by Hana Cole
Around him the treble of the birds seems very loud. He feels dizzy, as though he can sense the heavens spinning above him. He sits down among the long grasses, still wet from the deluge. Instantly sodden, his trousers cling to his thighs and buttocks but he doesn’t care and his indifference makes him laugh aloud.
On the other side of the village, he can see his cottage. He can’t go home because his mother will be there, fussing about the place, trying not to worry about Father Gui. He knows she loves him. It’s obvious from the way her face looks when she is thinking about him. Etienne doesn’t blame her. For all the problems that it causes him, he suddenly feels very sad for her. He doesn’t help his mother as much as he should, and his heart sinks as he recalls all that she does for him.
She is stuck. Her husband is dead and her family are poor and far away. She can’t get married again. Etienne knows that unmarried women aren’t really worth that much. Worst of all, his mother knows it too. He glances down at the departing crowds and considers those who took the cross. It’s different for boys, he muses. One day soon he will be a man, and he will find a way not to spend his days stooped to the earth picking out weeds or milking sheep, always the butt of someone else’s joke.
On the eastern-most horizon, storm clouds are eating up a strip of pale blue sky and he wonders what the people over there are doing – womenfolk bringing their laundry in, merchants on the road to Champagne taking cover with their fine silks and rare spices. Now that’s a good life, he thinks, going to those far off places and seeing strange sights that he can’t even imagine. The future is some far-distant land and he is not sure by what means he will travel there, but if he closes his eyes, he can see himself standing at a market stall in Chartres or maybe even Paris, picking out silks, watching the trader measure it out yard upon yard. His mother’s face when a mysterious package arrives. He won’t sign it. She will just know it is from him.
Etienne picks at a honeyed frond of cow parsley then tosses it down the hill. The square is nearly empty and the crowd is trooping away in a long chain, placards aloft, like ants carrying off breadcrumbs. He is troubled by the preacher’s sermon in ways that he can’t fully make sense of. Mostly because he felt a real, physical sensation that he had never felt before, and it told him Jean was right. Miracles happened all the time for sure, but not to someone like him. He shuts his eyes tight and asks God for a sign, just so he can be certain that the preacher’s message was for him too.
There is something scratchy inside his sleeve. Etienne worms his finger in and picks it out, to find himself looking at a small felt cross, exactly like the one the preacher gave to Jean. He can’t for a king’s ransom say how it got there. Maybe Jean put it there? No, he watched the preacher give him only one. Etienne’s chest feels too tight for his breath. He is sure he didn’t receive one at the sermon.
He hears the rustle of grass and someone panting before he sees a figure scrambling up the bank towards him.
‘Etienne! Etienne!’ A cap of white blond hair appears over the brow of the hill.
‘Jean!’ Etienne slides down the wet grass on his rump.
‘What is it?’
Jean gives him a triumphal smile. ‘Come quickly,’ he says as he starts back down, tugging Etienne’s hand. ‘It’s the miracle shepherd boy. It’s Stephen. People are saying he is gathering pilgrims for crusade now. You have to come.’
All his life Etienne has had to work that bit harder to win respect from other boys, always waiting for the trick that doesn’t get played on anyone else. That’s what it’s like when you are different. Usually it is just a bit of fun for the others, like a test he has to take again and again to earn his place in the game. But he can tell from the bright, open smile of friendship, that with Jean it will be different.
Chapter Five
Gui’s childhood friend, Philippe de Champol, lived half way up the cathedral hill. The three-storied merchant’s house was a cross-hatching of timber frames, its top floors bowing out over the walls below. The windows were garlanded with pots of herbs upon which his wife lavished great affection in the absence of land. Philippe hailed from a cadet branch of a noble line, and as third son, free from the obligations of a family estate, he had started a trade in textiles.
His family owned a vineyard near to the Courville manor and the boys all had played together through the dry, bleached grasses of the dying summer when Philippe’s father came to oversee the grape harvest. Although the four years that separated them no longer made a distinction, Gui had once been a nine-year old, looking up to the thirteen-year old friend who always intervened to save him from the mean tricks and accidental fists of the older boys.
