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

clapped over her mouth and she felt herself lifted up off the ground. Caboche had picked her up and was holding her against his chest with one arm.
    ‘Hold your tongue!’ he whispered under cover of the din. ‘Or I will be hard put to save any of you … if that’s still possible.’
    Half suffocated as she was in the butcher’s grip, Catherine stopped screaming, but she went on imploring him while the tears rained down onto his hairy hand.
    ‘Save him. Save him, I beg you. I would love you dearly for it …’
    ‘I can’t. It’s too late. Death can only be a merciful release to him in the state he is in.’
    Catherine watched horrified as he kicked the bleeding body at his feet.
    ‘We have found him again! That’s the main thing!’ he cried. ‘And now let’s finish with him. Come here, Guillaume Legoix. Let’s see how you wield a cleaver, now you are rich and comfortable! Finish off the carcass for me!’
    Cousin Guillaume stepped forward. His face was also very red, and there were splashes of blood on his rich, brown velvet robe. Notwithstanding his costly clothes, he had reverted to type and become a skinner again, with the same appetites as the rest. That was obvious from the savage pleasure he took in the sight of spilt blood, the smile on his moist, fleshy lips. He carried a butcher’s cleaver that had already seen service that day.
    Caboche felt Catherine’s body go rigid in his clasp and realised that she was about to scream again. He clapped his free hand over her mouth and whispered urgently to Guillaume:
    ‘Hurry up. Finish him off properly … for the child’s sake.’
    Guillaume nodded and stooped over Michel. In a quick, merciful gesture, Caboche moved his hand from over Catherine’s mouth and placed it over her eyes instead, completely covering them. She saw nothing, but she heard it all … the choking rattle of death, followed by a hideous gurgling noise. The crowd howled with delight. Wriggling like an eel, she managed to squirm out of Caboche’s grasp and dropped to her knees.
    What she saw made her eyes widen with horror and her hands fly up to her mouth. Michel’s body, its head cut off, lay on the ground before her in a pool of blood that stretched to her knees, the lifeblood still pumping out of the severed neck. A little way off, an archer in the green uniform of the Duke of Burgundy was calmly impaling the head on a lance.
    Slowly the life seemed to drain from Catherine’s bruised and weary body. She seemed to be turned to ice from head to foot. She began to scream, a thin ghastly scream that rose and rose to an intolerable pitch and hung there, curdling the blood of all who heard it.
    ‘Shut her up!’ Legoix shouted to Caboche. ‘It sounds like a dog that has smelt a corpse.’
    Caboche bent and tried to pick Catherine up. He found that she was as if paralysed, frozen into a crouched position even after he lifted her up. Her whole body had gone stiff in a spasm of horror, her eyes were fixed and her teeth chattered, and still the unearthly scream went on. With a shaking hand, Caboche tried to force her mouth shut. She turned dull, unseeing eyes on him. Her screaming ceased abruptly, only to be replaced by the stertorous panting sound one hears from trapped animals. The child’s anguished face had gone as grey as stone. A convulsion jerked her body in Caboche’s arms. It was racked by atrocious pains, as if she were being stabbed by a thousand knives at once. There was a red mist in front of her eyes and a roaring in her ears that threatened to burst them. A crushing pain at the back of the neck made her cry out again, but feebly this time. Suddenly she went limp in Caboche’s arms. She heard someone calling out – ‘Loyse! Loyse!’ – but the sound seemed so remote it might have come from the depths of the Earth.
    After that there was only a black, gaping hole, into which Catherine felt herself fall, plummeting down like a stone …

2
    Barnaby The Cockleshell