The Treasure of Montsegur

by Sophy Burnham

  “Our trinity of love,” he was saying foolishly. “One man and two women, each more beautiful than the next. And all three caring for one another! My love.” He turned to kiss his bride.

  But she began to laugh hysterically. “Oh, William!” She pushed away, and with a wild look left and right she fled the room. But I stood rooted in my passion, still held in William’s arm, and happy to be there, however or why it came about.

  “What’s happened?” He turned to me in astonishment.

  I clung to him, kissing his lips, his face.

  “Jeanne. What did you say to her?” He took me by the shoulders and held me away.

  “I told her that you belong to me. I told her that we loved each other at Montségur.” My arms found their way around his neck.

  With one hand he snatched my hands away, and with the other he slapped me across the face.

  Still I clung to him. “William!”

  But he turned and strode after Baiona, leaving me weeping and lonely and angry and alone.

  I was not proud of what I’d done. Later he tracked me down in the common room. He was angrier than I had ever seen him. “Go apologize.” He grabbed my arm. Hurting me. “Go tell her it’s a lie. Say you’ve lied.”

  I searched his face. I’d never noticed before how his blue eyes floated upward under his lids, leaving a white half-moon beneath. It gave him a cold sensuality.

  “Go on,” he urged.

  I went. I did as I was told. She listened from a distance and nodded in the same cool way that the Lady Esclarmonde might have done; and I made no move to approach or touch her. “My child is Gobert’s,” I added. “No doubt of that.”

  She accepted my apology with a queenly nod. “Only we will never be friends again,” she said. “I do not know you. I do not like you. I do not trust you.” There was a pause. “On the other hand, I see no reason to tell Esclarmonde about this. It’s never happened.”

  She was right not to trust me. I went away hurt and angry, and resentful too that the potion was a fraud.

  A week later I watched them exchange their vows and rings in the castle garden, under a blossoming apple tree. Baiona’s face was pale, but she walked head high with her usual grace, contained and regal, and she was smiling as she accepted the congratulations of the guests. She was very happy. I marveled that I could stand at the ceremony, blessing their union—I’d had to, for the sake of my hurt pride and perhaps for Esclarmonde—but the moment it was over I ran across the grass, running from the sight of the man I loved now married to another. He was kissing his bride, and I was running, running away from them across the grass. I plunged into the walled herb garden and hid, my back to the wall, weeping uncontrollably. My heart twisted in my chest like a writhing animal. It was breaking into two—no, a dozen bleeding fragments, shattering like glass.

  The pain was so intense that I bit my own forearm to stifle my cries, to hurt myself, to hate myself, to feel another pain. I bit my own flesh until the toothmarks flared up, imprinted red on my skin.

  The day following I mounted my horse with a frozen heart to return to my husband, Gobert, and his icy sister, who would treat me with distant and courteous reserve, and where my baby, soon after deciding that it didn’t care to be born, would slip out of my body, leaving a sticky trail of red slime dripping down my thighs.

  Five years passed. I had divorced Gobert and moved to a little house in Toulouse (bought with hush-money paid by Gobert to keep secret the reason for our divorce). The war had broken out again full force; and I had joined the Resistance, carrying messages. I was almost twenty, and I’d reached my full height. One night, as I was leaving a meeting to go home, I heard my name called:

  “Jeanne.”

  It was William. My stomach dropped. He too had changed. His body had thickened. The hair at his temples had the faintest sprinkling of gray. He walked with the heavy tread of authority, and he held himself taller, if possible, and with more confidence. I’d heard nothing of him for five years. Now, it seemed, he’d joined the court of Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse.

  “Jeanne, I’m so glad to see you. Look at you,” he said, laughing and turning me round. “You’ve grown. You’re beautiful.”

  At first I was embarrassed, shamefaced with memory.

  But he was smiling broadly. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  I didn’t know what to say. “How is Baiona?” I asked stiffly.

  He laughed and swept me in his arms for a big kiss. “She’s well enough. She lives in Foix. Come now, I’ll walk you home.”

