep and now he was up.
But now you’re done. They have no more claim on you.
Yes, for now. Until he returned to Florence and the inquisitor determined that he was still carrying heresy, still placing more faith in the ancient pagan philosophers than in the Gospels. As taught and interpreted by the church, of course.
Then learn to keep your mouth shut, you fool. Give the correct answer before they beat it out of you.
Lorenzo dressed himself and threw open the door to his monastery cell. It was still nearly dark and he stumbled into what proved to be nearly a foot of fresh snow. More snow fell from the sky, coating his hair and eyelashes.
He wanted to bury his feet in the snow, let the cold numb his flesh until it eased the throbbing pain. But after so many weeks on the road, in cold boots and with numb feet at night, he was already at risk for chilblains. He needed to keep his feet dry and covered.
Working in the dim light of pre-dawn, lay brothers swept out the snow that had blown beneath the arcades, while the other friars filed toward the chapel for matins.
Two men came around the arcade from the other direction, and when they drew close enough to identify, Lorenzo was disappointed to see his brother with the prior.
“There you are,” Marco said. “Hurry and dress. The horses are ready.”
“Where are we going?”
“Nobody told you?” his brother said with a frown. “They’re holding Giuseppe in Lord Nemours’s chatelet.”
“Yes, but . . . you’re coming too?”
“Why wouldn’t I? And Fournier, too. It has been some time since I’ve seen Giuseppe, and the man’s servant may be needed to identify him.”
“His identity is already certain,” Montguillon said.
“Yes, of course, Father,” Marco said, “but you are unknown in Florence. Our word will carry more weight when we return to Italy and report.”
“Yes, I see,” the prior answered, deftly put off by Marco’s explanation.
Lorenzo wished he had that ability. “Are the roads passable?”
“We have a sleigh and four strong horses,” Montguillon said. “We can pass through this snow with little difficulty.”
“But what if it keeps snowing?” Lorenzo asked.
“We are on God’s errand. We’ll get through.”
✛
The hardest part was getting out of Paris itself. Snow didn’t stop the morning crush of people and animals, the emptying of chamber pots filled with steaming urine and night soil into the streets, the refuse of butchers and tanners that didn’t make it to the river. The filth left the roads fouled, slick with packed snow and icy. And when they finally passed through the city gates on the Rue de Saint-Denis, no sooner had they gained the open road when the sleigh struck an abandoned handcart hidden beneath the snow.
The sleigh lurched and nearly toppled. When it came down, one of the runners had fractured. By the time Fournier and the driver—the young friar Simon again—had returned from the city with a wheelwright, the horses were cold and two fresh inches had fallen.
The passengers stood in the open air, watching the wheelwright at work, stomping and hugging themselves to fight off the chill. Simon and Fournier rubbed the horses with blankets to keep them warm.
“God’s blood!” the wheelwright cursed when his hammer slipped and fell into the snow. He was a squat, pig-faced man with massive forearms. One ear was docked where it slipped out from his cap, perhaps an old injury or maybe a punishment for a crime committed as a boy.
Montguillon glowered as the man released a stream of oaths, most of them dealing with anatomy of some kind: God’s teeth, Satan’s warty prick, Peter’s hairy ass, and so on. That the prior held his tongue in the face of this ongoing blasphemy was a wonder.
At last the man finished his work, then demanded an exorbitant sum for the emergency repairs. The wheelwright stood in front of the prior with his tools in a bundle slung over his shoulder and his hand outstretched. Montguillon stared at Marco until the older Boccaccio brother reluctantly handed over the silver.
The men shook the snow from their cloaks, brushed off the seats, and climbed back into the sleigh. Moments later, Simon had them moving again, sluggishly at first, then picking up speed.
“Can we still reach Lord Nemours’ castle by nightfall?” Lorenzo asked.
“Yes, of course,” Montguillon said.
Lorenzo hadn’t been speaking to the prior, but to Fournier, who had watched the wheelwright work with a gloomy expression. Fournier shook his head.
“Doubtful. We’ll be lucky to reach Villepinte.”
“I tell you we’ll make it,” Montguillon said. “Be patient.”
“I’m not looking forward to spending another night on the road,” Lorenzo said in Italian to his brother a few minutes later when they settled in.
“There are all sorts of villages along the way,” Marco said. “The priory probably owns half this land. We could stay with a tenant if we really get caught out. No, we won’t be spending the night out of doors.”
“You’re assuming the prior will let us stop at all.”
The two brothers sat in the back row with Fournier, with the prior alone in the front row, behind Simon on his perch, driving the team. The sleigh was not enclosed, and there was no canopy overhead to keep out snow. The four men and their driver wore heavy cloaks, and wrapped themselves in gray wool blankets taken from the priory. They rose periodically to shake the snow from their cloaks and to brush out the snow at their feet or collecting in the gaps on the benches.
