Halfway along rue Macon I met a young woman with a basket of laundry sheltering in a doorway; after we had exchanged complaints about the weather, she confirmed that Père Lefèvre did indeed have rooms in a house opposite, on the first floor. I considered knocking to see if one of his neighbours would let me in, but there were no lights visible in the rest of the house, and it seemed wise to keep my visit discreet. A little careful tinkering with the blade of my knife, and the cheap lock of the front door yielded without much resistance. I latched it behind me, so that I would at least have some warning if someone else had the same idea.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom of the entrance hall, and I wished I had thought to bring a tinder-box and taper. On my left, a crooked staircase ran up to the first floor; after listening for any tell-tale sound of movement from other rooms, I climbed as carefully as I could, though it was impossible to stop the old boards from groaning in protest. My stomach let out a low growl and I clamped a hand across it as if that might muffle the sound; I regretted turning down Gaston’s offer of supper. The door to Paul’s rooms was also locked, and took longer to tease into compliance; this lock appeared newly fitted, and was of a more sturdy and sophisticated type than the rusted bolt downstairs. Had he installed it out of fear for his own safety, I wondered, or to protect some item of value inside? My fingers had grown stiff with cold; I breathed on them and reminded myself to be patient – a steady hand was vital in the series of minute movements required to persuade a lock to yield without a key. Too much haste and you would break the mechanism or slice your fingers. A strange skill for a philosopher, my friend Philip Sidney used to say, though always in a tone of admiration – but then Sidney found it hard to imagine the life I had led before I met him. As the son of a noble family, he had been taught to duel as a boy by a celebrated fencing master; I had learned to fight with my fists on the streets of Naples. I picked up additional skills not usually taught to Dominican friars during the two years I spent on the road north through Italy after I abandoned my order: passing nights in barns, or in taverns where men will put a knife in your ribs for a heel of bread, you learn to shift for yourself however you can. My fellow travellers in those years were not aristocrats and poets but criminals, charlatans and itinerants: strolling players, card sharps, defrocked priests, pedlars, jongleurs, whores and heretics. They knew a few tricks about how to survive, and were generous enough to pass them on. I thanked them silently as the lock finally submitted to the point of my knife with a gratifying click.
Paul had liked his surroundings austere; I almost smiled at the painstaking self-denial in evidence as I closed the door behind me. The room smelled of woodsmoke, damp and that stale odour of unwashed clothes that often clings to bachelors. I felt a stab of pity for him; he had allowed himself so little joy in his determination to please God, and look what it had brought him. Perhaps that was the saddest aspect of his death; he had never been a man who cared much for worldly advancement. If he had joined the Catholic League – those hardline religious conservatives determined to restore the purity of the Church, at any cost – it would have been from a genuine zeal to purge France of all that was unholy. Mind you, that was what the Inquisition in my country liked to claim too.
The main room contained only a wide desk under the window and a carved chest, of the kind used to store linen, in the opposite corner. The desk held an inkhorn, a pot containing three quills, a block of sealing wax and a small penknife; to the left of the inkhorn sat a rectangular wooden box, about a foot and a half long and half as much wide, its surface inlaid with intricate patterns in mother-of-pearl and ivory and fastened with a padlock. A mournful Virgin holding an infant with the face of an irascible old man hung on the wall opposite the window. The adjoining room was partitioned off by a curtain, which I drew back to reveal a space that hardly deserved to be called a bedchamber; more an alcove barely wide enough to hold a single bed. There was another, smaller casement here; I peered out to see that it opened on to the yard side of the house, where part of the ground floor jutted out in a sloping roof directly below the window. Above the bed Paul had fixed a heavy crucifix, with a tortured Christ gazing reproachfully, his neck twisted down to one side so that, if you were supine with your head on the pillow, his wounded eyes would stare right into you. Dio porco; imagine waking to that sight every morning. I knelt to look under the bed; at first I could only make out a chamber pot and some unidentified shape among drifts of dust. I stretched in, groping towards it until my fingers touched the edge of a wooden casket. I drew it out to find it was secured with a sturdy iron padlock. The keyhole was too small to accommodate the blade of my knife; I cast around the room in search of an alternative, but the best I could do was a poker in the fireplace, with which I forced the padlock until it snapped open and a collection of small items wrapped in cloth tumbled out on to the boards. I picked one up, intrigued; it was tied around with twine and gave off a faint odour of decay and alcohol. I unwrapped the bindings and dropped the object immediately, smothering a cry of disgust as I realised I was looking at a severed human finger, seemingly pickled to preserve it, though with dubious success. The flesh was blackened, the torn end of bone and sinew ragged and stringy. Why had Paul hidden such a thing? I tried to refold it in its cloth wrapping when I noticed a tiny paper label attached to the string. It read ‘A. Briant’. The name sounded familiar; I searched the index of my memory as I replaced it in the box and picked up another bundle. This one rattled lightly; scrawled on its label was the name ‘E. Campion’. Already guessing what I would find, I untied it gingerly and tipped the contents into my palm, wincing as I looked at a handful of bloody teeth. The name Campion had sprung the lock of my memory; Father Edmund Campion had been a Jesuit missionary to England, caught and executed for treason four years ago by Queen Elizabeth’s government. Alexander Briant was one of the missionary priests executed with him. It seemed Paul had been collecting relics of English martyrs, items highly prized by the English Catholic exiles in Paris, though the trade was illegal. I wrapped the teeth again, intending to push the whole grisly box back where I had found it, when the label of another packet caught my eye. I lifted it and read ‘J. Gifford’. My stomach clenched as I untied the string holding it; the cloth weighed almost nothing. Inside was a lock of blond hair, matted with dried blood. I had known an English priest by the name of Gifford once; I had watched him die. It seemed a lifetime ago. The bloodied hair lay in the palm of my hand like a reproach, or a warning. I shivered. Whatever Paul was involved in was not my business; I needed to find what I came for and get as far away as possible. I had been too close to too many deaths, these past few years. I shoved the box back into the shadows under the bed and turned my attention to the desk.
The padlock on the ornamental casket proved easy enough to force; the lid opened to reveal a pile of papers, as I had supposed. I took out the first sheet; it was folded in half to make a pamphlet, and on the front was handwritten ‘THE KING OF SODOM’ in strident capitals. Beneath this headline was a crude sketch of a crowned and bearded figure bent double and wearing women’s clothes, which he had hitched up to his waist to allow another man to take him from behind while wielding a flagellant’s whip. I opened the paper; inside was a polemic against the licentiousness of the court, explaining in lurid detail that King Henri III of France could not get an heir because he wouldn’t take his prick out of the Duke d’Epernon’s arse for long enough. I turned the paper back to look at the drawing. I recognised the style, but the version I had seen before was typeset and printed with a woodcut; one of the many anonymous handbills sold for a sou, thrust at you in the square outside Notre Dame by men who took care to keep their faces covered. You could find these pamphlets, discarded, blowing along the gutter near the colleges on the Left Bank. Even a cursory glance at this draft was enough to see that the author