A/N: This is a chapter of two flashbacks. One five years back, the other more recently, one month prior to the current disturbances.
/
Chapter Eleven
1627
LA ROCHELLE:
The first cannons were fired, reverberating around the city walls and the harbour.
The Huguenots attack on the Royalist soldiers sealed their fate.
Revenge was swift.
The Royal French soldiers sealed the city and Cardinal Richelieu began to build ramparts, redoubts, trenches and barriers to ensure any advance from the sea was void.
Raspier had disappeared.
Masonne had not seen him since the city gates were barred from without and the people began to hoard what they could – flour, potatoes, vegetables, dried goods. Sacks were piled in the street and then dragged into the houses to be guarded by knife and musket. Solidarity soon collapsed. It was every man, woman and child for themselves.
As Huguenots, they had followed their leader, Gaspar Raspier, in their planned uprising, never imagining the events that would follow.
Masonne had searched for Raspier, but to no avail. "The Wolf," as he was known, had either been killed or captured. Masonne would make it his business to find and liberate him when the city itself was liberated.
The siege went on.
People died in their hundreds and then in their thousands. The Royalists were heartless. Richelieu could be seen walking the ramparts, inspecting the continuous building work, resplendent in armoured chest plate, his red ecclesiastic robes billowing behind him. This was no Man of God. The cries of the people could be heard behind their battlements, but Richelieu was a patient man. His blockade was completed. The English could not approach. There was no escape.
Eventually, the people surrendered; wretched, broken and embittered. Many thereafter swore allegiance to the King, but some did not.
Masonne swore allegiance to The Wolf, wherever he may be. His admiration had not dimmed.
The people who survived emerged as living skeletons, Masonne among them, his eyes scanning the horizon.
He would find Raspier. It did not end here.
It would take him four years.
/
1631
ONE MONTH BEFORE IT ALL BEGAN:
A wood, near a village with no name:
Paul Masonne tied his horse to a tree and drawing his pistol, he made his way further into the wood. The cave was difficult to find but when he did, he entered it cautiously, aware of who may inhabit it. Aware of his capabilities.
He had to duck his head as he made his way down the entrance tunnel. To the right was a small chamber stacked with sacks. He did not enter, for he sought the man himself.
It was eerily silent. His boots made no sound on the dry, packed earth as he crept forward, his eyes ahead where there appeared to be light.
It was a larger chamber, the ceiling higher here.
"I have found you," he said, staring in awe at the man who had been his mentor.
"Little Cub," Raspier said, as Paul Masonne approached him.
Like The Wolf he was, he was sitting on a huge chair, a throne almost, on a wooden platform built into the cave wall. Awaiting an audience. There, he could look down on the man he had known since boyhood. His protégé. One day, this red-haired man with anger in his blood would fight him for leadership. It was the natural course of things. But before that time, Raspier had work for him. He had not expected to see him so soon. He had hardly begun to lay the foundations of this plans. But Masonne was good. He had found him before he had done anything to draw attention to himself. Before he had formed his pack, before he had killed the first Catholic.
Masonne glared at him.
This was the first time he had seen Raspier since the day the cannons were fired from the battlements of La Rochelle.
And then, he had disappeared.
He had searched for him. At first to reunite, to regroup after his release from that hellhole of a city but then as the years passed, that desire began to taint. Why had The Wolf, the fearsome man he knew who struck terror in the hearts of his enemies, disappeared? If he had escaped, why had he not led an army to break the Siege? Had Richelieu arrested him? Had he been executed? But most of all, why had he left them to such a terrible fate?
Raspier's ragged beard reached to his waist, his hair to his shoulders which were encased in a black wolf skin. His face was broad and flat like a toad, warts and all. His eyes though, were as Masonne remembered. Wide apart and black, with the glint of madness. He had been powerful in his day, but there was now more fat than muscle. Any woman who shared his bed would no doubt do so from fear, not desire. He had held this man in awe as a boy of fourteen. He had gone willingly with him and learned from him and he had been punished by him as Raspier sought to remould him into his own image.
And then, on the eve of their battle, he was gone. They were leaderless and broken.
"We were family!" Masonne said, raising his fist as years of emotion and grievance spewed from his mouth;
"You were our leader. We followed you! You should have protected us. You were always the strongest."
Raspier merely met his gaze from his higher vantage point through slitted eyes. He looked bored. He shifted position and reached for a flagon that stood on a small table to the side of his chair, drinking half of it down. The contents spilled down his chin and onto his huge stomach.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, but still did not speak.
