The Lady Agnes Mystery, Volume 1

by Andrea Japp

  She began to trace the curved letters of her reply, which she knew by heart. She had repeated them for hours on end like an exorcism, thinking, hoping she would never need to write them:

  Amen. Miserere nostri. Dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla.20

  A cold sweat drenched the hem of her veil, making her shiver suddenly and drop her quill.

  She picked it up again and continued writing:

  Statim autem post tribulationem dierum illorum sol obscurabitur et luna non dabit lumen suum et stellae cadent de caelo et virtutes caelorum commovebuntur.21

  Amen.

  He was blinking from exhaustion. The filthy rags he wore made him feel nauseated. And yet the messenger was accustomed to this endless journeying, these arduous missions under various guises. Occasionally, he would sleep for leagues at a time face down on his horse’s neck, allowing the animal’s legs to decide his fate and his path. However, this time he had been obliged to travel incognito and in this impoverished countryside a horse would have been too conspicuous.

  A surge of joy lifted his spirits. He was the go-between, the necessary tool, the link between the powerful of this earth, those who shaped the world for future generations. Without him their decisions would remain as mere wishes, mere hopes. He gave them life, shape and substance. He was the humble artisan of the future.

  He was only a hundred yards outside the abbey enclosure when the soft sound of racing feet made him swing round. A figure in a white tunic was running towards him, a wicker basket joggling back and forth on one arm.

  ‘Oh dear God!’ she gasped. ‘I should not be here, but you are a brother monk. Our Abbess … Well, I came here on my own initiative. You are so exhausted. Why did you not spend the night in our guest house? We often receive visitors. Oh here I am chattering away like a jackdaw … You see, I feel so ashamed. Take these …’

  She handed him the provisions she had prepared and, blushing, explained:

  ‘I thought to myself, if our Reverend Mother received you, it was because she trusted you and you were a friend. I know her well. She has much work and many responsibilities. I knew she would have thought to feed you, but not to supply you with food for your journey.’

  He smiled. She had been right. She looked rather frail and yet a remarkable strength radiated from her every gesture. The kindly sister gazing up at him had broken the rule of the cloister for his sake, and she was glowing proof that his exhaustion was deserving and that Christ lived in them both.

  ‘Thank you, sister.’

  ‘Adélaïde … I am Sister Adélaïde, in charge of the kitchens and of meals. Hush! Do not thank me. You know I should not be here, and I wasn’t told to come – it was a simple oversight. I wished to make amends, that is all. I deserve no thanks. And yet I am happy to offer you these humble provisions – this rye bread, black but very nourishing, a bottle of our own cider – you’ll find it delicious – a goat’s cheese, some fruit and a big slice of spice cake, which I made myself. They say it’s very flavourful.’ She laughed, before confessing awkwardly, ‘I love to feed people, no doubt it is a failing. I don’t know why, it just gives me pleasure.’ Suddenly guilty, she stammered, ‘Oh dear, I should not say such things …’

  ‘Indeed you should. It is good to feed people, above all the needy. Thank you for your precious offerings, Sister Adélaïde.’ Suddenly glad of this brief exchange, which had lightened his spirits before his gruelling journey, he added, ‘And you have my word, this will remain strictly between us – like a little secret that unites us over distance.’

  Overjoyed, she bit her bottom lip and then, frightened, said hastily:

  ‘I must go back. I sense your path will be a long one, brother. Let it be safe from harm. My prayers will follow you. No, they will accompany you. Make a little place for me in yours.’

  He leant towards her, planted a fraternal kiss on her anxious brow, and murmured:

  ‘Amen.’

  Clairets Abbey, Perche, nightfall, May 1304

  Clément felt confident. All was quiet. The nuns had retired to their cells after supper and compline.+ Outside, a chorus of frogs croaked and the jays’ raucous complaints ricocheted from nest to nest. Further to his right, the tireless garden dormice tunnelled furiously between the stones with their claws. They were such cautious creatures that it was rare to catch a glimpse of their little black masked faces. The slightest unfamiliar presence would silence them. Clément delighted in the treasure trail nature left for those who knew how to watch and listen. He had uncovered most of its secrets, and its dangers too.

