Doctor Who: The Massacre (4 page)

Steven crossed the room towards them. ‘What will you do about the girl?’ he asked as Antoine-Marc brought another goblet from the bar.

‘Oh, yes, the girl,’ Lerans exclaimed in mock surprise.

‘I’d forgotten about her.’ He clapped his hands. ‘You can stand up now, wench,’ he called and the girl rose cautiously from behind the bar. ‘Come here, no harm’ll fall upon you.’

The girl edged her way towards the table while Antoine-Marc filled Steven’s goblet. ‘You shouldn’t play those sort of games here, Sire,’ the landlord half-whispered to Lerans.

‘It’ll give my establishment a bad reputation.’

‘A bad one!’ Lerans laughed as he sank back into his chair and pointed at the girl: ‘As a defender of helpless maidens, how can that possibly be bad?’ He indicated a chair and invited Steven to sit down. ‘English, aren’t you and in Paris for yesterday’s celebrations?’

‘English, yes, but we only arrived today and are just passing through,’ Steven replied.

Lerans picked up his goblet. ‘Where is your friend, the older man?’

‘He’s gone to Montparnasse to visit an apothecary.’

Behind the bar Antoine-Marc had pricked up his ears.

Lerans raised his eyebrows. ‘Is he sick?’ he asked and added that there were plenty of apothecaries in the immediate neighbourhood. Steven explained that his friend was a doctor and that the visit was a professional one, an exchange of ideas.

Muss’s eyes narrowed. ‘A
practising
apothecary?’ he enquired.

‘I don’t know,’ Steven replied.

‘What’s his name?’

Steven thought for a moment. ‘The Doctor did mention it. Premlin, something like that.’

‘Preslin, Charles Preslin,’ Muss stated. ‘A Huguenot.’

Lerans snorted with delight. ‘Nicholas was fishing to subtly discover whether you’re pro-Catholic or for us.’

Steven smiled. ‘I’m neutral,’ he said.

‘We, as you may have gathered, are not.’ Lerans glanced at the girl who stood meekly beside the table. ‘And baiting Catholics is my favourite sport.’

‘So I’ve noticed,’ Steven admitted with a laugh. Lerans picked up his goblet. ‘Here’s a toast to your Queen Bess, our ally, long may she reign’. They all rose and drank to Queen Elizabeth’s health. Then he turned his attention to the girl. ‘What’s your name, child?’ he asked.

‘Anne Chaplet,’ she replied.

‘In the service of the Most Illustrious Cardinal Lorraine.’ He made the title sound ludicrous. ‘Yet a good Catholic girl like you runs away – why?’

‘I’m not a Catholic, sir,’ Anne’s mouth was set stubbornly.

Lerans looked at the others and then at her in astonishment. ‘You’re a Huguenot,’ he exclaimed.

‘Yes, sir,’ she replied proudly.

Lerans chortled. ‘We must send you back,’ he rubbed his hands together gleefully, ‘and have a spy in the household.’

‘Oh, no, sir, please not that,’ she begged. ‘I don’t know would what they would do to me.’

‘For running away? A good thrashing, I suppose.’

Lerans’ manner was only half-teasing. ‘But now that you’re in contact with us, it’d be worth it, surely?’

‘But it wouldn’t be for running away, sir, it’d be for something I overheard.’

Everyone around the table glanced at one another before leaning towards her, their faces serious.

‘What did you overhear, Anne?’ Lerans measured out his words.

‘Wassy,’ she replied. Steven did not understand but the others obviously did.

‘What about Wassy?’ Lerans’s voice hardened.

‘It might happen again before the week’s out,’ she said, wringing her hands. There was a catch in her voice as she added: ‘That’s where I come from and that’s where my father was murdered.’

Lerans reached out, placed his hands on Anne’s shoulders, and looked directly into her eyes. ‘It’s very, very important, Anne, that you remember every word you overheard.’

Anne nodded and took a deep breath: ‘I was walking along a corridor in the servants’ quarters, the one where the Cardinal’s guards are housed, and I passed their door which was open. There were two men in the room. One of them was the officer who came here to take me back and the other was a man I didn’t know but the officer called him Roger when he said that there’d be more celebrations before the week was out and that it’d be just like Wassy all over again.’

Steven broke the ensuing silence. ‘May I ask where Wassy is and what happened there?’

