by Simon Raven
‘In six hundred years, sir? Dust to dust.’
‘No, no, Milo. How worthless the education they purvey at Trinity these days. Or is it just you who is unworthy? Either way, Milo, pray attend to this: the skeleton, the “steadfast and enduring bone” (as Housman has it), can go on for millennia. Have they not taught you that in the Schools?’
‘The matter hardly comes within my curriculum.’
‘It used to come within Dean ffoliott-Hume’s curriculum. It was one of his hobbies.’
‘I do not attend tutorials, sir, with Dean ffoliott-Hume.’
‘No more you do. How silly of me to assume, simply because the good Dean is among my acquaintance, that you would be up to him for your studies. Never mind. You will doubtless accept my assurance (and Housman’s) that bones do indeed endure; and you will doubtless be inquisitive to know what became of those of Hubert Nivalis Narbonnensis.’
‘Anything you say, sir.’
‘A little more enthusiasm, Milo, please. We have walked a long way, I know, through marsh and wilderness and along a crumbling causeway to get here; but do not let fatigue dull your attention when our affair is approaching its climax.’
‘Sorry, sir. Of course I am burning to know what happened to the skeletal remains of Hubertus.’
‘Let us not have any false zeal either,’ said Raisley Conyngham: ‘just intelligent interest.’
‘Sir.’
‘Well then. Hubert’s skeleton was purloined, we shall never know by whom, in order to serve as a fetish or auspicious relic for the community of Black Cathars (few in number yet finite) that still survive in the area of Montaillou and Molitq-les-Bains. Gagneac has seen it and so have I. In fact it was our suggestion that so precious an object of reverence should be concealed somewhere really remote and obscure (instead of the chest it occupied in a farmhouse near Prades) – should indeed be moved to this Island of Palus Dei.’
‘Not very fitting, sir, if I may say so. The islanders were White Cathars; Hubert was Black.’
‘Oh yes, indeed. Hubert, one might say, was the Red Gold from a Black Tomb. And now, so near him, the Seigneurs of Les Oiseaux and their fisher-folk vassals rest in the white graves we passed on the way to this chapel. Nevertheless, you will agree that this place, of any in France, is secure. No busybody – no historian nor archaeologist nor archivist nor bureaucrat nor health inspector – will come on Hubert Nivale’s skeleton here in the Marsh of God.’
‘Exactly where, sir, in the Marsh of God? Here in the Tomb which Claudius carved?’
‘Precisely: this Tomb, constructed indeed by a White Cathar but occupied by the ashes of Black ones, the friends of Hubert’s friends who buried him, the men that had murdered Cludes for his cowardly desertion of the burial party.’
‘And the Maltese Cross…behind which Hubert lies?’
‘A typical Maltese Cross, Milo…a symbol often regarded as an evil omen, as a warning which says, “Keep out, do not pry”, or, in this case, “Accursed be he that violates this panel”.’
‘You and Gagneac violated it to place Hubert inside the Tomb.’
‘No, Milo. We found the Cross among bric-a-brac in Gagneac’s museum. We battered it about and affixed it to the panel – with the assistance of a powerful industrial glue – after we had deposited Hubert inside.’
‘To warn off…whom, sir?’ Milo said. ‘You yourself told me that nobody will come here meaning harm to Hubert’s skeleton.’
‘To warn off ghosts of the islanders. They placed the ashes of Cludes’ murderers inside as a kind of trophy; but that is not to say that they would tolerate, in this Chapel, the entire skeleton of a Black Cathar (even of one who had received the “consolamentum”) that had been wished on them by other Black Cathars. And indeed it is this insult to the dead islanders that will make for the scene of the supernatural that will so dismay Carmilla and company. They will see the ghosts of the fishermen of Palus Dei hovering around this panel, meaning hatred and harm to Hubert within it, but frustrated and barred from entry by the emblem of the Maltese Cross, and at last withdrawing in misery and rage. They come every night, these ghosts, Milo – or that is what Gagneac will tell Carmilla and her band of brothers.’
