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A thunderous crash woke the household in the parvis Notre-Dame. Dame Aloïse, clinging to her daughter, begged a servant to investigate.
“But, my lady, there are devils in the dark,” the servant complained. There was more noise than just the crash, but it was somewhat muffled in these chambers.
Fleur-de-Lys gathered up all her courage. She was to be married to a soldier, so she had to learn to be brave. “I will go with her. We'll just open the shutters a little crack. The devils are about their own mischief; they won't even notice just a little crack in the shutters.”
“My dear,” her mother begged. “Stay here at the back of the house where it is safe.”
Fleur-de-Lys ignored her. “Come, we will go now,” she ordered the servant, hoping her voice did not shake as much as her nerves.
A single rush lit their way to the reception room. In the dim light, the salle seemed huge, a giant wasteland to cross, and the faïence boar's head glittered menacingly as the light flickered. Were it not for the servant, Fleur-de-Lys would have run back to her mother's chamber. But she could not allow the servant to see her fear. Upon her marriage, she would become the mistress of this house, and the servants would never respect her if she cowered in the face of unseen demons.
The shutters were heavy, yet they did not shut out the tumult in the parvis. It took both women to lift the heavy bolt, but Fleur-de-Lys insisted that she be the first to look outside. The servant was not to be trusted. It was the people outside, not devils, she told herself, and she must report back accurately.
Suddenly, the whole square seemed to shake with the reverberations of a huge drum. The servant began to cry, and her fear gave Fleur-de-Lys the courage to continue. “Really, to cry over a bit of noise. You would think the world was coming to an end.” If she could make the gypsy witch cry with a single word, she could certainly put a servant in her place, even if it meant she would have to act alone.
Opening the shutter, a stream of light flowed in, startling the two women. It was too early for dawn, and the light was too orange – there was a fire. Torches, Fleur-de-Lys realised as she put her eye to the crack. The parvis seemed filled with people, a dark, wavering mass illuminated by their torches. It was hard to tell the true size of the crowd, as the stone balcony blocked much of her view. The terrible noises proved to be the battering of the cathedral door with a huge beam of wood.
“Go to my mother,” she ordered the servant, “and tell her that the people are attacking the cathedral.” But Fleur-de-Lys never turned away from the sight outside her window. Something compelled her to watch.
Stones rained down on the attackers. Some fell as they were hit. She had seen her father's corpse laid in state in this very room, but the adored child had not been permitted at his deathbed so she might be spared the terror of the dying. This was her first glimpse of death, and it felt as if she could reach out and touch the corpses, they were so close. The parvis was a small battlefield, no distance at all separating her from the screams and cries of the fallen and their fellows crying out in shock and sympathetic agony. She shuddered, but she did not turn away. She could not turn away. Her gaze was riveted to the mad destruction before her.
Dame Aloïse did not dare approach the window. Instead, she hissed across the salle to her daughter, “Come away from there! They will turn on the houses next!”
“I don't think they will,” Fleur-de-Lys answered mechanically. There was a new light on the parvis as a fire started in the cathedral itself.
“You've not seen a revolt, and I'll not have you see one now. Bar the shutters and come to the back of the house, where it is safe.” Fleur-de-Lys did not answer. The people continued to beat at the cathedral doors. The stones had stopped raining down; the parvis was strewn with corpses. One of the torches flared, and she could see a man's head had been staved in. She closed her eyes and gripped the shutter for support, but she refused to hear her mother's entreaties. “Fleur-de-Lys!”
“They are busy with the cathedral,” she repeated mechanically. “They will not come for us.” The crowd had put a spell on her, and she could not abandon her vigil.
The fire began trailing down the façade, pouring off a gargoyle as if it were a heavy rain, and it drizzled onto the attackers. Fleur-de-Lys turned to see if her mother had heard the screams and smelled the burning flesh, but her mother was gone. She had been left alone to watch the world come apart. Not even a servant remained.
These were the torments of hell come to life before her, she thought. The people in the parvis writhed like the damned, tortured by a demon of fire and stone. Was this what a battlefield looked like? she wondered. Was this what Phoebus had seen in the siege of Beauvais? A soldier's wife should not look away, or she would be no wife to her husband. Despite the affair with the gypsy, she was betrothed to Phoebus, and she dared not stop the marriage for fear she would never have another. She was a soldier's daughter, and she would be a soldier's wife, even if there were a hundred more gypsies. She must be the best possible soldier's wife, shying from nothing for fear of losing her honour.
