The Lady Agnes Mystery, Volume 1

by Andrea Japp

  He took five silver pennies from his purse, a fortune for a pauper, and walked over to her:

  ‘Eat and rest a while, sister.’

  She stared at the coins he had placed in the palm of her hand and shook her head.

  When she looked up at him, her pale cheeks were streaked.

  ‘I … Come, I’m sweet and gentle, and I’m not sick, I promise … I …’

  ‘Hush, rest.’

  ‘But … How may I …’

  ‘Pray for me.’

  He turned on his heel and walked away quickly, leaving her weeping, overcome with relief and despair. For her and for his mother and sister, for all women who had no man to protect them, for Christ and his immense love for women, a love that had so long been scorned by miserable buffoons. Sinners, sinners disguised as practitioners of the faith.

  Giotto Capella. Long ago in a land where the sun scorched the earth, the Knight would have given his life to slay this man. Arnaud de Viancourt knew nearly all there was to know of Francesco de Leone’s childhood and had hesitated before pronouncing the name of their ‘unwitting intermediary’. When he had finally uttered it and awaited his brother’s response, he had evoked the threat that was hanging over them in order to justify imposing on him such a difficult task.

  The handsome white stone house, completed only months before, dominated Rue de Bucy. It belonged to Giotto Capella, a native of Crema, a small Lombard village to the south-east of Milan. His third-floor windows gave onto the Seine and the Louvre. It was the reason he had chosen the location: to be close to the heart of power and thus to the biggest borrowers, but also to Paris’s natural frontier. For the disposition of the powerful towards moneylenders was a fickle one. A fact that the Lombards – the name given to Italian and Jewish moneylenders alike regardless of whether they were natives of that province – had had the recent misfortune to discover. In reality, the inconsistencies of the new century with regard to usury should have amused Giotto, who was not an uncultivated man but one for whom money was a means and, above all, an end and a passion. How could they as merchants be expected to lend money to strangers without making a profit? Nonsense! There was a good reason why usury had been outlawed. It allowed kings and noblemen to borrow money and then banish the usurers, confiscating their assets and brandishing religion as a justification. How many times had they had to listen to that convenient verse from the Gospel encouraging the lender to expect nothing in return? Thus the debtors rid themselves of creditors, interest and debt. What fools they were. For someone who knew how to negotiate, a debt was always repayable, whether against cash or against less obvious forms of payment.

  Giotto Capella set down his glass of mulled wine, a rare treat he permitted himself regardless of the gout that seared his foot and was progressively immobilising him. The Knight Hospitaller had been waiting outside in his anteroom for some minutes. What did he want? The moneylender had felt uneasy the moment he agreed to the meeting. The Leones were one of the most eminent Italian families and had been in the service of the papacy for centuries. They were exceedingly wealthy, notwithstanding the vows of poverty taken by a number of their male offspring, which included Francesco. The Templars and Hospitallers were the type of complex and powerful entity it was preferable not to associate with. No prince, king or bishop could make them yield, so what chance had a moneylender! Even less so, as Leone was not there to ask for money. On this Giotto Capella would have staked his life. A pity, since money was so simple: it retained, restrained, and subjugated. What did he want, then? A favour, a mediator, the means with which to blackmail somebody? If Giotto Capella had had the courage, he would have turned the Knight of Christ away. But that was a luxury he could ill afford. Conflict with a military order would hamper his long-held ambition: to hold the post of Captain General of the Lombards of France by adroitly forcing out the current holder, Giorgio Zuccari – if necessary into his grave. For years he had been unable to abide Zuccari. A man given to preaching and impossible to catch at his own game, such was the loathsome integrity he showed towards his peers and, worse still, towards his debtors. Thus he applied to the letter Saint Louis’s recommendation that interest should not exceed 33 per cent. Why, if there were people crazy or desperate enough to pay 45 per cent? After all, Capella did not force potential borrowers onto his premises!

  This line of reasoning repeated a hundred times worked like a charm. It had the power to lift his spirits. His light-heartedness, however, was short-lived. What the devil did Leone want from him? Why hadn’t he gone directly to Zuccari? His name and the fact that he was a Hospitaller permitted it, and the old moneylender would have welcomed him with open arms. A pox on inscrutable people!