Philippe opened the door himself, dressed in embroidered cloak of mustard yellow wool trimmed with fox. He squinted at Gui, feigning not to recognise him, then ushered him across the threshold with a battery of jovial back slaps.
The more successful he became, it seemed to Gui, the more he delighted in embellishing his personality, so as not to disappear under the great waves of bright fabric that surrounded him.
Gui took a deep, velvet-cushioned seat by the fire. He had never desired the trappings of wealth that his own family might once have offered him, but sitting next to Philippe made him feel uncomfortable in his skin nonetheless. Though he could barely admit it to himself, the awkward itch came not from his coarse tunic but from the embarrassment that his old friend considered his asceticism childish. The wine Philippe served to revive his guest was full-bodied and aromatic. It tasted of some long forgotten pleasure and Gui fought the desire to drain the whole cup.
‘The wine in that shit hole swamp is really so bad you rode a week to get here, huh?’
Gui gave a laugh that sounded a little too hearty.
‘The old man?’
Gui nodded. Philippe swirled the wine round in his glass, nodding gravely. ‘We must all meet our end I suppose.’
Gui flicked his hand in what was supposed to be a casual acceptance of the inevitable but Philippe knew him better than that.
‘You know you are welcome in my house at any time. Come and visit me in Tours. It’s closer to you than Chartres and besides I am there more often these days.’
‘Thank you, my friend. You know I would visit you more often if my circumstances permitted.’
‘I know, you have other…responsibilities.’ For a moment a wry grin crossed the merchant’s face, but today was not the day to goad a wounded friend.
Philippe ordered a plate of pig’s trotters and more wine. It was Gui’s first meal of the day and the second carafe of wine made him feel drunk. Nostalgia took an easy fingerhold amidst the hazy warmth of rich hospitality, and they wound their way through the secret tree houses and ruined battlements of their youth until they arrived back at present circumstance.
‘So, what goes on in that village of yours?’ Philippe asked.
Gui shot him a look of exasperation. ‘The same. Petty landowners pen their complaints against me to the bishop. Directives. Charters. Squabbles.’
Philippe shrugged. ‘They say the bishop acquired a real taste for heretic flesh on that crusade down south. They are shaking the tree here for them. All sorts of diverting new creeds.’
‘They send me the sermons I am supposed to use for the fight.’
‘I just notice a tide is turning my friend. I am hearing things I don’t like. The king’s beloved tutor is an unassailable ally, but when the old man goes, there will be no one here to speak on your account with the powers that be,’ he said. Then, seeing his friend was snatching sips from a now empty cup, Philippe reached forward and laid a steady hand on Gui’s forearm. ‘But I think you know that don’t you?’
Gui flicked a nod of acknowledgement. In his mind’s eye ashes were falling like snow onto grease-smeared cobbles – the remnants of a human being devoured by the pyre. Philippe was still sitting with his bulk craned forward expectantly. There were not many moments like this that came in life – when a friend stood on the oth
er bank of a chasm that had defeated you a thousand times, hand in extension.
Pitching forward, Gui placed his palms together as though in prayer and said, ‘Roger has been my only ally in that nest of vipers. Even my own father wouldn’t suffer to hear my name.’ He wasn’t asking for a response and Philippe stayed silent. ‘I have hardly acquired more friends since then.’
‘There are friends to be had at the bishop’s palace? I didn’t know.’
He drew a smile from Gui. ‘Then maybe it’s time.’
‘Time for what?’
Gui took a breath as though readying to plunge his head underwater. ‘It’s my responsibility to make sure my family is safe, Philippe. Mine.’ He rubbed furiously at his collar. ‘I promised the old man I would tell Etienne the truth.’
Philippe threw his hands apart – what’s the problem? ‘He’s old enough.’
The pressure of what he had to say next forced Gui to his feet, and he began to pace the room. ‘How can I tell the truth to my son and then ask him to tell the same lie? How do you teach a man to lead if not by example?’ Holding up his girdle, knotted with the vows of obedience, poverty, and of chastity, he said, ‘What if I can’t live with this anymore.’
