FORTY-THREE

The Tumult of Amboise

 

 

Every day the list of known conspirators grew longer. The Prince of Condé expressed amazement that his name should have been mentioned, for he knew none of these people nor had the least desire to make their acquaintance. It was generally acknowledged that he would have been mad to stand by his friends.

To those who loved the King (said de Guise) his happy escape was cause for celebration and festivity – for expressing publicly one’s private joy, for reaffirming one’s undiminished loyalty. So those who were not at Court already flocked there to demonstrate their devotion and to sanction the just punishment of those who had transgressed. Neither Berenice nor Thomas could attend. They said the Cardinal could make of it what he chose. But Thibault argued that to stay away would be to risk drawing down Kempis’ fate on all their heads. Many agreed with him. So the King’s Lodging was uncomfortably crowded that day, the men pressed round by the women’s satin dresses as though they were already in their coffins.

What process of Law was in progress at Amboise and where in the castle it was taking place nobody could say, but most certainly penalties were being awarded more quickly and efficiently than Adam conferring names on the animals of Creation. They were as imaginative, too.

Guests slipped to and fro, apologizing, passing back-to-back, not stopping to talk, even to their closest friends, for fear of being thought factious. It was a masked ball, for although there were no masks worn, there were smiles instead which distorted familiar faces into grotesque grinning grimaces, and there were glazed eyes which looked without seeing. Thibault did not smile. It would have been out of character. It would have aroused suspicion. He was nevertheless obliged to talk, to move incessantly around the room, like a horse on a lunge rein, and made to leap the obstacles placed in his way to trip him up.

‘Your wife not here, de Gloriole?’

‘No. No. I find her presence hampers me in society, you know. She hasn’t the features one would wish on one’s friends, nor the broad-mindedness one would wish on one’s petits amours, if you understand me.’

‘A Saumur eiguenot, isn’t she?’

‘She is as I tolerate her to be, my lord Cardinal, and if the day comes when she’s not…’

‘Ah, what then?’

‘Then, since marriage is indissoluble I must clearly change her. She is, after all, as much my property as I am the King’s.’

‘Ah! The King. He’s not well, you know. What would we do if we were to lose him?’

‘God would provide, I dare trust.’

‘I see the death of a king holds no horrors for you. Monsieur le Comté?’

‘Thomas? I pray God for it daily.’

‘Why no. I was rather thinking of the other …what is his name?’

‘I fear you’re mistaken, my lord Cardinal. I have only one son.’

‘Oh but sure, I’d take an oath on having seen the Gloriole name among the list of those condemned.’

‘If someone chooses to wear my name, there’s no more I can do to prevent it than if they took a coach out of my stable without my permission.’

‘Still. You must be glad that noble necks escape the noose.’

‘Nobility, sir, is in deeds as well as blood, don’t you think?’ Thibault did not for one moment believe that he was being informed of clemency or Kempis. To say that noblemen cannot be hung is not to say the noblemen cannot be put to death. There were a dozen headless trunks already lying in the courtyard to prove it. He was surprised not to have seen Kempis among them. If he had, perhaps the demon fantasy would have left him alone by now. Instead he was plagued by imagined possibilities: a royal pardon .

. . the intervention of Kempis’ elevated mistress – which was she among all these? – winning the King’s sentimental forgiveness. A ram caught in a thicket. He remembered now what bronze that was that spewed up a fountain between island and shore of his ornamental lake. Abraham and Isaac. Well, Thibault had been perfect in obedience to his feudal god, hadn’t he, and delivered up his son? Perhaps, after all, when his God saw such perfect obedience he would find a way …The fantasies continued to dance in his brain. Would to God the thing were over and the demon exorcized once and for all.

‘Watch! Watch!’ exclaimed the King startlingly close the Thibault’s shoulder. ‘The Cardinal de Guise has an entertainment for you, my friends.’ He still reeked of naptha – his hair, his eyebrows, his breath. His ears were packed with plugs of wool and he carried a hot, metal pomander of camphorated oil. His face was full of pain. The infection of his sinuses had spoiled his sense of balance; he reeled up against Thibault; the smell of medication made de Gloriole’s eyes smart. ‘Watch!’ said the fifteen-year-old clasping Thibault’s sleeve. ‘Just watch!’ The room went on smiling, everyone smiling.

