Painted in Blood

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  ‘Like smoke before the face of the sun?’ I ventured. ‘For surely the heretics will soon be exactly that, if they lift their hand against the crown of France.’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ said young Jean, gratefully. ‘The king will have to crush them now. My father – God rest his kind soul – took the cross against the Albigenses when he was a young man, and when I hear of such … such outrages, I burn, I truly burn to follow his example.’

  ‘Is it simply the heretics, though? Who would have thought they would be so bold? Surely it is more the quarrelling of princes?’

  ‘No, no. It is heresy that has brought this matter to pass. Just as in my father’s time. There should be another crusade … I should dearly love to serve my king, and Our Lord, by taking up my sword against His enemies.’

  ‘Well, there is no pope at Rome just now,’ I pointed out, ‘so there can be no crusade. Most probably Count Raymond will die of his sickness and save everybody the bother, eh?’

  Jean de Joinville was still wriggling his shoulders with a child’s desperation to find the right words to answer this when we came to the door of the king’s chambers. Within I found King Louis; his brother Alphonse; a man I recognised as the Count of Soissons, and Enguerrand, lord of Coucy, the most powerful baron in all of France. They were talking excitedly, and the king waved a casual hand at me.

  ‘Dear Petrus, our business is finished. Wait for me a minute, dear man.’

  I bowed gratefully, for I found Count Enguerrand, with his stern face corrugated by years of war, and his shock of dirty white hair, somewhat terrifying. He had small, pale eyes that probed like gimlets, and though I had never exchanged more than a few courtly words with him, I had no wish to make his acquaintance any further than that, and certainly not today. And what was Alphonse, of all people, doing here? I had not seen him at Vincennes at all on this visit, and here he was, two hours after I had first heard of his new title of Comte de Poitou and the difficulties that had come with it. Well, this must be a council of war, I thought to myself. Had Henry already moved against France? Perhaps my little trip to England was not needed after all. Well, if this was a council of war, I ought to be relieved, for now I could get back to Venice. And yet I found myself hoping that it was not what it seemed, for since I had left the Cemetery of the Innocents I had felt something inside me, a faint, secret agitation, like blood returning to a sleeping limb but deeper, in my soul, if indeed I still had one of those. Something was happening. I was going to make something happen.

  At last Louis dismissed his brother and the nobles. When they had left, and young Joinville with them, Louis clapped his hands.

  ‘And now, dear Petrus, there is something I wish you to see before we take our luncheon. I think it will – nay, I am certain it will delight you.’

  We left the chamber, a pair of palace guards falling in behind us. Joinville was waiting in the passageway, and when Louis beckoned to him his face went slack with joy. We left the royal quarters and soon our footsteps were echoing down halls I had not seen before. This was the older part of the palace, what remained of the old hunting lodge. The kitchens seemed to be nearby, and no doubt this was where the lowliest servants lived. It was draughty, the walls exhaling the damp chill of old places. I wondered why this king, who was spending a fortune on planning his Sainte Chapelle, surely the most astonishing building of this age, was content to live here. But then I considered his back, clothed in plain taffeta with the lilies of France embroidered upon it in silk with only a touch of gold thread here and there. The chapel was for his subjects, I supposed. One heard a lot about the modesty of Louis, but I had to admit that it was true. He did not care that his palace was his grandfather’s hunting lodge with a new coat of whitewash, for he would rather be outside under his favourite oak tree. Accustomed as I was to seeking out the lies and artifice in every man I dealt with – and the higher the office, the filthier the soul – I could find very little in Louis Capet, and while that made me inclined to like him, it made me uneasy. He was a modest, gentle, even kind man, and to my way of thinking he had no right to be any of those things.

  We had come to a heavily banded door. The king paused and seemed to be considering. Then he turned to young Jean.

  ‘De Joinville, would you seek out the chamberlain and have the table readied? And await us there? We shall not keep you long.’ The young man blushed, no doubt at the notion that his king was concerned that he should not wait for his luncheon, and hurried away giving another of his exquisite bows.