  His unease combined with a feeling of displeasure the moment Francesco de Leone walked into his study – a veritable Ali Baba’s cave jam-packed with paintings, carved wooden boxes, furs and valuable pieces of porcelain from his latest seizures. God, the man was handsome, while he resembled an ugly toad, wizened and yellow-looking from the constant privations decreed by his physic in a clipped voice. Even his wife closed her eyes in disgust now, the rare times he stroked her thighs.

  He stood up, holding out his hands, forcing himself to be gracious.

  ‘Knight, you honour my humble dwelling.’

  Leone immediately sensed Capella’s hostility. He moved forward a few paces, responding to the perfunctory greeting only with a slight raising of his eyebrows. It occurred to Giotto that the man belonged to that select few before whom others knelt without them even noticing. His resentment mounted. He checked it, however, by enquiring:

  ‘Would you accept a goblet of my best wine?’

  ‘With pleasure. I do not doubt that it is excellent.’

  The moneylender considered for a moment whether the seemingly anodyne remark contained a hidden reproach. What he really wanted was for the Knight to show that he was as greedy as his fellow man, but shielded by his name, his order, his piety. Then he could despise him freely, dismiss him with feigned indignation. He could already hear himself saying:

  ‘What! And you a Knight Hospitaller, Monsieur! What a disgrace!’

  All those nobles and prelates, those so-called dignitaries who had filed before him and whom he had flattered, reassured and encouraged in their vices, which were the source of his livelihood – the never-ending source. Most had abandoned themselves to the deadly sins of cupidity and covetousness, which had corrupted their souls, their hearts, even their speech. But the man before him possessed the calm confidence of the pure, and they were the worst – especially when they were intelligent and no longer knew fear.

  The two men sat in deceptively companionable silence while a maidservant fetched the wine. Leone took the measure of the man opposite him. A few seconds were sufficient for him to know that Capella remained what he had always been: an avaricious swindler who only refrained sometimes from committing the vilest acts out of cowardice. An image flashed through his mind of a repulsive, carnivorous beast lying in wait uneasily, ready to pounce on his enemy’s throat at the slightest sign of weakness. The possibility of redemption was not distributed equally among men, for there were those who did not wish it.

  Francesco took a sip of wine and set down the goblet, made ugly by an excess of chasing and inlaid precious stones. He reached beneath his heavy linen surcoat23 for the Grand-Master’s letter and handed it to Capella. After the Lombard had broken the seal and read the first few lines, everything around him started spinning. He murmured:

  ‘My God …’

  He shot a glance at Leone, who signalled to him to continue reading.

  It had never occurred to Capella that this blood-soaked memory from nearly fifteen years ago might one day come back to haunt him. He had paid dearly enough for it in every sense of the word.

  A warm tear fell on his hand, followed by another. He let the sheet of vellum fall to the marble floor he had had brought over from his native Carrara at great expense.

  Was he aware that he was
crying? Leone could not be sure. Francesco de Leone waited. He knew the contents of the letter, of the blackmail note more precisely: any weapon, the prior had specified, himself having recourse to this strategy of extremes.

  What did he care about the usurer’s tears, or his memories? So many people had died because of him.

  The other man whispered breathlessly:

  ‘This is monstrous.’

  ‘Why? Because it is the truth?’

  Giotto Capella gave the Knight the look of a drowning man and spluttered:

  ‘Why? Because it was so long ago … Because I have suffered the torment of guilt, and of the worst kind: that which we inflict on ourselves. And because I have tried so hard to be worthy of forgiveness …’

  ‘You mean, to be forgotten. We have never forgotten and we have not forgiven. And as for the torments of guilt, why, I would laugh if I were a mere soldier. Who let the Mamelukes invade Acre more than a month into the siege? Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil was champing at the bit outside the city walls with his seventy thousand men on horseback and his hundred and fifty foot soldiers from Egypt and Syria. The defence of the citadel of Saint-Jean was heroic: there were only fifteen thousand Christian soldiers inside the city walls. They fought like lions, outnumbered by fifteen to one. The Sultan’s men identified the weak points in the enclosure and in groups of a thousand tunnelled into the sewers and the butchers’ pit with remarkable precision.’

