Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [282]
‘And an open bed?’ she said. ‘And an open bottle?’ She had not changed.
‘Suppose you come in,’ he said, ‘and ask Danny and Adam if they will give me a testimonial.’
‘You don’t ask,’ she said, ‘if I can supply one.’
Then he did sigh, looking at her from the open dark eyes in which there was much dignity but no guile, alas, to match hers. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that with or without a testimonial, you have only to come to be received.’
‘Even if I make no promises?’ she said.
‘I have learned that those, too, are pointless,’ he said simply.
*
The Cardinal of Lorraine’s first peace conference failed, and he returned to Paris with a quantity of perfumed gloves, pressed upon him by the Spanish. The release from captivity of the Constable retreated a little further into the future. The Duke de Guise’s programme for the uniting of the largest army ever mustered by any monarch was tackled by all concerned with exemplary vigour.
During the third week in May, the meadows beyond the Faubourg St Germain in Paris, normally the after-supper pleasance of students, were occupied by an orderly procession of four thousand Protestants singing Lutheran psalms interspersed with anti-Papal invective. In the course of their march, which led them after dark into the city and down the rue de St Jacques, they took with them for protection several companies of horsemen and many on foot with concealed weapons. The composition of the procession was extremely mixed, being drawn from noblemen, plebeians and artificers and men of every kind and condition, as well as from women and children. They were not stopped.
The following night they repeated the performance, this time to an immense crowd of spectators. On the third night, a proclamation was issued forbidding the gathering, and when it was ignored, the city gates were closed against them at dusk.
Even then, there was no disturbance. The concourse of ten thousand persons spent the night in the houses of the suburb, or strolling through the meadows in the pleasant mild air, re-entering the town in the morning. On subsequent nights they did the same but omitted, with belated tact, the ballads against the Vatican.
An account of the disturbances being sent to the Court, the Cardinal de Sens, the spiritual Primate of France, issued a severe proclamation in the King’s name to prevent further such demonstrations, and by offering rewards for information, succeeded in arresting some hundred persons of no great consequence who had taken part in the singing. Among them were a number of tutors and other officials from the University colleges.
Because of the nature of the times and the danger of civil war, great discretion was used in the case of a number of great persons who openly favoured Calvinism and were known to have attended. The King of Navarre, who had been present only, he pointed out winningly, as an interested bystander, was questioned none the less by the King and by the Cardinal.
François de Coligny, sieur d’Andelot, recently back in Paris after securing the Brittany ports against threat of English invasion, was less fortunate, as it happened, in his perfumed handshake.
He had been seen to attend the demonstrations. He had also, so the Cardinal was able to show, sent for Geneva books during his recent captivity. The King, who was fond of him, regretfully summoned him to face his questions, and went so far as to have him warned in advance of their content. A simple lie, there was no doubt, would have saved him. But confronting the King at his supper, the sieur d’Andelot merely replied, with strong rectitude and no sense of discretion that, while owing the French King his absolute devotion, his soul belonged only to God, and lit by the torch of the Evangile, he approved the doctrines of Calvin and thought Mass a horrible profanation and an abominable invention of mortals.
Enraged by the blasphemy, the King snatched a basin to hurl at d’Andelot but, his aim being no better than his son’s, instead cracked open the head of the Dauphin. M. d