Mary Gentle Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ravaillac wore his red hair shaggy to his shoulders, and he had the hands of a builder, not a user of wax tablet and stylus. It was some consolation that if any man proved a witness, they were more likely to recall a square-shouldered man with Judas-coloured hair than his companion agent of the Duc de Sully: tall and Spaniard-complexioned though I might be.
    “School-master.” I touched his shoulder. “Are you listening to me, or listening to God again?”
    “To you, Messire Belliard,” he said in an easy monotone. “You and He are both saying the same thing. Kill the King.”
    Fifty yards away, the box-shaped cart upholstered in deep red velvet jolted up the street from the Louvre, towards us.
    I rehearsed him again in an undertone. “Stand close behind me; I’ll go up to the carriage when it stops and ask the King if he’ll receive your petition; the rest is up to you.”
    So much had worked to kill the third Henri of Valois, twenty years ago; when a monk presenting a petition had presented, instead, a knife out of the sleeve of his robe. It seemed clear to me that this latest Henri’s men were smart enough to be suspicious of random petitioners. Ravaillac had a freshly sharpened knife on him; I’d seen to that. Once they found it, and I had the confusion of an arrest and a full alert…
    I glanced behind me.
    Cut down to the river and reach the Arsenal, before the Medici’s agents find out what’s happened in the confusion. And if her agents are in my way, do some justice on Maignan’s behalf as I go through.
    Now, when what happened during that early afternoon on the fourteenth of May is a matter of fame and common knowledge, rumour gives many facts that never happened. They say that the King’s coach was held up by the Carmelite Convent, opposite a tavern with the sign of the Crown and Pierced Heart, whereas I watched it come to a rocking halt—one wheel in the kennel-gutter in the centre of the road, the opposite one raised up—thirty feet away. I suspect the tavern keeper of venality after the fact.
    One hand on Ravaillac’s shoulder, I forced him down between the shopping booths that cluttered the rue de la Ferronnerie, and made it such a narrow way despite any edict. Since he and I were both tall enough to see over other men’s hats, we both witnessed Henri grope at his breast for his spectacles, wave a dismissive gesture, and signal to the Duc d’Epernon sitting beside him to read a letter aloud while they waited for the jam to clear.
    Any man, even a stranger to court, would have known Henri at once from the coinage, and from the jutting white beard that went up as he laughed at something Montbazon said. The Duc de Montbazon was seated on the other side of him from Epernon. The coach’s leather curtains had been drawn back, letting in the heat and Spring wind, and the stench of the streets. I could guess at those men sitting with their backs to us: La Force and Laverdin.
    “De Praslin isn’t with him,” I confirmed. Four hours of waiting for palace rumour to be proved true, that Henri is indeed taking out his carriage. Now, I could see that what I had bribed one of the pages into informing me was also the case. Charles de Praslin, captain of the guard, was at Henri’s orders overseeing the readiness of the palace for Marie de Medici’s official entrance, tomorrow, as Queen. Which left nothing but footmen and a few outriders.
    History says the King’s cart was stopped by a collision between two carters’ wagons, and the advent of a herd of swine, and that is true. History does not add that those three men were paid very well for their obstruction, although I have reason to know that it is so.
    As the squealing pigs rounded the corner of the street, shoving men and women irresistibly aside, I saw an occurrence I could not have paid for—all of Henri’s footmen ducking into the Cimetière des Innocents, evidently using it as a short-cut to wait for their master further down the road,