Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [72]
The children wept, and some of the women. The men talked. As he had expected, all those with swords were willing to attempt an escape, and most of the unarmed volunteered also to go with them. There was no possibility of leading out the women, or the old. In the open, no gallantry would protect them.
Shortly after that, the first group of men, swords drawn, dashed from the doors of the meeting-house.
Outside was cool air and a long, empty street, bathed in the flickering light of two bonfires. Certainly, the windows were thronged with calling people. But it must have looked as if a quick man, turning right or left, could run into a pend or a sidestreet, or through a garden, or across to the cemetery or into the cloisters of St Benoît itself.
They reached the road running and scattered. Before they had taken three steps, a curtain of driving rock swept the street, thudding on flesh and knocking on bone or dashing to shards on the causeway. Three men lay in the road. One, his head broken open, staggered from doorway to doorway. A fourth and fifth, slashed and limping, threw themselves into neighbouring gardens where hands grasped and held them.
The next group standing within the doorway of the Hôtel Bétourné saw it all. They waited only a moment, then in their turn ran out into that storm of rubble.
By the third foray, the stones were finished. They threw pikes for a while, which stuck in a man’s flesh and quivered, like harpoons in a sharkskin. When these were done, the inhabitants of the rue St Jacques, oblivious to the shouts of the sergeants, seized axes and halberds and swarmed downstairs into the roadway. Tardily, the soldiers at either end of the street began to move round the overturned wains and run towards the seat of the fighting.
There were still between sixty and seventy women and children inside the Hôtel Bétourné including the comtesse de Laval and the Maréchale de St André, when the pastor pulled the doors shut and locked them against the carnage outside. Alight with religious frenzy, with fear, with unreasoning blood-lust, the God-fearing people of Paris set upon the Calvinists trapped in the street, and did not use stones this time to attack them. One man died, kicked to death in the church cloisters. The others, spinning from fist to fist, were lashed with belts and beaten with cart-whips and chopped at with axes. The horses of the Huissiers, plunging amongst them, made little difference, nor did the strong arms of the sergeants and the archers. There were not enough of them. And blocking the light of the bonfires, they rendered Catholic and Calvinist quite indistinguishable.
The crowd swayed against the Hôtel Bétourné and commanded, screaming, that the heretics should come out. The door panels shuddered to the blows of bodies and fists. A torch, flung through the smashed windows, lay ablaze on the cloth of the altar table. The women, weeping, scrambled to smother it. ‘Mon Dieu, donne la main à ta servante,’ prayed Madame la Maréchale de St André. ‘Je te recommande mon âme.’
Then quite simply, a miracle happened. The shattered windows blazed and burned with a flickering and unearthly brilliance. The blows on the door ceased. The screaming altered. And there rang out the voice of their deliverer, in a thunder of arquebus shot that made every other noise puny and caused the uproar outside to falter, to stagger and perish.
‘I command you,’ said that scathing, peremptory voice, ‘to cease Satan’s work and stand back as you look for redemption. Will God rejoice that we send him blackened souls in place of penitent lambs who have seen their unwisdom? Will the strong arms here, who defend you day and night from the enemy, be given fresh heart from your actions tonight,