"You betrayed us!" Masonne yelled. "You walked away and left us sealed in the city! Tell me, where did you go? By the time we were released you were gone!"
At Raspier's continued silence, Masonne looked around.
"Is this it?" he said, gesturing at the walls around him. "This is your reward for all those years fighting against Catholics!"
"Your father was a Catholic, as I recall," Raspier finally spoke, pulling the wolf skin around his shoulders.
"My mother was a Huguenot. Killed by the mob," Masonne replied.
"Not quite," Raspier said, leaning forward and looking down on him, his black eyes glittering.
"What do you mean?"
"You have her red hair. Her fire," Raspier smiled slowly. "She put up quite a struggle. You should be proud. You are like her."
Masonne seemed lost for words, staring at him, his mouth open, and so Raspier continued, enjoying himself now.
"Your father was a right of passage," he said. "Your mother also, in the end."
"What are you talking about?" Masonne said, staring up at him and shaking his head in confusion.
"The pack needed to understand the hierarchy, Little Cub," Raspier shrugged.
"You sent them after my parents?"
"By the time you were a grown man, you admired me," Raspier continued, ignoring the question. "You wanted to be a part of it. It was our time. The Huguenots had been persecuted for years!"
"My mother was a Huguenot!" Masonne shouted.
"Married to a Catholic," Raspier replied, as if it were simple.
"I was nine years old!"
"Old enough to understand the ways of the world, Little Cub, then safely tucked away with the Duchamps."
"You knew about Sarah and Martin?"
"Of course. I placed you with them. How do you think a couple like that could afford to bring up two boys?"
"Why?" Masonne asked, bewildered. "Why kill my parents and then place me with another couple?"
"I needed you safe. Festering."
When Masonne did not reply, Raspier raised the flagon to his lips once more.
"I waited for you Little Cub!" he exclaimed, with a roar of laughter. "I waited until they died. You were fourteen then. You had such anger in you! Such fire. I used that. You were ready to follow me to avenge your mother. Unlike your brother, you did not disappoint me. And then," he sighed, "You did. Getting yourself trapped in La Rochelle was stupid. Such a waste. It was your brother's fault."
"What do you mean? My brother swore an oath to protect me!"
"He left you though, didn't he? Twice. He wasn't there when I came for you as a boy. Already gone to make his fortune. Pity that. I would have liked to have seen him right. He left you again, when he left you in La Rochelle.
"Just before I fired the cannons," Raspier added, with some satisfaction.
"You fired the cannons?"
"I gave the order, of course," Raspier said, lightly. "The Royalist soldiers were pressing their advantage. They needed to be stopped."
"But it was that action that set Richelieu's fury on us! We were not ready!"
"What would you have done, Little Cub?" Raspier snarled.
Masonne clenched his teeth, breathing hard.
"What we planned to do!" he said. "In line with the other Huguenot rebellions!"
"And where did that get us? La Rochelle was my last chance!" Raspier yelled.
"They sealed the city!" Masonne yelled back.
"It was my last chance," Raspier hissed. "I have been fighting the Crown since before you were born. Our people have always been sacrificed."
"Not by our own hand!" Masonne cried. "Where were you?" he asked then. "We thought you had been killed. We mourned you."
"The pack needs its leader," Raspier said, by way of explanation.
"You saved yourself. You ran," Masonne said then. "You got away. You left us. I swore I would rescue you. If I had known ..."
"But you have found me," Raspier smiled, darkly. "As I wanted, for you would not have otherwise. A word here, one there, and I knew it would reach you."
"What do you want of me?" Masonne said, aware he was at a disadvantage now, his eyes flicking around the room.
"Do you not wish to know why I have returned, Little Cub?" Raspier said then, pointing at the table in the corner.
Masonne tore his eyes from the man he thought he knew and looked at the papers spread out on the table.
"Revenge," Raspier snarled.
"Revenge on who?" he said.
"The Cardinal, of course."
Something stirred in Masonne. He hated the Cardinal as much as Raspier. He had watched from the walls as he built the ramparts, striding along the barricades he was building in his armour and red robes. Blocking the route into the city from the sea. Sealing them in to their fate.
"It will not be easy," Raspier said then. "He grows stronger by the day. He has the fool King's ear. And now he builds his own Temple, an extension to the Louvre! It is time he was stopped."
Raspier stood, throwing off the wolf skin and moving to the wooden steps at the side of his dais, the flagon in his hand.
"You are here now," he said. "We can start again. I have men still loyal to me. We need more, and weapons."