The four horses pulling them were tall, stout animals that forged through the snow with relative ease. Every fifteen or twenty minutes they would pass a smaller, slower sleigh, or occasionally, a man on horseback. The nearest Lorenzo could tell, they were making better than three miles per hour. To his surprise, he determined they would, in fact, reach the chatelet near to or shortly after dusk.
In late afternoon, they drew upon a sleigh struggling in the snow. The problem was not the sleigh itself, which wasn’t much bigger than a farmer’s hay sledge, but the animals. They were two short, stocky horses, well-suited for drawing a carriage, but not the best choice for pushing through the snow, which was eighteen inches high now, and up to twice that in isolated drifts. The animals struggled to get their hooves clear and so were pushing the snow aside instead of stepping through it like the animals pulling the prior’s sleigh.
A man in fine riding clothes drove the two animals, while a lady in a fur-lined cloak sat behind. She held something in her lap that Lorenzo didn’t recognize at first. Even with the hood around her face, her tense posture gave away her anxiety.
Lorenzo leaned forward and tapped Montguillon on the shoulder. “The lady is struggling. Offer her a ride into the next village. She can send someone for her animals and the sledge.”
“It will slow us down. We’ll lose an hour, maybe two.”
“We can spend the night and continue in the morning. Her horses will never make it.”
“No,” the prior said.
“A wealthy duchess or countess might endow the priory if she were grateful enough.”
“I said no.”
Marco tugged on Lorenzo’s arm to pull him back into place. “Leave it alone. This one is immune to the charms of a lady in distress.”
Fournier, too, looked disgusted and muttered something in an incomprehensible village dialect.
“I have no idea what that means,” Lorenzo told him, frustrated at the prior. “But I’m sure I agree with you.”
“Faster,” Montguillon told Simon at the reins. “We’re slowing down.”
“It’s the snow,” Simon said. “The horses can only go so fast.”
“We must reach the castle by nightfall. Drive them on.”
Simon cracked his whip. The horses struggled.
Lorenzo watched the sledge with a frown as they swung to the right to overtake it. The tongues of the lady’s horses lolled from their mouths and their heads drooped. Fine animals, but they looked as broken and dispirited as a peasant’s cart-pulling nag. The woman in the back kept her head down, face covered, instead of looking over at the prior’s sleigh.
He leaned out. “My lady!”
She didn’t look up.
“Don’t despair!” he tried again, this time shouting. “We are pressed, but I’ll send help at the next village. My lady?”
What was wrong with her? There was something about that posture that looked familiar. And that wasn’t a blanket across her lap—or, not just a blanket—there was something moving under there, as if she were hiding a man underneath.
“It’s Lucrezia,” Marco burst out. He pulled Lorenzo down, then shouted at Simon. “Stop the sleigh!”
The prior tried to keep them going, but as Simon began to obey, Marco jumped from the moving sleigh into the snow. Lorenzo came after him, irritated with himself that he hadn’t recognized Lucrezia before his brother. He sank halfway to his knees.
Lucrezia turned toward them now and gave a desperate shake of the head that Lorenzo didn’t understand at all. Wasn’t she relieved to see them? She wasn’t going to make it, not with those short horses.
Lorenzo was stiff from the previous night’s beating and he couldn’t catch up with Marco before he was trotting beside Lucrezia’s still-moving sledge.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
“I’m fine. Go about your business. We’ll speak in Paris.”
Lucrezia’s driver kept his horses struggling forward, but as the prior had finally consented and ordered a halt to his sleigh, she finally ordered her own man to stop.
Lorenzo’s aching feet gave him an opportunity to reconsider before he reached his brother. There was something wrong. He pulled at Marco’s sleeve.
“Leave the lady alone,” he said. “We’ll speak to her in Paris.”
“But, I—” Marco stopped, frowned, then nodded, with recognition dawning in his eyes “Yes, of course.”
But Montguillon was already out of his sleigh by now. “Lady d’Lisle? Are you all right?”
“Fine, no problems. Carry on.”
The prior inspected Lady d’Lisle’s sledge with an increasingly skeptical gaze. “What brings you onto the road in such an unprepared condition?”
“I’m on my way to see the king’s provost.”
“What a strange coincidence,” Montguillon said. “We’re on our way to Lord Nemours’s chatelet ourselves. But Nemours himself is in Paris.”
“Is he?” she said.
She sounded, Lorenzo thought, not quite surprised enough. Her driver was Martin, the mature servant from the house. He didn’t make eye contact with the prior.
Montguillon said, “And you are traveling in a crofter’s sledge with two undersized horses. How curious.”
A calculating element had entered his voice, and a strange, almost manic light glinted in his eyes. He looked like Father before the apoplexy, when the elder Boccaccio would examine a poorly written contract, finding profit in every weakness in the language. Montguillon too, had sensed a profitable opening.