by F. G. Cottam
The call he got that Thursday afternoon came on a secure line and was made personally by the British Home Secretary. He was trying to locate a library and, in it, a specific book. There was reason to believe that the family of Baroness Catherine Fleury, French wife of an English baron of the Tudor period, Edmund Fleury, had been at some time in possession of this book. The provenance was inexact and to Dan Carter unconvincing; he made a couple of lines of notes from the Home Secretary’s words.
This very senior politician sounded to Dan extremely stressed. He thought that completely understandable. Things were unusually fraught in Paris, in the aftermath of the Airbus disaster in the French Alps. That was thought to have been sabotage and the finger was pointing at Turkey. Left-wing militants, frustrated at how slowly EU membership negotiations were going. Right-wing militants, intent on distancing themselves from Europe in the cause of extreme nationalism. Evidence-wise, so far, the flip of a coin.
But if things were bad in France, in England Dan knew that the situation was dire. Half an hour before taking this call he’d seen on television the destruction of St Paul’s Cathedral in an inferno of flame. The embassy staff had clustered around the wall-mounted flatscreen in the bomb-proof basement canteen observing this event in a silence more stunned and complete, he thought, than any since that September afternoon when two hijacked passenger planes had hit the Twin Towers in New York.
Dan had watched that too on a wall-mounted TV, surrounded by his fellow officer recruits at Sandhurst. A lot had happened in his eventful life since then. But he would never forget the experience, and the St Paul’s footage he had witnessed that afternoon would be equally indelible.
Forty-eight firefighters had died when the cathedral dome collapsed, a figure that was only going to rise in the aftermath of the blaze. But it was the symbolic significance, more than the immediate death toll, which would stay with him, despite the valour of the men and women of the fire crews who had been wiped out. To all intents and purposes, London had fallen. And Dan Carter figured that the reeling shock he had heard in the Home Secretary’s voice was the consequence of that realization.
He made his first call to the tourist office at Amiens. They were immediately helpful, giving him the name and contact details of a local archivist and historian who was an authority on Catherine’s family. Her maiden name had been du Lac.
‘Her father was a vicomte, Fernand du Lac,’ the archivist told him, when he called to explain his mission. ‘A very patrician man, the perfect aristocrat, if there could be said to be such a thing. Civilized, benevolent, cultured. And at that time the Fleury and du Lac connection already went back three centuries. Their ancestors fought shoulder to shoulder in the crusades. Both a du Lac and a Fleury fought at the Siege of Jerusalem.’
‘What about the library?’
‘There isn’t one. Never has been, at the castle. Not to my knowledge, which is comprehensive. There may have been a Bible and a book of hours. But nothing so substantial as a library.’
‘You’re absolutely sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
‘That’s bad news.’
‘As far as I know, the du Lac library is at the family chateau, much nearer to where I’m guessing you’re calling from. It’s sited about ten miles to the north of Paris. It’s not theirs any more, though. The last of the bloodline died out in 1944. I’ve heard rumours about looting there, in the last year of the war, but I can’t confirm them. My specialism is the Somme region, and Amiens in particular.’
‘Anything you know about those rumours would be helpful,’ Dan Carter said.
‘It’s unconfirmed, unsubstantiated. But the story I’ve heard is that a British special forces unit assembled to eliminate Vichy collaborators had a member who was what you British call “light-fingered”.’
Dan thanked the man and ended the call. He didn’t want to think one of his SAS predecessors in the pioneering days of the regiment a thief. But the spoils of war were a temptation to some and human nature was what it was.
The archivist had told him that after a few months of post-war dereliction, the du Lac chateau had been extensively restored. The family of an industrialist, Philippe Troyer, had bought and refurbished and still inhabited the place.
The book he’d been charged to locate might have been looted by a serving British soldier. If that rumour wasn’t true, it could have been pilfered during the period of the chateau’s dereliction. A war had been fought in France and a chateau was a big target. The roof could have been damaged by a bomb, or by artillery fire, or just by neglectful upkeep, which meant that the book could have been badly affected or destroyed altogether by water or just rendered unreadable by damp, splotched with mildew and broken-spined, its pages swollen, its ink run to illegibility.
It had been called the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom. But the English academic advising the Home Secretary didn’t think that would be written on its cover, or spine, or frontispiece. Its main author had been a man from Lower Saxony named Gunter Keller, but he didn’t think that detail would be included either.
Clandestinely compiled, it was probably handwritten rather than printed. It might be written in English or Latin or a combination of both and some of it was mathematical formulae and some of it almost certainly written in code.
What Dan Carter didn’t appreciate was the significance of the book. The Home Secretary hadn’t told him that. But he was used to clandestine work, to the gospel of need-to-know. There’d been urgency in the voice of the man who’d charged him with this mission, and he liked a challenge. This one wasn’t run of the mill, it was unusual, and that made the task both challenging and enjoyable.
He decided he’d gather his embassy credentials and just turn up at the chateau. Knock on the door. He didn’t want to be put off on the phone by some snooty retainer if the Troyer family weren’t in residence. If they were there, he was capable of being exceptionally courteous. If they weren’t he’d bring his steely persistence into play. Not taking no for an answer was one of his less diplomatic skills, something learned the hard way in his former life, lethally armed and clad in combat gear.
