Cardinal Poré turned the gilded handle of the door to his personal quarters in Paris and pushed it open. He hobbled inside and shut the door firmly behind him, dropping his hand to the key and turning it in the lock with a reassuring clack. Finally, he allowed his face to crack with the pain and discomfort he felt so cruelly in his leg, his head lolling back against the door, his mouth wide, eyes tight shut, swimming in the agony coming from his thigh.
He pulled roughly at the buttons of his cassock and ripped the garment from his body, allowing it fall. The cool of the Parisian October air wrapped itself around the Cardinal’s thigh and unconsciously his hand dropped to his wound, snatching at the gash, as if in vain hope of being able to claw the bullet wound closed. The trauma to his leg, inflicted by Sister Isabella when she’d shot him with Tacit’s revolver, shrieked in anger and Poré moaned hopelessly and desperately in pain. He pictured the bullet, lodged deep within his leg, scraping hard against his thigh bone with every movement. It made Poré feel sick and hot. He gulped at the air in an attempt to calm himself and the pain. He had to be strong. He was too close now to fail.
Cardinal Bishop Monteria had looked more grave than Poré had ever seen him when the younger Cardinal first hobbled in. Monteria recognised at once that Poré had been wounded, not believing the excuse the ailing Cardinal had given to Bishop Varsy that the autumn air had disagreed with his joints. He immediately suspected that Poré’s earlier promise to ‘take steps’ must have, as he feared it might do at the time, backfired. Those within his flock commented that they had never seen the usually cordial Cardinal Bishop look so private and subdued.
“It must be nerves,” Varsy had said, but Poré knew it was his injury, and the manner by which it had been received, which so concerned the architect of the Mass.
“Don’t worry,” hissed Poré through his pain, when the pair had a moment of quiet together. “Tacit’s in Arras. He knows nothing of Paris, of our plan.”
That seemed to calm Monteria and he brightened as the final rehearsal ran its course.
In the safety of his apartment, Poré hobbled to the chair in front of his desk and lowered himself gingerly onto it, trying to straighten his leg with a cry. He forced his hand hard into the bullet hole, a pathetic attempt to stem the blood which had begun to stream from the wound after hours on his feet. He shook his head and wiped his sweating forehead with his unbloodied hand. Just one more night. Just one more night, he thought to himself. Just one more night and his work would be done. It would all be over then.
The sallow looking Cardinal looked about himself for something to help stem the blood trickling down his thigh and onto the chair on which he sat. His eyes fell on the sleeve of his shirt and moments later he was tearing strips from it, inserting a ball of wadding into the crimson hole. It made him howl and he collapsed into unconsciousness from his labours.
He came to, he knew not how long later, to the sound of a knock at the door. Thank Heavens I locked it, he thought to himself, as he clawed his way back to consciousness.
“Cardinal Poré?” came a voice the Cardinal recognised as Father Gugan’s outside his door.
“Yes? Who is it?” Poré replied, more alarmed than he wished to sound.
“It is Father Gugan. I just wanted to check you were alright, Cardinal Poré?” he asked, into the frame of the door. “You looked and seemed a little out of sorts at the Mass rehearsal. A little white, if I may say so. I just wished to make sure you were okay?”
“Yes, yes, I am fine, Father Gugan,” Poré replied, looking down at his shattered leg and blood-soaked wrapping bound loosely around the wound.
“I do hope you’re not ailing with something, Cardinal?”
“No. No, I am just a little tired from my travels, that is all. I will rest tonight and am I sure I will be fine in the morning.”
“Very good, Cardinal Poré. Is there anything I can bring you, Cardinal?”
“No, I am fine thank you, Father Gugan. Please be at rest.”
Poré waited until he heard no more footsteps outside his door. He wept and bit hard into his fist, shoved tight into his mouth to mask his cries. Slowly, with all the energy and nerve he could muster, he levered himself up out of his chair and hobbled like a broken thing to the cupboard. He inserted a key, which he had gathered from the desk, and unlocked the door of the tall dark wooden cupboard. He could no longer resist looking at it, to check it was still there. He had to look on the foul thing inside one more time before he retired to his bed, the source of his agony, his turmoil.
It hung alone on the inside rail, limp and grey, stinking, tufted with dirt and dried black blood where it had been roughly hacked from Frederick Prideux. There was a vulgar smell of rot about the pelt, an animalistic musk which seemed to seep through and outside the wooden cupboard which housed it. It looked vile, more belonging in the window of a demonic curiosity shop or a coven’s lair of sorcery. Its very essence seemed to emanate a dark power.
Poré stared at it, like a King surveying a great and terrible weapon, locked in a deep chamber beneath his castle walls, with which he would destroy his foes. Tomorrow everything would be completed. After tomorrow nothing would ever be the same again.