  Leone paused to study the breathless man, who was gripping the edges of his writing table with both hands.

  Capella made an attempt to justify himself in a barely audible voice:

  ‘The negotiations had been successful. Al-Ashraf had agreed to the citadel being evacuated if the defenders left behind all their possessions.’

  ‘Come now. King Henri would never have accepted such a complete, such a dishonourable surrender. What is more, the defenders of the citadel were soon able to judge for themselves how far they could trust the Sultan’s word,’ retorted Leone in a calm voice, fixing the usurer with his deep-blue eyes. ‘On 15 May, the New Tower, donated by the Comtesse de Blois, collapsed, having been undermined by sappers. Al-Ashraf then promised to allow the conquered to evacuate, above all their women and children. But the Mamelukes were already in the central square desecrating the chapel and raping the women. What followed was a bloodbath. The Dominicans, Franciscans, Clarisses were massacred and the women and children were taken away to be sold as slaves. That was only the beginning of the destruction. Almost everyone was slain: my brother Hospitallers, the Knights Templar of Saint-Lazare and Saint-Thomas. Only a handful of cripples were left alive.’

  ‘But it was inevitable,’ Capella whined. ‘Two years before – in the month of August, I believe – some peasants and Muslim merchants were attacked by Hugues de Sully’s Italian crusaders in a marketplace. The merchants were forced to seek refuge in their inn, and …’

  ‘And who came to their aid?’ Leone interrupted in a voice that was now openly contemptuous. ‘The Knights Templar and Hospitaller!’

  ‘It was a war. Wars are …’

  ‘No. It was an ambush. An ambush that was admirably thought out and therefore worth its weight in gold. Was it not, moneylender? As for that skirmish at the marketplace, it was nothing but a poor excuse. Anyone starting a war must always provide some kind of justification. But that is neither here nor there. Had the Mamelukes not known the precise location of the New Tower and the sewers, the work of the sappers would have been useless, or at least slowed down. We could have waited for reinforcements or, at worst, negotiated the evacuation of most of the people. How much did they pay, Giotto Capella, for the slaughter of fifteen thousand men and almost as many women and children?’

  ‘They … they beat me. They … they threatened to castrate me. They were going to … They were laughing …’ he stammered.

  The usurer’s eyes swept the room, as if he were expecting some miraculous intervention. Leone stared at him. The sly rat was using his last defence: pity.

  Early June 1291. The centre of the battle had moved. The Sidon Fort was now under siege and would not hold out much longer. A young boy of twelve struggled against the hand clutching his shoulder, that of his Uncle Henri, and, freeing himself from the iron grip, ran towards the ruins of Acre. He tripped and fell then leapt to his feet, his hands sticky with blood.

  The broad white steps were bathed in sunlight. The broad white steps of the chapel defiled by streaks of dried blood and a morass of human flesh. The broad steps swarming with bloated, feasting flies.

  Some of the women had attempted to seek refuge in the chapel, to hide their children there. Underneath one of them, whose head, almost severed from the neck, was facing the sky, the young boy recognised a mass of flaxen hair. Flaxen hair congealed with blood. His sister’s hair.

  ‘How much, Capella? How much for my mother and seven-year-old sister, defiled, their throats slit, left to rot in the sun, ravaged by dogs so that I could no longer recognise them? How much for your soul?’

  The other man’s gaze settled at last on the Knight. The gaze of a dead man, a gaze from the past. In a voice he no longer recognised as his own, and suspecting he might never recover from this confession, he said:

  ‘Five hundred gold pieces.’

  ‘You are lying. I can always detect your feeble lies. It was a smaller sum, wasn’t it?’

  Faced with the other man’s silence, the Knight persisted:

  ‘Wasn’t it? What did you think? That doubling or tripling the amount in gold would absolve you? That by multiplying the price of your treachery and greed they would somehow be legitimised? That everything in this world has a price? How much do you imagine a thousand pounds, or a hundred thousand, or ten million is worth in the eyes of God? Why, the same as a single penny.’

  ‘Three hundred … And I only saw half of it. They broke their word. They spat in my face when I went to claim the balance.’

  ‘The rascals!’ said the Knight, mockingly.

