The Barbed Crown

Chapter 16





The Archbishop’s Palace is a venerable medieval heap of a chateau adjacent to the rear quarter of Notre Dame, with tower, steep roof, and stacks. Therein was our opportunity. I strategized to send Harry down the cardinal’s chimney.

Astiza wasn’t happy with my idea, given that our mission was sacrilege, government sabotage, trespass, and theft. But I thought my son’s small size represented the only feasible way to break into the guarded clerical palace an alley’s width from the church, and that the adventure could be fun besides.

Harry was enthusiastic. “Like Sinterklaas!”

“Yes, like Sinterklaas.” From my time in New York I was familiar with the Dutch version of the Father Christmas fable, and had promised Harry that if he was good, some version of Saint Nicholas in a green coat would creep down our Paris chimney and bring him presents in the depth of winter. “You’re small, like an elf. Out you’ll pop to open a window for Mama and Papa. We’ll have a treasure hunt.”

“What if there’s a fire?” My four-year-old thought seriously ahead, which is more than I can say for myself sometimes.

“We’ll be sure to pick a chimney with no blaze burning. Even with autumn advancing they don’t keep all of them lit the entire night.” Wood was expensive for cardinals, too.

“No doggie?” Harry had been afraid of dogs since his introduction to the beast of Aurora Somerset. When we retired to an estate, I was going to get him a puppy, but meanwhile, he was fearful of the mutts that barked from farmsteads, snarled from alleys, and snapped at wagon wheels.

“No dogs.” Why would there be a dog in an upstairs clerical council room, which was the intended landing place for my son?

“Ethan, it’s a filthy idea,” my wife said. “Chimneys are foul, and the boys who sweep them are guttersnipes.” She could be snobbish about who befriended her son.

“Boys love to get dirty.”

“It’s terribly dangerous.”

“Not really. I’d try it myself if I were small. Rather a clever way to gain entry.”

She sighed. “In Egypt we didn’t need chimneys. The water was warm, and everyone was cleaner.”

“Yes, and in Egypt there’s so much religious bric-a-brac lying about that we could just scoop some off the sand, instead of having to creep into an archbishop’s palace and tiptoe around a snoring cardinal. You’re the one who confirmed by research and queries that the Crown of Thorns is almost certainly in his private chambers. We’re in France, there’s a precious circlet of brambles to be snatched, and once more we’re on a mad errand.”

“What if Horus gets stuck?”

“I’m going to lower some crossed sticks to confirm the dimensions before sending him down.”

She bit her lip. “He’s my only child.”

“Harry did a fine job crawling inside the Syracuse cathedral, and he speared a rat. Didn’t you, son?”

“I don’t remember.”

Well, he had been only two. From necessity I’d been exposing him to adventure from a very young age, after getting embroiled with a temptress and pirates. “If we spoil Napoleon’s coronation and royal ambitions,” I reminded patiently, “maybe the Corsican will have to trim back and avoid a monstrous war. We’ll be heroes, even though we never get a sou of credit. We’re thieving for world peace.”

My wife is more intrigued by religious relics than I am, so her objections were halfhearted. She finally agreed that she herself would assault the Archbishop’s Palace from the Seine side, helping to establish our escape by shooting up a rope with my crossbow. That was after she used her womanly charms to lure away guards, priests, or gendarmes.

“If we’re guillotined, at least we’ll all be guillotined together,” she said.

Is it any wonder we married?

I picked a moonless November night since we’d be crawling on the clerical palace roof in full view of central Paris. We kept this business of Brazen Heads and thorny crowns secret from Catherine, telling her the family was going to a comedy and not to wait up. She looked disbelieving, but I told her it was a good evening to stay longer at the Tuileries to work on coronation preparations. She had stopped her flirting since our arrest by Pasques, and had been happier and preoccupied working on the coronation. What had seemed mysterious about her was apparently a temporary lack of purpose after the collapse of the royalist conspiracy. Now she was employed and less quarrelsome because of it.

It never occurred to me that in fooling everybody, we risked being fools.