‘A chilling tale,’ said Milo, unchilled.
‘You know it. They do not. They think they are coming here to carry out an archaeological investigation. Only when they are here will Gagneac tell them the true significance of the Maltese Cross and what they will shortly witness.’
‘And where shall we be, sir?’
‘By the altar, listening. Unseen, watching and listening.’
Jeremy, thought Milo. My catamite, my darling, one to whom I must make love no more, Raisley says, in case of this new American and African disease. Nevertheless, one can love one’s darling without making love. I love you, Jeremy, my creature, my bugger-boy, my own sweet sweeting. You and your lovely round buttocks and your lovely round face. Your low and soothing voice. Your presence, the soft sweet touch of your hand, your words of lust, your words of grace. And now I am to see you made a fool of by Conyngham and his ghosts. Raisley, my Master: Jeremy, my pathic darling, heart of the heart of my heart.
‘The Demiurge,’ said Jacques-Emile Gagneac, flashing his torch on to a carved figure, naked, sinuous, and negroid in feature, that was emitting galaxies in streams from the tips of all eight fingers. ‘The Earth,’ said Gagneac, plying his torch; ‘the Pleasures of the Flesh’ – these apparently being a girdle round the Earth of infants in suggestive conjunction.
‘It reminds me of Huxley’s Brave New World,’ said Fielding Gray. ‘Children engaged in erotic play.’
‘You see,’ whispered Raisley to Milo, as they crouched beside the altar: ‘Vanity – the desire to demonstrate knowledge and wide reading.’
‘It will be interesting,’ Milo replied, ‘to see how they demonstrate their knowledge when Gagneac comes on to the Maltese Cross.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Raisley muttered back, ‘they won’t get a chance. Remember: the invitation to play the expert is a mere ruse to get them here; their attention will be fully occupied by something quite different.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Milo: ‘the rancorous ghosts of the dead fishermen, vainly seeking entry to the interior of the Tomb.’
‘They may, of course, fail to show up,’ said Raisley; ‘ghosts, you know, are not absolutely dependable.’
‘Then Carmilla and her lads will have had a long walk for nothing.’
‘Yes,’ said Raisley: ‘a long walk ending in nothing. Quiet now: let us listen to what they are learning from Gagneac.’
‘The Day of Doom for Satan the Demiurge,’ said Gagneac, playing his torch on the rippling body of the Creator, which was being stretched on a rack by Harpies and Sirens as it gradually floated down to where more Harpies were raising their claws to receive it.
‘A Nest of Harpies in Hell,’ said Gagneac. ‘And now the Maltese Cross which you have come to examine. With an addition hitherto unadvertised: watch for the spirits of the dead…with which you will soon be confronted.’
For about two seconds the beam of the torch lit a black cross which resembled a miniature four-pronged airscrew, with blades about nine inches long and amputated where they began to narrow to the tip.
Just like the Other Ranks’ cap-badge of the 60th Rifles, thought Fielding, probably snatched from a Memorial to the Green Jackets in a War Cemetery in Italy or the north of France, and then hacked about a bit.
Before he could communicate this opinion or confirm it by further inspection, the torch went out.
‘What’s the trouble, M. Gagneac?’ said Carmilla.
There was no answer.
‘Come,’ whispered Raisley to Milo, and guided him through a gap in the apsidal wall at the rear of the Chapel.
‘What’s going on?’ Milo heard Jeremy call plaintively.
Other expostulations from Carmilla and her group grew fainter as Raisley and Milo moved swiftly along the dunes, the lagoon bein
g on their right and the quagmire on their left, towards the old harbour of Palus Dei, from which the causeway now ran across the lagoon towards the distant wilderness of sea-grass.