  He closed his eyes, tilted back his head, and, as though speaking to himself, repeated:

  ‘A hundred and fifty gold pieces for all those corpses, for those two women … A hundred and fifty gold pieces, which allowed you to become a usurer. A tidy sum for a … what were you when you still had a soul?’

  ‘A meat merchant.’

  ‘Oh yes … That would explain your perfect knowledge of the sewers at Acre and of the butchers’ pit.’ Leone sighed, before continuing in a hushed voice, ‘I know you and your kind so well that I sometimes feel I am enveloped by a rotten stench. It follows me everywhere, sticks to my skin, makes my stomach heave. I can sense you before I see you, before I hear you. I can smell you. The stale odour of your dead decaying souls suffocates me. Do you know the stench of a rotting soul? It is worse than any stinking carcass.’

  The other man leapt up, suddenly oblivious to the stabbing pain in his foot. His face drained of blood, he moved towards the Hospitaller’s armchair, and fell to his knees, wailing:

  ‘Mercy, I beg you, mercy!’

  ‘That is beyond me, and I regret it. For my own sake.’

  Some minutes passed, punctuated by the kneeling man’s sobs. A violent sadness shook Leone. How could a simple act of forgiveness cause his infinite love for Him to waver? What had he lost, what had he destroyed of his faith? He pulled himself up with the thought that he had not yet become the Light, that he was still drawing near, with such difficulty, so much effort, like a desperate ant, deranged and sickened by darkness.

  One day. One day he would reach out and touch it at last, the Light he had only been able to glimpse in the nave at Santa Costanza. One day he would embrace it, he would breathe it in, be immersed in it and all his sins would be cleansed. He was drawing near, he could feel it. For so long the tireless ant he had become had crossed oceans, climbed mountains, braved every obstacle, nearly died a hundred deaths, seared by the desert sun, wasted by fever, swept away by storms. And yet each time he had picked himself up and
continued towards the Light. He longed one day to die inside the Light, to dissolve and at last to be at peace.

  The Ineffable Trace, the Unutterable Secret was within his reach, all that was necessary to attain it was to shed blood, his own blood.

  Leone stood up, gently pushing aside the broken man.

  ‘I await this meeting with Guillaume de Nogaret. You are, after all, an official moneylender to the kingdom of France, and I am sure you will find an excellent reason to explain my presence here. And remember: at the slightest sign of treachery Philip the Fair will learn who was responsible for the slaughter at Acre. I shall remain in your house for the duration of this enterprise. Do not speak to me, usurer, about any other matter. I shall take my meals alone in the room you will provide for me in your residence. I want it ready within the hour. I am going outside to breathe the putrid smell of the streets. It must be more tolerable than the one you mask with incense in your chambers.’

  He paused in the doorway without turning and addressed the shell of a man:

  ‘Never lie to me. I know so much about you, Capella, so much that you do not know. Should you be tempted to betray me for a fat sum or simply out of fear, I swear before God that I shall punish your days and nights with torments such as you have only touched upon in your wildest imaginings.’

  Clairets Abbey, Perche, June 1304

  Every night for weeks Clément had been coming back, drawn almost in spite of himself by the treasures in the secret library that were hidden from the eyes of the world. After a few uneasy forays he had gradually gained in confidence. He would enter at nightfall and occasionally felt bold enough to stay for the whole of the following day. He lived on the provisions he pilfered from the kitchens at Souarcy – for he was becoming more and more distrustful of Mabile. Indeed, his initial, rather dormant mistrust had grown keener since Eudes de Larnay’s last visit. Up until then, he had been content to spy upon the spy in order to protect Agnès, but now he was on the lookout for any suspicious activity. He had soon seen through the folly of his first plan: catching Mabile red-handed in order to give the Dame de Souarcy a legitimate excuse to turn her out was too obvious – too obvious but, above all, of little or no use. Why not instead catch the spy out at her own game? Why not plant a few harmless secrets for her to find? Then if Eudes tried to use them against his half-sister, it would be easy to discredit him in spite of his lineage and wealth, which gave him nevertheless a significant advantage. All Clément needed to do now was convince his mistress to agree to this subterfuge. He knew that his lady was beginning to glimpse an unpleasant truth.