The gypsy was in the cathedral, claiming sanctuary. Perhaps that was what the people were after, the witch who had been condemned for murdering a man who was still alive. Why else would the people attack the house of God? The people would not come here, to that man's betrothed, for they did not know enough to have seen what she and Phoebus and the gypsy had all seen on that day. She was a witch who needed the blood of a king's soldier, and she had cast her spell on Phoebus, Fleur-de-Lys had told herself, only half believing it true. As her mother said, there were witches everywhere these days.
Could a person watch so much destruction, see so much bloody death and hear such screams and go back to her needlework in the morning, untouched? Since the affair with the gypsy, Fleur-de-Lys had grown tired of remaining untouched. She had to throw her lot in with Phoebus de Châteaupers because the alternative was a living death. She had passed the age of twenty, and many of the girls she had once known were already mothers. Her own mother had married much upon these years, though her marriage had long been a barren and unlucky one – Fleur-de-Lys was the golden, longed-for child of her middle age, not her youth. If it took so long for the women in her family to conceive and bear a healthy child, she was already starting late. And since Phoebus had been chosen for her, no gypsy could be allowed to stand in the way of the way things must be.
Fleur-de-Lys accepted that she had to marry Phoebus, though he may have preferred the gypsy and she may have preferred a more civilised husband. A broken engagement would be a black stain on her character, leaving her among the ranks of the unmarried, and she had no vocation to become a nun. She did not wish to live out her life forever chained to her mother, chastised for looking out at the world below her window, always telling herself she could not be jealous of these fat, coarse women of the people dragging their children along behind them, gossiping in loud voices about everything and nothing. They were poor, they dressed badly, they were ugly, and their husbands did not adore them.
Phoebus did not adore her, not really. She knew what it was to be adored, to be comforted and loved with every look. Her father had been much older than her mother, an old man when he died not long after Fleur-de-Lys' tenth birthday, and he had adored the child of his old age. His eyes always smiled when he looked at her, and his grey beard belied the strength of his arms when he hugged her. This was adoration. When Phoebus deigned to look at her, there was not love, but a hunger in his eyes that concerned her. The gypsy looked at him in the same way, and Fleur-de-Lys knew that hunger must be evil, since it came from the gypsy. Yet the gypsy must have understood something more about Phoebus than Fleur-de-Lys, protected and adored and locked away from knowledge of the world, had yet grasped. She saw that, too, in the looks they exchanged. But she was betrothed, and the marriage would take place, and one day, perhaps she would learn just what they already knew. All the gypsy's power would be gone then. She was just a gypsy, not a real witch; her only power was a small scrap of knowledge that anyone could have. Fleur-de-Lys would not allow her the respect or fear due a true sorceress. The girl did not need to be a real witch to be full of evil.
There was evil in Phoebus, sharing hungry looks with a girl he was condemning to death, and Fleur-de-Lys suspected, as she watched the battle before her, that she had some evil in her as well. She suddenly wanted to see the witch burn, for only her death could put an end to all the doubts that girl had caused. Fleur-de-Lys had always known that Phoebus did not really wish to marry her, or to marry at all, perhaps, but the gypsy had brought his doubts into the daylight where they could no longer be denied. The gypsy's death would mean that she could never come back to sate her hunger for Phoebus, and any disturbance of their married peace would be theirs, not the witch's. The gypsy had to burn, just as Fleur-de-Lys had to harden herself into a soldier's wife if she were to keep this husband. She must be soft beauty without, to attract him away from the barracks and to the home, and steel within, to keep him on a straight path of civilised advancement with the king's men. The gypsy would burn, and Fleur-de-Lys would learn to be grateful that a woman had been executed for a crime that had not taken place.
The people had given up the door, which had resisted their efforts, and they had retrieved a ladder with which they would climb up to the cell and throw the gypsy down, smashing her on the pavement like so many stones, her bones mingling with their dead. But as the first men reached the high colonnade, the monks pushed the ladder away. It fell towards her in a long arc, landing seemingly under her feet. Fleur-de-Lys had thought she had grown numb to the crashes and the cries, but now she shook and cried, the failing battle coming ever closer. She looked only for the gypsy to join the damned below her: why would the cathedral not give up the witch? Had she repented whilst inside, and now God protected her? What made a gypsy girl and her trained goat – for the trick with the letters had been just that, a trick she had taught her goat so she might seduce Phoebus away, not an enchantment at all – more worthy of life than the hundred men who lay dead or dying? Why was a gypsy girl protected, and Fleur-de-Lys' beloved father permitted to die in pain? When would the gypsy come down?
