Pelletier’s hand drifted to his chest, where Simeon’s book lay next to his heart.
Alaïs was woken by a loud clatter as the shutter banged against the wall. She sat up with a jolt, her heart thumping. In her dream, she had been back in the woods outside Coursan, hands bound, struggling to escape from the coarse hood.
She picked up one of the pillows, still warm with sleep, and held it to her chest. Guilhem’s scent still hung about the bed, even though it had been more than a week since last he had laid his head beside hers.
There was another bang as the shutter smashed against the wall. The storm was whistling around the towers and skimming the surface of the roof. The last thing she remembered was asking Rixende to bring her something to eat.
Rixende knocked at the door and came timidly into the room.
‘Forgive me, Dame. I did not want to wake you, but he insisted I should.’
‘Guilhem?’ she said quickly.
Rixende shook her head. ‘Your father. He bids you join him at the Eastern Gatehouse.’
‘Now? But it must be after twelve?’
‘The midnight has not yet struck, Dame.’
Why has he sent you rather than François?’
‘I don’t know, Dame.’
Leaving Rixende to keep watch in her chamber, Alaïs threw her cloak over her shoulders, and hurried downstairs. Thunder was still rumbling over the mountains as she rushed across the courtyard to join him.
Where are we going?’ she shouted over the wind, as they hurried through the East Gate.
‘To Sant-Nasari,’ he said. ‘To where the Book of Words is hidden.’
Oriane lay stretched out, like a cat, on her bed, listening to the wind. Guirande had done a good job, both at restoring the room to order and describing the damage her husband had done. What had set him in such a rage, Oriane did not know. Nor did she care.
All men — courtiers, scribes, chevaliers, priests — were the same under the skin. Their resolve snapped like twigs in winter for all their talk of honour. The first betrayal was the hardest. After that, it never ceased to amaze her how quickly secrets spewed from their faithless lips, how their actions denied all they claimed to hold dear.
She had learned more than she expected. The irony was, Guilhem didn’t even understand the significance of what he had told her tonight. She had suspected Alaïs had followed their father to Béziers. Now she knew she was right. She knew, too, something of what had passed between them on the night of his departure.
The sole reason Oriane had concerned herself with Alaïs’ recuperation was in the hope of tricking her sister into betraying their father’s confidence, but it had not worked. The only thing of note was Alaïs’ distress at the loss of a wooden board from her chamber. She’d talked about it in her sleep as she tossed and turned. So far, despite her best efforts, all attempts to retrieve the board had failed.
Oriane stretched her arms above her head. Even in her wildest dreams, she had never imagined her father possessed something of such power and such influence that men would pay a king’s ransom to obtain it. All she had to do was be patient.
After what Guilhem had told her tonight, she realised the board was of less significance than she’d thought. If only they’d had more time, she would have coaxed from him the name of the man her father had met in Béziers. If Guilhem knew it.
Oriane sat up. François would know. She clapped her hands.
‘Take this to François,’ she said to Guirande. ‘Let no one see you.’
CHAPTER 38
Night had fallen over the Crusader camp.
Guy d’Evreux wiped his greasy hands on the cloth a nervous servant was holding out to him. He drained his cup and glanced towards the Abbot of Citeaux at the head of the table to see if he was ready to rise.
He was not.
Smug and self-satisfied in his white robes, the Abbot had positioned himself between the Duke of Burgundy and the Count of Nevers. The constant jockeying for position that went on between the two and their followers had started before the Host had even left Lyon.
From the glazed look on their faces, it was clear that Arnald-Amalric was once more castigating them. Heresy, the fires of hell, the dangers of the vernacular, all subjects about which he was capable of lambasting an audience for hours.
Evreux had no respect for either of them. He thought their ambitions pathetic — a few gold coins, wine and whores, a little fighting, then home in glory having served their forty days. Only de Montfort, seated a little further down the table, seemed to be listening. His eyes burned with an unpleasant zeal matched only by the Abbot’s own fanaticism.