"I can get both," Masonne said, as Raspier approached, his breath ragged from moving his bulk.
"Then The Wolf shall have a full pack once more. I have plans, Little Cub!" Raspier laughed.
Masonne took a breath. Raspier had waited almost five years for revenge, hidden away in caves such as this, no doubt. But he had spent the same searching for him, following rumours, bribing, threatening, until finally, he had been approached by an old pack member, who had told him about the cave in the woods. It was not as it seemed, though. Raspier was still pulling the strings. He had engineered their meeting.
"Revenge is a dish best served cold," Raspier was saying, holding out the flagon. "I would wait for ten years if I had to!" he crowed, reading Masonne's thoughts.
Need overcame disgust and Masonne took the flagon and drank the remaining wine. Raspier waved him to the table and soon he was engrossed in Raspier's plans.
"This is more than the Cardinal. This is ..." he finally said, looking up at Raspier.
"Total," Raspier replied. "I still have men loyal to me. And now, Paul, I have you. By the time we have finished, Paris will fear The Wolf!"
Raspier had nurtured him to anger since he took him that night from the DuChamps. Masonne had grown to become his second. At some point, Raspier always said the Cub would fight the Wolf for leadership of the pack but at this moment, their greatest triumph lay ahead, in the plans laid out before him.
Masonne absorbed Raspier's plans. It could work.
He slipped the blade from his belt and held it close, before turning around.
Raspier swaggered over to him, throwing his arm around him as he bent over the plans.
Masonne was ready for him. The knife already in his hand, it slipped easily between Raspier's ribs..
"I am a boy no longer, Raspier," he hissed in his face. "Did you think I would follow you still? I too have waited for revenge. We were betrayed and you were the worst of them. This is for all those of us who died at your hand, including my mother. You used me. But you trained me well."
He jerked the knife up and Raspier gasped, his knees buckling. He held him, staring into his eyes.
It took Raspier several minutes to die, his eyes locked on his former protégé. Finally, Masonne pushed him away, watching him crumple to the ground.
"The Cub is grown," he growled. The Wolf is dead. Long Live The Wolf."
Taking the papers from the table, he carefully rolled them and left the corpse in its lair. It would not take long to gather his own pack around him.
/
Masonne was right. It did not take long for them to come out of the woodwork, eager to pick up the old struggle. He recruited his own men too, and soon had determined their allegiance to Raspier.
"I come from The Wolf," Masonne said, as he strode into the room a few weeks later. They had no need to know the rest. The myth would live on. He had studied Raspier's plan and would put it into place in his name.
"The people must fear us. They must know we are Huguenots, but we are to pick them off slowly. We make them afraid that more is to come, which it is."
"What is the ultimate plan?" One man asked from the back of the room. Masonne recognised him as a member of Raspier's old pack.
"You will know soon enough," Masonne replied.
"Where is he?" the man continued. "He always briefed us himself in the old days. Why does he send you, Masonne? Who made you his mouthpiece?"
"He did," Masonne replied, his voice low. "As before."
"Where is he?" the man continued. "I was with him for a long time. When do the packs come together? When do we bring down the King?"
This man was beginning to influence the men around him, all the old pack, Masonne saw. They were difficult to control in the old days and their opinions seemed to have hardened. No doubt they would challenge Raspier himself if he were here. If he were not mouldering in the ground.
Masonne stood tall.
"Twixt the bear and the stork, the two shall fall," he said.
Some of the men cheered at that, even though they did not understand it. The small group around their ringleader at the back looked at each other and frowned.
"You speak in riddles!" the man said, coming forward. "Raspier is weak if he is reduced to this. We want revenge. He promised us revenge!"
"You will have it," Masonne said, pulling out the plans and holding them up.
"Here is his plan! He has worked on it and soon seeks to bring it to fruition. You will all play your part."
The man came forward until he could see the parchment Masonne held up. It was Raspier's hand, he knew. He could not read it from where he stood but continued to glare at Masonne.
Masonne folded the plan and put it back in his jacket.
"The two shall fall," he said, once more. "You will know when the time is right. Now go, continue your work. Do not overstep the mark. The people's fear needs to be heightened. They must fear The Wolf. When the time is right, it will be the Catholics who turn on the King and the Cardinal and France will be ours!"
The pack dispersed. Masonne pulled one of his own men to him.
"I will not have dissent," he said, quietly, looking toward the man who was now leaving with his four friends.
"Kill him," he said. "Make his followers watch. If they do not fall into line, kill them too."
To be continued ...