‘You see?’ said Raisley. ‘Even if a man kept by the sea and avoided the morass; even if he negotiated, in the pitch dark, the crumbling causeway; even if he found, at the heart of the wilderness of sea-grasses, the beginning of the path which leads away through the marsh to the distant road, he would still have to find his way along that path. It is designed, at every turning, to pitch any wayfarer strange to it into the quicksands. They will indeed be confronted by the spirits of the dead – if any such there be – before the night is out.’
‘They will pass a very cold and uncomfortable night, Raisley,’ said Milo, ‘and come out by daylight.’
‘If they stay there all night they may die of exposure.’
‘They are young, Raisley, and they have each other to embrace for warmth.’
‘Even if they wait for day and are still alive when it dawns, they will never find the path from the wilderness, and even if they find it they will never reach the end of it. It was still light when you and I came along that path to get here. Did you notice how often I had to pause, how often even I was nearly thrown into the black bog? So when and if they leave this island, Milo, they will very soon begin, as I told you, to mind their own business and cease interfering with my plans for Marius. Can you see the headlines? “Tragic disappearance of English explorers amid uncharted waters”.’
‘There will not only be headlines, Raisley,’ said Milo as Raisley led him along the treacherous causeway: ‘there will be enquiries.’
‘Yes Weeks or months later. After they find – if indeed they ever do – what is left of Carmilla and her trusting wolf cubs. No one will have known they were coming here, Milo: Gagneac impressed on them the need for secrecy, lest there were to be official prohibition. No one will have seen them set out in the dark with Gagneac. No one will know or care where you and I were going when we left the hotel at Sète or where we have been when we return to it.’
‘Marius will smell something amiss when he hears that they have disappeared.’
‘Marius is sworn to obey me, Milo. So are you.’
‘Yes. Yes indeed, sir. The sooner we get back to Sète and some supper, the happier I shall be in my obedience.’
‘There spake my loyal Apprentice.’
‘There spake my Worshipful Master.’
‘If we keep our heads,’ said Carmilla, ‘which, I may say, we have not done hitherto, we shall come out of this without trouble.’
‘No one liked to mention that that might not be too easy in view of the perilous and little-known route which they would have to follow. Piero, however, felt it worth remarking that they had a very cold, damp night in front of them, whatever else.
‘Movement is the thing to keep one warm,’ Jeremy said.
‘No one is to move anywhere until we have light to move by,’ said Carmilla, in an officer voice.
Jeremy was about to remark that the movements he had in mind were perfectly compatible with safely remaining exactly where they were, but decided, on second thoughts, that he would only be most roundly snubbed by Carmilla, in her present mood, presumably on the ground that energy must not be frivolously expended.
‘In the Army,’ said Fielding Gray, ‘we used to sing to keep warm at night. Hymns, bawdry, anything that came to mind.’
‘Making things dead easy for the enemy,’ said Jeremy: ‘I always thought that regiment of yours was a pretty amateur affair.’
‘When there was an enemy to be avoided,’ said Fielding, ‘we did silent exercises.’ Now you’re talking, thought Jeremy. ‘Like curling and uncurling the fingers, very slowly,’ Fielding went on. ‘You’d be surprised how effective it is.’
‘For the fingers, no doubt,’ said Jeremy. ‘What about the rest of one?’
‘Proceed on the same principle, mutatis mutandis. Knees bend, press-ups, flexing of the stomach.’
‘Now that sounds promising,’ said Jeremy in an arch voice.
‘I want no lubricious insinuations out of you, Jeremy Morrison,’ said Carmilla like a female Savonarola faced with Botticelli’s Venus. ‘There is a time and a place for everything, and this shrine, albeit at present invisible, is no place for that sort of sacrilege.’
‘You never objected to that sort of sacrilege in Ely Cathedral,’ Jeremy said, ‘in Bishop Alcocke’s Chantry. You squealed fit to raise him from the dead.’4
‘You unspeakable cad,’ snorted Carmilla.
‘At least,’ said Piero, in order to change the topic, ‘we now know that we did right to come here to the Languedoc. We must have been very close to Conyngham’s secrets for him to arrange our demise.’