Philippe drew back his head, suddenly the stern older brother. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous. Why would you give up a good job? Not everyone’s idea of fun, I admit, but you are housed, clothed, a small stipend. Every second priest has a family. Christ and his saints, Gui, you know that.’
‘You said it yourself. With the old man gone I have no advocate left in the Church.’
‘I meant only that you should take greater care now, not abandon your station to a life of hand-to-mouth scribe work writing out wills until your eyes fail.’ Philippe pressed at the air with his palms as though cautioning a small child from running too fast. ‘You are upset about Roger. It’s natural, he was as a father to you. Give yourself time.’
‘Time?’ Gui batted away the counsel. Philippe was on his feet by now, gesticulating as though he was seeking to halt a moving wagon. Gui ignored him. ‘You think the boy who thwarted the bishop’s inquisitors and got a parish for his sins has more time?’
Heart pacing as rapidly as his mind, the conversation with Abbot Roger turned over and over. Set it loose it will defend itself. The rising moon was tracking across the window. Gui glanced out. The streets were dead, like the set of a play. Beads of sweat breaking on his brow, he closed his eyes. In the blackness he saw the night his son came into the world. Agnes, weeping for joy and exhaustion, he, staring at the bundle of swaddling in her arms, flooded with relief and sweating terror at the enormity of it. That night he had sworn he would be the best father he could, that he would do anything in his power to protect them both and that they would know only his love.
‘I can’t explain it Philippe, but I know in here.’ Gui placed his palm on his chest and said softly, ‘If I don’t act now, everything falls.’
The merchant’s arms flopped to his sides in defeat. ‘Then may God protect you.’
*
Agnes sat up and rubbed off the fog of sleep. The dull glow of an overcast sky seeped through the shutters. It was long past dawn. The air felt warm on her skin – heat from the hearth next door. She threw off the bedclothes and raced to the living room. The floor was swept, the fire had a good flame, a large pan of water set to warm over it. She felt her face broaden with relief. Gui is back. Even though he had only been gone a week, Etienne was too obstinate to have undertaken so girlish a task as housework.
The joy fizzing in her veins ebbed as she surveyed the room more closely. The clutter of family life had been prodded onto shelves and patted into piles – Gui’s parchments, her drying racks spilling with herbs, church candles stacked into a precarious pyramid with a carelessness that would only seem orderly in the eyes of a child. Etienne must have crept about like a mouse not to wake her before he left for the fields. The unexpected help should have been a comfort, but instead she found menace in the ordered stillness, and the forebodeing of a mother’s instinct; all was not its proper place.
Opening the shutters a jar she peeked out, hoping against reason to see the man she knew should still be in Chartres. There was no one. Not even beyond the hedgerows that separated their cottage from the washing brook, where faces often popped up, hawk-eyed, hunting for some little treasure of malice to report about the unwed woman left unsupervised. She craned to see the angle of the sun but it was obscured by cloud. Perhaps it was not yet mid morning when the women usually began to drift down, baskets of laundry on their hips and children criss-crossing their paths.
A week was the longest amount of time she had been without Gui since he had first appeared at the prison door with his wild, black curls and earnest walnut eyes, and she had mistaken him for the angel Gabriel. Fighting the creeping unease, she ran her palm over the smooth, oak table, remembering the dirty shell the house had been when first she arrived, a suggestion of pregnancy hidden under her housekeeper’s apron and a sad tale of a husband suddenly lost. Gui had even held a funeral for him. She pressed her lips shut, sealing in her laughter at the memory, and crossed herself in reverence to her poor fairy tale man. How grateful she had been to see the spartan rooms, the cobwebbed corners, the damp larder. The two rooms they had cleaned and mended and made their home, the bed on which she had birthed her baby.