The men outside the windows smiled too, after a fashion. Three hundred iron hooks were sunk in the face of the chateau where it looked towards the river – three hundred hooks intended for flags and tapestries decking Amboise on feast days.

Some took the weight. Some did not.

Two ladies had been standing by the doors of the balcony, discussing a particular shade of cloth. One pointed to a panel in the other’s dress and said, ‘…closer to that. A shade darker than that and in silk rather than…’ she was startled by a sudden eclipse of light and looking up had to leap aside or receive a blow in the face from a pair of boots. The kicking was wild and uncoordinated however, and only set the rest of the body spinning and swinging and banging up against the open window. A moment later there were two, barging and shouldering each other, drunken and unmannerly, dancing an appalling drunken jig in empty air, grunting and sucking for breath. The third broke his neck cleanly. The seventh plunged directly to his death on the castle footings with a coil of rope and billhook and a shower of mortar for benediction.

The guests fell back from the window but were ushered forward again for a better view. Why, they had only to stand on that balcony to reach out and touch, push, tease the hanging men. What entertainment the good Cardinal had furnished for the afternoon! Mary Stuart, the King’s Scottish wife, turned white, then green, and begged permission of her mother-in-law to leave the room. A great many napkins were laid to mouths, a great many smiles slipped away. But the young men at the windows went on grinning and dancing, jigging and pulling tongues, banging their feet against the windows, plummeting off the roof – seemingly out of the sky, like three hundred Lucifers falling.

A column of polite Scots Guard apologized to guests for discommoding them as they led through the room a string of youths – all bloodied and bruised, some wounded, some fresh from the torture. They wore their nooses already round their necks, but were kept waiting while the other end was secured round the balcony rail. There was not room for them and the soldiers and the dead to jostle on the balcony, so for a time they had to share the States Chamber with the courtiers. No word was spoken; their hands were tied behind their backs; they had to resort to gestures.

And yet afterwards it seemed too many who remembered it that a conversation had taken place.

The prisoners searched the faces of the guests for pity. The guests searched their faces in return – for relations, acquaintances, perhaps, or favourite enemies. Thibault looked in each face for his son, but Kempis was not there. After they were gone – bundled clumsily out on to the overcrowded balcony and thrown over to dance in front of the other windows, outside other, lower rooms, he eased his way through the press and out into the afternoon air. He needed the air.

Looking both ways along the chateau’s façade, he could see it decorated from end to end with a bunting of corpses. The sun was too bright: the distances too great. If one was Kempis, he could not tell which.

He had to know. Seized with a quite irrational panic, he had to know which balcony, which rope, which member of the Guard, what clothes his son was wearing, what kind of death he had made. Whether anything was said. He returned indoors and crossed through one room to the next and the next and the one beyond. He began to walk faster and faster, along corridors of endless, indistinguishable magnificence, past guests clothed in indistinguishable splendour and faces indistinguishably inert with horror. They washed about like stirring kelp in the inlets of a rocky shore, unable to get away, unable to stop still. A smell was beginning to pervade the galleries and landings – a smell that should have been confined to the dungeons.