‘We are not interested,’ said Carmilla rather grandly, ‘in the possibility of demise. First things first. Getting through the night. Singing, as Fielding suggests. I’ll begin:
‘“Who would true valour see,”’ she chanted throatily.
‘“Let him come hither…”’
The men lifted up their voices and followed her in the old song:
‘“One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather…”’
About a furlong from a minor but tolerable road the path across the marshes mounted on to solid ground and became an easy and ordinary track.
‘I’m quite glad that’s over,’ Raisley Conyngham said, switching off his torch as they climbed into his car. ‘Incidentally, I noticed that you called me “Raisley” instead of “sir” once or twice back on the Island. I thought we agreed that this was not to happen until you emerged from your apprenticeship.’
‘For a moment or two, sir, I thought that I had emerged. But then common sense asserted itself.’
‘And what made you think,’ said Raisley, turning the car right on to the main road for Sète via Montpelier, ‘what made you think, Milo, even for a moment or two, that you had emerged from your apprenticeship?’
‘If one has been made privy to a conspiracy to murder four people, one could be said – one just could be said – to have grown out of the status of mere apprentice.’
‘Not unless one has actually seen at least one of them die.’
‘That is what occurred to me, sir; so I resumed the condition of apprentice and renewed calling you “sir”.’
‘Your education has a long way to go yet, Milo. Not only, as I have just observed, have you never witnessed actual death by murder, but you are entirely ignorant of death by Anathema.’
‘Anathema, sir?’
‘The Curse of God, or (to loyal Black Cathars) the Curse of Satan, who is also God.’
‘Are you a Black Cathar, sir? You know some of them, that is evident, and you are interested in their doctrine, but are you actually one of them?’
‘I am eclectic, Milo,’ Raisley Conyngham said: ‘I make use of whatever faith, philosophy or formula I fancy at the time. I have recently chosen to place the Anathema of Satan on my house and estate at Ullacote. You know why?’
‘No, sir. It seems rather an unreasonable proceeding.’
‘There speaks the apprentice, you see. Understand, Milo: this Curse will affect anyone who has ever stayed at Ullacote – anyone, that is, of my selection. You and Marius have stayed there; you are both, of course, exempt from the Curse.’
‘And Teresa Malcolm, sir?’
‘Also exempt. So long as Teresa is close to Theodosia Canteloupe, we may well need her. We no longer need Captain Jack Lamprey and we no longer need Gat-toothed Jenny, the stable lass. Both, as you know, are dead.’
‘Simply because you no longer need them, sir?’ Milo enquired demurely.
‘No. Because I was sorry for them. I exercise more human pity than you might think. Lamprey had before him only drunken stupors and a steady decline in his skill with horses, the one thing that made life worthwhile for him. Jenny was possessed of a yearning for Marius, which would have been answered only with his
total neglect when absent and his blistering scorn when present.’
‘And yet he loved her once.’
‘Briefly. With my consent…which was withdrawn as soon as Jenny had served her turn.’
‘And you claim to exercise human pity?’
‘Jenny had an hour or two of ecstatic happiness. This is more than falls to the lot of most of us. The price – early death – is trivial. Any wise person would in any case prefer an early death, when he or she considers the horrors that life probably has in store.’
‘Still…he or she might wish, sir, to make the choice for him – or herself.’
‘That is mere self-regarding folly, and need not even be reckoned.’
‘So who else that has been at Ullacote will be victim of your Curse?’
‘The horse, Lover Pie. He holds attractive memories for Marius of his childhood innocence. These memories I wished to exploit when I made Marius his stable lad at Ullacote last April.5 Now I wish to blot them out.’
‘Why?’ asked Milo.
The car, which had been skirting Montpelier, veered left at a sign marked
FRONTIGNAC
SÈTE
‘They are memories, not only of the horse, but of Jeremy Morrison; memories of a soft spring day some three or four years ago6 when they went to Newmarket together and backed Lover Pie, who won his race at thirty-three to one. At that time he belonged to someone other than myself.’