  Cautiously, he stretched a numb leg out of his hiding place in the large hollowed stone the herbalist used for soaking the leaves, rhizomes, and berries she collected. The air was rank with the smell of rotten foliage. It would be dark within an hour. He had time to eat something and to reflect.

  What was to become of them? The two of them that was, for Mathilde’s fate was of little concern to him. She was far too vain and foolish to worry about anything except her little breasts that were not budding as fast as she would like, her ribbons and hair combs. What would become of Agnès and him? A feeling of joy made his eyes brim with tears, for there were two of them, he was not alone. The Dame de Souarcy would never forsake him, even at risk to her own life. The certain knowledge that it was true wrenched his heart.

  Crouching unseen behind the door to the main hall, he had witnessed the gruelling evening to which her half-brother had subjected her the day before. As usual she had outwitted him. And yet the following day, just after the scoundrel had left, while they were doing their round of the outbuildings, he had sensed her uncertainty and understood her fears: how far was Eudes prepared to go? What would he stop at?

  The answer to the second question was obvious and Agnès knew it as well as Clément. He would stop at fear, when he came face to face with a beast more ferocious than he.

  They were so alone, so vulnerable. They had no beast to champion them, to come to their aid. For months now the child had struggled with his despair. He must find a way out, a solution. He cursed his youth and his physical frailty. He cursed the truth of his origins, which he was forced to conceal for both their sakes. Agnès had explained this to him as soon as she could, and he knew her fears were well founded.

  Knowledge was a weapon, Agnès had explained, especially when confronted with an ignorant boor like Eudes. Knowledge. It was passed on, to some extent, by the schoolmistresses at Clairets. And so, two years earlier, his lady had allowed him to attend the few classes open to children of all ages from the rich burgher families and gentry from the surrounding countryside. These offered him scant intellectual nourishment since, thanks to Agnès, he had long ago learnt to read and write in French and Latin. He had vainly hoped he might learn about the sciences, about life in distant lands. In reality, most of the time was spent on the study of the Gospels and learning by rote the words of worthy Latin scholars such as Cicero, Suetonius and Seneca. Added to these limitations was the terror the schoolmistress,22 Emma de Pathus, inspired in them all. Her permanent sullenness and readiness to raise her hand was enough to strike fear into the hearts of her young charges.

  In the end, it mattered little. The goodly Bernardines were unstinting in their efforts, zealously caring for some, educating others, settling discords, calming hostilities, accompanying the dying. Unlike some of the other orders, they could not be accused of indifference towards the world outside the abbey, or of profiting from the misfortunes of humble folk. It mattered little because Clément had learnt so many things. Each seed of knowledge sprouted another. Each new key to understanding he forged unlocked a bigger door than the last. He had also learnt not to ask questions the sisters were unable to answer, for he realised that his curiosity, which initially rewarded their pains, ended by perplexing and then troubling them. In truth it mattered little because he had become convinced that the abbey contained an intriguing mystery.

  Why had he slipped behind the pillar? He had been waiting for t
he Latin mistress. Was it instinct? Or was it the strange behaviour of the figure in white? The Abbess had looked around furtively before hurriedly locking the small postern door she had just emerged from, and then darted down the corridor, like a thief.

  A quick, discreet enquiry left him none the wiser. No one seemed to know where that door led. What was in the room on the other side? Was it a secret cell for some important prisoner? Perhaps it was a torture chamber? The child’s fertile imagination ran away with him until he decided to solve the mystery himself. A roughly drawn map of the central part of the abbey helped him to determine that, if there were a secret chamber, it must be quite small, unless it contained a window – one of the ones that gave onto the interior garden that ran alongside the scriptorium and the dormitories. And if his modest topographical plan was at all accurate, it must be in the middle of the Abbess’s chambers and study.