Thibault saw more than most that day. Whereas the rest could turn away their eyes, he must leap to each window in turn, often convinced that a pair of bound hands were those of …waiting for the wind off the river to swing the body about and …always proved wrong by the blackening face that turned out of the wind. His search took him down through the chateau to small, unplanned intricacies of the building – little courtyards and stairwells and rose gardens and washing yards and chicken runs. And everywhere men were being butchered, as if there were a Mardi Gras of haste for meat. A boy bound to the leg of a water tower was being hacked to pieces by three men with small firewood axes. He called out to Thibault to help him live. An older man spread-eagled across the cover of a well was being disembowelled. He called out to Thibault to help him die. On a bonfire the quarters of several men were failing to burn. The trees on the terraces cast a red dapple on the ground. The stones underfoot were slippery with blood. They cried out to Thibault for washing but he had no time to spare them. The whole sky, the whole body of Amboise air was charged with screaming. It was so penetrating that even as he looked, the mortar was shaken out from between the bricks of the chateau and blood was oozing out through the gaps. It limed the roof tiles where the birds were sitting; it stained the heads of statues. The river below crawled by, almost too viscous to move. Culprits of no social rank, unworthy of torture and with no information to give, were being thrown down from the battlements into the river. It would never do. Someone would have to put a stop to it, or what of the fishing, the river sluices, the castellar moats? The laundry. Red. The bathers. Red. He did not have time to consider all the ramifications. He had to find Kempis and know that he was dead.

Looking down from the walls, he could see that the surfeit of Justice had overspilled into the town and that the city walls and street arches and iron gates and trees and lamp-holders and balconies were festooned with bodies. He was unaware that the minutes of his search had given way to hours, the hours to half a day. He found himself back in the States Chamber of the King’s Lodging. He would be methodical. He would be systematic. A list must exit, along with instructions for disposal.

‘And did you find your son, Comte?’ enquired the Cardinal de Guise. Alongside him, the King barely came as high as to his scarlet, cowled shoulder.

‘How could I find what’s not lost?’ replied Thibault. ‘I was simply looking for the Queen Mother to tell her of certain improvements in hand at my chateau which may be of interest to her. An Observatory.’

‘What’s that? A bribe? The current rate is more costly than an observatory, my dear Comte. Today I’ve been offered…’

’My hand beneath your foot. Lord Cardinal, but I fear you misheard me. I said that I had an item of news for the Lady Catherine. If the word “clemency” had inadvertently entered my mouth, I feel sure I should have tasted it and spat it out. As far as I know or care, Kempis-known-as-Gloriole is already among the chickens whose necks you’ve wrung this afternoon.’

‘Oh, but he isn’t, my dear Gloriole. I happen to know he’s still to be executed. Won’t you speak a word with him beforehand? I’m sure it would raise his spirits marvellously. He must be seriously downcast. Don’t you agree, Your Majesty?’

The King was rubbing his cheekbones, puggling his ears and blowing down his nose to try to ease the pressure in his head. His small eyes with their prominent blood vessels moved only dilatorily between Cardinal and Comte.

‘By no means, my lord,’ said Thibault. ‘By your leave, it would turn my stomach to see him again and think that I gave life and breath to a godless jackanape.’

‘Oh for shame, for shame, sir. And you of the Sword-Noble. I would’ve thought it would gratify you to see His Majesty’s justice carried through.

King Francis grasped the game that was in hand, and lent his weight to de Guise, as he had been well schooled to do. ‘Oh do. Do by all means, Gloriole,’ he said rattling one finger in his ear and wincing with pain.

So Thibault was obliged to follow the Cardinal out of the States Chamber. Two pillars supported its exquisite vaulted ceiling, stuccoed from base to top with the ermines of Anne of Brittanny. The whole room – the whole palace swarmed with ermine. They played the strangest tricks on the eye, seeming all the time to move, to swarm upwards into the roof cavities, like maggots crawling up out of a carcase. Thibault realized that he had not eaten all day. Perhaps that was why his head swam, why the ermine swarmed. Everywhere piles of food were heaped on tables untouched while the guests moved incessantly to and fro between, unable to leave, unable to remove their seal of approval. They shimmered like silver salmon on the spawning beds, their stomachs occluded, incapable of eating amid limitless food. Now and then, without having expressed anything amiss, a man or woman would faint discreetly, the smile still on their ashen lips, and those they were talking to would turn aside and reanimate the conversation with someone new. Only those of very great power dared pass free comment on the tableaux of butchery in every window.

‘No good will come of this,’ said the Duchess de Guise to Catherine de Medici. ‘Blood calls to blood.’