  He tucked my arm under his and escorted me through the dark stone streets to my little house, talking all the time. I did not invite him in.

  In the next weeks, I seemed to meet him everywhere. At first I thought he’d lost his boyish ebullience, but every now and again it flashed forth in a sly wink of those startling blue-sky eyes, or he would rock back on his heels in silent laughter at some joke. When did I realize William was flirting with me—the way he stood full face, legs apart and hands on his narrow hips, or else leaning back on his heels, smiling straight into my eyes? Displaying himself for me. He would hold my eyes in long luxurious looks. It took me several days to understand—I mean, to remember—that he had stood like that even at Montségur. He’d been flirting with me even then.

  “Don’t you understand, little silly?” he said one day.

  “Understand what?”

  “There’s no one like you. Don’t you want me still?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’ve never forgotten you. Or your wonderful declaration of love. I couldn’t take advantage of it then. Do you love me still? Why don’t you love me now? There’s nothing now to interfere with you and me.”

  I was shocked. “What do you mean? You’re married.” I paced the reception room nervously, and yet I was helpless to send him away. I’d wished so often for this moment.

  “My marriage to Baiona has nothing to do with my feelings for you.”

  His hands reached out to touch my breasts. I could not move.

  “Don’t you like me just a little?”

  He was kissing me now. “Oh, Jeanne, I’ve missed you so.”

  I was helpless with longing and hopeless with self-hatred. I tried to push him away. “Why didn’t you want me at Montségur?”

  He stepped back, paced two steps, turned, and faced me. He clapped his hands briskly, as if wiping out that memory.

  “Because I wanted a woman of property. I couldn’t afford to get you pregnant. But now we’re both older. There’s nothing to stop us. Unless—” he faltered. “Unless you don’t like me. I’m only a landless faidit. I have nothing to offer; I’m not worth your time.”

  Now began a game of hide-and-seek, or hunt-and-chase. We were thrown together by the Cause. But in addition he pursued me subtly, finding ways for us to serve on a mission together. He’d come up behind and wrap one arm about me, then brush my breasts with the back of his hand, teasing to make the nipples stand high. I was a bird caught in a trap. If he found me alone in a passageway, he’d lift my hair and kiss the back of my neck, and when I turned he’d catch me in his arms, seeking my mouth hungrily. Eventually my mouth searched his as well.

  He called me his darling love. He said that his wife didn’t understand him, that she was a miser, controlling the purse-strings. She didn’t appreciate his need for one of the big Lombard or Spanish warhorses, for example, and in fact refused to accommodate him. His horse was old and small and not strong enough to win prizes in the jousting lists; he needed a charger that, by winning for him, would allow him to buy a castle, lands. He needed it for war besides. How could he run down a French knight and hold him for ransom when his own horse was so slow? Yet Baiona kept tight watch on their money, he said, doling it out to him in bits and coins. All the time, we were laughing together, playing, or plotting missions. He was complex. He would fall into brief black moods—the black dog at his throat—and another day come whistling to my house as sunn
y as a day in June.

  Soon we were all but living together. On many mornings during the next ten months I handed him his armor and watched him dress and walked him to his horse. One day we went together to the horse fairs, and I bought him a destrier. It was my pleasure to buy him a new strong horse, though it took nearly every penny I had. He accepted it because of his true love for me, he said, and I believed it. I wanted him well mounted. I wanted him safe. How many times did he murmur his love? He said that when Baiona died, he’d marry me.

  Did I suffer guilt? Yes, but he dispelled that too. He explained that he lived with Baiona as a sister. How could what we did be wrong? And anyway (I told myself), I wasn’t responsible: I’d drunk the magic drink.

  My arms around his neck, and his hands pulling at the laces at my breasts, mine fumbling with his breeches, and we are falling onto the bed with William already inside of me, push and thrust, our lips engaged—while I, near fainting, gasping, hold him deep inside me, swallowing hungrily this man I love. It’s all entwined, our love, the Cause, betrayal, love, and war.

  “He doesn’t sound so fine a man to me.”

