As a direct consequence of this fact, and in the teeth of the Queen Mother’s vigorous disapproval, the King issued a formal summons to de Bale to present himself at the Basilica of St Denis, next to the tombs of the King’s father, Louis VIII, and of his grandfather, Philip II Augustus, on the exact day, and at the exact moment, of the sixteen-year anniversary of his God-driven intervention.
4
At first Amauri de Bale had been tempted to avoid what he suspected was a trick invitation by impulsively volunteering to serve in the army of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor. But he knew that if the Queen Mother truly wanted her revenge on him, she could reach him in Germany just as easily as she could have reached him at any time during the past sixteen years within the tenuous security of his chateau and estates.
That he owed his life – and the non-severance of his extremities – to the King’s grace was in little doubt. De Bale shuddered to think what the Queen Mother would have ordered done to him had he not changed his mind at the very last moment and leapt in to save the King’s life. His – on the face of it – perverse decision that day had not been prompted by any unlikely eruption of random human charity, however, but rather by a trained warrior’s reactive instinct, twinned with the sudden realization – triggered by the King’s sublime jeu d’esprit – that Louis might yet prove to be a credit to France, rather than merely another Capetian burden on its soul.
The upshot, of course, had been that de Bale had fallen foul of the Duke of Brittany, with all that that entailed in terms of loss of influence, a less advantageous marriage, and a dramatic narrowing of his political ambitions. But he had decided, in the general scheme of things, that this was the lesser of two evils – Mauclerc was bad, but the Queen Mother was awful.
De Bale knelt, therefore, before the King’s father’s sarcophagus, his head bowed, his forearms resting across his single upraised knee, and waited for the King’s pleasure. His entire life had consisted of a series of often impulsive gambles, and he now felt a fatalistic sense of his own insignificance in the magnificent new Rayonnant Gothic setting of the St Denis Basilica.
The King, flanked by his confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and his chaplain, William of Chartres, watched de Bale from the lee of one of the twenty statue columns adorning the portal of the Basilica’s west facade.
‘Look,’ said the King. ‘It is Our Lady.’
The two counsellors fell back, staring at their King. ‘We see nothing, Sire.’
The King turned to them. ‘You see nothing?’
‘No, Sire. We see nothing. What do you see?’
The King turned back in the direction of his father’s crypt. ‘I see Our Lady, the Mother of God, raising my champion’s cloak and laying it tenderly across his back so that he should not take cold.’
The two men covered their faces with their hands. Then they fell to their knees and prostrated themselves on the flagstone flooring of the nave.
The King, after only a brief hesitation, strode towards the kneeling figure of the Count.
De Bale heard the King’s approach, but chose not to look up. The King’s words had carried to him through the echoing Basilica, and de Bale understood that, at this exact moment, his own and his family’s future was being decided forever.
He felt the tip of the King’s sword touch him on the back of his right shoulder. ‘You saw the Devil, de Bale?’
‘I did, Sire.’
‘And you protected the King?’
‘With my life, Sire.’
‘And you will always protect the King?’
‘Always, Sire.’
‘And this realm of France?’
‘I and my family, Sire. Throughout eternity.’
‘Then you shall be my Corpus Maleficus.’
Louis turned away. He raised his voice, so that it echoed throughout the Basilica. ‘I have the Bishop of Reims to crown me. The Bishop of Laon to anoint me. Langres to bear my sceptre. Beauvais my mantle. Chalons my ring. And Noyons to bear my belt. I have the Duke of Normandy to hold the first square banner, and Guyenne to hold the second. I have Burgundy to bear my crown and fasten my belt. I have the Count of Toulouse to carry my spurs. Flanders my sword. And Champagne my Royal Standard. But who do I have to protect me from the Devil? Who to be my champion?’
De Beaulieu and de Chartres had risen up from their prone positions. Both men recognized a fait accompli when they saw one. ‘You have the Count of Hyeres, Sire.’