Blood calls to blood. Was that what she said? It explained the throbbing in his ears and the clogging of the sluices in his heart where the blood swashed while he walked. He followed the Cardinal down endless passageways diminishing in size as though towards infinity. Finally, where an adit no wider than a man’s shoulders led to a courtyard full of flowerpots, they came to a herb-drying house being used for a cell. In place of the stench of blood and burning, there was a sudden smell of basil and thyme, lemon mint and bay.

The windowless hut let in light only through the cracks in the plank door, and the gap underneath it where it made a white rectangle like a lover’s covert letter slipped under the door. Each prisoner sat with folded sack and bound hands in his lap.

‘Father!’

It had to be borne. It had to be gone through. He would have preferred not to have to justify his decision to Kempis, but it had to be borne. He felt irritable: how much more did he have to do to prove his loyalty to King and Court? Now look. The Cardinal was untying his son’s hands.

Fortunately Kempis gave every appearance of having forgotten that his father had betrayed him: he made no reference to it. At first he mistook the untying of his hands for the signal that he was free, and praised God and his father in equal parts. Then the Cardinal disabused him. After that, all he did was to plead for Thibault to buy his freedom. ‘Give them anything, Father! Give the King anything! For Christ’s sake, give them a ransom! Exile! I’ll go into exile! Only let them bail me, Father! What’s happening out there? What’s happened? The rumours in here …they grow and grow. I’m condemned to die, Father! Don’t you understand? I’m condemned! Are there pardons being given? Is the King giving our pardons? They’re saying he is. They’re saying he’s not. They’re saying he’s already hanged some.’

‘Hanged some. Gutted some. Burned some,’ said Thibault inexpressively. ‘What d’you expect? Traitors, the whole pack of you.’ The men sitting cross -legged on the floor, knee to knee, shoulder to shoulder, looked up at him blankly, silently. Some began to sway forwards and back. Kempis did not appear to have heard him.

‘Father, give them Gloriole! Make a present of it to the King!

Give them anything!’

‘Give away Gloriole,’ said Thibault smiling. ‘What an extra-ordinary notion. You’re plainly mad. That’s plainly how you came here. Madness. And vice.’

‘Father?’

‘Can we leave now, my Lord Cardinal? I find I have nothing to say to this young man.’

Father!’

‘Ah, but the King finds it so hard to credit. This dichotomy of views in a single household,’ said the Cardinal sinuously.

‘That’s because the King is young’ said Thibault. ‘When he reaches our time of life, my lord, he’ll realize how powerless a father is to curb an unnatural son.’

‘Not powerless to punish, however. After the event.’

‘Indeed so,’ said Thibault. ‘What then? Does the King invest in me the might of his justice? I’m indeed honoured.’

‘He does, he does. And what punishment will you mete out to your son for the crime of conspiring against the Crown – for planning violence upon the person of the King?’

Thibault regarded his son. Astounding that a man could so resemble his father outwardly while inside he was of a different species. ‘Sell Gloriole?’ he recollected, as if the meaning of what Kempis had said had only just reached him. ‘Huh! You claim yourself equal to a peasant and yet you think yourself worth more than the sum of all your ancestors and forebears. No, sir, a House may shed a man. A man doesn’t merit shedding of a House. What a waste. What a profligacy. All those meals eaten. All those clothes worn through. I should have drowned you in a bucket the day you were born.’ Then turning to the Cardinal again he said, ‘The man’s a Leveller. So. Let him share whatever fate was allotted to his peers here.’

Like a battering ram the light suddenly broke into the room through unsuspected double doors in the far wall. Like slashing the blindfold off a horse, the calm of the darkened hut was suddenly destroyed and the prisoners began to thrash out with bound hands, and struggle to their knees, and shout, and name themselves, and protest their innocence, their reasons for living, the reasons why the world could not spare them. Kempis, by contract, became abruptly calm. He had seen his false hopes broken, whereas his companions were only now raising theirs.

