Chapter 9

Pernelle forced herself to stride purposefully through the market gate, holding her basket under her cloak and leaning a little, as though it were heavy after a successful marketing. Through the gate, around a corner and another and another, ignoring a preaching monk, a shouting coachman, a broadside seller singing a scurrilous ditty about a playwright, she walked as though she knew where she was going and didn’t want to be late. It took every shred of self-control she had. She wanted to run until Paris was far behind her, but innocent ordinary women did not run in the street, and her only chance was to remain unnoticed. As she walked, she wondered if she could at least avoid starving by hiring herself out as a servant in another part of the city, far from the New Converts’ House. If she could clean herself up a little more, she would be presentable. She’d learned, since the dragoons came, to be a good enough liar. She knew how to pretend to be Catholic. She—

A woman’s screams brought her sharply back to the present. Two men walking ahead of her looked at each other and started toward the sound. But when raucous male laughter half drowned the screams, they shrugged and kept walking. Pernelle, remembering how the guards had controlled the Huguenot women with touches and insinuations and threats on the way to Paris, forgot everything else and ran toward the screams. They were coming from a courtyard just beyond a secondhand clothes dealer’s shop. The courtyard’s wooden gate hung half off its hinges, and Pernelle looked cautiously around it. Across the garbage littered cobbles, a pair of laughing men had a cursing, kicking girl trapped against a wall. The girl was clutching a shrieking baby against her breast, and Pernelle recognized her as the girl from the fountain. The man pressing her to the wall pulled her skirts higher, and his fellow started to unlace his own breeches.

Pernelle grabbed up a short heavy piece of board fallen from the gate and flew at them. Their own noise covered her running, and she caught the one who was thrusting his loins at the woman full on the back of the head. He dropped like an ox. The other man lunged at her, and she swung the board again with all her strength. She overbalanced and the blow was glancing, but his knees buckled and he went down. The girl with the baby was pawing through scattered trash in the yard’s corner and cursed as Pernelle dragged her unceremoniously out of the court.

The old clothes dealer watched them pass from the door of his shop. “Crazy whores,” he muttered, and spat in their path.

Pernelle rounded on him. “Pig! Why didn’t you help her? Bastard! Son of a monk!”

The woman with the baby started to laugh. “You curse as good as a soldier, you! Come on, one of those shit-born curs might wake up.” Without slowing, she pulled open the frayed man’s doublet she wore for a bodice and stuck a nipple in the baby’s mouth to quiet it. “Those pissants took my jerkin,” she said furiously, looking over her shoulder at the ruined gate. “That’s what I was looking for.”

“What jerkin?”

The girl’s eyes slid sideways and she shrugged. “I was going to sell it.” She spat over her shoulder, then grabbed Pernelle’s arm. “Run!”

Pernelle looked back. The second man had staggered through the gate and stood swaying on his feet.

“Come on, keep moving your ass.” The girl tugged Pernelle into a trot. “If those hell spawns come after us, we’re dead!” When the man was out of sight, the girl narrowed her eyes at Pernelle. “You’re the one was at Holy Innocents. The fountain. With that dog.”

Pernelle nodded. “Is the baby all right?”

“He’s like everybody else: full belly, all’s well.”

“Nothing’s well with an empty belly.”

“No. Mary’s holy milk, I could have got enough for that jerkin to last days,” the girl lamented. “It was worn, but good leather. You been on the street long?” The girl reached out and fingered Pernelle’s cloak. “You don’t look like it.”

“How much filthier do I have to get to look like it?”

The girl just looked at her, and Pernelle bit her lip and looked away. Her answer was walking beside her.

“Where’d you come from?” The girl was frankly studying her now.

“Where? Um—oh—the north.”

“You have babes?”

“A little girl. She’s not here, though.”

They walked in silence, Pernelle following the girl’s lead for lack of anything better to do. They came to a place where six streets angled like ill-grown tree branches off a more or less triangular stretch of cobbles. Where the triangle narrowed, there was a roofed well with a wooden bucket hanging from its neatly winched rope.

“Know where you are?” the girl said.

Pernelle shook her head.

“See that wall over there?” The girl pointed to the left.

Pernelle squinted against the sun. “Is that Les Halles?”

“Right. You want to stay alive out here, always know where you are. So you know where to hide. And where not to. Come on.” The girl marched across the cobbles toward a church with an imposing spire. “That’s Saint Eustache. A rich people’s church. It’s Saint James’s Day; they’ll be stopping by.” She jerked her chin down at the baby, now fathoms deep in sleep, with milk dribbling down his chin. “Now I’ve got him, I get more coins.”

Pernelle stood still, as put off by profiting from the charade of a saint’s day as by the thought of begging. The girl, halfway across the triangle’s pavement, looked over her shoulder.

“Come on, if you want to fill your belly.”

Feeling as though she’d been told to take her clothes off in the street, Pernelle caught up with her. “I don’t know how to—”

Trumpets blared and they jumped out of the way as a pair of outriders cantered toward them. Behind the outriders came a coach drawn by six white horses, the mounted trumpeters behind. Pernelle had a glimpse of plumes and piled hair and rich colors and liveried lackeys hanging on to the rear of the coach.

“Begging’s easy as pissing,” the girl said, as they started walking again. “You plop yourself down in their path, hold out your hand, make big eyes, and look hungry.”

“I can look hungry.”

They climbed the steps to the church’s porch and the girl sat down squarely in the path to the big doors. With a sense of unreality, Pernelle huddled beside her, wondering who St. Eustache was. She thought she remembered hearing that he was a martyr. Perhaps he’d starved to death on this very spot, too holy—or too shy—to beg. She pulled up the hood of her cloak, withdrew into it as though it were a cave, and cupped her hands on her knees. A rainbow of skirts went past, accompanied by white-stockinged and well-shod male legs. Then stiff primrose satin slowed along the stone, above wooden pattens keeping heeled and ribboned green shoes out of the dirt, and a coin dropped into Pernelle’s hands. She jerked her head up in surprise. A small woman veiled in lace was mincing down the steps to a waiting carriage, followed by a dumpy chaperon delicately holding her nose as she stared at the baby. The baby’s mother elbowed Pernelle in the ribs. Pernelle turned, speechlessly holding out the silver coin.

“A livre! She gave me a whole livre.”

“Bite it,” the girl said.

“What?!”

She snatched the coin, clamped her uneven brown teeth down on it, and nodded vigorously. “It’s a good one.” She handed it back with a gap-toothed grin.

Then the quick clip of heels on the paving transformed her face into a pleading, lip-quivering tragedy mask as she reached toward a young man in a bouncing black wig. The lace foaming down the front of his coat waved in the breeze as he shied from her hand, but Pernelle heard the musical rain of small coins. Clutching her livre and its promise of food, she realized that she didn’t know her mentor’s name.

“What are you called?” she whispered.

The girl studied her, letting new footsteps pass unregarded. Giving her name, Pernelle realized, was giving one of the very few things she owned.

“Barbe,” the girl said gravely. “You?”

“I’m Pernelle.”

They exchanged shy smiles and went back to work.