‘The Mandylion of Edessa.’ Louis was biting his lower lip. That was guilt, not guile. He was not testing me; he was wondering if his mother was spying on us. ‘Is it …’
‘The Mandylion! Oh, of course,’ I chuckled, although I did not feel in the slightest bit amused: in truth, the terror I had felt in the dungeons had once again taken hold of my tripes. ‘It was not in the Pharos Chapel, but de Clari saw it in Blachernae, which is in a different part of the city. So far as I know, the palace of Blachernae and its church were completely pillaged. It is abandoned now, certainly.’
‘Was it real, do you think?’
‘Real, Sire? Do you mean, did it exist, or was it …’
‘Was it – is it – the true imprint of Our Lord’s body?’
‘Ah.’ I thought carefully, or pretended to. The memory of lukewarm pig’s blood and clinging, stifling cloth binding to my mouth and nose welled up like vomit, and I shoved it to the very back of my mind. ‘The Greeks thought it was real. But, Sire, it is possible that you already possess it, for I have always thought that de Clari was writing about the burial cloths in the Pharos Chapel – the sudarii, the shrouds.’
‘But they bear no image,’ said the king, raising a pedantic finger.
‘Just so. But it is possible that the chroniclers were talking of a … an imagined image, if you will, or a miraculous one, not ordinarily visible? I do not honestly know, Your Majesty. But I would be terribly dishonest if I said I have not been extremely curious.’
‘I rely on your honesty, good Petrus,’ said Louis. ‘So you think it never existed?’
‘In point of fact, Your Majesty—’ God’s guts, how I hated speaking like this! ‘It is my belief that the Mandylion of Edessa did exist, and every piece of evidence I have found indicates, to your humble servant at least, that it was a miraculous image, not made by human hands. While you possess the burial clothes, this Mandylion is reputed to have been some sort of sheet on which Our Lord appeared at his full length.’ I forced myself to purse my lips like a matron and cross myself delicately. ‘But it has gone, and left no trace save in rumour. My lord, Constantinople must have been a place of wonders such as the mind of man cannot begin to imagine. No longer. What you have saved from the ruins is, I fear, all that was left when the Crusaders and their Venetian friends sacked it. There is nothing left save bones, of the ordinary variety. My unpleasant conclusion is that the Mandylion left Constantinople in the satchel of some man-at-arms from Flanders or Burgundy who had no clue as to what he had stolen, and in the way of delicate things that are not valued by their owners it has since faded from this world.’
‘So it has disappeared.’
‘I fear so, Your Majesty.’
‘For good.’
‘I cannot truly imagine it otherwise, Sire.’
‘Lost.’ The king pressed his hands together as if in prayer, and rested his chin upon his finger-ends. I sighed, and nodded.
‘What is lost can be found, if one knows where to look.’
My blood froze. ‘Sometimes, Your Majesty, sometimes,’ I agreed, keeping a croak from my voice with difficulty.
‘I cannot think of a living man better suited …’ he began. Then he pointed his clasped hands straight at me. ‘Petrus, if it could be found, you would find it.’
‘You … you wish me to look for the Shroud of Edessa?’ I stuttered, unable to keep the panic from my voice any longer.
‘I do, truly I do. Will you accept this mission? I can see in your face that you will. Excellent! My dear man, it is settled. But …’ and his voice sank to a whisper. ‘Do not tell my mother.’
Chapter Five
I stepped ashore on London Bridge, snatching at an iron ring that hung against the grey and slimy face of the pier. The wherry that had brought me up from Tilbury was bucking and scraping against the pier even though it was slack tide, and the Thames was slumbering. I heaved up my valise and paid the wherryman, and started up the worn and treacherous steps towards the tumult above.