Louis nodded. ‘The Count of Hyeres is now the thirteenth Pair de France. My father’s and my grandfather’s bones are witnesses to this fact. Bring me the Seal and my crusader’s cross.’
PART ONE
1
Le Domaine De Seyeme,
Cap Camarat, France
Present Day
Ex-Captain Joris Calque, grateful recipient of the Police Nationale Francaise’s early-retirement plan for officers injured in the line of duty, had long ago accepted that he was built for comfort and not for speed.
It was for this reason that he had bribed a notorious local poacher to build him a camouflaged hideout on a hill overlooking the present-day Dowager Countess of Hyeres’s private estate on the St Tropez peninsula, almost exactly 765 years after the events at the St Denis Basilica.
The hideout came complete with battery-operated fan, blow-up armchair, and high-density, polyurethane insulated, safari-style picnic box. From his eyrie on the opposing hillside, the newly retired Calque intended to monitor the comings and goings of the group of individuals he now knew as the Corpus Maleficus, and, in his own time, to secure proof of their involvement in the death of his lieutenant earlier that same year.
Calque had done his homework well. He had spent the first fortnight of his retirement trawling through the records of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and the French National Archives at Fontainebleau, researching everything he could about the history of the de Bale family. And he had come to a number of inescapable conclusions.
Firstly, that the de Bales had managed to thrust their fingers into just about every slice of religious, political, civic, administrative, governmental, socio-religious and socio-political pie that France had contrived for itself – or had contrived on itself – since the early Middle Ages. And secondly that, almost without exception, the de Bales had abused whatever power they had thus managed to grasp.
Across a span of nearly eight hundred years, the de Bales could count three marshals, one seneschal, and two constables of France amongst their number. They had bought archbishoprics, infiltrated the college and orders of the Cardinalate, and even manipulated popes, without ever having quite achieved the papal tiara themselves. They had started wars and engendered riots. They had conducted massacres, espoused revolutions, and incited assassination attempts. They had weakened kings and queens, suborned dauphins and minor princelings, seduced foreign princesses and even, on one occasion, a Mademoiselle de France. They had fomented bastards, and undermined the principles of fair play at every opportunity. Far from protecting France from the Devil, the de Bales appeared, at every opportunity, to have eagerly encouraged her towards his fold.
The history of the de Bale family, via even the partial records available to Calque through the exclusively public sector access open to him, showed a family so intent on the pursuit and enjoyment of power, that it had ultimately ended up so diluting itself and dispersing its seed that, by the time of the Great War, it had lost virtually all influence. Lord Acton, thought Calque, had hit the nail squarely on the head with his ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.’
This had led to a situation where the last remaining direct holder of the de Bale name had found himself – via the misfortunes of war – incapable of procreating and of continuing his direct line, whilst at the same time being titular head of a fast diminishing cabal that was unravelling itself at the speed dirty water flushes down a drain.
Nearly thirty years later, in the age-old way of
such things, and in one final, desperate grasp at life, this elderly man had then procured himself a much younger woman, of lesser lineage, perhaps, than his own, but who was possessed of that inestimable compensation – a greater fortune. The family of Genevieve Odilonne de Moristot had been more than happy to trade her youth, her beauty, and the astonishing fortune she had inherited thanks to being the only daughter of a minor nobleman with a phalanx of elderly female relatives widowed in the Great War (and now gradually dying off in their coddled eighties and nineties), for a countship, a marquisate, and one of the oldest names in France.
The fact that the de Bale line could not be continued in the direct fashion that might have been expected had proved no hindrance to the new Countess. Using the example of Italy, in which the per se continuation of great names often takes precedence over strict genetic purity, and of France’s very own ‘ Maman toujours, Papa peutetre ’ – ‘Mummy always, Daddy only perhaps’ – dictum, she had persuaded her elderly husband to allow her to adopt thirteen children from her family-funded nunnery orphanage.
When Calque had first confirmed that this number was true, he had reared back from the microfiche newspaper he had been reading just as if a poisonous spider had landed in front of him and flashed him her claws.