  ‘A sweet child – he shows considerable promise,’ Louis told me, opening the door. Beyond was a flight of stairs and we descended into musty torchlight. The cellars below were clean-swept, the stone of their high vaulted ceilings hardly touched by spider webs. A scullion was filling silver pitchers from one of the great tuns of wine that lined the walls. We passed her and entered a narrower passage. The palace’s winter fruit and vegetables were stored here, and there was a wholesome smell of apples, onions and earth. The king paused to pat the head of a little serving boy who was digging carrots from a box of sand. I followed Louis as he turned down another corridor and stopped in front of a plain door. Three royal guards stood against the wall, looking as if they were resting from some labour. Louis struck the door with the flat of his hand and at once it was opened from within.

  I saw a big room with walls of ashlar, lit by torches and an ugly wrought iron candleholder upon which trembled twenty or so candle flames. Clean rushes on the floor. Against the far wall, two women and a man were sitting. Another figure was slumped amongst the rushes. Between them and the candles a bench had been set and on this sat a priest and a black-robed Dominican friar. Hearing the door, they turned and rose hurriedly to their feet. Over the green scent of the rushes and the warm fug of the lights crept the reek of fear and piss. The king waved away the fawnings of the two clerics and leaned to engage them in earnest mutterings. I stood as close to the door as I could. Pleasant as this room seemed to be, there is no mistaking a torture chamber, or its victims. Louis turned back to me at last. My sinews were tensed. It was all so obvious: why else would I have been brought here? But instead his brow was furrowed with honest concern.

  ‘My dear Petrus,’ he said. ‘You were there yesterday, when de Joinville brought the news from the south.’ Dear God, I thought with a horrid uncoiling of my bowels, He knows. Matheus … a trap … But Louis was still talking, heedless. ‘I saw right away, as you must have done, that the heretics of Toulouse have decided that they are a power in this land. They are not. You know my feelings on the matter – you share them, of course.’

  ‘I will not forget our conversation last year under the oak tree,’ I said, earnestly. The stench of the huddled creatures’ terror was stifling me, but I summoned up every grain of false piety I could, and crossed myself twice over. ‘But surely these are not the murderers, unless …’

  ‘Alas, alas! That would be a miracle indeed! No, there is no better place to seek out your Enemy than at home.’

  ‘Albigenses in Paris? I did not think it possible.’

  ‘These are not Albigenses, my son.’ It was the friar. He had very black hair and skin of fish-belly whiteness, and his stubble-shadowed face was running to fat. ‘They are Leonistae – not from Albi, do you see, but Lyons. They call themselves the Poor, or Waldenses.’

  ‘But they are …’ I searched my mind for words that would not implicate me. ‘They suffer from the same detestable errors as their brethren in the south?’

  ‘No. They do not – although they call their priests perfecti, as do the Albigenses, and do not take oaths or lie …’

  ‘And their particular error?’ I enquired, adding a note of prurience that I saw strike home with the pallid friar.

  ‘Dear oh dear, my son.’ He lowered his voice to a mock whisper. ‘They deny the existence of purgatory!’ He shook his head and crossed himself. ‘They deny the efficacy of prayers for the dead, and indulgences!’ He held his hands up beseechingly to t
he ceiling. ‘Appalling. And they teach the absolute need for poverty. They hold worldly goods to be sinful, and go about the land prating and chastising our Mother Church for what they regard as worldliness.’

  ‘The shame of it!’ I breathed, pointedly stroking the fine brocade of my tunic. ‘And they were spreading these errors in this great city?’

  ‘They were living in the Temple marshes,’ said the friar. ‘I cannot tell you the squalor …’

  ‘Well, Your Majesty,’ I said, turning to Louis, who stood regarding the heretics with a brow ridged in discomfort. ‘Your words to me last year were truer than I could have brought myself to imagine.’

  ‘The canker must be stopped,’ he said quietly. ‘The Enemy is always – always – nearer than we believe.’

  Nearer even than that, I thought. Aloud I said: ‘What will become of these wretches?’

  ‘Two have recanted,’ said the friar. ‘They have confessed their errors and wish to come back to the bosom of the Church. The others … That one there—’ and he nodded at the still figure in the rushes ‘—could not be budged, even when the stones were crushing his limbs.’ He spread his arms helplessly. Over his shoulder I noticed an orderly stack of big granite blocks, each with an iron ring set in its top. How neat it was in here.

