The Treasure of Montsegur

by Sophy Burnham

  One day toward the end I came on Baiona weeping over the embroidery in her lap. All day long she sewed, and for as long at night as the fire let her see; her fingers embroidered fruits and flowers on many of our dresses. She gave away her work. One woman carried an embroidered tree twisting up one sleeve, its leaves spreading over her shoulder and down her back. Another had the image of her husband worked in black and gold across her breast.

  That day in February I came on her in the women’s chamber. She was sewing with such concentration that strands of brown hair fell from her cap across her face, unnoticed. Her shoulders were shaking. I sat beside her, put one arm around her shoulder.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She shook her head silently. I thought perhaps she’d had a fight with William. God knows everyone’s nerves were on edge. But she held up her hands. They were swollen with cold and blistered, langouste red. I covered them with mine, thinking her joints too stiff to sew. Then I saw that she was not adding stitches but rather picking at the thread already sewn.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” She pulled away the cloth, but I snatched it to me and spread it out across my knees, and then I saw she was removing the designs.

  “Why, Baiona?”

  “I have no more thread.” Her voice was a cry of distress.

  I left her there, tearing at her work. And when she had enough thread free again, I spied her working a different design in the half-used cloth.

  Arpaïs, who was one of the daughters of the commander, Raymond de Perella, took a piece of her own underlinen and pulled out threads for Baiona, until the garment was completely destroyed; but her friend had thread again with which to work. I wished I’d thought of it. Every few days Baiona would tear out the work she’d done and begin a new design.

  At the end of February we surrendered.

  TWENTY-TWO

  After that I would talk no more. Jerome undressed me and put me to bed as if I were a child, kissing me gently, and he stroked me until my flesh awoke to his touch and I turned toward his sweet and urgent presence. Afterward I lay awake a long time, listening to this kind man’s heavy breathing, and wondering what would happen now and whether I should go to the young priest and confess, as he’d enjoined in his sermon. (No, a bad idea, for it would mean my very life, and Jerome’s too.)

  Then I remembered that grace comes only through God and through praying for forgiveness to Christ Jesus, whose love is given not by our earning it but by His Being and through our sincere repentance (if only I knew of what to repent). And then I found myself praying with all my heart—praying not only for having spent my life in hatred and jealousy, in anger and in ungrateful fear of not having enough or of not being enough, when all was ordained, but also praying for forgiveness for having lost the treasure, and for I don’t know what else—all of it—as I lay in the dark beside this gentle man; and slowly forgiveness came in the form of blessed sleep.

  Jerome woke up, instantly alert. It was the middle of the night. Jeanne lay beside him trustingly, her head close, her soft breath on his arm. She was a heretic, or at least she had consorted with them—confirmed, admitted; and worse (or was it better?), she knew where the treasure lay buried in its cave, guarded by the spears of ancient hunters under the eyes of the fleeing stags. A terrible fear accosted him, a chill fear. He’d brought her here out of dogged stubbornness, an intractable refusal to be pushed around, and he could be killed for harboring her. He slipped out of bed to his knees, praying for help—God’s help. What was he to do?

  There was a reason the heretics were surrounded at Montségur. She hadn’t told of that, but it was common knowledge. He wondered if she’d been involved in that raid too, perhaps run messages back and forth. Not long before the siege, two emissaries of the Pope had embarked on a new inquisitorial tour. One was William Arnald, the first and most hated Inquisitor of the province. He was accompanied by a pair of Dominicans, a Franciscan, several other Inquisitors, and four domestic servants—a party of eleven in all. It was known that on Ascension Eve, the group would stay at Avignonet, as guests of the Count of Toulouse. The day of their arrival fifteen knights and forty-two men-at-arms from Montségur, in addition to others from the surrounding neighborhood, had ridden hard for sixty miles to gather secretly near Avignonet. They walked their horses quietly, speaking in whispers with only the sound of hoofbeats, of saddles creaking or the clink of armor attesting to their path. They halted by the leper-house just outside Avignonet, where a messenger from the Count’s bailiff came to meet them, bearing a dozen axes.