But upon further consideration, he had begun to see the logic behind the Countess’s actions. What better way to rebuild the Corpus’s influence? She had had both the money and the leisure – thanks to her extreme youth in relation to that of her husband – to use it. If one accepted that the nature/nurture debate was something of a moveable feast, what better way to gain power over your adopted children than by the use of titles, influence, and, last but by no means least, virtually unlimited funds? The old Count had chosen his partner well.
So was Achor Bale simply the exception that proved the rule? As far as Calque could tell, he had been the only one of the thirteen children adopted by the Countess old enough for his character to have been significantly formed before the fact. Was he the simple one-off freak that he seemed, and that Calque’s Commandant insisted he was? Or had all the Countess’s children been similarly groomed? Freed from the pressures of bureaucratic interference by his premature retirement, Calque now intended to find out.
The jobbing farmer on whose land Calque had planted his semi-permanent encampment had been easy enough to persuade. Before vacating his desk at the 2 eme Arrondissement, Calque had contrived to mislay his Captain’s badge and shield amongst the maelstrom of his boxed-up belongings. He had been a police officer for thirty years. Calque reckoned that the desk sergeant, embarrassed at having to say farewell to a man he had taken orders from since he was a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, wasn’t going to quiz him any too closely about the loss.
In the event all Calque had needed to do was to promise to drop the badge and shield off the next time he visited his old friends at the precinct. It was with exquisite satisfaction that Calque had noted the desk sergeant solemnly ticking off the box marked ‘Identification Returned’ on his retirement checklist. He had plans for that badge, the first of which was to use it to silence the farmer.
Calque hadn’t been that badly injured, of course, in the car accident the Countess de Bale’s adopted son, Achor Bale, aka the ‘eye-man’, had contrived on him and his assistant, Paul Macron, earlier that summer. But Macron’s brutal death at the hands of Bale a few days later had damaged more than merely its victim – it had undermined Joris Calque’s rock-solid sense of his own vocation.
It wasn’t that he mourned Macron unduly, or even felt guilty about his death – the man had been a bigot, for God’s sake, and as thick as a navvy’s bicep. It was more that he had lost the urge to explain himself anymore to superior officers who were both younger than himself, stupider than himself, and seemingly incapable of seeing or imagining anything beyond the confines of their own little time capsules.
This new breed of men and women infesting the upper echelons of the police department had no earthly sense of history – no earthly sense of what was seemly or appropriate in terms of their behaviour. When Calque had told the Commandant of his initial suspicions about the Countess and her baker’s dozen of adopted children – Calque had briefly been tempted to call them by the more accurate medieval term of a ‘Devil’s dozen’ but had thought better of it – the man had as good as laughed in his face.
‘Achor Bale was a freak. A one-off. What do you think? That someone as respectable as the Countess of Hyeres – who must be seventy if she’s a day – has been grooming a family full of killer orphans to fulfil her late husband’s 800-year-old sworn duty of protecting the French Crown from the Devil? Captain Calque, this may come as a surprise to you, but there is no Devil. And there is no French Crown any more, either. The last King of France was Louis-Philippe. And he was got rid of in…’ The Commandant had hesitated, a vague sense of betrayal suffusing his face.
‘They got rid of Louis-Philippe in 1848. But he wasn’t the last King of France. He was the last King of the French. The last reigning King of France was Charles X. You’ve heard of him, surely?’
‘You’re skating on very thin ice here, Captain.’
‘I know that the Countess was running Bale while he was cutting his murderous swathe across France. That she had ordered him to harry the American, Adam Sabir, and his two Gypsy friends, Alexi Dufontaine and Yola Samana, to death. That she was convinced Sabir knew the identity of Nostradamus’s Third Antichrist. A secret the Corpus Maleficus needed to secure if it was to continue with its sworn duty of protecting France from the Devil.’
‘Pah.’