She poked at the loose bundle of threads that Etienne had stuffed hapharzardly back into her darning box. It was the one possession Gui had managed to salvage from the lot sequestered by the Bishop of Chartres’s bailiffs after her father’s execution. Estève had been a broad–shouldered, squat man, with an honest charm and a keen nose that had taken him from a paludier on the blood-red salt flats of the Camargue to a merchant whose wealth exceeded many of the noblemen he supplied. Her mother, Céline, was noble born, ostracised by her family for defying them in a love marriage to a merchant - and one from the Langue d’Oc to boot. Not even the crystalline riches of the salt trade had been enough to undo the stigma of this swarthy foreigner, or the disgrace of such a wilful daughter. By the time Estève’s fortune had grown enticing enough for those pinch-faced aristocrats it was too late. Céline had been taken birthing her second baby.
Agnes had only the vaguest impressions of her, she couldn’t even call them memories; the scent of rosewater and lavender, a full skirt of green silk stretching up and up, a tear drop pearl that chinked on a silver bracelet. Rather, it was her father’s expression as he reminisced that made the portrait Agnes had of her mother. His adoration declared in the shrug of Mediterranean indifference he gave to her dowry of familial fury, the riot of irreverence in his eyes capturing as no memory could the spirit of this woman.
Her father declared he would never re-marry, and Agnes found herself elevated to the status of a son. Her childhood was spent accompanying him up and down the salt routes, her world the blush-pink rocks of far-off mines, the grey, sandy crystals of Biscay, tiny particles that always seemed to be caught under her nails, and large, inviting chunks that looked like candied apricots. Salt, her father taught her, was the nourisher of blood, preserver of life.
By the time she was twelve she could read and write both French and Occitan. Estève handed her his account ledgers, heavy as bricks. Creamy leaves of parchment tied in leather binders, embossed with his logo - a Roman coin laid over an ‘S’ shape. For, as he often told her, the Roman army had marched for its Salarium Argentum, its salt money. One day you will have a household of your own, he said. I will find you a husband worthy of sharing this with you once I am resolved into the earth. As she grew towards womanhood, the great guessing game began: who will he be, this worthy man? Will he be from Marseille, a merchant like her father? An Italian perhaps, the floppy-haired son of a banking family? Or a tall, fair Dutch Guildsman, like the ones who came to the Fairs to sell their wool and linen?
But no, papà, you brought me none of those, she thought, sweeping the breadcrumbs left from Etienne’s breakfast
into the fire. You brought me none of those power-hungry Italians, or petty French noblemen looking for a stipend to buy a larger army. The task of finding a suitor worthy of his daughter was interrupted just before her fifteenth birthday as they returned to Chartres, a mule- train of merchandise turned to gold. That’s alchemy, he told her. But all the gold in the world could not have saved them. She knew that now. If only she had known it then. The key had been in her hands.
Voices carried on the air, waking her from the past. The ululating tones of women pierced with the shrieks of young children. Agnes looked outside for heads bobbing up and down behind the hedge line as they washed their garments; a blonde bun neatly pinned under a cloth bonnet, or a tangle of auburn, loose whorls twisting like Medusa. But there were only the branches of a sapling bending in the breeze, their shadows dancing back and forth across her face. The women must be making their way down from the village square, she told herself. Or else it is another one of those marches for the Holy Land, organised by charlatans to drum a pity penny for their own purses. They wouldn’t have lingered so long if Gui had been here, that was for sure.
Shrinking away from the window, her gaze fell on Gui’s disarray of parchments. She pictured him sitting at the desk in his long, black robe, lean, muscular hands turning the pages of the psalter as he taught Etienne to read. In a strange way, she thought, her father had kept his promise. He had brought her the worthiest of men. He’s worth all the salt of the earth, father, she thought. He has taken more than a dowry of fury for me, he has taken the life-long menace of death.
For comfort, she bent to pick one up. And it was then that she saw it - the spider’s leg scratches of a script she knew to be her son’s. Her hand was already shaking as she let the sheet fall open. Suddenly, the voices from the villlage were deafeningly loud, the shrieks a clarion of comprehension. She brought both hands to her mouth and the note fluttered back down onto the pile.