Catherine: One Love is Enough (Catherine Series Book 1) by Juliette Benzoni Page B

meant that he did not want the girl for his harem. The old crone who had brought the girl along shrugged crossly, and made as if to escort her protégée away. Just then a frightening apparition stepped out of the crowd, a dwarfish man so broad across the shoulders as to be almost square. His scarred face owed nothing to the usual tricks and artifices of the beggar fraternity. There was a purple sheen on his red, bulbous nose. His mouth was opened in a soundless laugh, showing teeth like blackened stubs. When he stepped toward the girl, Catherine gave an involuntary shiver of revulsion. What followed was worse still. This time Catherine kept her eyes tight shut as this repulsive creature threw the girl to the ground and took her publicly, there and then. But she could not help hear the beggar girl’s wild scream, and she realised then why Barnaby had forbidden her to so much as show her nose outside the house. When she opened her eyes again, the girl, who had fainted, was being carried away amid cheers and laughter. There was blood on her legs …
     
     
    Catherine was beginning to grow restless after being shut up for so long. As her strength returned she felt an overpowering urge to run about, breathe in the pure air down by the river and feel the sun’s warm caress on her skin. But Barnaby shook his head.
    ‘Not till the day you leave Paris, my pretty. Till then it’s dangerous for you to go out by day, and still more so by night.’
    Then, one day, Landry, who came almost every day to see Catherine, appeared hotfoot and breathless.
    ‘I know where Loyse is,’ he shouted as he burst through the door.
     
     
    While wandering in his usual fashion about the city that afternoon, Landry had visited the Notre-Dame market to buy some tripe his mother wanted for supper. As a keen admirer of Caboche, the lad had gone straight to the shop kept by Mère Caboche, who specialised in offal. She lived in a narrow, dirty house in one of the less savoury alleys thereabouts. The whole of the ground floor reeked sickeningly of tripe. During the day the wares were displayed in front of the house, spilling out of large metal basins. Behind sat Mère Caboche in person, her scales on one side, and a metal fork in one hand, a quivering mound of yellow fat. She was famous throughout the neighbourhood for her ugly temper, which her celebrated son had inherited, and her inordinate fondness for the bottle.
    On reaching the shop, Landry had been surprised to find it closed and shuttered. If the door had not been half open he would have thought the place uninhabited. But it so happened that a mendicant friar of the Order of Frères Mineurs, in his grey robe girdled by a triple-knotted rope, was stood in the doorway talking to Mère Caboche, whose frowsty face could be clearly seen.
    ‘Just a little bread for the brothers, my good woman,’ said the friar, rattling his basket. ‘Today is the Feast of St John. Surely you will not refuse!’
    ‘The shop is closed, Father,’ retorted Mère Caboche. ‘I am sick and I have only food enough for myself. Go on your way, Father, and pray for my recovery.’
    ‘But even so …’ the friar insisted. Some passing housewives stopped to place an offering in his basket. One of them said:
    ‘The place has been shut for two months now, Father. No-one round here can understand it at all. As for being sick, you should just hear the sort of psalms she sings in the evenings. Sick of work more like!’
    ‘I can do as I please,’ scowled Mère Caboche, making vain efforts to close the door again. The friar’s sandaled foot was now wedged in the crack.
    ‘How about a little wine then?’ the friar suggested, inspired by the other woman’s comments. At this, Mère Caboche’s face turned red as a beet under her yellow linen coif and she roared at him:
    ‘I have no wine! To the Dev –’
    ‘My child!’ the scandalised friar exclaimed, hastily crossing himself.
    All the same, he did not remove his foot.