The coronation was near. Pope Pius VII had arrived from Rome to stay in one wing of the Tuileries after a carefully calibrated, first comic meeting with Bonaparte. The collaboration between general and pontiff was a calculation between Paris and the Vatican, the pope wanting to play a role in European politics and Napoleon craving legitimacy. Every detail was a ticklish dance. It took months of negotiation to make Pius agree to the arduous journey to crown a man with a cynic’s view of religion. Nor could their meeting be simple. The egotistical emperor didn’t want to appear to be obsequious by waiting for the pope like a petitioner, and the pontiff didn’t want to have to knock on one of Napoleon’s palaces like a supplicant. Accordingly, Napoleon pretended to be out hunting—an activity that usually bored him—when the papal coach approached the palace at Fontainebleau. The two “accidentally” met on a country lane that avoided either waiting for the other. The French general timed his dismount to match the pope’s exit from his coach, they greeted one another as equals, and then went to either side of the vehicle so they could step back inside at exactly the same time.

So is status shared and measured.

I encouraged Harry by promising that we might find some candy on our expedition, and brought some for him to discover later. Astiza and I practiced by cranking, aiming, and firing the crossbow at one of the cemeteries being excavated, since the grim task of transferring bones kept the superstitious away at night. She proved a good shot.

On the evening of our attempt, Astiza put a length of rope, a crossbow bolt tied to thin line, and the weapon itself in a shallow wicker basket, disguising her load with baguettes and bread cloth. She temporarily hid the basket near the Seine and waited to play alluring decoy.

Horus and I didn’t dare take ropes on our mission lest we arouse suspicion. Since we were already breaking a commandment or two, we’d steal the lines we needed from the cathedral. We crossed to the Île de la Cité as if we were religious sightseers and ate supper at a small café, my treating us to pastry at the end.

“I get to stay up late,” Harry boasted.

“And eat sugar and get dirty in a chimney. It’s fun to hunt for treasure.”

Our problem was this. The Archbishop’s Palace was set between Notre Dame Cathedral and the Seine, security was tightening as the coronation neared, and it was easy to be conspicuous. A large number of houses had been torn down around the church to heighten its grandeur and accommodate crowds expected to total half a million. A temporary gallery and tent were being built alongside the transept doors as a private way for dignitaries to enter and dress: the coronation robes were so heavy that no one wanted to bear them more than a few hundred feet. Accordingly, hammering went on day and night. Torches burned. Guards strutted across the new plaza

Harry and I entered the soaring cavern of Notre Dame at sunset, its western rose window on fire atop a nave of shadows, and the church strewn with heaps of lumber for the coronation stands being built for spectators. The church was a cavern of Gothic gloom, smelling like a cave. There were just a scattering of old women worshippers in a monument in sad disrepair since the revolution, and one desultory priest shuffling toward the confessionals. He looked bored. In Astiza’s novels, beautiful young women whisper of stolen hearts and sexual indiscretions to wise parish counselors. In real life it seems to be women of sixty relating that they’re tired of their husbands and cross with their grandchildren.

We hid in the shadows by a chapel altar until the cathedral was shut for the night. Then, using skills my British spymasters had taught me, I picked the medieval lock on a heavy wooden door and entered the north bell tower. The trick impressed my son.

Circular stone steps worn by centuries of sandals ascended. Harry led as we steeply climbed to where the bells were hung, a timber framework inside the outer stone of the tower. Just two bells remained; the others had been melted down to make cannon.

We caught our breath as we took in a grand view of Paris. Then we settled in. A ghost of twilight came through the apertures, enough that Harry could use chalk I’d brought to draw pictures on the plank floor while we waited. Once it became completely dark he began squirming, so I whispered to be patient and told him stories, half true, about Red Indians and Nordic treasures. He finally nodded off, while I waited impatiently for midnight.

When it was time to finally assault the Archbishop’s Palace, I lit a candle with my tinderbox and used a knife to saw rope from the bellpulls. I made two coils, one for each shoulder. I tied off the remainder to be discovered by puzzled priests at dawn when they found that there was no way to signal for Mass. Then I woke Harry, and we stole partway downstairs to a child-size door giving access to a narrow balcony. It led across the front of the church, around the south tower, and to the eave of the steep slate roof. There was a wide gutter we could follow.

