Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (80 page)

He stepped towards her and opened wide his arm and embraced her and pulled her to his chest. She looked at him, with her jaws clenched, in the way she sometimes did. He felt her nails dig into his chest until it hurt, her private way of telling him he was hers. Not so frail, then. He offered her the babe. Amparo’s wailing subsided to a tremble of the lip.

Tannhauser smiled.

‘Carla, love, our nightingale is hungry, and not yet the worse for my thorns.’

CARLA REALISED IT
was the first time she had ever heard Amparo cry.

Yet despite the lamentations that echoed about the cathedral, some of them the cries of infants, she knew the instant she heard it that the voice belonged to her daughter. The sound penetrated her despair and shocked her out if it. No sooner had her most passionate wish been granted than she was afraid that she was wrong. Reason said she had to be wrong. It was mere desperation that recognised the voice, not her ears.

The cries came from the back of the church.

Amparo couldn’t be here. No one knew that Carla was here, except Bonnett, and why else would anyone bring Amparo, and who would dare this bloody night with a baby, and how? She tried to stand up too quickly and her vision went black and she sat down again. She couldn’t let herself faint. By the time she came round, Amparo might be gone. She put her head between her knees and breathed steadily. Her head cleared. She could still hear the unique cry, now louder than ever, and clearly outraged, but no closer.

Carla sat up slowly. She reached out and found Antoinette’s hand.

‘Antoinette, come and sit on my left side.’

Antoinette slipped past Carla’s knees and sat beside her. Carla slid along the bench and lifted her legs over her violl to sit on the outer edge. Her pelvis had stiffened. The pain was considerable. She felt another trickle between her thighs. She turned to look down the nave. She forgot the pain.

A barbaric figure loomed from the rearmost shadows of Notre-Dame.

Her heart soared so fast, it almost broke.

She wanted to blink but didn’t dare.

Mattias strode up the nave towards her with Amparo yelling from the bight of his arm. He was murmuring and pursing his lips at her with great absorption. His neck was black with blood, as was the cross of Saint John on his chest, and the gore pooled in the creases of his boots was still wet. He looked as untamed as ever. She had never seen him filled with such joy. He had found her. He had found them both. She noticed the white ribbon tied around his brow. The pale horseman to the judgement had come, carrying her baby. And he had brought the Morning Star with him.

Estelle clung onto his arm with both hands, repeatedly lifting both feet off the floor, whereupon he swung her in the air, and her red locks flew out behind her, and she laughed. Carla smiled. As a spectacle it made the royal wedding, which had taken the same route the week before, seem utterly drab. They drew closer. She was almost reluctant to spoil so lovely a picture. She felt a flutter in her throat and wanted to cry with happiness. She didn’t. She didn’t want his first sight of her to be a woman in tears.

Carla put her hands on the bench and pushed herself up. She didn’t fall. Without thinking she smoothed her frock and realised she was almost as bloody as Mattias. She smoothed her hair and arranged her braid.

Mattias, entranced as he was by his daughter, walked right past her.

Estelle, giggling in flight, didn’t see her either.

Carla almost laughed, but she needed all her might to step into the nave.

Mattias’s back blocked out the high altar.

He was haloed with golden candlelight.

‘Mattias?’

Mattias stopped. Estelle let go of his arm and turned towards her with delight, and said something she didn’t quite hear. They had searched for her. They had found her.

Mattias’s head bent forward and his shoulders heaved. He raised his head.

He turned and looked at her.

Of the things she needed most from him, she could only have named Amparo, and his love, which, long as he had been gone, she had never doubted. Had she doubted it, she could not have endured. Yet he gave her something more: his tears. Though he did not let them fall, they made his eyes shine, and she drank in the sight of their gleaming for a long time. There was no hurry. Mattias was always ready to die, as any blaze of fire must be. So was Amparo, cradled as she was against his blood-soaked chest. Her daughter. Their daughter. Yet in this moment his. Mattias and his daughter.

Nothing had ever stirred her more deeply.

Carla was ready to die, too.

If they were together, she was ready for anything.

