The City of Tears Read online

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  As always, for my beloved

  Greg & Martha & Felix

  And for Peter Clayton

  20 June 1964–18 June 2018

  Much missed

  But He that sits and rules above the clouds Doth hear and see the prayers of the just, And will revenge the blood of innocents That Guise hath slain by treason of his heart,

  And brought by murder to their timeless ends.

  Christopher Marlowe

  The Massacre at Paris (1593)

  The mind is its own place, and in itself

  Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

  John Milton

  Paradise Lost, Book I (1667)

  Historical Note

  The Wars of Religion in France were a sequence of civil wars which began, after years of grumbling conflict, on 1 March 1562 with the massacre of unarmed Huguenots in Vassy by the Catholic forces of François, Duke of Guise. They ended, after several million had died or been displaced, with the signing of the Edict of Nantes on 13 April 1598 by the formerly Protestant King, Henri IV or Henri of Navarre. The most notorious engagement of the Wars of Religion is the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris, which began in the early hours of 24 August 1572. But there were many such slaughters the length and breadth of France both before and after it, including in Toulouse in 1562 (the period covered in The Burning Chambers) and copycat massacres that occurred in twelve major cities following the Paris massacre in 1572.

  The events of spring and summer 1572 leading up to and immediately after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre – the death of Jeanne d’Albret, the marriage of Marguerite de Valois to Henri of Navarre, the assassination of Admiral de Coligny and the responsibility for ordering the massacre itself – have been heavily interpreted, not to say fictionalised, by generations of librettists, artists, filmmakers, playwrights and novelists, key amongst them Christopher Marlowe, Prosper Mérimée and Jean Plaidy. However, the most enduring creative interpretation of the real historical events is Alexandre Dumas’s 1845 novel La Reine Margot. In this same spirit I, too, have allowed myself a certain amount of artistic speculation and licence …

  Henri IV, the first Bourbon monarch of France, converted to Catholicism (for the second time and for good) in July 1593 – in an attempt to unite his fractured kingdom and win over France’s fiercely Catholic capital city – reputedly with the words: ‘Paris vaut bien une messe’: Paris is well worth a Mass … He was crowned in Chartres in February 1594 and his excommunication was lifted a year later.

  The Edict of Nantes, when it came into force in 1598, was perhaps less a genuine reflection of a desire for true religious tolerance than an expression of exhaustion and military stalemate. It brought a grudging peace to a country that had torn itself apart over matters of doctrine, religion, citizenship and sovereignty – and all but bankrupted itself in the process.

  Henri IV’s grandson, Louis XIV, revoked the Edict of Nantes at Fontainebleau on 22 October 1685, precipitating the forced exodus of those Huguenots still remaining in France. Every country which accepted the refugees was enriched by their presence – indeed, the word ‘refugee’ comes from ‘refugié’, a French word first used to describe the Huguenots.

  The Eighty Years War in the Low Countries was no less complicated. Beginning in 1568, it was a revolt of the Seventeen Provinces – what are today the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg – against the violent occupation of Hapsburg Spain. Under the leadership of the Prince of Orange, Willem the Silent, the invasion forces under the Duke of Alba – working for Philip II of Spain – were eventually expelled from the north and west of the country. On 18 February 1578, the Satisfaction was signed, reconciling Amsterdam and Holland, and on 29 May that same year, Amsterdam – the last major city in Holland remaining Catholic – finally became Calvinist in what was known as the Alteration. What is extraordinary, in the context of the bloody history of the times, is that no one was killed. I have allowed myself many artistic liberties in the imagining of this event, too.

  Hollanders, Frisians, Zeelanders, Gelderlanders and others gradually started to think of themselves as Dutch. On 26 July 1581, the Provinces signed the Act of Abjuration, the first step to self-rule for the Netherlands. In 1588, the Republic of the Seven United Provinces was established and in 1609, one year before the assassination of Henri IV in Paris, the Dutch Republic was recognised. All the same, it would be another generation before the Peace of Munster was signed in 1648, marking the end of the Eighty Years War and the beginning of the so-called Golden Age of the seventeenth century.

  The story of French Protestantism and the beginning of the Dutch Republic are both part of the larger European story of the Reformation – from Martin Luther hammering his ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, Henry VIII of England’s dissolution of the monasteries, which began in 1536, to the missionary Evangelist Calvin setting up his safe haven in Geneva for French refugees in 1541, and the sanctuary offered to Protestant refugees in Amsterdam and Rotterdam from the late 1560s onwards. Key points at issue were: the right to worship in one’s own language; a rejection of the cult of relics and intercession; a more rigorous focus on the words of the Bible itself and a desire to worship simply, based on the rules for living laid down in scripture; a rejection of the excesses and abuses of the Catholic Church that were repugnant to many; and the nature of the host in communion. For most people, though, these matters of doctrine were remote.