‘I’ll pray for your soul, Papa, but God curse you, body and brain. You’ve placed the King so high in your sky that he’s thrown the rest of us into eclipse. What manner of man loves his King more than his own flesh and…’

Two guards took hold of him, tumbled him off his feet and threw him into the wagon outside like a rag effigy for burning. The sacks allocated once in such an orderly way, one to a man, were gathered up again and thrown in on top of the prisoners, hugger-mugger. Then the cart trundled away at walking pace towards a side gate, for the hut proved to be on the very perimeter of the chateau.

‘I shall direct the King’s attention to your loyalty,’ said de Guise surlily. He had been so convinced of Thibault’s Protestant sympathies that he was simply disappointed to find his suspicions unfounded. He had never liked de Gloriole on the same unconscious grounds as most men: jealousy and his looks, of his fascination to women. Now he found he was still more disgusted to find him just like the rest, abject in obedience. (Since the Cardinal had aspirations to rule the country from behind the throne, he naturally felt contempt for such men.) ‘We shall be watching you from above. The King and I.’

So Thibault followed the cart, not quite knowing why, or what more was expected of him when it came to a halt. Ridiculous to think the King watching from the balcony – any more than God was watching out of Heaven. He followed the cart out on to the broad, beautiful bridge, even so; out over the Loire.

The setting sun was colouring the water. It made the castle behind them flesh-pink, too, as though it had overexerted itself in the cause of Justice. Or perhaps it was not the sun at all, but the blood seeping into the tufa, suffusing it with rosy blushes. The windows caught the sun, making them too pricking bright to look at, and Thibault turned his eyes back to the river.

One by one, the prisoners’ hands were untied and they were invited to put on, for a shroud, one of the sacks. Then the cord that had tied their hands was used to knot shut the sack, before two guards heaved it over the parapet of the bridge and into the river far below. So very labour-intensive, thought Thibault. So very extravagant of man-hours. So many guards needed to dispose of so relatedly few, while keeping the rest in order.

They were flour sacks for the most part, and sturdily made, but some tore. A hand or an elbow or a foot poked through. And of course the hessian did not muffle the sound so very well. He wondered whether any were from the Sablois flour-mills.

A crowd gathered – not a crowd exactly, but four or five dimly aware that the day would live in the history of the town and that history would value eye-witnesses. They held off at a distance – expressionless, deadpan, deferring opinion till they were safe home behind locked doors. One mistook Thibault for an officer-of-the-court overseeing the execution. He asked deferentially, ‘Why this way for these?’ Thibault could not answer him.

They could not expect a nobleman – a comte – to hump sacks like a miller. They could not expect a man dressed for a ball to dirty his clothes with flour dust and husks. They could not expect him to labour like a stockman in an abattoir. The sinking sun was overtaken by cloud, and left nothing but a single beam of light pointing downriver like abeam from the eye of God.

The soldiers were faster at tying reef knots than in disposing of the bulging, struggling sacks. A backlog had built up of bagged prisoners propped against the parapet. Thibault went forward and lifted one. A hand grasped him through the sacking, but could not keep hold. A leg kicked. There was a cry as the backbone swung against the bridge balustrade. Thibault hadn’t the art: could not get the awkward load high enough to rest on the parapet, but just kept banging it against the wall. A soldier came to his aid. Then the rope got tangled in the archer’s brace on his wrist, and slid off the collar of the sack. As it dropped away from them into the river below, Thibault glimpsed a tuft of hair on the crown of a head, inside the opening bag.

‘Just leave it to us, sir, ’said the archer patronizingly. Thibault moved away to the end of the bridge and watched the river purge the sins of Amboise chateau, carrying its burden of corpses through the reddening reflection of the evening. It was the first plague of Egypt. The river had turned to blood.

The water pushed fast between the arches of the bridge, but where the flow slackened further downstream many of the sacks resurfaced and bobbed away between the sandbars, the pilings, the reedbeds, the eyots, as far as the eye could keep trace of them. And there was no bend in the river as far as the eye could see. Who was to say where those sacks might end, what perverse current might snatch them into what culvert, what Loire tributary, what ox-bow backwater, what castle moat?