by Simon Raven
‘One can hardly expect that sort of a thing to come cheap, sir. Really, I don’t know when I last tasted such horrible food.’
‘Never forget we are in Lourdes, Milo. We are being punished for our sins.’
‘I didn’t go to Maisie Malcolm’s lupanal exhibitions. Why should I be punished?’
‘Because you have performed the abominable act with the Honourable Jeremy Morrison.’
‘It gave him great pleasure.’
‘That is no excuse. It is still a sin. Leave its wickedness aside, I shouldn’t, if I were you, dear boy, repeat it. Jeremy has been… indiscriminate. Mind you, I’m told that since an odd and uplifting experience he had at Brindisi3 late last year, he has elected the way of chastity. But before then he had placed himself well and truly in danger of catching this new carnal infection which comes from California. So don’t wander down Memory Lane with Morrison, Milo, even if he lapses from virtue and invites you.’
‘This new malady is one of the things we have heard about in Trinity, sir. One of the chaps has an uncle who picked it up while on safari in Kenya. It seems that it’s spreading so efficiently that with any luck it will halve the population of the world. Just what is needed.’
‘Greed and pollution will do the job far quicker, Milo: they won’t just halve the population of the world, they will destroy it, globe and all. Meanwhile, one must do something to pass the time, so now to our muttons. My information is that Carmilla and the rest of the Fatuous Four have gone to Narbonne, where they will follow up a heavy hint which they received at Montaillou the other day. So you will be pleased to hear, Milo, that you are now eating your last distressful dinner in Lourdes. Tomorrow we shall remove to an amusing hotel at Sète. It is right on the central canal and has an interior atrium with five circumjacent tiers of balconies leading to the bedrooms. A very handy place for suicide. An average of three fatalities, in the Icarus style, every month.’
‘How very disagreeable. Shouldn’t they arrange grilles or preventive netting?’
‘Why? The French are much too sensible to deter anyone who wants to kill himself.’
‘I meant, sir, disagreeable for the patrons of the hotel. One is sitting having a drink in this atrium, say, and some witless bankrupt or lover comes whizzing down SPLOSH at one’s feet…or, worse still, on top of one’s drink. But I suppose the place carries full insurance to replace it.’
‘One can never tell with the French,’ said Raisley Conyngham. ‘In some matters they are unaccountably mean. I once left my shoes outside my door for cleaning – I was staying in a very civil hotel which offered that service – and they were ruined by some brute who filled them with piddle. The management refused to pay for them – they only took responsibility for property signed into the Hotel Safe, they said – as civil as ever. A pair handmade by Lobb, Milo. So perhaps we had better be careful, after arriving in Sète, where we sit in the hotel atrium…’
‘Dear Marius,’ wrote Raisley Conyngham, who had discovered an entirely secure Writing Room (or Chambre des Études) just off the atrium in the Auberge des Langoustes at Sète:
Thank you for yrs. I’m indifferent about the death of that vulgar old woman, but very glad to know of it, as it raises one or two points which should be promptly made.
1) Mrs Malcolm’s death should alter nothing in your relation to Teresa. On the one hand, she should still not be told that your father in wedlock was also hers from a chance bout with Maisie Malcolm; this disclosure could serve no sensible purpose and would almost certainly invalidate your option here, one that for a variety of good reasons should be allowed to remain open. On the other hand, although your option with Teresa should remain open, you are not to start dallying with her, if only because, as things are at present, this would annoy my Lady Canteloupe.
2) By extension, you are not to annoy anyone else either. You are to give no cause of complaint to anybody at all. You are to behave exactly as Henry VI commanded early pupils at his foundation of Eton College: ‘Sitis boni pueri, mites et dociles, servientes Domino.’ You and I may have our own ideas as to which ‘Dominus’ you are in fact serving, but this must in no way be apparent to anyone else.
In brief, dear boy, mind your manners and mind your book…while I do battle (as I am now about to) with the busybodies and snoopers who would like to remove you from the range of my affection and influence.
Yours as ever,
Raisley Conyngham.
