Painted in Blood

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  ‘These men wish to know about the crucifix of the Good Christians,’ I said quietly. His eyebrow twitched. ‘I have heard that your people have a cross that you say resembles the one Jesus met his death upon, is that not so?’

  The man nodded. ‘That is so,’ he said in Occitan. They must have been the first words he had spoken in days, and they hissed forth like sand blowing across the dunes.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It proves …’ He blinked, and when he went on his voice was stronger. He meant for his tormentors to hear. ‘It proves that he who died at Golgotha was a man of flesh and blood. Flesh is of the Devil. Jesus Christ was the Son of God, who is not flesh. He who the Romans crucified was not Christ. It is a lie that binds you to the Devil.’

  I heard an angry inrush of breath behind me, but I held up my hand sternly. De Montfort grew up in the lands of Toulouse. Of course he would know Occitan.

  ‘They say it is not like … like our true cross, that has four arms. They say it shows that Jesus was nailed in a different way.’

  ‘With three nails,’ he hissed. ‘And His hands above His head. His side pierced by a lance.’

  ‘I cannot hear you,’ I said loudly. Then I leaned my head so that my face was an inch from his. ‘And how do you know this cross is true?’ I said in the merest whisper.

  ‘Because we have the blood and body of Christ.’ His breath was failing. ‘We have it.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’ He fixed me with his eyes. The pupils were widening, crushing the green iris against the dying yellow beyond. He gave a little nod, and his mouth stretched into an almost-smile, a last triumph over the rictus of pain.

  ‘Good. I am glad, Perfectus,’ I whispered in his ear. Pretending to wait for an answer, I stayed there for another moment, then straightened up.

  ‘You heard what he said, my lord Leicester.’ I spoke loudly, giving them a touch of swagger, the torturer’s pride in his work.

  ‘A blasphemous cross,’ said de Montfort. ‘Yes, I heard.’

  ‘But the Mandylion? You asked him about the Mandylion?’ snapped Balecester.

  ‘I did, my lord. He only knows of the heretic cross. I am sorry.’ I strolled over to where the two lords, of earth and spirit, stood black against the doorway. ‘But it was, as you promised, interesting. I did not know the why of this so-called heretic crucifix, but now I do. It is barely conceivable to those of us who love God, but these fools actually believe that the fact that Our Lord died as a man upon the cross disproves His divinity!’ I shook my head in disbelief. ‘So thank you, my lord Leicester, and you my lord bishop, for educating me. How many pitfalls the Devil digs for us …’

  ‘Amen, amen,’ said the bishop crossly. He was looking over my shoulder to where the Cathar knelt, slumped over.

  ‘Is he dead?’ he barked.

  ‘Perhaps …’ I began.

  ‘No he ain’t!’ the fat soldier sang out. He hauled up on the rope and again the man was jerked to his feet, his arms flexed obscenely behind him. Balecester let out his breath and loosened his shoulders, like a drunk who has decided to pick a fight.

  ‘With your permission, Lord Leicester, he might still talk, and we have our duty as Christians to perform,’ he said, showing his teeth. De Montfort blinked and sighed.

  ‘As you say, Ranulph,’ he said wearily.

  First they hoisted the Good Christian up until he dangled above the floor. The soldier squatted down and hauled on his skinny legs until his shoulders dislocated with a wet pop. His mouth opened wide and his tongue stuck out, but no words came. Then they let him drop. The soldier kicked him flat upon his face. Then Balecester ordered the soldier to pile the grain sacks from the cart on to the heretic’s back. The fat man began to heave the heavy sacks off the cart and drop them one by one upon the still, silent body. Balecester knelt by the man’s head and lifted it by the hair.

  ‘Is there a real shroud, you heretical wretch?’ he yelled. The soldier, sweat pouring down his blotchy meat and tallow face, heaved up another sack and let it fall. The bishop shouted another question. Another sack fell, then another.

  Then, in the silence after the leaden whump of one more sack dropped onto the pile, there was a cough, no louder than a child coughing in its sleep. The bound feet rose, tapped the cobbles with painful delicacy once, then slumped sideways.