  At nightfall twelve of the vigilantes moved to the house where Arnald and the other six Inquisitors were sleeping. They battered down the bedroom door. They fell on the Inquisitors, and, without allowing them time to say their prayers, they butchered the men with axes, maces, daggers, and swords. Va be, esta be! they shouted, as they competed in battering the skulls and dead bodies, each giving a coup as blood-sign of having participated in the deaths, and each taking glory from the massacre.

  After the killing the savage raiding party divided the spoils and valuables: some books, a candlestick, a box of ginger, a handful of coins, some clothes and bedding. They left the bloody corpses in the house at Avignonet and clattered noisily away, without even trying to keep their deed a secret, until they separated that night, dispersing into the countryside, a large group returning to Montségur.

  By the next morning, Ascension Day, news had spread like fire through the region, with crowds gathering in every village to acclaim the fighters. The story was soon well known, told and retold with elaborations in every town and tavern. Some thought the raid was carried out with the blessing of Toulouse, whose guests the Inquisitors were—the way these nobles thought! Others believed that the raiders were outlaws, operating without orders in a frenzy of pent-up frustration. The Count’s war of liberation had begun.

  The effect was immediate. The French in fury called for vengeance. They mounted the Crusade against Montségur, where hundreds of the perfecti lived. Death for death, a hundredfold. Again the populace were divided in their judgments, some feeling the murders justified, others that they were a foul and cowardly deed. Jerome waffled between the two sides. He didn’t approve of the hunting of heretics, but the Catholic Church was right: you couldn’t have holy friars and monks murdered and massacred in their sleep.

  And what of Jeanne? Tears choked him.

  After a time, he crept back into bed beside the woman, but still he couldn’t sleep. If truth be told, he did not like to give her up, not because of the treasure, which she might know nothing of anymore, months having passed—and who knew where it was by now (or even if she were lying or repeating stories she had heard, just common-knowledge tales), but also because (taking in a breath, expanding his chest, stretching his legs straight out like a satisfied cat)—the fact was…he felt just fine.

  Was his soul in peril? He didn’t know. He considered himself a good Catholic, and no question he’d turn her in when the time came, if necessary. But he had no taste for this harsh duty. He’d go see Bernard in town. Bernard would know what to do. He’d go this week, he thought, and feel the question out, without telling Bernard anything about the woman who had come out of nowhere almost, as a gift to him, who kept a house so clean that she’d taken the harvested threshings and spread the straw thickly over the dirt floor, right up to the hold-thresh door-stone—straw as thick as his hand—and her cooking was tasty and waiting ready when he came in from the fields, the fire always hot. She was a strong woman, not too proud to work beside him in the fields or haul in wood and water. How had he managed by himself? She attended church—and everyone knew that no Devil’s whelp would enter or pray in a House of God. At Christmas he’d see she took the Eucharist, and surely that would prove her faith. She was the gift of goodness. He stretched his leg over hers; good company, fine stories, and also good in bed. Why shouldn’t he like her? When he saw Bernard, he would find out what penance had been laid
on the civilians at Montségur, for possibly she’d paid hers off (if indeed she’d been there at all), and if she had, then she was free to stay.

  Yet still he couldn’t stop thinking about her story. Wasn’t it as fantastical as any fable, and ruined moreover with useless bits about her friend and one man who had obsessed her all her life—which thought sent an irritable ripple through him, so that inadvertently he pulled his leg back, the one that had covered her, and she came with it. He pulled her toward him roughly, turning her on her back, a little growl rising his throat. She woke sleepily, smiling into his face, and her arms reached round his back as he slipped into her again, thrusting angrily at her, at all the murderers and heretics, back and forth, pole and thrust, and wondering also, but too vaguely for the thought to rise to full consciousness, if entering a heretic made a heretic of him.

  The next morning I rise with a light heart, singing, as if my Lord Christ himself had placed His hand upon my brow: forgiven. I am forgiven! I remember Jerome taking both my hands in his and kissing them in a gesture as sweet and noble as that of any aristocrat. And I remember how gently he undressed me last night and brought me back into my body with his touch. Our ribald night together. I laugh aloud.