I had not wanted to come to London. I had been here only once before, and that occasion had left a stain on my memory that time had not scoured away. As I stepped out onto the carriageway of the bridge, I did not see the shops, the yelling barrow boys, the servants running on their errands, the knights and ladies riding by with their noses pointed at the unrepentant tedium of the English sky. I only saw the dung-crusted stones of the road, and as I stepped onto them I felt a lurch inside. This bridge crossed the river and became a street, and that street in turn led to the place where, five years ago, I had seen a horse rear up and kick a woman to death. Anna had been destroyed there in the mud of Cheapside while idlers stared and market-goers stepped over her body. I looked at the mud of London, spread across the foot-smoothed cobbles by countless boots and hooves and wheels, and saw Anna’s black hair flung against it, and the terrible brightness of her blood, and her fading eye.
Enough of this. I had dreaded coming here, had felt a gathering unease in my belly as I had ridden across Normandy, and as my fat little ship had carried me over the Channel and up the Thames. Now here I was. I made myself look up. There, in a gap between two buildings, were the great shoulders of Saint Paul’s, and out of sight in its shadow lay the little church where Anna rested. I closed my eyes and stood there, feeling the crowds move around me. Someone knocked against my side and cursed me evilly. My eyes opened in time to see a fat arse lurching towards the north bank. Here I was, then, not alone at all, but blocking the roadway and being someone else’s nuisance in a city of fifty thousand souls. Someone was dying as I stood here. Someone was being born.
Perhaps I had imagined the air to be thick and stale, like a tomb. It was not. It stank, all right, but it was alive with stench: fish from Billingsgate just alongside, horse-shit, man-shit, pigeons, beef pies, beer, clary wine, the fetid waft of filthy men and the sharp, sweat-and-flowers savour of pretty women. Anna was nowhere here. She was where she had been these five years: in her grave, and in my heart. I watched the raddled, magnificent mountebank’s parade of the city for a moment streaming like a flood tide, a second river above the Thames. Then I slung my valise over my shoulder, stepped into the roadway and let it carry me away into London town.
I walked to my lodgings, for they were not far. The company had an interest in a hostelry close to Baynard’s Castle called the Three Coneys, and I found a set of rooms for myself, paid the landlord to be discreet, and went upstairs to change. I had thought to go straight away to the palace at Westminster, for I had heard that the king was there with his brother, but the tide had delayed me, and by the time I had washed the day’s travel from my face and eaten a late luncheon it was well past the ninth hour. The morning would do just as well, and I would be the fresher for a night’s sleep, so I went out and wandered the streets for a little while. At first I skirted around the city walls, but the huge escarpment of Saint Paul’s drew me, the tower like a spindle pulling the confusion of London to it, and at last I surrendered and allowed myself to be pulled in to the happy din of the booksellers and clerics who bantered in its shadow. They had still been building the tower when I had last been here, and we had heard the pulleys creaking and the hammers tapping as we buried Anna. I did not remember much of that day, except that as the nervous priest had chanted the requiem mass, the voice of a mason had risen in song to bless someone’s mighty cock and balls and the merry fur his lady sported below. He had been high above us, but his words had fallen down and slipped through the windows, and to me they had made no more or less sense than the priest’s as he called for the chains of Anna’s sins to be forgiven.
Something drew me round the buttresses of the great church to little Saint Faith nestling beneath its northern flanks. The door was open and I went inside. It was empty but some candles were flickering. I found Anna’s tomb easily, for the marble slab glowed bravely from the floor of the aisle. I knelt beside it.
Anna Komnena Doukaina
A Ω
I pressed my palm
against the cold, grainy stone. She had once asked me if the dead can dream. I had not known the answer then. But I had picked through enough graves since then to know the truth. There is no peace in the tomb, only the busy work of decay, the seething haste of death as it transforms beauty into its opposite. The alpha melting into omega. Anna was no longer Anna, except where I had carved her beneath my ribs, and painted her behind my eyes. I did not have to say goodbye. A tombstone is a farewell already said, so I added nothing to the silence, but kissed my fingers and touched the alpha of her name, and left.
Outside, the bells of London were pealing five, and the clouds were fragmenting into mackerel skin. I ambled back through the emptying streets to my hostelry, climbed into bed and fell asleep with the dying sun across my face.