Nicholas Muss told him that Wassy was a small town about two hundred kilometres to the east of Paris. In March, 1562, some soldiers under the leadership of the staunchly Catholic Duke Francois de Guise had massacred twenty-five Huguenots who were attending a service in their Reform Church there. Steven glanced at Anne.

‘My brother and I escaped by clambering up into the loft and jumping from the roof onto a hayrick before the Church was set on fire,’ she said simply. ‘My father was not so lucky.’

‘It was the spark which ignited the Religious Wars in France,’ Muss added, ‘and there have been sporadic out-breaks of violence all over the country ever since. Francois de Guise was assassinated within the year. Sudden death without time to confess became the rule of thumb between Huguenots and Catholics. But we hope that yesterday’s marriage will bring about a reconciliation.’

Suddenly a chord was struck in Steven’s brain. He knew the play where he had spoken those lines mentioning shriving time. They were from
Hamlet
. He had played the Prince who, plotting revenge for his father’s murder, cries out:

‘He should those bearers put to sudden death Not shriving time allowed.’

Of course: ‘shriving time’–the time allowed to a condemned man so that he may make peace with God before his execution.

What had the cleric said? ‘with the Most Illustrious in Rome, [Steven now knew who he was] my Lord Abbot will allow them no shriving time.’ The other priest had added:

‘Not even a few seconds for Vespers.’ Combined with Anne’s story, it could only mean a Catholic conspiracy against ‘them’. But who were ‘them’? He decided to let Gaston and Nicholas solve that one.

‘Now, let me tell you what I overheard earlier this afternoon’, Steven said, remembering not to mention a play that hadn’t yet been written. ‘It was meaningless to me until I heard what Anne had to say.’ He repeated word for word the incident in the Cathedral.

There was a long silence after he had finished which was finally broken by Lerans who looked at Anne and then at Muss. ‘Safekeeping for the girl, Nicholas, where?’ His voice was brisk, authoritative.

‘The Admiral’s house,’ Muss replied without hesitation.

‘Where better than the residence of the Queen Mother’s closest advisor?’ He turned to Steven: ‘Admiral de Coligny, he’s a Huguenot, one of us, and as his secretary, I can keep an eye on her.’

Lerans looked at two of his young companions.

‘Fabrice, you and Alain take her there,’ he ordered before turning to Steven. ‘Now, what about you, Englishman?’ He paused and then smiled. ‘Forgive my ill manners, I have not introduced myself nor asked your name.’ He bowed his head slightly. ‘I am Gaston, Viscount Lerans, the personal aide to His Majesty, Henri of Navarre.’

‘My name’s Steven Taylor,’ Steven said and, half-raising his hands in a mild protest, added, ‘but I’m not involved.

I’ve told you all I know and now I’m waiting for my friend, the Doctor, to return as we’re both just passing through.’

‘Then I wish you well and a safe journey home,’ Lerans replied and turned to the others. ‘Gentlemen, we have matters to attend to.’ He walked over to the bar and place a coin on it. ‘That should be sufficient, I think, including a glass each for the Englishman and his friend when he comes back,’ he said and, followed by Muss and the remaining companion, went outside. Antoine-Marc pocketed the coin and thought how much more would be coming to him when next he spoke to Simon Duval.

Once they were on the street Lerans took Muss by the arm. ‘Them,’ he said urgently and repeated it. ‘Us? All of us? That’s unthinkable: we’re more than ten thousand strong in Paris.’

‘Then a faction,’ Muss replied. ‘Not your master for that would bring about a catastrophe for both causes.’

‘I agree. But nonetheless a group of us has been selected for the Abbot’s justice.’ Lerans almost spat out the last word.

‘But which one?’ Muss spread his hands in despair.

‘If I were a Catholic – which merciful Heaven I’m not –

I would consider that the most contentious Huguenots, more so than our clergy, are those whose theories and experiments had them disenabled in ’67,’ Lerans replied.

‘The apothecaries!’ Muss exclaimed.

Lerans pointed back at the auberge. ‘And if what that young Englishman said is true, we have only a few hours in which to warn them.’

‘Until Vespers.’

‘So we’ve no time to waste.’

They both strode off purposefully, forgetting that the Doctor had gone to exchange ideas with a Huguenot apothecary named Preslin.

