Into The Fire (53 page)

At each name, a stride across the cell, gloves hurled aside, fat fingers fumbling at his points. He chest-buffets her back. She is crushed between him and the wall, pressed there, held by his bulk. She is hobbled, unable to run. She has no breath to call for help; all her air has been stolen by his weight.

‘I can’t believe they haven’t made you wear a gown, these worms who call themselves men. They need an Englishman to show them how to bring you to heel.’

His face thrusts at hers. Spit flecks the corners of his lips. His breath swarms over her, hot with fury. He is not drunk, unless an excess of lust and the thrill of slaughter be his wine, but he will break into her by force if he can.

His teeth are at her cheek again, pressing, crushing, driving her head back against the wall, sucking her breath. He is stuck at the forty points that tie her hose; always, she has had double the usual number, and this is the reason.

He rocks back, to look, and this is her chance. She brings up her knee, as hard as her fetters will let her. She thrusts her balled fist at his throat. And she screams. ‘Help! Rape! Help! Talbot! Tomas!
Help!
’

‘My lady?’ By luck, Tomas is walking nearby, but he is outside, and must argue his way into the chateau. ‘Let me in! No, don’t go for Warwick! Actually, yes, do go for Warwick, but let me in first.’ And up the stairs, to the guards’ room, where five men shrug awkwardly; a lord has given them orders, what are they to do? But they would like to help. They have lived in her company for five months and they no longer piss in her food. He is a priest; he has enough authority to overrule some petty lord’s second son. He sends them for John Talbot, cousin to the one in French hands, who has laid his hand on the bible and sworn to protect her. ‘You would let them make an oath-breaker of you?’

In the cell, she is still under assault.

‘Shut
up
!’ Her assailant is fast: her knee did not reach the parts she aimed for. His fist slams her chin, her head smashes back against the wall. She bites her tongue, tastes blood, feels her nose crack and gush.

She is falling, flailing, grabbing out for loose clothing, for flesh, for anything she can hit and hurt, because she will
not
lose her chastity. She will not let them call her a whore. She cannot: only maids are immune to the devil. Without her maidenhead, she is as good as burned.

He falls on top of her. His points are open. He is struggling, thrusting. She can feel the rigid end of his member like a piston against her hose. He will force himself through if he cannot work them open. She bites his nose. He hits her. He is grunting, ‘Whore! Whore! Whore! I will break you apart, you little French cunt. I will—’

‘My lord, you will not.’ Tomas grabs his arm, fingers biting into the flesh.

John Talbot takes his shoulders. ‘Sir, you will stop this. It does you no honour. Matthew, take his arm. Tomas, the prisoner is in your care. If she is harmed, I will hold you responsible. Send to your lodgings for someone to bring your unguents.’

In short order, they are alone. Tomas has a bucket of cold water and a cloth to make a compress, but her nose is broken, and her lip is the size of her chin, and there are bite marks on her cheeks and bruises the size of a man’s fist to back them up. The air stinks of sweat and fury.

‘My lady, lie still. Let me …’

He eases back the neck of her shirt, to clean a scratch mark that goes down below her collarbone. And so he sees it: the red strawberry mark below her right ear, exactly as it is on Marguerite. The mark of the old king’s get.

His world, already shaken, fractures. His hand will not move. Water drips from the cloth.

‘Tomas?’

‘You are the king’s daughter. The old king. You were not just his ward. You were his
daughter
.’

She is too broken to smile, too bruised, but he sees a spark deep in her eyes. She licks her lips, tries to speak. Stops. Tries again. ‘Are you going to tell Bedford?’

‘Lady …’ He is on his knees at her side, his hands clasping hers, careless of her wounds. ‘That you could think that of me—’ And because his mind is open, his thoughts flying too many different ways, ‘You are Guerite!’

That at least raises a smile. ‘My father was not stupid.’

He has never thought that. Mad, clearly, but never stupid. He named his daughter ‘little war’ because she was his warrior. And on her, it is as a glove made to fit the hand. She
is
Guerite, body and soul.

But then … ‘Who is Marguerite? The king only had one daughter.’