More torches were lit, and the crowd cried to renew the attack. It could almost have been morning in the parvis. Still Fleur-de-Lys watched, silently cheering the people who would not let the witch have her way. She was a part of them now, seeking the destruction of the witch, and their failures were her failures, but so long as they did not abandon the fight, she would not abandon them.
The people were climbing the cathedral façade, shimmying up like spiders. What were these creatures who were called “the people” who could perform such feats? Could they be demons in human form? Was the witch being called home to Satan? Was she to be rescued from her confinement, the demons destroying God's temple to free their queen? No, Fleur-de-Lys told herself, do not tell silly servants' tales. A true queen of demons would never have been caught, or would have put the whole court under a spell so that she would never have been condemned. She was a gypsy girl with a flea-bitten goat who had learned three or four tricks. The people were climbing to take the girl and revenge themselves on the monks, and when they threw her down among their dead, Fleur-de-Lys would be relieved of any lingering spell. When the sound of hoofbeats approached, and she knew it had to be the king's troops come to put down the revolt, she silently repeated the curses she could make out from the crowd. A thousand popes! Beelzebub take the soldiers!
Torches fell to the ground and burned themselves out as their bearers fled into the dark streets. The king's men cried their arrival, but it was difficult to make out what they said amidst the general tumult. The people who had not fled were cut down by the soldiers on horseback.
Suddenly, Fleur-de-Lys saw that she had not been the only silent watcher through the night. All around the parvis, the shutters flew open and musket shots rang out. More and more of the people fell, cut by the swords and pierced by musket balls. She had never heard the discharge of a musket before, seen the flash of fire and the bang of the powder, the man at a distance cut down so quickly he could not know his attacker. This was witchcraft, indeed, protecting the witch and slaying the people who sought justice. In the face of this new force, the people who had stayed to fight the soldiers fled into the darkness with their fellows.
The parvis was full of corpses and the wounded, blurred by the smoke of snuffed torches and the musketfire from the windows. In the brightest torchlight, before the soldiers had come, Fleur-de-Lys had seen that the crowd was composed of all ages, both sexes. Women lay dead below her window; children had been cut down by soldiers. Soldiers like Phoebus.
A man who accompanied the soldiers took a torch and went up to the great door. A soldier accompanied him. In the torchlight, Fleur-de-Lys recognised her betrothed. Phoebus had been slaughtering children as she watched, had scattered the people out to destroy the gypsy's sanctuary. He could have gone to the court and announced that he was not dead if he had wanted to save the witch, but he was too much a coward to show his face as the captain involved in the affair. She might have cheered him then, despite the looks he shared with the gypsy, for it would have proved him a man of honour. But he had let her go on to her death sentence, and that was why the gypsy had to die tonight. He had no honour, no spine of steel as a soldier ought to have, and if the gypsy lived, her hunger for him would be a perpetual temptation. If he would not speak the truth, the truth would have to be pushed firmly into the past, never to return.
But tonight, at the head of his troops, he enforced the sanctuary and denied his soon-to-be wife the peace – or vengeance – she had earned. He denied her vengeance whilst slaughtering children before her very eyes, whilst spilling women's blood beneath her very window. Fleur-de-Lys wiped the tears from her cheeks. She was to be his wife; he was dedicated to the king; her claims were nothing if King Louis had ordered him to break up the revolt. The people in arms were always a revolt, even if tonight they had claimed nothing more than justice. Phoebus had no choice but to obey his king. A soldier's wife could not begrudge him his duty. The women of Beauvais would have gladly been slaughtered by the Burgundians, for they had done their duty. She must do as the Beauvaisiennes did, standing beside her husband when asked and willing to share his disgrace if necessary. The women of the people Phoebus had just slaughtered had done exactly the same, and though she had felt herself a part of the crowd for so long, she knew it was a trick of the night. She was better than they were and must go beyond their little example. A noblewoman could never be shown up by the rabble. She would stand by whatever King Louis had ordered. Her duty was to her husband and her king, not her heart, and she would do her duty.
Phoebus and the man were inside for a long time while the other soldiers occupied themselves in throwing the bodies into carts that had been brought for the purpose. The parvis would be cleaned immediately of this monstrous night, so that only the neighbours and the relatives of the dead might ever know an epic battle had been fought in the middle of Paris. The wounded who cried out were dispatched, their bodies and souls joining the dead in the carts. They were rebels, and rebels must be executed.