Evreux knew de Montfort by reputation only, even though they were near neighbours. Evreux had inherited land to the north of Chartres with good hunting. A combination of strategic marriage and repressive taxation had ensured the family’s wealth had grown steadily over the past fifty years. He had no brothers to challenge his title and no significant debts.
De Montfort’s lands were outside Paris, less than two days’ ride from Evreux’s estate. It was known de Montfort had taken the Cross at the personal request of the Duke of Burgundy, but his ambition was common knowledge, as were his piety and courage. He was a veteran of the eastern campaigns in Syria and Palestine, one of the few Crusaders who’d refused to take part in the siege of the Christian city of Zara during the Fourth Crusade to the Holy Land.
Although now in his forties, de Montfort was still as strong as an ox. Moody, introspective, he inspired extravagant loyalty in his men, but was distrusted by many of the barons who thought him devious and ambitious beyond his status. Evreux despised him, as he despised all those who proclaimed their actions as the work of God.
Evreux had taken the Cross for a single reason. As soon as he had accomplished his purpose, he would return to Chartres with the books he had been hunting half his lifetime. He had no intention of dying on the altar of other men’s beliefs.
‘What is it?’ he growled to the servant who’d appeared at his shoulder.
‘There’s a messenger come for you, my lord.’
Evreux glanced up. Where is he?’ he said sharply.
‘Waiting just outside the camp. He would not give his name.
‘From Carcassonne?’
‘He would not say, my lord.’
Bowing briefly to the top table, Evreux excused himself and slipped away, his pale face flushed. He walked quickly between the tents and animals to the glade on the eastern boundary of the camp.
At first, he could pick out only indistinct shapes in the dark between the trees. As he got closer, he recognised the man as a servant of an informer in Béziers.
‘Well?’ he said, disappointment hardening his voice.
The messenger dropped to his knees. We found their bodies in woods outside Coursan.’
His grey eyes narrowed. ‘Coursan? They were supposed to be tailing Trencavel and his men. What business had they in Coursan?’
‘I cannot say, my lord,’ he stammered.
At his glance, two more of his men appeared from behind the trees, their hands resting lightly on the hilts of their swords.
‘What was found at the site?’
‘Nothing, my lord. Surcoats, weapons, horses, even the arrows that killed them were . . . were not there. The bodies had been stripped. Everything was taken.’
‘So their identity is known?’
The servant took a step back. ‘The talk within the castellum is all of Amiel de Coursan’s bravery, not so much of who the men were. There was a girl, the daughter of Viscount Trencavel’s steward. Alaïs.’
‘She was travelling alone?’
‘I know not, my lord, but de Coursan escorted her personally to Besièrs. She was reunited with her father in the Jewish quarter. They spent some time there. In a private house.’
Evreux paused. ‘Did they indeed,’ he murmured, a smile forming on his thin lips. ‘And the name of this Jew?’
‘I was not given his name, my lo
rd.’
Was he part of the exodus to Carcassonne?’
‘He was.’
Evreux was relieved, although he did not show it. He fingered the dagger in his belt. Who else knows of this?’
‘No one, my lord, I swear. I have told no one.’
Evreux struck without warning, plunging the knife clean into the man’s throat. Eyes alive with shock, he started to choke as his dying gasps hissed from the wound and blood, pumping red, sprayed the earth around him. The messenger dropped to his knees, clawing frantically at his throat to remove the blade, lacerating his hands, then fell forward.
For a moment, his body lay jerking violently on the stained earth, then he gave a final shudder and was still.
Evreux’s face expressed no emotion. He held out his hand, palm up, waiting for one of his soldiers to return his dagger. He wiped it on the corner of the dead man’s tunic and returned it to its sheath.
‘Get rid of him,’ Evreux said, prodding the body with the toe of his boot. ‘I want the Jew found. I want to know if he is still here or is already in Carcassonne. You have a physical likeness?’