He’d hail a taxi, he decided. Paris streets were always busy, but north was the easiest way out of the city and the only practical way to reach his destination was by car.
It was hot, on the street. He was immaculately attired in a grey Savile Row summer-weight wool suit and black polished Grensons and a Hermès necktie. And all he could think about really were those vast, billowing infernos of flame the cathedrals of London had become earlier that day; the hundreds of tourists and worshippers who had met their horrific end trapped inside. It had looked apocalyptic, biblical. It had looked to Dan Carter like he imagined the end of the world would. He glanced at his wristwatch, got into his cab and settled on to the rear seat. It was just after five p.m. on a sunny June Thursday. A day already rendered unforgettable.
THIRTY-SEVEN
October 15, 1528
We have become a family in the midst of bereavement and tragedy. We are sundered suddenly, for ever now incomplete. Our beloved daughter did not appear for breakfast two mornings ago. I went to rouse her. She seemed asleep, when I entered her room, but was cold and pale and quite dead. She appeared entirely serene, which was of course no comfort. Matilda was ten years old. Children die. Wealth and rank guard no parent against this too common eventuality. But she slipped from life without warning, without illness or disease or even any sign of visible discomfiture.
Already I have been delivered a letter of condolence from the king. He is at present visiting the nearby monastery in Shaftesbury, where he must have heard the news. He writes generously and sympathetically, and his words seem heartfelt enough. But they offer not a shred of consolation. My emissary has been dispatched to deliver the melancholy tidings to my brother at his friary in the hills outside Florence in Italy. I expect Gerald will return home for a vigil of prayer for his niece that will not in the slightest alleviate the suffering in g
rief we are all undergoing. Catherine and my sons Jacques and Sebastian are utterly heartbroken. Our household is in the grip of the most painful lamentation imaginable.
Grief makes men mad. I have on occasion witnessed this. But I do not think it madness to believe that Matilda’s death is wholly unnatural in cause. There are two alternatives. Perhaps this is a painful reverberation, just the price exacted for the lurid and revolting magic Gunter Keller performed off the coast of France before my return to England.
There is, though, a second possibility. And it is this. I insulted Keller personally. I slighted his appearance and demeanour and called into question the authenticity of the powers of which he boasts. And he was angered and offended. Perhaps our daughter’s death is his revenge for those supposed affronts to his miserable character and dubious capabilities. His brittle, fractious pride.
I am inclined to believe this latter possibility to be the more likely. It is not probable that I will ever be able to prove it. This loss has not, though, deterred me from the course of my commission, as it might in truth have done. It has had the opposite effect, in making me all the more determined. My daughter’s death will earn its rightful retribution. I will see Gunter Keller burn. I will hear his anguished dying cries and smell his flesh as it roasts, and he will see me there, laughing into his flame-blackened face at his extinction. This I swear, in God’s grace, by all that I hold holy. This I most solemnly swear.
Paul Beck stopped reading. Quietly, he said, ‘This mission of the king’s is killing Edmund Fleury.’
‘Corrupting him,’ Juliet said. ‘Eating him up, polluting him with hatred.’
Paul nodded at the chest on the table between the two of them. ‘The locket in there. That miniature?’
‘Matilda,’ Juliet said. ‘Do you think he ever recovered from his grief?’
‘Infant mortality was a great deal higher then,’ Paul said. ‘You know that.’
‘Around fifty per cent.’
‘And we know he pressed on with this business. But my intuition is to say no, that his heart never recovered from the loss of his daughter. He was too loving a father and husband for that ever to be possible.’
Juliet looked at her wristwatch. The museum was about to close. Paul read her thoughts and stood and lifted the lid and put the book back into the chest and closed it again.
‘We could probably take that away with us.’
‘I doubt it qualifies as loan stock,’ he said.
Juliet sighed. She said, ‘I think we can do as we like, to be honest, with our bright shiny new security clearances.’
Paul shrugged and looked at her. ‘I don’t think it’s going to tell us where the Almanac is now.’
‘I don’t either, but we’ve got this far, Paul. I’d still like to get to the end of it.’
‘Agreed. And who knows? They might be making headway with the search for the Almanac in France.’
‘Long shot.’
‘Beggars and choosers, Juliet.’
He lifted the chest lid again and rummaged carefully until his fingers found the locket miniature. He opened it and came around the table to Juliet’s side of it and squatted on his haunches beside her. He undid the locket’s delicate clasp. A tiny portrait of a little girl was revealed. Flaxen hair, vivid green eyes, a bright bud of a mouth, pink against a pale complexion.
‘Pretty little thing,’ Juliet said.
‘Looks like the style of Holbein,’ Paul said.
‘Holbein didn’t do miniatures – not at that stage anyway.’
‘He might have for Edmund Fleury.’
She shook her head. ‘It was a specialist skill. And Holbein didn’t settle in England until after this was written.’
‘I’m surprised he wasn’t buried wearing it. The same goes for his wedding ring. He was devoted to Catherine.’