  I shoot Jerome a look. “He was wonderful.” How did all that happen to spill out? I wasn’t going to confess. The story pouring out like water over a dam, my pent-up longing to talk of William, and the past.

  Jerome snorts, unimpressed. “Wonderful how? I’ve known men like that, dreamers, drifting from woman to woman. No patience for hard work. He couldn’t even support himself, according to you.”

  “He had hard luck.”

  “What’s the difference between his marrying for money and your Gobert’s using up your dowry? This William spent his wife’s money on big horses for the wars and jousts. A gambler, right? He was unfaithful to his wife and unfaithful to his mistress—you.”

  “You never met him.”

  “What did he have then?”

  I hesitate. Who can say what captivates a woman’s heart? “He was the most fascinating, most entertaining, handsomest man I’ve ever met. He inspired us. He laid down his life for our parage, our Occitan way of life. He didn’t have to. He came from a foreign country. He was warm and funny and daring.” But my voice shakes. I’m remembering other times.

  Jerome lets out a foul-mouthed curse. “Charm doesn’t last,” he says, concentrating on his leather. He looks up at me. “He was unfaithful. I don’t like lies. I tell you, if I found the woman for me and knew her to be true, as true as gold, I wouldn’t let her go for lack of money. Or give her up to someone else, neither. And if she married me, I wouldn’t cheat on her.” He stares at me so fiercely that I blush and drop my eyes.

  We’re silent then for a long time.

  I was remembering those times when I carried messages for the Cause—word of raids or plans of them, reports of movements of French troops, or news of papal Inquisitors. My tasks were simple. I’d pass word to the baker four streets over, who might pass the message on in relays to a shepherd to carry on. I sat in on underground meetings. Sometimes I rode with a message to the fighters at Saissac or Mirepoix or Peyrepertuse or Roquefixade.

  I kept a safe house where a Good Man or Woman could find shelter for a night or a week, or where a small group could meet to hear him or her preach. Sometimes I gave a roving knight hospitality for a night.

  One night I heard a banging on my door. In my nightshift, terrified, I plunged down the steep stairs to the door.

  “Who is it?” I called out, my voice low.

  “Hurry! Open up.”

  I recognized the voice and swung the door open to reveal William on the threshold. He was half-carrying a limp and bleeding man.

  “Quick.”

  “He’s badly wounded.”

  We carried him upstairs.

  “Keep him safe,” said William. “They’re looking for him. I have to go. Tell no one he’s here.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “A raid. We’ve killed one of the Dominicans.” He kissed me quickly and was gone into the night, filthy and mud-splattered, the blood of his comrade drying on his shirt.

  I bathed the visitor, washed the hole in his gut, but anyone could see he would not live the night, not with his stomach seeping out the hole and dirt and wood embedded in the wound.

  He died without revealing his name or any information. I had no way to pass the word to William. My problem was to get the body out of the house, without the neighbors’ prying eyes. I burnt his clothing and sewed him into a sacking, as if a bag of vegetables. My houseboy helped. We lugged the sack outside and tossed it in broad daylight on a wagon. We drove him out of town into the fields, where we tossed him in a ditch, poor man, unsacked, for the buzzards and maggots. We couldn’t dig a grave. Better to make it look as if he’d been set upon by brigands, robbed and left there dead.

  The saints know there were enough of them.

  I sent the boy across the mountains into Aragon. No use his being caught for what I did, or turning me in either. With money in his pocket he was happy to be gone.

  And always there would be William riding in at night to bed down at my Toulouse house if he was in the neighborhood, or to ask my help. I’d have laid down my life for him.

  “What about the second time?” asks Jerome.

  I jump, startled out of my reverie. “What second time?”

  “You said you married twice.”

  “Ah, the second time. Roland-Pierre. He was a good, generous man. I was fond of him, but not the way I yearned for William. Still, we stayed married almost nine years, and then he died.”

  “That’s the way of it,” says Jerome.