3

The windows were open yet the heat inside the carriage was stifling as it rattled across the cobblestone streets towards the Sorbonne, jiggling the Doctor about and making him perspire profusely. But his physical discomfort was far outweighed by the curiosity which had led him to make the spur-of-the-moment decision to visit Charles Preslin.

The carriage came to a halt and the driver, leaning over, looked down. ‘That’ll be twenty sous,’ he said and the Doctor handed him thirty as he stepped out. The driver tipped his hat, shook the reins and the carriage rumbled away.

The Doctor looked around him. The Sorbonne tower stood in the centre of a small circus from which six busy streets radiated like the spokes of a wheel. The Doctor studied each of them in turn, looking for the mortar and pestle sign of an apothecary. He could see three such signs within the first thirty metres, all in different streets, and set off to investigate each one in turn, knowing that, regardless of the one he chose to begin with, the shop he wanted would be the third.

Which, of course, it was and, moreover, it was closed and had been for some considerable time by the state of it.

The window shutters were closed, the door locked and the nameplate barely legible but the Doctor managed to discern the name
Chas. Preslin
.

He moved back into the centre of the crowded street to obtain a better overall view of the building. It was a two storey house similar to the ones they had seen when they left the TARDIS on the rubbish dump. There were two windows on each floor and three of them were shuttered.

The fourth and smallest was the top one on the lefthand side. At least someone lived there, the Doctor thought and noticed a narrow lane between two houses a few metres further down the street. ‘I’ll try the back door,’ the Doctor muttered to himself and walked towards it, counting front doors on the way.

The length of the lane was littered with rubbish and opened out onto a general area of wasteland between the backs of the houses. Some people had tried to cultivate their small patches of soil in which vegetables struggled to grow. Others kept pigs or hens in compounds and there were a few tethered goats. The Doctor put his handkerchief to his nose as he made his way among the washing lines slung between the back windows and poles stuck in the earth. He counted back doors as he went along until he reached the one he calculated would be Preslin’s. He knocked on it with his cane and waited. No one came to the door so he looked up and saw that all the windows were shuttered. He knocked again but there was still no reply.

‘There’s no good you doing that, he won’t come to the door,’ a rosy-cheeked, stout woman announced from her window in the house next door as she prodded some washing out onto the line with a stick.

The Doctor looked up at her and raised his hat. ‘Pray, how does one attract Monsieur Preslin’s attention, madam?’

‘You open the door and you go inside,’ she replied.

‘Thank you, madam,’ the Doctor said and did as she had advised, closing the door behind him.

Enough light filtered through the rear shutters toallow the Doctor to make out his surroundings. The room appeared to be an abandoned laboratory with bottles, jars, phials and jugs stacked on several shelves around the walls.

In the middle of the room there was a table, covered with dust with mortars and pestles and measuring instruments lying on it. There was a door which the Doctor decided led to the shop so he opened it and went into the short corridor which lay beyond.

On his right was a narrow staircase winding up to the floors above. The Doctor stood still and listened. He could hear no sounds. ‘Monsieur Preslin,’ he called out and waited. There was no reply. ‘Charles Preslin,’ he repeated but again there was only silence. He sighed and opened the door in front of him. He was right. It led to the shop with its dust-covered counter and cobwebbed shelves. He went back into the corridor and mounted the stairs. He looked into both rooms on the first floor. One of them was a bedroom and the other appeared to be a library. He went up to the second floor and opened the door of the room with the open shutter. A man sat at a desk by the window.

He was writing with a quill pen in a ledger and several sheets of paper lay on the desk. The man did not look up as the Doctor came into the room.

‘Is that you, David?’ he asked, his pen still scratching on the parchment.

‘No, it’s not,’ the Doctor replied and waited as the man carefully laid down his pen on the desk and then slowly, as if preparing himself for a shock, turned around as he removed the small half-spectacles from the tip of his nose.

‘And who may you be, sir?’ he asked quietly and politely.

‘A doctor,’ the Doctor replied.

‘There are many such,’ the man replied as he stood up,

‘with clothes of different cuts, medicine, philosophy, the sciences, even the arts.’ He studied the Doctor’s cape for a moment before asking what lay under it. The Doctor flicked it back off his shoulders and the man stared at him for a while before speaking. ‘A strange attire,’ he observed finally.

The Doctor smiled. ‘Of my own design,’ he said. ‘I travel a lot and cannot abide discomfort.’ Then he hesitated fractionally before asking, ‘You
are
Charles Preslin, I presume?’