  So I am singing as I open the door to the new day, and the colors of the grass and yellow fields are bright as the Garden when first seen by Eve—which is how it is, I’ve found, after intercourse. “Good morning, Day.” All things bright and beautiful.

  “Someone’s coming this morning,” I say to Jerome at breakfast.

  “How do you know?”

  “That I can’t say,” I answer. “But it’s a woman, and something’s wrong.”

  “Well, you either know or not. I’m off to the field with the sheep.” And he’s smiling into my eyes too, and I know that he sees the colors brighter too. Then he scowls. “I’m going into town tomorrow,” he says. “I have business there.”

  I watch him grab his staff and move away, sprightly, a spring in his limping step, shoulders rocking easily as he sings out to the sheep.

  Sure enough, another half-hour and the young Domergue girl, Fays, runs into the yard, pushing away the goat that trots up to butt her in a friendly way.

  “Get out, you beast!” High color in her cheeks. She’ll be a fine woman soon.

  “Push him away,” I say. “Go on, get out!” To the goat, that is.

  “Jeanne, Bernadette is in labor,” she calls out. “She wants you.”

  “Me? Where’s the midwife?”

  “She’s attending another birth. She can’t come. My mother says she’s asked everyone she knows, including the far-off midwife in town. There’s no one else to help.”

  “I’ll be right there.” But I’m scared. What do I know of childbirth? Nothing, other than having given birth to one child and lost two others in miscarriages. I’ve never delivered a babe.

  Bank the fire, collect my few things. My hands are on fire again, throbbing with light and heat. “Is it all right?” I ask as we walk downhill to the Domergue farm. “How long has she been in labor?”

  “Since yesterday. All day yesterday and last night. She’s groaning a lot,” says Fays.

  “Groaning’s all right,” I say. “But that’s a long time to push. Is the baby coming out?”

  “I only know my mother sent for you. She said to hurry.”

  At the Domergue house, the men and children have been sent out to the fields. Bernadette is in the birthing chair, hanging on to the cords. But she is exhausted, limp.

  “Push,” says her mother, almost screaming. “You know how to do it. What’s the matter with you, child?” Then, with an anguished look at me, “There’s something wrong.”

  I put my ear to Bernadette’s belly and stroke her flanks. “You’re tired.” Just then comes a contraction, and she digs her nails so hard into my palm that I gasp at the same time that she emits a bellow like a lowing cow, her voice as deep and throaty as a man’s.

  “It’s been like this for hours,” snaps Alazaïs. “It’s her third baby. She ought to drop it like a bean.”

  The contractions are weak, irregular, and every now and again I think the poor girl is leaving us, she’s so tired. Her skin is dry, hot, red and shiny with sweat. She wants something to drink, but Alazaïs says no, that water will drown the baby. The mother cannot drink until after the babe is born, she says. The room is incredibly hot, with the fire blazing on the hearth.

  I knead Bernadette’s belly, helping her to push. The baby is turned wrong way, and where is the midwife but tending to another woman, and everything is noise and distress, moans, bleeding in the dark little hut; and we women turn on one another, shrieking angrily, because we’re all afraid. I’m scared and helpless, and something’s very wrong.

  It’s a nightmare of moans and bellowing as Bernadette pushes; of blood, feces, urine; of us women jostling one another in filth and angry outbursts and frightened tears—and in the corner the terrified rising and falling of little Fays, repeating her prayers. It’s only right to pray, for don’t so many women die in childbirth, and don’t so many babies die?

  The light from the window shifts across the bed, fading, so that the shadows deepen in the little room, pale dove to gray to charcoal black, as the sweat pours down our arms. As the hours pass, a strange thing happens: I begin to see Bernadette as Guillamette, my little girl, who would have been her age, I think, had she lived past five, and maybe lying-in with a baby of her own; so that this woman under my hands, Bernadette, hanging on the birth ropes, this woman so tired she can no longer push and barely hold the straps, her head sunk on one shoulder, eyes closed—or rolling up into her lids—this woman struggling to give birth is my own daughter, and my fear for her increases.

  “Come, Guillamette,” I urge her.