‘No, he had two, but one was never spoken of. I was acknowledged because my mother was La Petite Reine. My sister was got on a chambermaid if you speak to the dairymaids, or a dairymaid if you speak to the chambermaids. I don’t know which of these is true, but she was the product of one of his bouts of madness. Her mother died when she was born. My mother would have taken her in, but … you don’t know what it was like at court. She was safer, probably, growing up with her mother’s people. And she came to visit us, often. My mother doted on her, and Yolande. All the ladies did. She was so beautiful, so pure. She still is.’

Two daughters, then, and one of them a warrior. The other … he remembers Claudine.
We called her the Princess. The king’s daughter. The king’s bastard daughter. We saw her hardly at all, and when we did she was with La Petite Reine …
Clever Claudine.

He says, ‘Claudine let me think what I already believed was true. She didn’t betray you.’

‘I’m glad. Did you kill her?’

‘No. That was an agent of Bedford’s. I choked him to death and buried his cockless body in a midden.’

She laughs, breathlessly, painfully. ‘Oh, Tomas. Thank you. Hanne will be pleased. She liked Claudine.’

Hanne. That name spoken with the same warmth he heard in a hovel in Rheims on the night of the king’s anointing. And so the last piece falls into place and the broken story is made whole.

‘Marguerite is Hanne?’ Of course. Of
course.
They are like this. Tight as crossed fingers. Claudine not a part of their closeness. So much explained.

She is watching him, the Maid who is the king’s daughter. Laughter sparks her eyes. ‘Properly she is Jehanne. I took her name, she took mine. We had to stay as close to the truth as possible so that if anyone –
when
everyone – started to ask questions, they would find what we wanted …’

She dries as much for pain as for the words. In a while, looking away, she says, ‘It was always going to come to this.’

‘No! No …’ So many reasons why not. ‘If the king had only … Body of Christ, he is your
brother.
’

‘Which is exactly why he could not accept me; a woman who fights when he does not so much as tilt? It could never be. Yolande saw that from the start.’

‘She made this happen? Yolande of Aragon?’

‘The king’s mother-in-law. Indeed.’ A dry half of a smile. ‘My poor brother is surrounded by women who would rule him. I had to wait until my mother died, but then Yolande was ready, and we planned it, she and me and Marguerite, so that when Marguerite de Valois returned to court in the middle of winter, it was not the same girl who had left Chinon four years before. Nobody noticed. They hadn’t paid me any attention when I was young and they were far too busy making sure they were in favour with the new princess to ask questions. She fills the role well, don’t you think?’

‘As if born to it. You, however, are not a peasant.’

‘And yet nobody asks. Father saw that. “If you claim God on your side, they will ask about that, not about the horses or the swords.”’ Her eyes close. ‘They haven’t asked, any of them. Not once have they asked how I was able to take the field against Bedford at Montépilloy and scare him into flight.’

‘They dare not. The man who turns my lord regent into a laughing stock will find himself thrown in the river.’

‘And I will burn.’

‘My lady, no! Did not your father say you would be freed before the end? You told me he said so. Dear God, you even told Pierre Cauchon that your voice promised you freedom before the end.’

‘He has not said it recently.’ She closes her eyes, and is lost to him.

He presses the cloth on her neck, holds it awhile, dips it in the bucket, wrings it out, then goes down on his knees and lays his hand on her arm, where there is no bruising. ‘I swear I will not tell them. I will not tell Bedford. I will not tell Cauchon. I will never tell anybody. I swear this on your life, which I hold more dear than my own.’

Through her bruised lips, past her broken nose, she manages a smile, of sorts. ‘Thank you.’

PICAUT’S DRIVE ALONG
the Loire towards Blois is miraculously unattended. Christelle Vivier is no longer a story, therefore Cheb Yasine is no longer a story and Picaut may have run her full gamut of celebrity.

It’s pleasantly liberating, although she is dogged by the sensation that something bigger is on its way, more damaging, something for which it was worth the effort of hacking into Christelle Vivier’s campaign servers. Something, somewhere, will prove to have been worth distracting the entire police enterprise of Orléans.