The soldier nodded.
‘Good. Unless there is news from there, do not disturb me again tonight.’
CHAPTER 39
Carcassonne
WEDNESDAY 6 JULY 2005
Alice swam twenty lengths of the hotel pool and then had breakfast on the terrace watching the rays of the sun creep above the trees. By nine-thirty she was waiting in line for the Chateau Comtal to open. She paid and was given a leaflet in eccentric English about the history of the castle.
Wooden platforms had been constructed on two sections of the battlements to the right of the gate and around the top of the horseshoe-shaped Tour de Casernes, like a crow’s nest on a ship.
A stillness descended over her as she walked through the formidable metal and wooden double doors of the Eastern Gatehouse and into the courtyard.
The Cour d’Honneur was mostly in shadow. Already, there were lots of visitors, like her, wandering around, reading and looking. In the time of the Trencavels, apparently an elm tree stood in the centre of the courtyard under which three generations of viscounts dispensed justice. There was no sign of it now. In its place were two perfectly proportioned plane trees, the shadow of their leaves cast on the western wall of the courtyard as the sun peeked its face above the battlement walls opposite.
The far northern corner of the Cour d’Honneur was already in full sunlight. A few pigeons nested in the empty doorways and cracks in the walls and abandoned arches of the Tour du Major and the Tour du Degré. A flash of memory — of the feel of a rough wooden ladder, the struts lashed with rope, clambering like an urchin from floor to floor.
Alice looked up, trying to distinguish in her mind between what was in front of her eyes and the physical sensation in the tips of her fingers.
There was little to see.
Then a devastating sense of loss swooped down on her. Grief closed around her heart like a fist.
He lay here. She wept for him here.
Alice looked down. Two raised bronze lines on the ground marked out the site of where a building had once stood. There was a row of letters set into the ground. She crouched down and read that this had been the site of the chapel of the Chateau Comtal, dedicated to Sainte-Marie. Sant-Maria.
Nothing remained.
Alice shook her head, unnerved by the strength of her emotions. The world that had existed eight hundred years ago beneath these sweeping southern skies existed here still, beneath the surface. The sense of someone standing at her shoulder was very strong, as if the frontier between her present and another’s past was disintegrating.
She closed her eyes, blocking out the modern colours and shapes and sounds, imagining the people who had lived here, allowing their voices to speak to her.
This once had been a good place to live. Red candles flickering on an altar, flowering hawthorn, hands joined in matrimony.
The voices of other visitors drew Alice back to the present and the past faded as she resumed her circuit. Now she was inside the Chateau, she could see that the wooden galleries constructed along the battlements were open to the air at the back. Set deep into the walls were more of the small, square holes she’d noticed on her tour around the Lices yesterday evening. The leaflet told her they marked the joists where the upper floors would have been.
Alice glanced at the time and was pleased to see she had enough time to visit the museum before her appointment. The twelfth- and thirteenth-century rooms, all that remained of the original buildings, housed a collection of stone chancels, columns, corbels, fountains and tombs, dating from the Roman period to the fifteenth century.
She wandered, not much engaged. The powerful sensations that swamped her in the courtyard had disappeared, leaving her feeling vaguely restless. She followed the arrows through the rooms until she found herself in the Round Room, rectangular in shape despite its name.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. The room had a barrel-vaulted ceiling and the remains of a mural of a battle scene on the two long walls. The sign told her Bernard Aton Trencavel, who had taken part in the First Crusade and fought the Moors in Spain, had commissioned the mural at the end of the eleventh century. Among the fabulous creatures and birds decorating the frieze were a leopard, a zebu, a swan, a bull and something that looked like a camel.
