‘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 people 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