  He had been burning with curiosity and impatience ever since. He had given a great deal of thought to the problem of how to remain within the abbey enclosure in order to pursue his secret inquiry and test his theories. In the end one solution imposed itself: the herbarium adjacent to the medicinal garden would give him shelter for a few hours while he waited for nightfall.

  The full moon that night was Clément’s unwitting accomplice. He left the herbarium, moving as silently as a ghost and blending in to the outer wall of the dormitory. He passed beneath the scriptorium windows, taller and broader than the rest in order to allow the copyists as much light as possible. He continued alongside the smaller windows of the steam room, the only part of the abbey that was heated in winter, and the place where the sick were tended and the ink stored overnight so it wouldn’t freeze. Only a couple more yards to go. The young boy was breathless with anxiety, wondering what explanation he might give for being there in the middle of the night if he were discovered, hardly daring to imagine the ensuing punishment. He slipped below the two small windows in the Abbess’s study and below the two air vents cut into the stone wall of the circular room in her chamber containing the garderobe. The mystery chamber should be located somewhere between these two rooms. Clément retraced his steps and measured the distance in paces between Éleusie de Beaufort’s chamber and her study. He estimated about twelve yards. Abbess or not, a nun’s cell could not be that wide or spacious. The secret chamber, then, though much bigger than he had first calculated, must be windowless. The thought sent a shiver of fear and excitement down his spine. What if the room was an inquisitorial chamber? What if he discovered signs of torture there? No. There was no such thing as a female Inquisitor. He went back over the same patch, this time on his hands and knees, his nose to the ground. A cellar window, measuring approximately two yards long and a foot high, opened onto the ornamental flowerbeds at the base of the wall. Thick bars protected the window against intruders. Full-grown intruders, he supposed correctly, for they were widely enough spaced to allow a slim child to pass through. Relief gave way to panic. What should he do now? Curiosity prevailed over the many excellent reasons he could think of for turning back and leaving the abbey enclosure as quickly and, above all, as quietly as possible.

  How far was the cellar window from the floor? A piece of gravel from the pathway bordering the flowerbeds served as a sounding device. Clément calculated from the clear and almost instantaneous impact it made on the ground that five feet at the very most lay between him and his objective. He was wrong.

  Stretched out on his side, he struggled through the bars that dug into his flesh, holding his stomach in and exhaling as deeply as he could to make himself as thin as possible. Finally his chest squeezed through and he let himself fall to the floor. The length of time he was suspended in the void startled him. He landed like a dead weight and a searing pain almost made him cry out. His suffering soon gave way to panic. What if he had broken something? How would he find his way out of there? He gripped his rapidly swelling ankle, rotating it this way and that and forcing back the tears that pricked his eyes. It was a sprain, only a bad sprain. It would hurt but he would be able to walk.

  He was encircled by thick blackness. A humid darkness in which wafts of dank air combined with a lingering sweet smell reminiscent of animal glue. The cool gloom of a cellar. He began to tremble with rage at himself. How could he have been so stupid, he who was so proud of his quick wits? How was he going to get out of there? He hadn’t given it a thought. What a fool!

  He waited a few moments for his eyes to become accustomed to that indoor gloom, denser than the darkness that had camouflaged him in the garden. A long table, like a work bench, covered in uneven heaps was the first thing he was able to make out. He limped towards it, his arms outstretched. Books. Piles of books on a table. Then, out of the gloom, the shape of a ladder. No. More like a small stepladder leaning against some shelves containing more books. A library. He was in a library. Over in the corner stretching up to the ceiling, a large indistinct shape loomed. He walked over to it, wincing from the pain in his ankle. It was a spiral staircase leading to another room, and below the steps were pinned pieces of fine leather, no doubt intended to repair the book bindings. He carefully climbed the stairs. The darkness seemed to grow less opaque the further up he went. Emerging on all fours into the room at the top, he slowly rose to his feet. He froze with astonishment. It was a vast library with a soaring ceiling and books covering every wall. Moonlight filtered through the horizontal arrow slits, ingeniously positioned more than four yards above ground level, which was why he had failed to notice them earlier. Their function was to allow both light and air to filter discreetly into the room. As though in a trance, he walked over to one of the bookcases and with reverential awe pulled out a few of the weighty volumes. The good condition they were in was proof of the care they received. Choked with emotion, Clément managed to read some of the titles. He sensed the world was opening up just for him. Everything he had always longed to discover, to learn, to know was here, within his grasp. Overcome, he murmured:

  ‘My God! Could it be that the entire works of Claudius Galen* are here? De sanitate tuenda … And De anatomicis administrationibus … And even De usu partium corporis …’

  The child’s breathless voice trailed off.