Her flame leapt towards his and in an instant they were one.

Mattias looked at her whole and the sight knifed him. Her appearance must have been more sorry that she imagined; yet what was a frock? The last thing she wanted was for him to think feeble. She willed him to hold her so she could show him it was not so, and he stepped forward on the very instant and grappled her to his body and took her breath away. Desire surged up through her exhaustion and she dug her nails into his chest until her fingers hurt. He was here and he was hers.

He gave her something else that she needed and hadn’t known it. He grinned the broken-toothed grin that had enchanted her when first they had met.

‘Carla, love, our nightingale is hungry, and not yet the worse for my thorns.’

Amparo was cocooned in animal skin. Her lip trembled. Whatever her adventures had been, she radiated good health. There was no hurry, at least not to feed her.

‘Kiss me.’

Mattias made a sound in his throat. He kissed her on the lips.

She felt him flow into her. She poured herself into him.

She opened her eyes, her lips still on his, and he sensed it. She looked into icy pools. How strange was his love. It cascaded from places where love did not belong. He was altogether mysterious. Well as she knew him, and his instincts and reactions, at this range she always felt that she did not know who lurked inside him at all.

He withdrew and his expression changed.

‘My intention was to leave Paris, tonight, but it will be perilous. This is the safest place in the city, especially for you. I’ve a bag of gold that would keep you as the cardinal’s private guest for months. The intelligent move is to stay here. I think you should.’

Her stomach turned over. ‘Are you telling me you can’t stay?’

‘The longer I stay in Paris, the closer I am to a noose.’

‘Would Garnier violate Notre-Dame?’

‘When he calls me out, and he will, I can’t hide behind the priest’s skirts.’

‘I’d never ask you to.’

‘If I did hide here, they would simply wait for me. This is their city, not mine. If I’m still here when this feast of blood is over, the crimes of which they will accuse me, and of which I am guilty, will be harder for those who matter to ignore. I’d be the fiend who lurked in their cathedral. But if I’m long gone, then it’s a few dozen corpses among thousands, and their suit becomes a tale they’d be wise not to tell, for they’re guilty, too.’

‘How could you imagine I would let you go without us?’

He studied her. He had the respect, and wisdom, not to argue the case.

‘The Porte Saint-Denis opens at midnight. We have time but I’ve a wagon to collect. Wait for me by the font. By the way, I baptised Amparo. It’s valid – doctrine of dire necessity, Council of Trent, so forth. I didn’t know you were here or I’d have waited.’

‘You did right. What else troubles you?’

‘Naught that need trouble you.’

He took her around the waist and led them to the rear of the cathedral. He spotted a stray chair and scooped it up as he passed. Carla leaned into him and lost herself in Amparo’s face. When they reached the shadows, he had Carla sit down. She unbuttoned the top of her frock and put Amparo’s mouth to her nipple. She began suckling at once. The sensation induced an ecstatic drowsiness. Carla threw her head back and shook it to rouse herself. The ochre glow beneath the vault augured some enormous conflagration.

‘Charge towards the fire.’

‘Carla, are you well?’ asked Mattias.

‘Yes. I’m well. Go.’

Carla saw Estelle watching her.

‘I didn’t take Amparo to the convent.’

‘Thank you, Estelle, with all my heart.’

Estelle grinned. ‘Now all we have to do is find Pascale.’

Mattias turned. Carla saw that this was what so troubled him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not tonight.’

‘But when?’ said Estelle.

‘Who is Pascale?’ said Carla.

‘She’s one of us. She’s a sister.’

‘We don’t have time,’ said Mattias.

‘You had time until you found me,’ said Carla.

‘My word is final.’

She saw the pain it caused him. She did not need to know more.

‘Mattias, go and find Pascale. We’ll wait here.’

Mattias walked away, towards the portal, not the altar.

‘Mattias.’

He stopped. ‘She’s just another a child. Of those the world has plenty.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘She has as good a chance without us as with us, maybe a better one.’

He continued and stopped again as an ungainly boy ran into the cathedral.