All of which is all very well, thought Marius Stern, when he read this letter at his school three days later, but I refuse to be taken for granted. I shall have to decide soon, decide for myself: Raisley Conyngham or Carmilla Salinger. It would go hard with me to separate myself from either, but harder, I think, to separate myself from Raisley…supposing, of course, that he would allow this, or could be compelled to withdraw. It is better to be owned by a man than by a woman: a man is generally civil enough not to insist orally on his right of ownership (even though he continues to exact it); a woman becomes shrill and nagging the moment one so much as forgets her birthday. But then again…perhaps Carmilla has more to offer than Raisley. Raisley purports to offer the world; Carmilla, like the Sirens, offers wisdom and resignation to necessity. True, this Sirens’ song entices one towards a peace that may become torpor and, in the end, death. But even Raisley does not offer immortality, and such a gift would in any case be accursed. Does Raisley offer crowded hours of glorious life? Power? Fame? No. And rightly not. To be handed Power or Fame on a salver would be merely boring. Raisley offers something far more alluring. He offers to instruct one in such a manner that one can achieve power or fame by one’s own efforts and therefore take the credit for oneself. Raisley offers the ultimate temptation: pride in personal attainment.
Well, thought Marius: I have no need to decide either way just yet. So meanwhile I shall accept Raisley’s advice (telling myself that it is indeed advice rather than commandment), sit demure and still, let life go on, and gather minor merit.
It will be interesting to hear, later on, what is the result of this struggle (whatever form it may take) between Raisley and Carmilla in the Languedoc… The Languedoc, thought Marius: Troubadour Country. Jeremy says his father once heard a tale of an Englishman who went to Troubadour Country, where he learned the manner of the thing. Back in England, while he rode unarmed to a tryst, singing and playing to please his page, he was cut down by six black knights in full armour in a flowery meadow by a river. Fielding Gray was there when Jeremy repeated this story of his father’s, and said that he – Fielding – had seen the grave of the troubadour, who was called Lord Geoffery of Underavon, in a Wiltshire churchyard. If Raisley is the leader of the Black Knights and Carmilla the troubadour, will Raisley cut her down with sword or lance? Or will she just as the troubadour charmed his page) charm Raisley with her lute? Is it better to be cut down while singing to one’s page in a flowery meadow by a river and then to rest in a churchyard in Wiltshire? Or is it better to be a Black Knight and ride home to the feast and the leman in one’s castle?
The same day that Marius received Raisley Conyngham’s letter, Carmilla, Jeremy, Fielding and Piero went to see the curator of the Museum of Antique Sculpture in the Priory Church in Narbonne. They had hoped to see him earlier, but the museum was closed from Friday noon to Monday noon, and the curator, who was called Jacques-Emile Gagneac, refused to grant them special audience, in the Priory Church or elsewhere, out of official museum hours.
‘Hubertus Nivalis,’ said Carmilla when they were all four seated opposite Gagneac (who used a princely sarcophagus as a desk and a chantry off the west end of the north aisle as an office), ‘or Hubert Nivale, once of this city but interred at Montaillou, where he died. We have been told that further information about this Hubert may be available in this museum.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Jacques-Emile Gagneac: ‘we of the Museum of Antique Sculpture are very interested in Hubert Nivale. We have acquired the right to the sarcophagus (it has a fascinating frieze on on
e side of it) in which the remains of his coffin were placed. Unfortunately the cost of transporting the sarcophagus from Montaillou to Narbonne is almost as massive as the sarcophagus itself, and our museum is not well primed with funds.’
He addressed this last remark towards the ceiling, where it hung in the barrel of the vaulting.
‘Quid pro quo,’ said Jeremy crisply. ‘I shall be at charges, M. Gagneac, to transport the sarcophagus from Montaillou to the museum here in Narbonne, and you will be at pains to tell us what you know of Hubertus Nivalis Narbonnensis.’
‘How refreshing to find an Englishman with whom it is easy to do business,’ said Monsieur Gagneac.
‘An English gentleman,’ said Piero.
‘No doubt that explains it,’ said M. Gagneac sourly. ‘Kindly come this way.’
He led them up the nave of the church and into the southern arm of the transept. Halfway along this was a screen of ten-foot high crudely constructed of loose chunks of marble, in the centre of which a narrow opening was guarded by a grille. This M. Gagneac unlocked and pulled back on villainously squeaking hinges.
‘Our library,’ he explained when they had all followed through. The term at first seemed grandiose, as there were no more than five shelves, on the south wall to the left of the south portal, that held books. But the slender collection became imposing when it was seen that every single volume was chained, roughly in the manner employed in the more celebrated library in Hereford Cathedral.
‘Hubertus Nivalis was a merchant,’ said Gagneac, ‘whose money excited the greed of the Church and whose religious beliefs excited the curiosity of the Inquisition. His name figures frequently and prominently in the annals of the Inquisitorial Court presided over, from 1339 to 1351, by the Dominican Prior of the Priory of which this church was the centre. Hence the claim of the museum to the manuscript of the records – a manuscript which is, rather oddly for a legal document, very beautifully and eerily illustrated.’