  ‘Jesus!’ The Bishop of Balecester rose stiffly to his feet. ‘Damned … You.’ He pointed at the soldier, who was leaning forward, hands on his thighs and belly wagging between, breathing hard. ‘Take this polluted carcass to the square and burn it for all to see. And this rubbish as well.’ He flung the painted sheet at the corpse and stamped off in a barely stifled rage.

  I turned and walked out into the courtyard. Plainly I needed to be sick, for icy, greasy sweat was prickling me everywhere under my clothes, and there was a ringing in my ears. Instead I dropped to one knee and crossed myself, then put my hands together and pressed them to my face, breathing out my fury and my guilt into them. This is my prayer, I said to myself again and again. This is my prayer! But as to what that prayer might be, I had no answer. Except that Simon de Montfort patted me on the back and knelt beside me. We stayed there while the soldier cursed and rolled the grain sacks off the corpse, and while he dragged the dead Perfectus away. We stayed until the bishop came out, clapped his hands, and blessed us.

  ‘God’s work is never done, my good Leicester, but He does not begrudge us our rest. Shall we take luncheon?’

  May faded into June, which dragged endlessly. I remember little except the hiss of the sea and the endless wheeling of gulls against the blue sky. Horribly bored, I wrote letters to the Captain that contained all the news I had, which was to say nothing, threw stones into the sea and drank too much wine. That morning with Balecester and the Earl of Leicester had left me feeling poisoned, as if I had eaten spoiled meat and could not get the smell out of my nostrils. The ladies-in-waiting felt it too, for one by one they left me to myself, all but Margarete, who had discovered that, like a good horse, I could be ridden into a better mood. Balecester had called upon me again, and I had had to explain to him my invented theory as to why the existence of the Cathar crucifix did not mean that the Mandylion had anything to do with it. I knew, though, that the man who had died that morning had seen the very thing that I had taken from the Pharos Chapel, and that had made a bond between us even in the few minutes that we had spoken. I had killed him, in a way. But then as a Perfectus he had wanted to die. I wondered if the bishop would understand that, or de Montfort. And I decided that they would not.

  We left Royan in the second week of July, heading northwest through the flat water meadows of Poitou. I had no real place in the great armed column. I was officially a courtier now, I supposed, but no one in the king’s party really knew what to make of me, and I was keen to escape any further attention from Balecester, so I trotted up and down the line, feeling like a pet dog, finding all the excuses I could to visit Letice, who was travelling in a lovely silk-lined wagon with a gaggle of court ladies. I had some sport with her, for she could not abandon her pose of the noble lady, no matter how much she longed to lash me with her foul London tongue as I teased her, but she made do with getting the ladies to mock me in their turn, and although they were all as lovely as a bowl of strawberries and cream I will confess their tongues stung like nettles, a needling that was not completely unwelcome, for my tryst with Margarete had been cut short by our departure, as she was riding in the wagon train with the ladies, and there would be no way we could meet without discovery. I was missing her already. If it had not been for the fact that we were riding to battle it would have been a lovely way to pass a couple of days, but there, somewhere up ahead, lay something terrifying. Still, the jolly men and women around me might have been on a summer pilgrimage – the nobles and gentry, that is, for the foot soldiers and camp-followers slogged and cursed somewhere ahead of us, so that we at least trailed the real world, although we seemed to be doing our best to ignore the truth
of our situation.

  I was part of Earl Richard’s retinue, and I rode most often in the crowd of knights and squires that jostled for favour around him, hoping for some of his power to rub off on them, competing in their vanity and obsequiousness. I played the part as well, and Earl Richard liked to talk to me of the places I had been and the wondrous relics I had helped translate. My professional urge to find him something that would take his fancy, should I ever return to my old life, had been dampened by Balecester’s murder of the poor Cathar, but I did my best and hoped I was doing my duty by the Captain. As a further spur for my disquiet, Simon de Montfort seemed to have taken an interest in me as well, and revolving against my will between de Montfort, Earl Richard and Balecester I felt their powerful, competing interests bind me ever tighter.

