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