The height made me dizzy. Below, jutting out into space, were flying buttresses that arched down into the dark.

“Cling like a squirrel, son.”

“This is fun, Papa.”

I looked down the precipitous drop. “Yes, it is.”

Harry again led, me watchful to catch him if he should start to go over. But instead of looking at the gulf of gloom, my boy was more intrigued by the gargoyles that jutted over each buttress. “Monsters, Papa.”

“Gargoyles. They catch the rain and spit it from their mouths.”

“I want to see them chase it.”

Children are like monkeys, and the entire expedition was the type of naughty thing mothers never allow. The gutter walkway was wide as a ship’s plank.

“We should do this at our house.”

“Quiet like a gargoyle.”

The floor plan of Notre Dame is like a cross, and now we had to negotiate our way around its western arm on a narrow balcony. We crept on all fours so as not to be spotted, passing under the cathedral’s enormous rose-shaped window.

Rose. The rosy cross.

Then we were creeping the gutter along the rear third of the church, above what was called the choir. Once again the buttresses fell away and gargoyles spat.

“I’m getting tired,” Harry whined.

“We’re almost there.”

Each buttress was a pitched beam that rested on a column, giving the high walls a sturdier stance. Gargoyles spat rain into a channel grooved into each one, and at the lower end a companion gargoyle collected this stream and spat toward the river. Atop this lower junction jutted a decorative stone tower like a little chapel, spiked with a cross, Gothic gables, and studded with gewgaws, knobs, and fantasy creatures from the imagination of the masons.

“Now we’re going to swing,” I whispered to Harry. I peered into the pit between cathedral and Archbishop’s Palace and caught the glow of a pipe. Yes, a sentry was down there.

So I briefly lit my candle again, letting it signal.

On cue, Astiza called from the dark. The sentry hesitated, the ember of his pipe lowered a moment in perplexity, and then he walked toward the feminine voice.

“Now, comes the tricky part. You’ll mind Papa, yes?”

He looked down. “I don’t want to fall.”

“Which means you must sit still as stone while I rig a rope. Then we’re going to have very great fun indeed.”

I slid down the buttress gutter as if it were a leaning log, climbed its decorative tower at the lower end, and tied off my rope on the neck of a snarling gargoyle that pointed sideways. This would give us swinging room.

I quickly looked around.

Across a yawning gap was the steep slate roof of the cardinal’s quarters. A tower and steeple jutted from one corner. Beyond the palace were the river and the roofs of the sleepy city. I spied the spark of the sentry’s pipe at the gate to the archbishop’s gardens, where my wife was presumably flirting. A few candles shone in the bishop’s house, but the rooms looked quiet. As soon as I crossed and gave another signal, Astiza would break off her conversation, walk to the Seine, fetch her basket with crossbow, and find a target to shoot at with her bolt.

We are, as I’ve said, a peculiar family.

Holding my newly tied rope in my teeth, I crab-walked back up the cathedral’s buttress to where Harry obediently waited. “Now comes the fun part,” I whispered. He held his hands out and I gathered him to me. Beneath my coat I’d put on the military cross belts that soldiers wear to carry their gear. They’re a harness for humans, and now I tucked his little arms and legs inside so he was pressed with face to my chest, like a little monkey. “Hang tight.” I pulled the rope until it was taut, fixed like a pendulum above a child’s swimming hole. The arc, I judged, would just bridge the gap between church and palace.

I had one chance to get it right.

I gripped, pulled tight, and sprang.

We fell, swinging past the little chapel, and soared into space, Harry clutching like a kit. He gasped, making a kind of mewing sound. Momentum carried us above the canyon of air, and at the top of our arc we were weightless.

I heard a crack. The neck of the gargoyle had snapped.

We fell, me still holding the rope. There was the gray slate of the bishop’s roof below. We hit and I slid, scrabbling for purchase. My legs shot out into emptiness, while the head of the broken gargoyle banged into the alley below.