  He found a translation from the Latin by a certain Farag ben Salem of a book by Abu-Bakr-Mohammed-ibn-Zakariya al-Razi,* a name he had never heard of before. The work, Al-Hawi, or, in Latin, Continens, appeared to be on pharmacology but the feeble light of the moon hampered his ability to read.

  Other books remained inaccessible to Clément, their strange-looking titles in foreign tongues guarding their secrets.

  Was it Arabic, Greek or Hebrew? He did not know. So the room he had gone through to reach there was only a storeroom, or possibly a workshop. That would explain the smell of glue and the pieces of leather. Exhilarated, he studied the books for hours, losing all notion of time. The night sky filtering through the arrow slits became tinged with milky blue, finally alerting him that day was approaching.

  With the help of the stepladder, Clément managed with great difficulty to climb back out through the cellar window. He could feel his ankle pounding – an immense throbbing pulse.

  Porte Bucy, Paris, June 1304

  The oppressive afternoon heat did not bother Francesco de Leone any more than the stench emanating from the mounds of refuse at the corner of every alleyway. On the other hand, the ceaseless activity of the human anthill made his head spin.

  The city numbered over sixty thousand hearths, meaning a population of close on two hundred thousand souls. This buzzing populace was distributed on both sides of the river Seine, spanned by only two wooden bridges: the Grand Pont and the Petit Pont, which were recklessly over-constructed – the larger of the two accommodating a hundred and forty dwellings and a hundred shops, as well as the added weight of watermills. As a result, it was not unknown for flood waters to wash the bridges away as if they were clumps of straw.

  The Knight slowly climbed Rue de Bucy, benignly refusing
the advances of a famished-looking young woman with dark shadows under her eyes. He thought she must have come out of one of the steam rooms. It was common knowledge that the mixed public baths were also used for assignations of an amorous nature, whether of the clandestine or the remunerated variety. Sex was for sale all over Paris and there was no lack of customers. Carnal love was considered a minor sin so long as it had a price on it. It allowed men whose poverty inhibited them from marrying to satisfy their urgent needs, their desires. It also allowed starving girls, cast into the street because of an untimely pregnancy or by penniless parents, to survive, while at the same time saving married women from the lechery of the powerful. At least these were a few of the glib arguments that acted as a balm for the consciences of some and the guilt of others. They did not persuade Francesco de Leone, and he was filled with a strange sadness. The oldest profession in the world, practised by women who were increasingly excluded from any others, was spreading in the city. At this rate they would soon be able to count their options on one hand: born to wealth, married, nuns or prostitutes. In the latter case they would end up eaten away by tuberculosis or intestinal diseases, or even slashed to ribbons by some casual client. Who cared what became of these spectres? Not the powers that be, not the Church, certainly not their families.

  The girl kept her eyes fixed on him. She was intimidated by his appearance yet driven by hunger and fear of destitution. He paused to study her.

  He was chasing that woman, always the same one, in the ambulatory of that church, always the same place. Did he want to kill her or was he trying to save her from some unseen enemy? He had prayed for the second theory to be the true one. And yet he remained unable to convince himself that it was.

  The eternal misery of women, their astonishing frailty. His mother and infant sister, their throats slit like lambs, left to rot in the blazing sun, their wounds crawling with flies. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, the girl was smiling at him, the pathetic smile of a poor unwanted creature looking for money for her supper and a bed for the night. There was nothing seductive or alluring about those sickly-looking lips. And yet, though powerless to seduce, she still attempted to persuade him.