  I had played my part at the rectory too well, for de Montfort seemed to think I was some kind of nascent Inquisitor, full of hardness and zeal and yet tender compassion. He was not simply the warrior and consummate diplomat that reputation painted him to be. He was also a man of deep faith, which I gathered his time in the Holy Land had strengthened. I could talk to him of the scriptures and indeed of the holy places we had both seen, and a bond formed between us, superficial at best, for I was a commoner and a merchant, at that. Nevertheless, de Montfort seemed to find himself alone in this army, for although he and Richard were old friends, there was a distance between them, for Richard had never quite got over the way de Montfort had rather underhandedly married his sister. But I gathered they had patched matters up between them, even that Richard had stood godfather to his sons.

  I also gathered that de Montfort had an abiding contempt for King Henry. He did not utter treasonable words out loud – he was far too clever a man for that – but it was plain that he thought of Henry as little more than a buffoon. When I told him of the great fuss the king had made of his newly painted ship at Portsmouth, he pursed his lips in vexation. ‘The kingdom will be bled white,’ he muttered, and stared at where the king rode at the head of the column, dressed in red and cloth of gold, the banners of England fluttering promiscuously above his crowned head.

  As we progressed I had the sensation that we were heading into a storm, for what traveller has not found a wall of black clouds across his path, and has sunk into his clothes, knowing full well that, although he is warm and dry now, in a half-hour he will be drenched and assailed by thunderbolts. The sky ahead was blue, day by day; the perfect blue eye of summer. But somewhere below the horizon a storm waited just the same.

  It was past the mid-point of July when we came to Tonnay-Charente, and could go no further in that direction, for the Charente river is wide and deep, and there is no bridge downstream of Taillebourg. At Tonnay we learned that Louis was heading for Taillebourg, for the lord of the castle there had taken the French side in this matter. So we set off again up the right bank of the river, through a sweet land of willows and grazing sheep, until two days later we came to a village called Saint James, which lies in the midst of flat, marshy fields astride a raised road leading to Taillebourg bridge. Evening was coming on, but there was enough light to see that over the castle flew the white and gold banner of the King of France.

  Chapter Twelve

  Louis had got here before us, but there was no army to oppose us this side of the Charente. If we attacked at dawn, went the talk around the royal tent, we would take the bridge and be treating King Louis to luncheon, for he had plainly outstripped his army in his haste to reach Taillebourg. We were no more than a bow-shot from the river, and it would be short work. All this jolly talk of easy victory made me even more uneasy than I had been. I dearly wanted to visit Margarete, but she was with the throng of court ladies, and so I wandered slowly around the meadow for a while, trying to ready myself for sleep before I took myself off to the tent I was sharing with a party of over-excited gentlemen and squires. I was passing near the spot where the king’s tent was pitched when I heard a discreet cough behind me. Turning, I found a freckle-faced, carrot-topped page who I vaguely remembered from Portsmouth. He was wearing the colours of Lusignan.

  ‘Would you come with me, sir?’ he asked politely. I thought that perhaps Earl Richard wanted to see me for some reason and had sent his mother’s page to fetch me, so I nodded and began to follow him. To my surprise we passed the earl’s tent and instead I found myself in front of a small but richly decorated pavilion from which was flying the flag of the Counts of Poitou and the blue and silver banner of the Lusignans. The page slipped through the door curtain and I followed. I found myself in a space that was bigger than it promised to be from the outside, lit by scores of candles so that it glowed pale gold. There were dividers and screens of tapestries, and behind one I heard the low growl of Hughues de Lusignan, whom I had encountered once or twice with Earl Richard but who had never given me more than a contemptuous glare from beneath his lavish grey eyebrows. He was a fearsome man, a dangerous warrior and as fickle as a sand-bar in the Gironde, and I was very relieved that the page did not conduct me to his presence. Instead, he showed me with a bow that I was to go behind a fine tapestry of leaves and roses. I gave him a puzzled look but he was already scurrying away, so I pushed aside the hanging.

  ‘Petrus Zennorius. Please sit with us.’ In a chair flanked by two racks of candles sat Queen Isabella. She would have been above fifty years of age then, but even so she was still one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. When we had first met in Westminster Palace she had been dressed plainly, but tonight she wore a dress of green and silver damask and her face was powdered white. Her eyes were delicately outlined in black and her lips were stained strawberry-red. She looked both young and old, as delicate as a shell but hard as marble. But she was smiling.