Alice looked up in admiration at the cerulean blue ceiling, faded and cracked, but beautiful still. On the panel to her left, two chevaliers were fighting, the one dressed in black holding a round shield, destined to fall for ever more under the other’s lance. On the wall opposite, a battle between Saracen and Christian knights was being played out. It was better preserved and more complete and Alice stepped closer to get a better look. In the centre, two chevaliers confronted one another, one mounted on an ochre horse, the other, the Christian knight, on a white horse, bearing an almond-shaped shield. Without thinking, she reached up to touch. The attendant tutted and shook her head.
The last place she visited before leaving the castle was a small garden off the main courtyard, the Cour du Midi. It was derelict, with only the memory of the high arched windows left standing. Green tendrils of ivy and other plants wound through the empty columns and cracks in the walls. It had an air of faded grandeur.
As she wandered slowly around, then back into the sun, Alice was filled with a sense, not of grief this time, but regret.
The streets of the Cite were even busier by the time Alice emerged from the Château Comtal.
She still had time to kill before her meeting with the solicitor, so she turned in the opposite direction to last night and walked to the Place St Nazaire, which was dominated by the Basilica. It was the fin-de-siècle façade of the Hotel de la Cite, understated but grand all the same, that caught her eye. Covered by ivy, with wrought-iron gates, arched stained-glass windows and deep red awnings the colour of ripe cherries, it whispered of money.
As she watched, the doors slid open, revealing the panelled and tapestried walls, and a woman appeared. Tall, with high cheekbones and immaculately cut black hair held off her face with gold-rimmed sunglasses. Her pale brown sleeveless shirt and matching trousers seemed to shimmer and reflect the light as she moved. With a gold bracelet on her wrist and a choker at her neck, she looked like an Egyptian princess.
Alice was sure she’d seen her before. In a magazine or in a film, perhaps on television?
The woman got into a car. Alice watched her until she was out of sight, then walked to the door of the Basilica. A beggar stood outside, her hand stretched out. Alice fished in her pocket and pressed a coin into the woman’s hand, then went to go in.
She froze, her hand on the door. She felt as if she was caught in a tunnel of cold air.
Don’t be stupid.
Alice once more tried to make herself go in, determined not to give in to such irrational feelings. The same terror that had overwhelmed her at Saint-Etienne in Toulous
e held her back.
Apologising to the people behind, Alice stepped out of the line and sank down on a shaded stone ledge beside the north door.
What the hell is happening to me?
Her parents had taught her to pray. When she was old enough to question the presence of evil in the world and found that the Church could provide no satisfactory answers, she’d taught herself to stop. But she remembered the sense of meaning that religion can confer. The certainty, the promise of salvation lying somewhere beyond the clouds had never entirely left her. When she had time, like Larkin she always stopped. She felt at home in churches. They evoked in her a sense of history and a shared past which spoke to her through the architecture, the windows, the choir stalls.
But not here.
In these Catholic cathedrals of the Midi she felt not peace but threat. The stench of evil seemed to bleed out of the bricks. She looked up at the hideous gargoyles that leered down at her, their twisted mouths distorted and sneering.
Alice got up quickly and left the square. She kept glancing over her shoulder, telling herself she was imagining it, yet not able to shake the feeling there was someone at her heels.
It’s just your imagination.
Even when she left the Cite and started to walk down rue Trivalle towards the main town, she felt just as nervous. No matter what she said to herself, she was sure someone was following her.
The offices of Daniel Delagarde were in rue George Brassens. The brass sign on the wall gleamed in the sunlight. She was a little early for her appointment, so she stopped to read the names before going in. Karen Fleury was about halfway up, one of only two women.
Alice went up the grey stone steps, pushed open the glass double doors and found herself in a tiled reception area. She gave her name to the woman at a highly polished mahogany table and was directed to a waiting area. The silence was oppressive. A rather bucolic-looking man in his late fifties nodded to her as she walked in. Copies of Paris Match, Immo Média and several back editions of French Vogue were neatly stacked on a large coffee table in the centre of the room. There was an ormolu clock on the white marble mantelpiece and a tall, rectangular glass vase filled with sunflowers in the grate.