  ‘He will be burned,’ said Louis, sadly. He turned to me and laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘If a limb of my dear oak tree began to wither, I would have it cut off to save the others. So it is with these … these fools. They are denying themselves the Kingdom of Heaven. Nothing that befalls them can be worse than that. And I must save the others. Men such as yourself, Petrus, carry out such great labours to glorify our Lord and Saviour. I wanted you to see, to reassure you that we will not tolerate your work, yours and others, being undermined by these cankerous worms.’

  ‘Your Majesty, I am humbled,’ I said. ‘I do the Lord’s work, it is true, but I am just a servant. I require no proof of Your Majesty’s piety. It is as evident as the sun that warms the earth.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Louis, smiling wryly. ‘Good brother Umbertus, we will leave these wretches to your tender care. Try and bring that last fool back to Christ, I pray you.’

  ‘As you command me, Majesty,’ said the friar, bowing his glossy head. He followed us from the room, and as we left I heard him giving curt orders to the soldiers outside.

  Luncheon was a sunny, pleasant affair, and I ate the king’s meat and drank his wine as if a man’s joints were not being splintered a few yards below our feet for believing … in what? As it happened, I knew a little about these Waldenses. Their error was one of the gravest in the eyes of the Church: the belief that Christ’s teachings, as laid out in the Gospels, should be heeded by Christian men – and women too, for the Waldenses saw no need to bar women from their priesthood. The teachings of Christ – preposterous! Where would the Church be then? And how could honest men such as Captain de Montalhac hope to make a living if that holiest of institutions abjured wealth and worldliness? I allowed myself a grim little laugh, for of all the absurdities rife in the great cesspool of Christendom, that was the bitterest. I had trained for the priesthood. As a novice monk I had lain on cold stone floors and risen when the puddles were frozen in the cloisters to say the night office, and fancied myself an honest imitator of Our Lord and his apostles, but all that I had seen and heard since, all that I had done, had taught me that the Dominicans and their Inquisition would have spared the Pharisees the trouble of crucifying Jesus Christ, for they would have had him crackling on one of their pyres long before he rode into Jerusalem.

  King Louis was listening intently to the Archbishop of Saint Denis, who was rumbling, sonorously but ominously, like a distant storm cloud, about the detestable presence of heretics amongst his flock. To my right sat a stocky, slab-faced man, who was laying into his meat as if he had just been plucked from the desert. I had been amazed to learn that this was none other than Pierre de Montreuil, architect of the king’s Sainte Chapelle, for he seemed more like a dull-witted stonecutter than someone capable of drawing, let alone imagining, such a delicate vision. I never heard him speak, save to answer, with curt yeas and nays, the questions the king now and again loosed at him. When he heard that I was the man who had brought the relics of the Pharos Chapel to Paris, he raised his eyebrows at me as if to scold me for causing him so much trouble. I did not have much appetite, for the morning’s revelations, and then the goings-on in the royal cellars, had left my spirits turbid. So I was glad when the last crumbs of bread had been swept up and the lute-player waved away, and Louis had risen, giving us leave to do the same. We all made to leave the royal presence, but the king stayed me with a raised finger.

  ‘You are leaving Paris tomorrow, I believe?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you would care for one more walk outside.’

  In a few minutes we were sitting on the warm grass beneath the high shade of the king’s oak. A pigeon was soothing the still air with her call.

  ‘Your Majesty knew, yesterday, about the Waldenses?’ I asked. Louis’ lack of guile was legendary, and I was fairly sure that I would have sniffed out a trap by now if one had been laid for me; but it would not hurt to probe a little.

  ‘Alas, yes,’ he sighed. ‘They have been wandering into the city from Lyons for several years now. They are few, and often the folk whom they dwell amongst drive them out, so … but after the news we heard yesterday, an example must be made. We will not tolerate heretics in Paris, as we will not tolerate them in the lands of Toulouse. They grow bold because there is no pope on the saint’s throne, so it falls to the Christian monarchs of the world to do the Lord’s work. And I for one will not shrink from it.’

  ‘The more innocent the error, the greater is its danger,’ I agreed.