Phoebus and the man came running out of the cathedral before the parvis had been cleared. “Fan out. Start with the bridges!” Phoebus called to his horsemen, and they rode off in the direction of the pont Notre-Dame.
The gypsy must have fled somehow, for they were chasing someone after spending so much time in the church. The sanctuary had not been violated, but she had run of her own accord. She could be hanged now if they could find her, and Phoebus was leading the chase. Was he acting as her minion, diverting them from his mistress, or was he playing the upright man of law, seeking out the witch and putting her to justice? Fleur-de-Lys did not know, and her heart no longer soared at the prospect of the gypsy's execution. Why was Phoebus, of all people, asked uphold the law tonight? He was the one man incapable of acting solely according to duty in this affair. Had any stranger led the troops, she might still have encouraged their search, but Phoebus was too intimately involved with the gypsy. He had been more embarrassed than anything by her hungry gaze, and though Fleur-de-Lys wanted her dead, she did not want it to be by Phoebus' hand. He had not enough honour to make the deed only his duty as the king's soldier and not a personal relief, and he had already proved himself too cowardly where the gypsy was concerned to do anything honourable.
Fleur-de-Lys closed the shutter tiredly and went back to bed. The witch was gone, but not dead, and so were her remaining illusions. There would be more sieges of Beauvais to come, for the wars never truly ended but merely halted for a time, and she would have to support her husband rather than be a weeping weight around his neck. She was now embarrassed that she had ever been so. Even at the time, she had known she ought not cry over a minor soldier's wound, but she had been so relieved that she had not been abandoned that the tears flowed in a most ridiculous manner. And they had dried, she had thought forever, when she saw that the wound had been given by the gypsy in her cursed hunger, not in a half-forgotten duel. Though she feared she might never sleep again, with visions of cracked skulls and screaming women forever running through her head, she was unaccustomed to late nights and fell into a deep sleep.
When she finally emerged from her room, the day much advanced, her mother chastised her like the girl she knew she no longer was. “When did you go back to bed? I don't know how you could stand it! You must not let Phoebus know you were keeping watch this night.”
“And why not?” Fleur-de-Lys challenged. “Why shouldn't I have kept watch? Perhaps I should have gone down into the street with the other women, like the Beauvaisiennes.”
“Don't be silly, my dear.” Dame Aloïse had seen the clean parvis and was just as determined as the king to put the nasty business behind her. These things should not happen to cathedrals, nor should they happen within sight of the house of a good gentlewoman. “Those were women of the people, and they followed the orders their men and the king's general gave them in a desperate time. This was a little revolt, and we know better than to get involved when the people kick their heels.”
“The king's soldiers were involved. Phoebus de Châteaupers was at their head.”
“My girl, watch your tone. You are not yet mistress here, nor do you understand what it is you do. A nobleman may be ordered to do whatever the king likes. A noblewoman is to sit at home, ignorant of soldiering, to preserve a quiet, civilised place of rest. Your father would never have permitted us to see such nasty things. He would have protected us, as was his duty. Whatever you saw cannot have been good for you, and I ask that you come away from the window. You have always spent too much time watching the people, and now you know where it gets you.”
“Yes,” Fleur-de-Lys answered evenly. “I know precisely where it has got me.” Engaged to a soldier of good enough name but not a truly fine family, of good face but no conversation, and without any sort of innate nobility. Had she never gone to the window, she would never have seen the gypsy herself, never been forced to see just what her betrothed was. No, not permitted to see what her betrothed was before he could surprise her as his wife with some new betrayal. The night had taught her nothing new of what her life would be or of her husband's honour. Spending her days at the window had always proved more instructive than her mother had wished.
“I won't be surprised if you never sleep again, and it will serve you right. You will never speak of this night again, to anyone.”
“Yes, mother. I understand.”
Phoebus did pay a visit that afternoon, looking no more tired than usual. Fleur-de-Lys believed him accustomed to nocturnal adventures if he could come through a midnight battle unscathed.
“You ladies must have had an unpleasant night of it.”
“Oh, Phoebus, you've no idea,” Dame Aloïse complained. “Such noise, at such an hour, and a household only of women. We were scared out of our wits.”
Fleur-de-Lys kept silent, her eyes on Neptune's grotto. When Phoebus grew bored of Dame Aloïse's complaints, he wandered over to look over Fleur-de-Lys' shoulder. “And did you have an unpleasant night?”