She sifts through every sentence of her conversation with Father Cinq-Mars in the basilica, with Troy Cordier in the Hôtel JJR, with Monique Susong yesterday, with Sylvie, Garonne, Rollo. Nothing cracks the walls of her subconscious and the monster still lurks, but at least she hasn’t spent the time considering the implications of being in love – there, she’s said it now – with a man who still lives with his parents.

In Blois, she lets her satnav take her through the town and up the hill towards the castle. This, too, she last visited with her school, a day trip out to see the decadence of France’s royalist past or the tragedy of its loss; her teachers were not entirely clear which.

Her father was entirely clear; she still remembers him reciting the bloody litany of fortunes spent on gold and diamonds, of lives lost and uncared for, of petty princes wreaking havoc with France’s history for the sake of their vanity; the grim necessity of the revolution, and the bloodbath it became.

Sylvie is right. Here, where the houses date back to when England owned the land, where the roads are really not built for cars and she has to ditch hers in a parking space and walk, where the houses are built on a latticework of dark wood, with white walls and black-tiled roofs … here are properties owned by families with wealth nearly to match the Bressards. She had never imagined Patrice in one of these.

She is hoping there’ll be a gap in the long stretches of magnificent medieval terraced mansions, that she’ll find something else, a servant’s cottage, perhaps, turned into a scruffy communal hideaway for the digitally obsessed.

But she follows the curve of the road to the address Sylvie has provided and it’s identical to all the others: three storeys high, double fronted, of white stone under black tiles. A black-painted door gives directly on to the street. The window shutters are painted white. She glances in through the nearest window and sees a distressingly ornate chaise longue and two matching pre-revolutionary chairs all facing a wide screen television. Something inside her shrivels.

She reaches the door. There is more than one bell: three, in fact, one above the other set to one side of a brass plaque on which, with the kind of arrogant permanence the Bressards would employ, three names are engraved:
P. Lacroix
,
V. Tavel
,
S. Sarles
.

Courage is made of moments like this. Before she can walk away, she pulls her hands from her pockets and presses the bell, hard. No sound filters back through the black front door to say she has been heard. She counts a slow hundred and tries again, longer, harder. And then again.

Five minutes later, when a ten-second lean on the bell has produced no response, she tries the name below: V. Tavel. And receives an answer.

‘
Oui?
’ A woman’s voice comes from a speaker set on the other side of the door. Young, perhaps twenty-something. She sounds warm, just in that one word: intelligent, friendly.

‘Police. I’m looking for Patrice Lacroix. He’s not in trouble; we need his help.’ She has planned this approach in the five minutes of waiting. There has to be a reason Patrice has kept his work and home so far apart, and it may well be that the people who live around him don’t know what he does for a living.

‘Who is it?’

‘Police. From Orléans.’

‘You said that already. Who?’

‘Picaut. Capitaine Inès Picaut.’

There is a moment’s pause, and then the buzz that even here, in a place where the stones of the porch are over six hundred years old, signals the unlocking of a door. The woman’s voice: ‘Come up to the second floor.’

Inside is airy, and smells pleasantly of great age. Pale stone flags in the hallway are worn with the footsteps of centuries. Picaut follows their line to a wide spiralling staircase that sweeps up and round to the left ahead of her. Tall windows let in the almost-summer sun, washing to white the pale cream plaster. Everything is fresh and clean and painfully bright.

Running up, Picaut tries to imagine Patrice sliding down the gilded oak banister, or skateboarding down the grey marble stairs; something – anything – to break the perfect, bourgeois
neatness
of this place.

She reaches the second floor, on which is a small landing before the stair spirals on up. Ahead, a door hangs ajar. She’s raising her hand to knock when a woman opens it and comes out; slightly built, with short, blue-black hair, she is wearing a white linen shirt that reaches just short of her knees, belted with calf skin. Her eyes are iron-grey and they scour Picaut from head to foot, take in the jeans and trainers and leather jacket that’s not quite old enough to be vintage, not nearly new enough to be chic.

She reaches out a hand. ‘Valérie Tavel.’ She tilts a smile. ‘Patrice has spoken of you.’

Her accent is Canadian, the old-French of Montreal. She kicks the door shut with her bare foot and nods up the stairs. ‘I have a spare key. I think you’d be allowed inside.’