  ‘This is a happier meeting than our last. Since then, I have learned that our younger son speaks very well of you,’ she said in French, pointing to a low stool at her side. I sat, almost squatting, and she nodded her head.

  ‘You are a Cornishman,’ she said. I nodded gratefully, for this sounded like small talk, but no. ‘We have never been to Cornwall,’ she went on, ‘though Richard is fond of it. Of course, Cornish tin has made him rich.’

  ‘It is a venerable trade,’ I said, hoping for some shallow discourse about tin.

  ‘As venerable as yours?’ she asked lightly. I sighed inwardly. She was yet another would-be customer, and a rich one, but on the eve of a battle I was in no mood for business. Still I smiled my most professional smile.

  ‘Like a tinner I could be said to bring hidden riches to light,’ I said. ‘But …’

  ‘Quite so.’ She tapped the chair with the perfect oval of a fingernail. ‘What are you hunting for now, Monsieur Petrus?’

  ‘I am not hunting for anything, Your Majesty. My company has lately moved into banking. In fact we are at this moment opening a bank in Florence.’

  ‘Speak to us of Constantinople. The Emperor Baldwin is our cousin. You have been a great help to him.’

  So I told her a little about the relics of the Pharos Chapel and their translation to France and the possession of Louis Capet, which was a well-known tale by then, and one I had told more times than I could remember. She seemed politely interested until I drew it to its end.

  ‘And the last of those treasures is now in Paris,’ I finished, and she leaned forward, eyes narrowed slightly.

  ‘All of them, gone to Louis?’ she said.

  ‘Indeed. The piety of King Louis is unbounded – though it does not approach that of your son,’ I said diplomatically.

  ‘And his wealth matches his piety.’

  ‘That I could not say.’

  ‘So. Nothing else in Constantinople. There are many stories, however. One has heard some of them. So fascinating, so …’

  ‘If there is something in particular, Your Majesty, I would be honoured to discuss it.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said airily. ‘Wondrous things, though, Monsieur Petrus. Saints’ heads, the nails of the Cross …’ She shuddere
d almost coquettishly. ‘And miraculous shrouds.’ Her fingers closed over the end of the chair arm, and then let go. There was something almost spider-like in the gesture, but … no, it was a lovely hand.

  ‘Alas, that is mere legend,’ I said sorrowfully. ‘If such a thing ever existed – and we only have the word of one dead Crusader and some schismatic Greeks – it burned along with Constantinople. I will admit that it has been my dearest wish to find it, and I searched long and hard in Greece, but everything I discovered told me that it is lost for ever. There were some burial garments of plain cloth, and those are in Paris. But no miraculous image, or face, or any other of the many wonders said to be possessed by the holy shroud.’

  ‘So you have given up the hunt?’ she said winsomely, and I thought she is mocking me! – but surely not.

  ‘When one deals with the miraculous, one comes to expect miracles,’ I said piously. ‘I don’t suppose I shall ever really give up. But I do not expect to find it.’

  ‘Such a pity. To look upon the Holy Face …’ She crossed herself, and I did the same. ‘How nice to talk to you, Monsieur Petrus,’ she said, holding out her exquisite hand for me to kiss. ‘May tomorrow bring you good fortune.’

  The freckled page led me out to the meadow, and I stood there for a moment, staring at the faint golden light seeping through the walls of the pavilion. I had just received a great honour, and yet I felt strangely cold, and uneasy. But then my mind raced forward to the morrow, and I set to pacing again, and the Queen, and her white hands, faded from my mind.

  The river had spun a gauze of mist over the meadows when I finally crawled out of the tent. I had not slept a wink, but now the churning of my stomach had made the wait intolerable. There were plenty more figures wandering about, carrying pails of water or bundles of hay, hunched over blades or bows, or just standing and gazing over in the direction of the French lines, where Venus was hanging, a baleful point of foxfire in the sky. I tottered on stiff legs over to a culvert and squatted among the reeds. I was not the first to empty my guts here, for the stench was strong even in the cool air of the night. Now I felt a bit better, although if anything I was too empty, a sack of skin filled with nothing but vague terrors.