There was another gutter to arrest our fall. I slammed my arms into it and stopped, trembling from strain, my legs extending into space. The rope slapped against the archbishop’s balance. I heard the thud of boots as the sentry hurried back, shouting a challenge. I hastily got my legs into the gutter, hurriedly pulled up the rope, and leaned back from the edge so we couldn’t be seen. The broken demon I’d hauled in looked accusatory.

Below, the sentry stopped, peering about. Nothing amiss.

I waited an eternity. Astiza called again. The man stalked away, muttering. So I dipped my head to address my boy.

“Harry, are you all right?”

“Are we there?” His voice was very small.

“Almost.” I got my knees back up on the roof and scrabbled swiftly up its slippery slate to the ridge. There I let Harry loose and waited for my sweat to cool.

Accomplishment Number One: I had not yet killed my son.

Harry looked back at Notre Dame. “That was scary, Papa.”

“It’s the next part that’s jolly. You get to be Sinterklaas.”

“Will you come, too?”

“Better. You’re going to open a window, and Mama and I are going to meet you there as part of our special game. You like games, don’t you?” Meanwhile, I hoped a lightning bolt wouldn’t strike me dead for blasphemy.

At least it was quiet. Cardinal Belloy was an astonishingly thriving ninety-five years old who by all reports was an able administrator. I was betting the old man also needed his sleep.

“Now, let’s creep along to the chimney.”

Astiza had found plans for the palace in the library, and I’d picked a flue that appeared to have the necessary width and which led to the cardinal’s council chamber. We sidled to it. I took the other coil of rope I’d cut from the bells and quickly lowered some crossed sticks I’d brought to make sure the chimney had no odd obstructions. The sounding went straight down, slackened in the hearth, and came up with cold ashes.

“Harry, this is the clever part. You must pretend you’re Father Christmas, bringing presents down the chimney like the Dutch story I told you, but instead, you get treasure. I’m going to lower you on this rope, and you’re going to get as dirty as you like.” I gave him a bottle with a soft glow. “This holds fox fire, to give you a little light on the way down. When you get to the bottom, the rope will go slack. Then you’re going to pull here to release the knot, step into the room, and look for Mama’s face in a window. If you open the window latch, we can climb inside.”

“What’s the treasure?”

“Candy. Here are a few pieces to keep your strength up and show you what we’re after.” I’m so practiced telling improbable fables to nubile wenches that I can do the same with four-year-old children.

He nodded solemnly, thinking, I believe, that if such a path was good enough for Sinterklaas, it was good enough for him. He was a brave little lad, and he had his parents’ curiosity. So down he went.

Harry slipped without jamming, dangling like a passive puppet as I’d instructed. The rope finally slackened and came loose. So far, so good.

Then I heard a growl, rumbling up the chimney as if it were a speaking trumpet.

Damnation! The cardinal had a dog after all. I braced for a scream and wail from my son, shouts from priests and guards, and maybe even gunshots. I froze on the roof ridge, as plain a target as the tin plate I’d used in Boulogne.

Instead, silence.

Heart hammering out of fear for my boy, I swiftly pulled the rope up, doubled it around the chimney, and dropped it down the roof to the Seine side of the palace. Then I slid along it over the side and looked for what I hoped would be there. Sure enough, a crossbow bolt was stuck in a beam on the underside of the roof eave, and from it a string led down to the ground. When I pulled on the string, I pulled up Astiza’s rope. I doubled it around the beam, braced myself, and hauled my wife up. She helped by walking up the wall with her feet.

“Finally,” she gasped. “I’ve lived an eternity. Is Harry all right?”

“I hope so. I heard a dog.”

She moaned while I reeled in the rope from the chimney.

She quickly swung to the window we hoped Harry could open, climbing onto its French balcony. I followed.

“Nice that the crossbow worked,” I whispered.

“I missed twice. Priests must sleep like the dead.”

“Clear conscience. Women wouldn’t know what that’s like, would they?”

“Not funny, husband.”

“You have the substitute?”

She patted a satchel at her side. “In my bag.”