He eased a large, long, fat volume into position on the desk above the shelf and began to turn the vellum pages. One by one he called up Carmilla and her following and showed each of them a picture of a richly dressed burgher of the fourteenth century, the lower part of whose robe had been cut away to reveal skeletal legs of ghastly luminous white.
‘Hubert of Narbonne was given the sobriquet of “nivalis” or “snowy”,’ said the curator, ‘because he was a leper. Since the disease attacked only his lower limbs – hence this disagreeable portrait – he was able to conceal the infection for some years. Normally, as a leper, he would have been turned adrift with a bell; as it was he was able to go about his business and (with discretion) his pleasures like any other man for some years… until, when he was in his late thirties, the disease started to gain ground and began to show slightly on his hands. These, of course, he kept gloved; yet eventually a servant discovered his debility and began to spread word – not plainly, for it was ill luck to name horrors such as leprosy, but in an easily comprehensible code: his master, he said, was “nivale” – “snowy”.
‘At this stage Hubert did something he had long planned to do: under pretence of going on a pilgrimage to the shrine at Roncevaux, he in fact took refuge in a household or ostal near Montaillou, owned by a business correspondent from Pamiers with whom he had long dealt in luxury imports which came in by Agde, Sète and Bacarès and were much prized by the inland nobility. The ostal had several advantages for Hubert: it was remote; it was inhabited by people who, like himself, were Black Cathars; it was near the source of some waters supposed to be efficacious even in cases of leprosy (these waters are still to be had at Molitq-les-Bains); and it was also near the church of a priest called Bertrand Cludes (Claudius in the Latin of the Court records) who was known, by the Cathars, to be secretly of their number and rumoured to possess miraculous powers of healing. However, Cludes-Claudius was a White Cathar and a “perfectus”, i.e. one who had renounced all the goods and pleasures of this world. He told Hubert that in his opinion his leprosy, having long been dormant, was now about to spread over his entire body, and that like all leprosy it was beyond cure and in a few weeks would be beyond concealment – at which time he would have to be cast out by his kind and make his way, announcing his passage with his bell, to the nearest leper colony, which was in a forest near Foix. But Claudius had one helpful suggestion to make.’
Again Gagneac called up his audience, one by one, to examine an illustration from the Prior’s Indictment: this was of a wasted figure, clearly in extremis, laid along a couch over which a cowled head was leaning in exhortation.
‘Claudius offered Hubert the “consolamentum”,’ said Gagneac: ‘a formula of prayer whereby a Cathar, or any man for that matter, is totally and eternally dedicated, by a White Cathar “parfait” or “perfectus”, to the Good God, to the Pure and-Celestial Faith, and so to assured Salvation, on these conditions: first, of absolute penitence for sins committed; and secondly, of what is called “the endura”, which means complete abstinence from food or drink from the moment the “consolamentum” is finished until that of the penitent’s death…which might, after all, be delayed by several days and thus make the “endura” live very painfully up to its name.
‘In the end,’ Gagneac continued, ‘Hubert accepted this offer; but something then went very badly wrong. Although Cludes-Claudius waited several weeks, he had still badly miscalculated the time it would take Hubert to perish. Leprosy, even when flaring up after a long period of dormancy, is leisurely in its manner of killing. Hubert, penitent, fully purified by the White Cathar rites, all ready to inherit Salvation, simply did not die. Since he was permitted, and was given, nothing to eat or drink, he was in agony. The solution was obvious to anyone of charitable disposition: put the poor fellow out of his pain. Such a course was forbidden to White Cathars, so could not be followed by Claudius, who, however, raised no objection when Hubert’s Black Cathar friends stifled him with a pillow. And there the matter would have been concluded, had not an informer from among the servants –’
‘Another servant?’ said Fielding Gray.
‘It was the constant tactic of the ecclesiastical authorities to tempt servants to betray their masters,’ said Jacques-Emile Gagneac, ‘and the fees offered were generous. Hardly had Hubert’s coffin been buried in a few inches of sun-baked earth (how it came to be housed in a sarcophagus is another story) than the Agents of the Inquisition were knocking on the portal of the domus in which he had died. His friends were all arrested – except the priest Cludes-Claudius, who had an accurate nose for trouble and had smelled it on the way back from the funeral. As a man of some consideration, he was on horseback; and when the group that had managed the burial was a mile or so from the domus, he suddenly turned his animal off the road and down a rough track which led away through the mountains in the direction of Perpignan. For many months, he was neither seen nor heard of again.’