  ‘There you have it, Petrus!’ sighed the king. ‘To tell the truth, I feel a little beset. My cousin Isabella is trying to stir up a rebellion in Poitou for her Lusignan husband, and she will try and enlist her son Henry, your king Henry … now, is he as much in thrall to the Poitevins at his court as the talk would have it? Will he go to war for Hughues de Lusignan? If his mother tells him to?’

  ‘I do not know, Sire,’ I said, wondering again if I had been spied upon. My instincts told me no: Louis was not cunning, and I was certain he would consider any sort of subterfuge beneath his dignity. ‘I am hardly an Englishman any more, sad to say,’ I added, for it was the truth, and when you are filled to the brim with falsehoods it is good to be able to speak the truth.

  ‘Mothers …’ Louis let out a mighty sigh. ‘But let us talk of happier things!’ he went on brightly, plucking a blade of grass and putting it between his lips. ‘Will you be returning to Constantinople?’

  ‘There is no need, Your Majesty,’ I said. ‘The Pharos Chapel is empty. You have everything.’

  ‘Ah, but do I?’ said Louis, and for the first time I saw something furtive in his open face. It did not belong there, and indeed in an instant it was gone, and the young man looked almost sheepish.

  ‘You do, Your Majesty, I can assure you of that,’ I said kindly.

  ‘Aha. Everything in the Chapel, yes. And for that …’

  ‘And with that you have enriched your kingdom more than Charlemagne himself,’ I put in.

  The king winced. ‘I have spent rather a lot of money,’ he admitted. ‘I hope my wretched cousin … nay, that is unfair. Baldwin is a stout rock standing against a sea of infidels and schismatics. But I should hope he has put his … his gifts from me to good use.’

  ‘You can be certain of it,’ I told him. In fact, the last time I had been in that dismal city, Baldwin had himself taken me up to the roof of the palace of Constantine and showed me how he was mining the lead from it to pay his starving, resentful troops. The Greek army was a mile beyond the walls, their cooking fires rising into the low clouds that seemed to hang permanently over the Bosphorus. ‘Thanks to you, the Emperor is Christ’s champion in the east, as you are in the west.’

  ‘Well, that is good,�
�� said Louis, sounding less than convinced. I could not blame him. Baldwin de Courtenay had been sniffing round Vincennes off and on for years, kissing hands, putting on airs and treating the court to petulant outbursts that only made it more plain that he was callow and desperate. Louis might be guileless but he was no fool – not in any way save his faith, and in that he was by no means alone in this world – far from it. We both knew what Baldwin was, and if we danced around the matter, that was because I was a merchant and he was king of France. He did not pay me to tell him the truth; he paid me to understand what he wanted, and to get it for him. I suddenly hoped with all my heart that I was not about to be sent off to Constantinople once more, to poke amongst the bones and the burned and desecrated ruins for some fabled but chimerical treasure.

  ‘Have you heard …’ he paused. ‘Petrus, this is between ourselves, if you do not mind. You of all people know what has passed from the treasury of France to Venice, and Constantinople …’ I closed my eyes and nodded gravely, a gesture I had learned from the Captain. ‘My mother does not approve,’ he said flatly. He caught my eye, and there was that furtive look again, like a child caught climbing into a stranger’s orchard. Then he smiled, and I remembered that he was only a little older than me, for while life had been somewhat careless with my face, leaving me with a fine collection of lines and scars and a crooked snout, Louis still had a boy’s countenance. And he had been a boy-king, just eleven years old when his father died, and for another eight years his mother had been regent. A terrifying woman, old Blanche. She had fought the English and beat them, and then had been forced to crush a rebellion of her own barons. Louis might rule France now, but Blanche had never ceased to rule Louis.

  ‘The Queen Mother need have no fear,’ I told him. ‘There is nothing left in Constantinople.’

  ‘Ah, but listen, Petrus. Have you heard of Robert de Clari?’

  ‘I have, Sire. You yourself gave his book as a gift to Monsieur de Sol.’ De Clari had been one of the Crusaders who had sacked Constantinople, and being, I suppose, somewhat less of a brute than his Frankish brethren, he wrote down what he had seen of the greatest city the world has ever seen, before it was destroyed. It was de Clari who had itemised the treasures of the Pharos Chapel and, in so doing, had given Louis Capet his shopping list.