We tapped the window. A small face appeared on the other side and matter-of-factly climbed up on the window ledge and unfastened the leaded glass. It swung inward. That’s my boy.

“You said there wouldn’t be a doggie.” He was accusatory.

“Just friendly ones. Where is he?”

“I gave him candy.”

And indeed, a hound was snuffling at something on the carpet, growling a halfhearted warning as we dropped onto thick carpet. Some watchdog. I shook loose a curtain rope from its hook and gently approached, holding out my hand as if I had more food. The growl was a low rumble, but the beast looked warily hopeful. I gave it a pet, and then swiftly cinched its muzzle before it could do more than yelp. More rope around the thrashing legs, and I trussed the mutt like a calf.

I stood, breathing heavily. “You’re a very clever boy, Harry.”

“Papa said there’s more candy here, Mama.” Our son was covered in soot and seemed rather proud of it. I admired his mercenary instinct, which I consider common sense.

“You’re a very good son and shall get some treats.”

“And a bath,” his mother added.

The council room had a long central table with armoires, cabinets, and bookshelves alongside. We emptied one of folded tablecloths and put the struggling dog inside, throwing the fabric on top of him to muffle any scratching. I felt sorry for the beast, but fortunes of war and all that.

Now, where to look? It was a splendid home. Clergy work is steady, clean, and with good quarters; one could do worse except for the celibacy part. Gothic arches made a fine roof overhead, stone pillars coming down like trunks in a forest. The furnishings were a little bare, the place having been ransacked in the revolution, but what had been brought back in was Italian and finer than I could afford. There were wool carpets as thick as bear pelts, fine tapestries, gloomy portraits of popes, and bright ones of the Virgin. The latter seemed to be eyeing me with particular disfavor.

Now we had to find something small enough to be cruelly jammed on our Savior’s head.

I whispered to Harry to stay close and began creeping around, hating the way the board floors creaked and cabinet hinges squealed. Logically, I knew the sounds were barely audible, but when stealing Christendom’s most precious relic, every peep sounds like the boom of a cannon.

I don’t know how professional thieves bear the nerves.

We tried chests, armoires, shelves, mantles, and decorative boxes. Harry peered under furniture and behind curtains. Astiza had theorized that such a precious item might be hidden somewhere clever, such as a hollowed-out Bible, so she tugged open weighty-looking books. I tapped a globe, wondering if it might have a secret compartment in its hollow. We looked behind paintings in case there was a hiding spot in the walls. Each time we were disappointed. The Bishop’s Chapel next door had nothing unusual on its altar or in its tabernacle. We didn’t try the kitchen or cellars on the floor below, since I didn’t think a prelate would put a precious relic in a pantry. We also avoided the ground-floor antechamber out of concern it might hold guards or secretaries.

“Maybe he moved it to another church for safekeeping,” Astiza whispered worriedly.

“It has too much status. No churchman would willingly give it up.”

“I’m tired, Papa.”

“Here, I found more candy.”

“Ethan, the only place left is his bedchamber.”

“Our damnation if it is. What if Belloy wakes up?”

“Please be careful with your language around our boy.”

“Dammit, you’re right. I mean, sorry.”

“Can we go home, Mama?”

“Have another piece of candy.” It wasn’t good parenting, but most spies don’t have to bring the entire family along. He was black as a briquette and rapidly flagging.

“All right, the bedchamber if we must, but quiet as a confessional,” I said. “If the cardinal suspects what we’ve done, the whole scheme comes to naught.”

One stroke of luck was that the aged like to sleep warm. The prelate had drawn the heavy silk curtains on his sumptuous bed to make a cozy tent, and his snores were faint, which meant our burglary was also muffled. “Ethan, Harry and I are lighter and quieter,” Astiza whispered. “You walk like a moose. Stand watch by the door.”

“A stag, perhaps. Or a stallion.”

“We’ll be only a minute.” My wife and son disappeared into the gloom of the bedroom. I’d given her the vial of fox fire to provide meager light, but shadows swallowed them.