He spoke to Mattias in great earnest but Carla couldn’t make out the words. He had a harelip. At his ankles trotted a small, grotesque dog. The boy mimed putting something over his own head, like a collar or a necklace.

Mattias turned and rushed past her, she couldn’t see where.

He returned in yet greater haste and ran through the portal with the boy.

Carla gave in to the drowsiness without sleeping. As her milk filled her babe, her babe filled her. There was no hurry.

She opened her eyes and saw Grymonde.

He shambled towards her, his either arm held by Mattias and the boy. His face was painted white and the skins of broken blisters hung down his cheeks. His head roved back and forth in sudden jerks as if in search of his lost sight. His tawny brown eyes.

She felt Alice draw back with a deep breath of pain.

Whether behind her or inside her, Alice was here.

Carla turned back to Amparo and began to cry.

TANNHAUSER WOULD HAVE
left Pascale behind but for Grégoire’s news. He would have left Juste and the Mice, too. He would have swallowed the guilt, though he would never have digested it. He glanced across Grymonde’s bulk at Grégoire and nodded, in the hope that some particle of his gratitude would be conveyed. Grégoire grinned. They stopped by the door in the alcove and Tannhauser set down the lantern and found the tool pouch in Grymonde’s satchel. He opened the neck and pulled out a handful of flat iron rods with tips of diverse shapes at their either ends.

‘If you can’t make good on your boast, tell me, and I’ll find the priest.’

‘Give me the pick filed like a scimitar. Guide my fingers to the keyhole.’

Tannhauser did so. Grymonde knelt and put his left hand on the lock case to gauge its size. He explored inside. He spat, as if on the locksmith who had provided so puny a challenge. He removed the pick.

‘Let me feel the others.’

He selected one of several picks with L-shaped ends. He explored again.

‘Give me another of the same.’

Grymonde inserted the second pick. He was reaching past the wards to trip the lever and the bolt. Tannhauser had seen his father forge lock parts, though he’d never picked more than a padlock. Grymonde inserted a third pick. He twisted the rods and the bolt scraped and clicked.

‘No rust on that one.’ Grymonde stood up and pushed the door open and sniffed. ‘Have you found the priest yet?’

Tannhauser climbed the spiral stair. Since morning the number of steps seemed to have doubled and the walls become narrower. He pushed himself. He reached the exterior walkway and crossed to the wicket at the foot of the north tower. He set the lantern at his feet. Sweat had long since overwhelmed the ribbon and he took it off and used the ends to wipe his eyes. He rolled his neck. He opened the wicket and shouted up the stairs.

‘Pascale! It’s Mattias!’

He waited. The timber staircase was pitch-black. Would he have to climb the damned tower? He didn’t think he could and still have the energy for what might come. He bent from the waist to loosen the knots in his back. He straightened and stared into the bore of a horse pistol. The sweat on his back ran cold.

Pascale lowered the pistol and stepped into the light.

‘You’re the first to make the chance to have me,’ he said.

‘The chance?’

‘Come here, girl.’

Pascale skipped down the last of the steps and into his chest. He put an arm around her. She seemed so small. In his mind, she had assumed a much greater stature. He thought of what she’d been through. He gave her a moment. She didn’t take more. She stepped back. Her eyes, like her hair, shone like obsidian.

‘I saw Flore,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Pascale nodded for answer.

‘Are the others fit to travel?’

‘Yes. Where are we going?’

‘Home.’

Pascale smiled.

‘The risks are as bad as staying here, maybe worse, but the prize better.’

‘I don’t give a damn for the risks.’

She was ardent. She was alive. Her vigour raised him.

‘I found my wife and our new baby. They’re waiting for us below.’

Pascale blinked and there was an instant of bitter disappointment before she hid it behind another smile. He understood, though the understanding surprised him. To him she was a girl, at least as far as that went. She was entitled to see herself otherwise.

‘When I told Estelle I was going to find you,’ said Tannhauser, ‘she asked if you were one of us. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I said you were. What I meant was that you’re one of me.’

‘I hope so.’

‘You shouldn’t.’

‘I wouldn’t change any of it, if it meant changing this.’