  But I’m thinking of the lighthearted Roland-Pierre, who went off to fight with the Count of Toulouse and came back from the wars a melancholy man. Afterward, he could not shake his nervous sadness. I tried to lift his spirits with games and guests, and hunts for stag or boar. But his despair lay so heavily on him that you could see it like a dark mantle covering him, black as death. Nothing I did could cheer him up.

  The doctors strapped him into a special chair with leather thongs and poured bitter purges down his throat, so vile that he vomited across the room; they slathered him with plasters and poultices as smelly as a stableyard. I held his hand, my darling friend, weeping at his sorrow and his plight. He could not shake that accidie, which the monks call sin.

  “He didn’t die.” I cannot stop myself, my voice too loud. “He killed himself.”

  “Killed himself!” says Jerome, looking up in horror from his work. “A suicide!”

  My hands shake. I put down the spoon.

  “So then the Devil has claimed his soul.” Jerome’s voice is hoarse.

  “No! I had him buried decently in hallowed Catholic ground, with a good carved stone for his marker. I wouldn’t have him left outside the Church. It was an accident.”

  And yet I’ve always wondered and worried for him: they say that a suicide can never find his way into the Light and drifts forever in the gloom, not here, not there; I could not bear to think of it. The Friends of God say that he’ll come back to earth once more but in an even worse life, and that’s also too horrible to bear.

  Jerome is watching me under his brows, considering. “Well, you did right to bury him in consecrated ground.”

  “Yes.” I had to pay plenty for his burial in sanctified Church grounds, though, for he was a good and pious Catholic. The priests demanded most of his estate for the favor of a Christian burial, but I did not grudge him that, poor, gentle soul, not for his eternal life. He hurt, poor lamb. All he wanted was to relieve the pain. I was hurt and angry he would leave me. I felt abandoned. But I’d never condemn him to eternal punishment. He loved me and also my little Guillamette. We had happy times. If I could love him when he killed himself, why wouldn’t God the more?

  When I first met him, he was one of the Resistance knights, young and merry. I had been warned to expect his proposal.

  “What will you do now?” he’d asked that night, sitting before t
he fire in my little house. He nursed his mug of hot spiced wine.

  “When?” I pretended not to know what he was referring to.

  “Now that you’re pregnant. William told me—do you mind? He says the father died.” (At which I sucked in my breath.)

  “No,” I said quietly, staring into the flames. “He didn’t die, but he cannot marry me. I’ll have the child. It won’t be the first bastard born into this world.”

  “Why not marry?” he asked, taking my hand.

  “And with whom would that be?” I laughed lightly, but my heart twisted cruelly in my breast. I’d already made my decision. It remained only to proceed. He smiled an open charming grin.

  “Why not me? We’d do well together, you and I.”

  Why not? He was younger than I, and not bad-looking. If he was willing tra-la to overlook my condition, why not take the man who wanted me and would give my child a name?

  Jerome is squinting at me, askance, waiting for me to continue. I duck my head. “It was long ago. I’ve had good times too. My life’s not all been bad. I’m not complaining. Roland-Pierre was a good husband and a good father to my little girl, who surely is in heaven herself. I have loved and been loved, and what more can any of us ask?”

  I smile at him and toss my head. “And what of you?”

  And so we pass the evening, the two of us indoors, exchanging our stories, with the smell of stew brewing in the pot and the smoke warm on the hearth, and the cozy sound of rain clattering against the roof.

  Then, to keep from thinking about William or Roland-Pierre, I tell him the fable of King Midas and the golden touch, and the Bible story of Susanna and the three men who tried to seduce her. Jerome likes stories, so I tell about Abraham and how the angel saved him from killing his son Isaac, and then I tell the story of how Jacob stole his brother’s inheritance, and finally some of the romantic tales of Tristan and the Princess Iseult.

  Jerome is impressed. He doesn’t know the Bible stories so well as I (not having ever had a Good Book to read, and not being able to read if he’d ever found himself in possession of one). Naturally, he doesn’t know the romantic ballads either. But he tells me about the robbers and the barnyard animals. Soon we’re laughing at each other’s tales.