Merchants of Virtue by Paul C R Monk

Author:Paul C R Monk [Monk, Paul C R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780993444241
Publisher: Bloomtree Press
Published: 2016-12-23T22:00:00+00:00

10

August and September 1687

On the evening of the 25th August, a bedraggled company of prisoners rode their pack-donkeys into the fortified Mediterranean city of Aigues-Mortes. Jacob’s hands were blistered from the rough cord of the primitive bridle, and his body ached. His clothes had become three sizes too large, and he felt his bones with the donkey’s every stride.

He and the rest of the detainees had ridden without stirrups from Montpellier to the walled city, under the escort of fusiliers on foot and archers on horseback. At their head rode the subdelegate of the intendant of Languedoc. The fourteen captives, men and women of every age and rank, did not look like criminals at all. In fact, despite their visible signs of fatigue and wear, they resembled the townsfolk who watched them pass, mostly in silence, through the crowded lanes of the newly confirmed papist town. And yet, by law, criminals they were. Guilty of favouring their conscience over the King’s divine will.

They were the resistants, secretly envied by those who looked on, by those who, for whatever reason, lacked vocation or strength of faith to remain Protestant.

‘Look at the poor wretches,’ said a stocky man with burly forearms unable to keep his thoughts to himself. He had paused with his handcart at the sight of the procession. The man, whose name was Jean Fleuret, secretly said a prayer asking for forgiveness for his own sins, and to give strength to these righteous convicts.

‘Ay, I wager t’is another load for the great crossing,’ said the dapper grey-haired man standing next to him. Jean knew the man to be the haberdasher who twice took to the sea in his younger days, but had long since taken over his father’s boutique. The man continued in a reminiscent tone of voice, ‘T’is soon the season to be leaving. We used to get to the Canaries by mid-November, then crossed at Christmas tide. Best time for avoiding the hurricanes.’

‘See what you become, eh?’ said a rotund man with a potbelly of good living.

‘I ask you, sir,’ said Jean Fleuret pointing to one convict, ‘should we not be prouder riding with that poor fellow there than watching this procession of true faith like they were miscreants?’ He doffed his hat respectfully to the ragged Huguenot in question, then wheeled his cart full of carpentry tools alongside the company a short distance toward his home.

Jacob Delpech endeavoured to remain as dignified as possible to show the onlookers he was not a broken man, for he rode with God. It nevertheless came as no small relief to see, at the end of the lane, a bridge over a moat that led to the round tour de Constance, an impressive and impenetrable vestige of medieval times, and his new prison.

The massive stone tower, walls six yards thick and thirty yards high, housed two dim vaulted chambers, one on each floor. The prisoners were divided into two groups according to their sex. The women and girls were placed downstairs

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