Calque was fleetingly tempted to throw in the information Sabir had vouchsafed him, in the strictest confidence, about the possible existence of the Second Coming, but decided that discretion was the better part of valour. The situation already sounded terminally far-fetched. Why aggravate the issue even further? The Commandant was probably an atheist anyway – he was certainly incapable of any significant degree of lateral thought. ‘Achor Bale took his orders directly from the Countess, his mother. That makes her an accessory before the fact. In fact I would even go so far as to say that she was a joint principal.’ Calque realized that he might be stretching the point a little. ‘A great deal more than a simple conspirator, anyway.’
‘Have you any proof of that?’
‘He called her from the Maset. When he was in trouble. He asked her if he could come home. She told him to finish the job. To kill Sabir.’
‘No he didn’t. He spoke to that butler of hers…’ The Commandant ransacked his memory, unconsciously pandering to Calque’s notorious pedantry. ‘… Millefeuille.’
‘Milouins.’
‘Milouins then. And Milouins replied to him partly in German. He used the word Fertigmachen. Which could have any number of meanings. From “go away and off yourself, you murderous bastard”, to “let’s make an end of it here and now”. But Bale never spoke to the Countess personally – the evidence that the order came from her is purely circumstantial. But we’ve already been over this, Captain.’
‘I’ve seen that hidden room at the Countess’s house, Commandant. I’ve seen the document she keeps in there. The one that mentions a secret society called the Corpus Maleficus.’
‘But the document was indecipherable. Written in an unknown code. You’ve acknowledged that much yourself. Damn it, man, the thing was dated 1250. What earthly connection can it have with a crime committed today?’
‘It wasn’t dated 1250. It was post-dated 1228. We know this because it contained the non-coded signatures and seals of three men crucial to King Louis the IX’s realm. One man, Jean de Joinville, would have been four years old at the time of the signing. An impossibility, of course. So the document was clearly enacted retrospectively – possibly in appreciation of an act whose real significance was only recognized later.’
‘For pity’s sake, Captain. We all know about your absurd pretensions to a classical education – you made Paul Macron’s life a misery
with them. You’ve no way of knowing this, but a week before his death Macron put in an informal complaint against you for psychological harassment.’
‘Psychological harassment?’ Calque wanted a cigarette badly, but, thanks to the new ruling, he knew that if he dared to light up, his superior would probably call in the Paris Fire Brigade to put him out with a hosepipe.
‘We persuaded him that it was in his own best interests to shelve the complaint. Your long service with the department still counts for something, you see. But the complaint can easily be resuscitated – even from beyond the grave – and all the more damaging for that. However, we are straying off the point. From here on in you will leave the Countess and her children alone. Do you understand me? The case is over. Bale is dead.’
‘You mean she’s too well-connected to tangle with?’
‘In a nutshell, Captain? Yes.’
It was at that exact moment that Joris Calque had decided that his injuries from the car accident were a good deal more severe than he had ever let on. A stumble or two in the office, followed by a full-on fall had been quite enough to start the ball rolling. He had then found difficulty remembering simple things. Been forced to acknowledge to the Chief Medical Officer that he had been suffering from blackouts ever since the accident, and that he had recently been entertaining thoughts of suicide because of his guilt at Paul Macron’s death.
The whole process had proved surprisingly simple. He had only had five more years to serve out anyway until forcible retirement – in the event they had been glad to be rid of him. Clear up the office. Out with the unregenerate males. Bring in new blood.
Calque had left the building without so much as a backwards glance. The icing on the cake had been that his ruinous-to-maintain ex-wife would now be deprived of her legally sanctioned monthly tranche of his pay cheque. Because he had been invalided out of the service with full honours and an unblemished record, and had, in consequence, been deemed incapable of functioning at 100 per cent of his usual competence thanks to the injuries – not to mention the post-traumatic stress – he had suffered whilst on active duty, the State would now be taking up a significant portion of the financial slack on his behalf. And the State, as Calque knew only too well, didn’t go in for guilty consciences.
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