She looked up and saw he still had no tenderness in his expression. “I am not as accustomed to late nights as you seem to be,” she replied sternly, keeping her voice low so that her mother might not overhear. She pushed aside her tapestry. “I need some air. Will you join me at the window, Cousin Phoebus?”
“Always at the window,” her mother complained.
“I need some air,” Fleur-de-Lys repeated firmly. The parvis had returned to its normal appearance, but nothing could hide the dark streaks across the façade of the cathedral. Phoebus put his hand around her waist again, and again she slipped out of his embrace. “Not in front of my mother,” she insisted. “There will be time enough after the wedding. What was the revolt over?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant and only vaguely interested, since it had happened under her very windows.
“The gypsy had taken sanctuary, you may remember.” He was suddenly embarrassed, as if he had forgot just why Fleur-de-Lys must remember all too well what had happened in the affair of the gypsy. He rushed forward, as if to gallop ahead of the subject. “As far as we know, the people decided it was time she be hanged, not knowing an order had been given by the court that the sanctuary was to be broken today. She slipped out in the commotion, but we caught her in the place de Grève itself.”
“She is dead?” Fleur-de-Lys asked, unable to conceal her satisfaction. God was kind to put an end to the entire affair. It was not ideal that Phoebus had lead the successful chase, but the affair was decidedly over. Had the crowd never come, had the battle never taken place and the sanctuary merely taken by order of the court, the affair would have been too clean. Fleur-de-Lys was not glad that she had seen so many people die so horribly, but she was glad to no longer be an ignorant child unsuited to be the wife of the man who had been declared her husband. “Really and truly dead?”
“Yes. Hanged at daybreak under the eye of Tristan l'Hermite himself.”
“Then everything is finished. You will not think of her again, and we will not speak of her again,” she insisted firmly. Phoebus seemed surprised at the order, but he readily agreed. The affair could not have been comfortable for him even before he was caught, and his dull embarrassment could perhaps be to his wife's benefit. “We have put off the marriage long enough,” she added. “I cannot wait three months. The wedding must take place by the end of the summer. I think we would both prefer that course.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he stammered.
“You will not advance if you get mixed up with another gypsy witch. Your affairs and mine will be one then. This house will belong to you as my husband; so will my father's seigneurie. I bring more to the marriage than you do. You must put your interests in my hands,” she pleaded. “That shall be your bride price.”
“Now that's rather hard,” Phoebus complained. “Has your mother put you up to this?”
“My mother knows nothing of what I say, just as she knows nothing of what else has nearly passed between us. I do not know all that went on with that gypsy, but there was a trial and an execution, and you were embarrassed to be mixed up in the affair. It was a very gross and paltry sort of affair for a king's officer, especially as it caused a revolt of the people.” Fleur-de-Lys suddenly saw the whole situation clearly. “It could almost look like treason if some unkind person wished to suggest you were the cause of the revolt. Someone who wished to make you look bad in the eyes of the king. It could ruin you, and that would grieve us both. Since I am to be your wife, I wish to do the best I can for us, for the children we will have. I have no doubt that I shall make something of a mess at first, being untutored in the ways of soldiery, but you have not handled your interests well without a wife. Such affairs will not happen again in future if you let me rule your affairs.”
She did not order him to do anything. She was neither stern nor cruel. Instead, she pleaded as charmingly as she could, for if she were to be mistress of her fate as well as mistress of her father's house, she must be softly civilised without so she might use the steel within. Whether from his embarrassment or his understanding that he was not able to look after his own affairs, he agreed to the bride price.
They never spoke of the gypsy again, not when they married, not when their first son was born barely a year after the wedding, not when Phoebus marched off to Italy when the wars began again in the wake of Louis' death. Fleur-de-Lys de Châteaupers was mistress of the house in the parvis Notre-Dame, mistress of the small seigneurie of her husband and the not-much-larger seigneurie of her father, and mistress of her husband's career. She held dinners and parties and was determined to be much admired. Phoebus was under her orders to make himself indispensable to the commanders and to distinguish himself in battle at the earliest opportunity. “I prefer that you return home with scars,” she insisted. “It will mean you have been very brave, and I will be so proud of you.” And Phoebus obeyed. Though he did not know how, she had been right when she had asked him to leave his affairs to her. Fleur-de-Lys, however, thought of the battle for the gypsy at every success and every failure, for in that single sleepless night, she had earned the right and the ability to rule her fate.