The palace at Westminster is nothing like Vincennes, I discovered the next morning. It is a vast old building onto which each new king had daubed his own vanity as a swift in spring daubs mud upon last year’s nest. That day the halls belonged to strutting men with silk upon their backs and red meat in their bellies, casually seeking out their friends and far less casually circling their enemies. People had enemies here, it was plain: they all pranced and circled like bantams in a cockpit, from the squires and pages up to the formidable creatures I took to be earls and counts, and barely restrained violence hung in the air. It was interesting, though, and not unlike certain places in Venice, where a friendly gathering can end with one man’s sweetbreads on the end of another’s dagger without anyone finding it amiss. It suited me, in any case. This swarm of popinjays were so intent upon each other that I passed through them like a ghost.
At last I came to a large chamber thronged with men of all sorts, whom I took to be supplicants for royal favour. Most were commoners of the better sort, merchants and ship-owners, and they all looked as though they expected their wait to be a long one. I thanked my good fortune that I had papers from the Captain which I knew would at least bring me to the king’s door-keeper, and to my relief, when I presented them to the bored clerk who was supervising the room, I was admitted to a smaller, empty antechamber that had one large door in the back wall and another to the side, and after an hour of mapping the cracks in the ceiling, that personage did indeed come to investigate. I explained that I had come from Venice on a pressing matter, and that Earl Richard would receive me. The door-keeper, a thin-lipped fellow with sandy eyebrows and red-rimmed eyes, squinted at me and scratched his beard.
‘I am afraid not,’ he said at last.
‘Is His Highness not in London?’ I asked, puzzled. The man twirled a finger through a curl of his hair and tugged.
‘It is not our custom, sirrah, to bandy explanations to tradesmen,’ he said. ‘You have my answer. Now get yourself gone.’
‘My lord—’ I assumed he was a lord, for did not the nobility get all the best jobs at court? Doormen, sniffers of the piss-pot royal and the rest? ‘—The head of my company is a fond acquaintance of Earl Richard, and I am his lieutenant. I hope that these papers will be a sufficient introduction.’
The door-keeper was holding my letter. He narrowed his eyes and held the paper first close to and then away from the tip of his nose, and I wondered if he could read at all.
‘Petrus Zennorius. A Devon name.’ It was not a question. So he could read after all.
‘Cornish,’ I told him.
‘Yes – you do sound foreign. A Cornishman from Venice: we live in wondrous times,’ he said. There was no trace of friendliness in his voice. ‘Should I call the guards, or will that not be necessary?’
It was not. I took my letter and went back to the waiting room. I was furious, but a room full of bored merchants is the greatest place to collect gossip and information, so I mastered myself and looked around at the crowd. I chose a portly fellow with a cloak of heavy wine-coloured velvet, much too heavy for the season, but new and expensive.
‘Is the king indisposed today?’ I asked, after a little small-talk. ‘I had thought he was here with his brother.’
‘Not indisposed, no,’ said the man. ‘But he’s shut in with his damn French relatives.’
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘Yes, his bloody in-laws.’ He lowered his voice. ‘And their relations. Bad for business. Not English at all.’
‘I should think not,’ I agreed. ‘By the way, who is the door-keeper?’
‘Today? That is Sir Edward. Bloody man. He’s got pink-eye: can’t get rid of it, and it does his temper no good.’
‘So Sir Edward is today’s doorman.’ My new friend chuckled and gave me a knowing wink. ‘And tomorrow?’
‘Sir Edward again.’ He shrugged. ‘Or some other bugger. What is your business here, my friend?’ It was professional curiosity, nothing more, I decided.
‘In fact, I came to see the king’s brother, Earl Richard,’ I said. ‘But he isn’t receiving either.’
‘Aha! Our great Crusader,’ said the man, with the merest touch of mockery. ‘Well, you must be in someone’s good graces if you got as far as Sir Edward. Try again tomorrow – no doubt you’ll see me here.’