  There are many excellent histories of the Huguenots and the influence of this small community is extraordinary, a diaspora that took them – as skilled immigrants – to Holland, Germany, England, Ireland, the New World, Canada, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and South Africa. The origins of the word ‘Huguenot’ are unclear, though there are indications that initially it might have been a term of abuse and contemporary followers tended to refer to themselves as members of l’Église Réformée or the Reformed Church. For the sake of the narrative, however, I have used Protestant, Calvinist and Huguenot within the text.

  The City of Tears is the second in a series of novels set against this backdrop of three hundred years of history, travelling from sixteenth-century France and Amsterdam to the Cape of Good Hope in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The characters and their families, unless otherwise specified, are imagined, though inspired by the kind of people who might have lived: ordinary women and men, struggling to live, love and survive against a backdrop of religious war and displacement.

  Then, as now.

  Kate Mosse

  Carcassonne, Amsterdam & Chichester

  January 2020

  Principal Characters

  IN PUIVERT

  Marguerite (Minou) Reydon-Joubert, Châtelaine of Puivert

  Piet Reydon, her husband

  Marta, their daughter

  Jean-Jacques, their son

  Salvadora Boussay, her aunt

  Aimeric
Joubert, her brother

  Alis Joubert, her sister

  Bernard Joubert, her father

  IN PARIS & CHARTRES

  Vidal du Plessis (Cardinal Valentin), Personal Confessor to Henri, Duke of Guise & later Lord Evreux

  Louis (Volusien), his illegitimate son

  Xavier, his steward & manservant

  Pierre Cabanel, a captain in the Catholic militia

  Antoine le Maistre, a Huguenot refugee from Limoges

  IN AMSTERDAM

  Mariken Hassels, a Beguine

  Willem van Raay, a wealthy grain merchant & Catholic burgher

  Cornelia van Raay, his daughter

  The Mistress of Begijnhof

  Jacob Pauw, a Catholic burgher

  Jan Houtman, a Calvinist soldier during the Alteration

  Joost Wouter, a Calvinist mercenary

  Bernarda Joubert, Minou’s youngest daughter

  HISTORICAL CHARACTERS

  Catherine de’ Medici, Stateswoman & Queen of France; mother to three Valois kings – François II, Charles IX and Henri III (1519–1589)

  Marguerite de Valois, Queen Consort of Navarre & Catherine’s daughter (1553–1615)

  Henri of Navarre & the first Bourbon King of France (1553–1610)

  Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, military leader of the Huguenots (1519–1572)

  Henri, Duke of Guise & founder of the Catholic League (1550–1588)

  PROLOGUE

  FRANSCHHOEK

  28 February 1862

  The woman is lying beneath a white sheet in a white room, dreaming of colour.

  Hier Rust. Here lies.

  She is no longer in the graveyard. Is she?

  The woman is caught between sleeping and waking, surfacing from a place of shadows to a world of harsh light. She lifts her hand to her head and, though she feels the split skin on her temple, finds there is no blood. Her shoulder aches. She imagines it purple with bruises where his fingers pressed and pinched. Pictures now how the tan leather journal fell from her unwilling hand down onto the red Cape soil. That is the last thing she remembers. That, and the words she carries with her.

  This is the day of my death.

  The woman opens her eyes. The room is indistinct and unknown, but it is a typical room in a Cape Dutch homestead. White walls, plain but for a piece of embroidery with verses from the Bible on the wall. Bare-board floors, a chest of drawers and a nightstand made of stinkwood. On her journey from Cape Town, through Stellenbosch and Drakenstein and Paarl, she has lodged in many such houses. Settlers’ houses, some grand and some small, but each with a nostalgia for Amsterdam and the life left behind.

  The woman sits up and swings her legs off the bed. Her head spins and she waits a moment for the sickness to pass. She feels the wooden floor through her stockinged feet. Her white shirt and her riding skirt are stained with red dust, but someone has removed her boots and placed them at the foot of the bed. Her leather hat is hanging from a hook on the back of the wooden door. On the chest of drawers stands a brass tray with an earthenware jug of wine – strong local wine the colour of cherries – and a piece of white bread and strips of dried beef beneath a cloth.

  She does not understand. Is she prisoner or guest?

  Unsteady on her feet, the woman moves to the door and finds it locked. Then she hears the whistling of a chattering of starlings outside. She laces her boots, walks to the window. A small square frame with thin metal bars on the inside. To keep her in or to keep others out?

  She reaches through the bars and pushes open the glass. The sky at dusk in the Cape is the same as it is in Languedoc. White, with a wash of pink as the sun sets behind the mountains. The woman can see the chapel at the top of the town; another small white building in the Cape Dutch style, with a thatched roof and peak-arched windows either side of the arched wooden entrance. Ever since the new church opened its doors to its Protestant congregation a few years ago, it has served as the school. The sight of it gives her hope, for at least she is still within the boundaries of the town. If he meant to kill her, surely he would have taken her up into the mountains and done it there?

  Away from prying eyes.