I waited nervously, imagining a thousand disasters. And of course, one soon occurred. The palace was big enough to boast a corridor, and suddenly a shadow rose at its far end, where a stairway led to the ground floor.

Someone was ascending the steps.

“Astiza!” I hissed. “Hide!” But I dared not say it loud enough for her to hear. I stood in shadow by the bedroom door, trying to communicate with my family by will alone. That didn’t work. She’d passed into a dressing room.

A lamp rose from the lip of the stairs like a rising sun, and with it a figure. A priest, thank goodness, not a soldier or gendarme.

He bore a pitcher of water or wine and made straight for the cardinal’s room. Wash water, perhaps, for the morning? Need he bring it now? Then I remembered holy men rise at ungodly hours, as if the Almighty were on a tight schedule.

A hand touched my arm, and I jumped. It was my wife.

“All I found were miter hats and sacramental robes,” she whispered. “And I’ve lost Harry.”

“Lost him?” I was getting panicked. “It’s just a bedchamber.”

“He didn’t come back to you, did he?”

“He’s hiding, I hope, as you were supposed to. A priest is coming.”

“Now?”

“Slide under the bed. I’ll take care of the servant.” I closed the door nearly shut and skipped to the library on the other side. When the priest came abreast of the bishop’s bedroom, I spilled some books to make a thud.

“Excellency?” The priest stepped into the library, dark except for the gray rectangle that marked its window.

I put out my leg.

He tripped, grunting, and fell to the carpet, me catching the pitcher just before it shattered. Then I let it drop on his head, not enough to break but enough to stun, and taking care it didn’t tip and spill its liquid. I’m fastidious in my own way. Before he could react I dragged him square with the rug and started rolling him up. In moments he was encased in a wool sandwich, his dazed cries muffled by the carpeting. I yanked down more drapery holders, letting the curtains make it even darker, and tied the rug at either end, taking care to leave just enough of a gap so he could breathe. Smothering a priest would be sure to doom our quest with divine wrath. What a bollocks our adventure had become!

I knelt and put my mouth to the hole at the end of the roll of carpet. “My apologies, Father, we’ll be on our way soon.” My captive shouted something, but I couldn’t make out what, since it came out as a muffled whisper. I glanced toward the bedchamber. When the priest didn’t return, a guard would come looking. It was past time to flee.

I went back to the cardinal’s door and swung it open to look for my wife, but she was already there, holding Harry.

“He was under the bed,” she explained.

“Papa, I found a nest,” he said proudly.

Astiza held out a wreath of ancient brambles, as unprepossessing a crown as can be imagined. Had this “nest” of reeds really topped Jesus? Medieval fragments of the crucifixion were as plentiful as homes in which George Washington reputedly slept, so except for the periodic mummified feet or heart of a saint, all but the most devout were skeptical that anything was real. Yet I felt a chill and an odd feeling of the sacred, as if the wisps of dry vines had supernatural power. Stealing the Crown of Thorns was our maddest act yet.

If the pope lifted this Crown of Thorns in surprise as the hat for the new French emperor, the entire ceremony—and Bonaparte’s campaign to win respectability—would come apart. Claiming the crown of Jesus! The subterfuge wouldn’t kill Napoleon’s body, but it would destroy his pretensions to being a republican and make him a laughingstock among the nobles of Europe.

“I slipped our substitute in its place,” Astiza said. “It’s kept in a lacquered and inlayed box. Hopefully, he won’t look and, if he does, won’t notice the switch.”

We had chopped some brambles out of the graveyard and tied them into a circle.

Behind the bed curtains the snoring stopped with a snort, there was a shift, and we feared our unwitting host was waking up.

“Then let’s descend by the rope you doubled, take it with us, and melt into the dark. We’ll steal some plate and porcelain so our priest there will think we’re ordinary thieves.”

“But we didn’t find all the candy!” Harry protested, instinctively copying our anxious whispers.

“Yes we did.” I gave him another piece. “I’ve got it in my pocket. We’ll share it all when we get home.”

The cathedral bells should have rung by the time the sky lightened and we made for the rue du Bac, but the priests of Notre Dame were no doubt looking for fresh rope.