I said my farewells and stalked back through the palace. Angry as I was, I took care not to rub shoulders with anyone, for the whole building looked as if it was about to ignite with rage like the bush on Mount Horeb. My temper was not improved when I found I had missed the tide, and that I would have to walk back into the city. It took me the better part of two hours, and I had to suffer the contempt of mounted gentlemen and ladies, and the rough curiosity of a swarm of peasants and poor townsfolk, for the road was crowded. I had just come in sight of Lud Gate when it began to rain, and my day was complete.
The next day was dim under lowering skies. I bought the use of a handsome gelding from the landlord, who also maintained a stable, and spent extra coin on a noble-looking saddle of tooled and gilded leather. Now I would not be dependent upon the Thames, at least. I hoped this would be my last day in London, for I did not feel at ease here, and I was beginning to yearn for Venice and blue skies.
But although the door-keeper was a different gentleman, more polite and free from pink-eye, his answer was the same. I returned the next day, and the next, until the surly cleric in the waiting room began to greet me rudely by my name. Even my friend with the burdensome cloak must have received more satisfaction, for I only saw him on that second day, and then no more. On the third day I fell to chatting with a gaunt soldier, a Templar Preceptor from Suffolk. He turned out to have a capacious if eccentric knowledge of holy relics and told me of a set of Saint Christopher’s undergarments he had been offered in the bazaar of Jaffa. Vast, they had been, and as sails they might have propelled a small boat. But too new, and too little soiled … From there the conversation turned to undergarments in general, and his own painful experiences in the itchy heat of the Holy Land, and how the finest breech-clout he had ever worn had been woven by a cloister of nuns in Bury Saint Edmunds … Before our talk could take a more unsavoury turn, as I saw it might by the heat that had risen in his face, I excused myself and left for the city.
The weather was refusing to cheer up, and although my lodgings were pleasant, I left early and came back late, and never in the mood to go out and enjoy what the town had to offer. Instead I kept to my rooms and tried to work out how I could break through the seemingly impenetrable door to the inner chambers of Westminster. It was well known, as the merchant had said, that Henry was dominated by his French relations. These were in the main from Poitou, the family of his father-in-law Hughues de Lusignan, on whose behalf Henry was supposed to be invading France. I told myself that if the king was listening to Poitevin counsel, he might not need any encouragement to launch his invasion. But I did not see any preparations for war in London. I asked about for rumours and speculation, for merchants and especially financiers are full of that, but although I heard that an army had been raised in the West Country, it was not thought to be very large. The king might be planning to fight in France, but there again, weren’t the
y always? I thought myself that the impatient and choleric mood at court was due to a battle promised but not forthcoming, and that could be a good sign or a bad one: I had no way of knowing which.
Richard of Cornwall was supposed to be at court: my information had been right about that. But no one had seen him or indeed the king for days, and gossip had it that he had had one of his frequent quarrels with his brother. I cursed my luck by the hour. It was supposed to have been as simple as delivering a package, this mission, and instead it was becoming a frustrating, time-devouring burden. And as the days threatened to become a week, I began to think more and more about the Captain far away in Venice, and the great plot slowly grinding into motion like a mill-wheel after a long drought has broken, the vast net of alliances and promises that were spreading out to snare Louis Capet. I had no loyalties in this affair save to the Captain, and so I supposed that my loyalties were his. Was I, then, an agent of Raymond of Toulouse? Of the Cathars? Was my part in all this very small, or did the whole enterprise hinge upon my success or failure? The more I pondered, the less comfortable I felt.
And then – it was Wednesday evening – I went out to a tavern and came back too full of beef and beer, and was met by the landlord, wringing his hands.
‘I am so sorry, dear sir, so very sorry!’ he cried.
‘About what?’
‘A thief, in your room.’
‘Good Christ! How do you know?’ The beer gave a nasty lurch in my belly.
‘Oh, we have him, sir. The fool slipped on the stairs and turned his ankle. Sitting there moaning, he was, so we put him in the scullery. Would you care to see him?’
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