Curator Gagneac beckohed to them one by one to take yet another look at the manuscript of the annals. This time there was a picture, exquisite in detail, of ramparts with towers and turrets at frequent intervals and one particularly prominent and complicated tower in the foreground. Near this were moored two thirteenth-century galleons, on to one of which some dispirited men-at-arms were embarking along an insecure gangway from an arched opening halfway up the near wall of Constance, as the tower was labelled.
‘Aigues-Mortes,’ said Fielding.
‘Aigues-Mortes as it was then,’ said Gagneac, ‘when the sea, or rather the marine lagoon, came right up to the walls. Even now the area between Aigues-Mortes and the sea is mostly marsh and salt flat: in those days the only land was to be found in a group of Islets called Les Oiseaux, only the largest of which, Palus Dei (The Marsh of God) was inhabited. On this, which was little more than a bank of dunes encircling a quagmire of sea-mud, was a crude hamlet, from which a tiny colony of fishermen laboured for their livelihood and which was dominated by a three-storey keep of stone, the residence of the Seign
eurs des Oiseaux, and a chapel adjacent to it very much of the kind you saw at Montaillou. Cludes – or Claudius – was a younger son of the reigning Seigneur, and hither he made his way, ferried by loyal tenants of his father’s with whom he made contact while they were selling their catch at St-Gilles.
‘But meanwhile, of course, the Inquisitors were on his trail… as was a party of vengeful Black Cathars who had heard how he had deserted their brothers near Montaillou and left them to be captured and tortured.’
‘Surely, there was nothing much he could have done to help the wretches,’ said Jeremy.
‘It is no good expecting logic from peasants,’ said Piero. ‘Besides, it might have been expected of Cludes that whether he could help his companions or not he should have “gone up into Jerusalem”, so to speak, “and perished with them”.’
‘His pursuers,’ continued Gagneac, ‘knew well enough who Claudius was and where they could probably find him. The problem was to procure passage. The narrow channels and submerged sandbanks of the dead waters were fatal to uninstructed mariners, and the only Masters of vessels capable of sailing there were the vassals of the Seigneur, who would on no account ferry strangers to their island, or the captains of the Royal Fleet, who only understood the possible courses directly south from Aigues-Mortes to the Mediterranean proper, whereas Les Oiseaux lay a league west by south of their harbour.’
‘So,’ said Carmilla, ‘Claudius was safe home and immediately began, one imagines, to die of boredom.’
‘He was a man of hardihood,’ said Gagneac, ‘and resource. Being a “perfect” he could survive without difficulty on fish or even, if pressed, on seaweed; and being not only a “perfect” but one of vision, he set himself to the task of designing and constructing his own tomb.
‘This, he determined, should be cut into the inner south wall of the chancel of the chapel, next to some sedilia on which the family of the Seigneur habitually sat when attending Mass. The conception was prodigious. Cludes-Claudius set himself the task of depicting on the outside of his tomb the pure and original Cathar Cosmology as conceived by a “parfait” of the White Cathars. The carving, variously in high and low relief, was to show the creation of the Archangel Lucifer by God, the fall of Lucifer and his transformation into Satan – who, in his character of Demiurge, created the material universe, its stars and planets, and, at its centre, the Earth, on which human beings could revel in the pleasures Satan had concocted for them. It would also show an Allegorical Figure of the True (Cathar) Faith, who rejected the world and the flesh, lived a life of total asceticism, and finally assisted the Good God in the destruction of Satan and his Universe. Cludes was busily engaged on this latter portion of his work when he was at last run to ground by an avenging posse of Black Cathars, who became even more vengeful when they saw Cludes’ carving of their own Satan-God in the moment of defeat and humiliation. They murdered and dismembered the sculptor, threw the hideous fragments to the sea birds, and were then themselves overcome and killed by the fisher-folk of the island, led by the Seigneur. Their bodies, together with that of the traitor who had guided them thither (once more, a servant) were burnt on the sea-shore and the ashes collected and placed in the hollow space behind the carven wall which had been intended by Cludes-Claudius as his own resting place. It was felt by his father to be an appropriate act of retribution to place the ashes of his enemies – cremation, remember, was rejected with horror by all Christians of the period, even by fundamental heretics – as a kind of trophy in the tomb which he himself could never occupy.’