  “What did you call her?”

  “My darling, my little one. Rub her stomach with sweet herbs.”

  Then, with a wash of relief, I see the baby’s head. Another contraction, too weak and ineffectual, and I see that it’s not the head but the buttocks, and there is poop everywhere, a black, viscous tar.

  “A boy!” Its feet are up by its little shoulders, apparently. I put my fingers right up inside Bernadette, tugging on the baby’s butt in an effort to pull it out, but it takes all my strength, and now I’m swept again by certainty: a baby is supposed to slip out easily. It should come out fast, not require all my strength. I look up at Alazaïs helplessly.

  “What do we do?”

  Just then Bernadette falls forward off the chair, landing on her hands and knees, her head in her mother’s lap. She is gasping, but in this position I can see the baby easily.

  “Hold her there,” I say.

  Bernadette’s shrieks are yellow ribbons before my eyes, filling up my head, but the baby is half out of the mother now. I manage to get the feet loose so the legs are out, but the baby is caught at the navel. The cord is so tight that it’s pulling at the infant’s tiny tummy; in a moment it will tear away, and suddenly a great calm descends like a mantle over me, and I know exactly what to do. With my fingers I follow the cord up inside of Bernadette; she is screaming with pain, screaming with my fist up inside her, and the moist juices and blood are pouring out, and sweat in my eyes—and “Pray!” I shout helplessly. “Pray to Christ and to the Virgin to help us now. Just pray!”

  Off to one side rise the mumbling voices, drowned out by Bernadette; yet I work in a teardrop of silence, listening to the voice that has taken over. I think my hands are not my own, as my fingers feel for the cord, trying to unhook it from around the baby’s head. I can’t get it loose.

  “We have to cut the cord,” I say. “A knife—get me a knife and flax.”

  My fingers, still inside, grope above the baby’s head, feeling for the umbilical cord. There! I hooked it on my forefinger. I pull it down and out where I can see it, and quickly tie a string around the cord and pull tight, not knowing how my hands can be so practiced, marveling at my skill; a second tie, and I’m gro
ping for the knife that Alazaïs holds out to me, as Bernadette leans howling, moaning, and weeping in her mother’s lap.

  Slicing a cord is hard. I’m sawing at it and then the knife cuts through. The baby can come out. I’m turning the poor slippery thing, trying to ease the shoulders out. Bernadette is groaning, too tired to push, so the baby is dangling, its head still caught but no longer strangling on its cord.

  “Push!” I slap the girl’s behind. There is no time!

  “Stop that!” cries her mother, quite rightly. But this is no time for gentleness.

  I twist the head, lifting, while Bernadette once again gives one of her deep, lowing, anguished bellows as she tries to drop the babe. Then comes a torrent of blood, and the baby’s dark head plops out, with Bernadette flopping like a fish, palpitating, sobbing with pain and fatigue. She is torn and bleeding. She rolls on her side to the floor, her head still in her mother’s lap.

  The baby’s face is black, and the marks of the bruising cord are imprinted on its throat. I thrust the baby onto the mother’s stomach, where Alazaïs catches, steadies him.

  “He won’t breathe. He can’t breathe!” She bangs him on his back to bring the breath, but no cry comes, and Alazaïs is swinging from her daughter to the babe and back again.

  “He’s dead,” she cries, “and she’s dead.”

  “Not yet,” I say fiercely. I snatch up the baby and wipe its face with the hem of my dress, turning the tiny thing in my hands as I wipe away the slime. Its limbs are limp. It slips a little in my grasp, almost drops, but I grab it by one arm—and then we hear the tiny suck of breath and a feeble cry. Praise God!

  “Ah, there!”

  “Alive!” I cry.

  “Give me him.”

  I pass him to the grandmam, Alazaïs, who swaddles him right well, murmuring, clucking, “His face is all bruised!” while I turn back to Bernadette, who’s lying on the floor, too tired to expel the bag. She’s still bleeding. There is another gush of blood. I grab her belly with both hands, holding on to a fold of flesh. Slowly the placenta seeps out, the bloody bag expelled. I am ecstatic: everything’s all right.