‘Who outlived him. Edmund Fleury died quite young, though not before Keller.’
‘So perhaps he kept that promise?’
‘We’ll find out. But the point is that before he died, Edmund left Catherine all his most precious possessions.’
‘Until they were confiscated by the king.’
Juliet thought about this. ‘I don’t think it happened like that,’ she said. ‘I think Catherine willed the contents of this chest to the Crown. The story they tell about their father was not one she wanted her sons to have to hear.’
‘You’re strong on human nature, Juliet. You’re very intuitive.’
‘Strong theoretically,’ she said. ‘When it comes to the practical side of things, I’m crap.’
That made Paul smile.
But Juliet meant it. She was thirty-five. Her one really meaningful romantic relationship had ended in sordid betrayal. She would be classified as elderly on a maternity ward. Her life had passed her by in a tedious blur in recent years as she busied herself with spinning classes and a bit of yoga and Sunday supplement recipes for one. Preparing lectures, marking papers, trying to stay as far off Martin Doyle’s radar as was possible. Matters had degenerated to the point where sipping a flat white in a branch of Costa was something looked forward to as a treat.
Edmund Fleury five hundred years ago had had his strong and valiant heart broken by the sudden death of his daughter. But he had experienced the intense joy of a parent’s love for their children and Juliet hadn’t, and she was gloomily sure she now never would, even if the world recovered from its current calamitous state of chaos. That possibility was lost to her. And she felt pretty wretched about it, even though now wasn’t really the time for any sort of self-indulgence.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘Where are you thinking of staying tonight?’
He said, ‘I suppose I’ll book into a Novotel.’
‘You must know I live in Oxford?’
‘I do, but I wouldn’t presume,’ Paul said.
‘Cold feet already?’
But he didn’t look amused by that. He said, ‘Not taking anything for granted. That’s all.’
‘Kiss me.’
He kissed her. Given the odds of Ms Plummer bursting in to tell them it was closing time, she thought the kiss a commendably long one.
‘Now what?’
‘Now we go back to that charming pub on the Cherwell for some dinner. And after that, Paul, I’m taking you home.’
They were watching footage of the cathedral fires on the TV news in the pub when Paul Beck’s mobile showed a number he recognized. A fortnight earlier they’d both watched these epic conflagrations in a shared mood of stunned disbelief. But calamitous was getting to be the new normal and all either of them felt was the sort of helpless sadness everyone viewing the screen seemed to share.
He went outside to take the call. It was Dan Carter, against whom he played tennis. Dan, with whom he played five-a-side, a mate from the embassy. Both a nice bloke and a bit of a mystery man. Someone perennially affable who never said anything at all about his own personal history.
‘Got a story for you, Paul, about the Almanac.’
‘This is an open line, Dan.’
‘Doesn’t matter, mate. Bit late in the day for cloak and dagger, with everything that’s going on. Where are you?’
‘Oxford.’
‘But you’ve seen the cathedrals?’
‘I’ve been busy. Only just now. Is this about them?’
‘It’s about the missing book, mate. The chief said to brief you. Where are you specifically?’
‘A pub on the Cherwell.’
‘Well, take your beer goggles off, Paul, and put your brain into gear. In fact, put your brain into overdrive.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
Philippe Troyer had bought the du Lac chateau in 1946, after it had been semi-derelict a couple of years. Dan Carter thought the man who opened the door to him was probably Philippe’s grandson, Albert. He was a spare, sinewy man casually attired in black jeans and a pale sweater that looked soft and fine enough to be cashmere worn over a soft-collared shirt. His dark hair
was shoulder length and he looked friendly and inquisitive and about fifty years of age.
Dan introduced himself. He showed his embassy credentials. Albert Troyer (for it proved Dan was correct about his identity) raised an eyebrow, smiled slightly and invited him in. They stood for a moment in a rather grand, marble-floored vestibule. There were tapestries hanging on the walls and an enormous crystal chandelier was suspended from the ceiling high above them.
Dan looked around. He said, ‘You open your own door, Monsieur Troyer. No faithful retainer?’
‘My family are socialists. Wealthy socialists, but espousing the values, nevertheless. I have a team of people come to clean once a week. It suffices. We’ll communicate in English, because I enjoy the practice of speaking the language. And in the informal English manner, I will answer to Albert and will call you Daniel, if I may.’
‘Just Dan.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Dan.’
‘Likewise, Albert.’
The two men shook hands.
Albert guided Dan down a long corridor to a large and brightly lit and incongruously modern kitchen. The work surfaces were granite. The knives, Sabatier, were on a magnetic strip. The refrigerator was enormous and constructed from some shiny alloy. A TV on a wall bracket showed images of the London cathedral carnage with the sound turned down. Albert picked up a remote and switched it off.
‘A bad day for London.’
‘Lately they’ve all been bad.’
‘My parish priest is whispering about the End Times.’
Dan thought about this. He said, ‘How long before the one priest becomes a chorus and the whisper becomes a shout?’
Albert smiled again. He was a man, Dan thought, who smiled easily. But then life had given him plenty to smile about.