  She can make out the fruit orchards, too, growing Cape damsel and damask plums, sweet saffron pears and apples hanging from the trees; in these weeks she has learnt to identify each variety and the farmers who grow them: the Hugo family and the Haumanns, the de Villiers and descendants of the du Toits.

  Now she can hear the rise and fall of girls’ voices playing a skipping game. A mixture of Dutch and English, no French, the legacy of years of struggle for control of this stolen land. The Cape is once again a British colony, the main road renamed Victoria Street in honour of the English Queen. Further away, the plangent singing of the men coming home from the fields. Another language, one she does not recognise.

  Her feeling of relief is fleeting. Quickly, it gives way to grief at the loss of the journal, the map, the precious Will and Testament which has been in her family for hundreds of years. Though the journal is gone from her possession, she knows every word of it off by heart. She knows every crease of the map, the terms and provisions of the Will. As she waits and waits, and the light fades from the sky, she thinks she hears the voices of her ancestors calling to her across the centuries.

  ‘Château de Puivert. Saturday, the third day of May, in the year of Grace of Our Lord fifteen hundred and seventy-two.’

  Then her sorrow at the loss of the documents turns into fear. If he has not killed her yet, it can only be because there is something more he wants from her. She regrets her caution now. Remembers reaching to scrape the lichen from the stone. She shivers at the memory of the cold muzzle of the gun and his pitiless voice. His shadow, the smell of sweat and clinker, a glimpse of white in his black hair.

  She’d drawn her knife, but had only grazed his hand. It was not enough.

  The light is fading from the sky and the air is still, though filled with the whining and the buzzing of insects. The children are taken inside and, in every house, pinpricks of light appear as candles are lit. Though she is tired, the woman keeps vigil at the window. She picks at the bread and drinks only a little of the smooth Cape wine, then pours the rest out of the window. She cannot afford to dull her senses.

  She sits on the end of the bed, and waits.

  The church bell in its solitary white tower chimes the hour. Nine o’clock, ten o’clock. Outside, darkness has fallen. The mountains have faded into shadow. On Victoria Street and the criss-cross of smaller roads and alleyways, the candles are extinguished one by one. Franschhoek is a town that goes early to bed and rises with the sun.

  It is not until past eleven o’clock, when she is fighting sleep and the throbbing in her head has started again, that she hears a sound from inside the house. Instantly, she is on her feet.

  Footsteps on the floorboards beyond the door, but quiet. Walking slowly, as if trying not to be heard. She has had hours to decide what to do, but it is instinct that takes over now.

  She slips behind the door, holding the empty wine vessel in her hand. Listens to the rattle of a key being pushed into the lock, then the clunk of the catch as it gives and the door is slowly opening inwards. In the dark, she cannot see properly, but she glimpses the flash of white hair and smells the leather of his jacket so, the instant he is within reach, she launches the earthenware jug at the height of his head.

  She misjudges. She aims too high and though the man staggers, he does not fall. She throws herself towards the open door, intending to try to get past, but he is faster. He grabs her wrist and pushes her backwards into the room, clamping a hand over her mouth.

  ‘Be quiet, you little fool! You’ll get us both killed.’

  Immediately, she is still. It is a different voice. And in the moonlight filtering through the window, she can see the back of his hand. No sign of where her knife grazed her assailant’s skin. And, seeming to trust her, the man releases her and takes a step away.

  ‘Monsieur
, forgive me,’ she says. ‘I thought you were him.’

  ‘No harm done,’ he says, also speaking in French.

  Now, in the silver shadows, she can see his face. He is taller than her attacker in the graveyard and his black hair is shorter, though split through by the same twist of white.

  ‘You do look like him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She waits for him to say more, but he does not.

  ‘Why am I here?’ she asks.

  He holds up his hand. ‘We have to go. We have little time.’

  The woman shakes her head. ‘Not until you tell me who you are.’

  ‘We –’ He hesitates. ‘I saw what happened in the graveyard. I’ve had to wait until now. He’s my brother.’

  She crosses her arms, not knowing whether she should trust this man or not. Waits.

  ‘We do not see eye to eye.’

  Again, she expects him to say more, but he glances at the door and is restless to be gone.

  ‘Whose house is this?’ she asks.

  ‘It belongs to our mother. She is bedridden, she doesn’t know you are here. None of this is her fault.’ He briefly touches her hand. ‘Please, come with me. I will answer all your questions once we are safely out of Franschhoek.’

  ‘Where is your brother now?’

  ‘Drinking, but he will be back at any moment. We must go. I have horses waiting at the eastern boundary of the town.’

  She unfolds her arms. ‘And if I don’t come with you?’

  The man looks directly at her and she sees the determination, the concern too, in his eyes.

  ‘He will kill you.’

  The calm statement convinces her better than any entreaty or fierce persuasion could. Better to take her chance with this stranger than to remain here, passive and waiting for what the dawn might bring. She takes her hat from the back of the door.

  ‘Will you tell me your name?’ she whispers, as she follows him along the dark corridor and towards a door at the rear of the house.