On the following Sunday, for the second time, the priest reads out the banns. We stand proudly with the others in the cold stone church, and I look about me at the familiar old building with its four thick pillars (two on each side of the center aisle), its low roof, and its altar. It has two windows, one on each side wall, and both of them with glass. My feet are cold on the cold stones, because it’s snowing outside, but my heart is warm with the prospect of my marriage to Jerome. And then from behind me comes a hoarse voice:
“It can’t be done.”
I turn in surprise. It was Domergue who spoke. The priest looks up, equally surprised.
“Aren’t they cousins?” Domergue thrusts the question forward like a piece of meat on a knife. “Jerome told us she was his mother’s cousin. And doesn’t the Church forbid a marriage to the fourth degree?”
Jerome grips my hand. I sway. The church has erupted into a buzz of conversation, everyone craning to peer at Jerome and me. A lie, one little lie, prevents our marriage. Do we confess to the lie? But who would believe us if we change the story now? Jerome has gone white. His eyes roll helplessly around the church, catch on Domergue, who stares back grudgingly, then turns his face with a shrug. The shrug of the stubborn peasant.
“Is it true?” asks the priest.
Jerome shakes his head, confused.
“You cannot be married until you investigate the relationship,” the priest decrees, but he falters helplessly. “The church does not allow marriage between two people bound by blood. Do you understand the degrees?” he asks, stepping toward us down into the aisle. “You cannot marry your own sister or brother, or your aunt or uncle, or your niece or nephew. You cannot marry your aunt’s or uncle’s child. I mean your own first cousin. These are forbidden relationships.
“You cannot marry the child of your first cousin. You cannot marry the child of your niece or nephew. You cannot marry your mother’s cousin’s child—your second cousin. That’s marriage to the third degree.
“Is this clear? These are forbidden by the Church. You cannot marry the brother of your husband or the sister of your wife. That too is incest. Am I clear?”
Still, neither of us speak. None of it is clear, and a great buzzing has arisen in my ears. I can’t keep track of his cousins, aunts, brothers.
“It used to be forbidden to the seventh degree,” he pursued us relentlessly, “but our Holy Church is merciful. Marriage is now forbidden only to the fourth degree. So confess, are you two related?”
But what was the fourth degree?
“I…we…I don’t know,” says Jerome, looking wildly around.
“We will speak of this later,” says the young priest, “privately.” And he swings back to the safety of the altar, relieved to continue the comfortable Latin liturgy, while we stand smitten in our places, and now I see how the others edge away from us, uncertain how to behave. After the service, we stagger from the church, bewildered, only to see Domergue talking to the priest, together with Alazaïs. We slink back inside to huddle together and wait.
“What are we to do?” I whisper.
“How do I know?” he snaps.
But when the priest returns and launches into his next lecture, I think from his garblement that he understands no more than I, and the only thing that’s clear is that somehow all this relates to children, though the relationships are so confusing I just want the priest to stop.
In the end Jerome confesses all: how we had met on the mountain path (but without reference to the Inquisitors who had come riding up behind), how Jerome had invited me home, and not wanting to create a scandal had told the neighbors a lie, and yes, he ought to have admitted it in confession but had not thought it important, and how filled he now is with remorse, and how he wants to do what’s right both by me and by the Church. But we are not related, no.
I say nothing. I hang my grieving, hopeful head.
The young priest nods and listens and fidgets, twisting the tassels of his shawl around his fingers. He doesn’t know what to do. Finally he says that when next he goes to town he’ll take the matter to his superiors, and he gives us penance and the injunction to chastity while we live together. This he repeats: we may no longer share a common bed, on peril of our immortal souls.
In a few weeks, he says, he’ll report back whether we may marry or not. He rises to dismiss us with the decisiveness of someone young and inexperienced who’s trying to act beyond his years. But what has shaken me is a new idea, that we’re too old for marriage anyway, since procreation is no longer possible.
We walk back home in silence. I feel chastened, chastised, punished for daring to be happy with this man. He stalks one pace ahead, not looking at me. His back is hard and his neck stiff in that stubborn tilt I’ve come to know.
What are we to do? The snow falls softly, softly, white on his crumpled hat, white on my cloak, white on our footprints, white on the grass and brush—the sky white, the earth white, the foggy air we breathe all white with the purity of snow.
TWENTY-SEVEN
We live now in chastity, as if perfected friends, while the priest waits on his superiors, who take their good time, I might add, to hand us their decision. I tried one night to draw Jerome to bed with me, as we used to do, but he sprang away. He both wants and doesn’t want me.
“I cannot jeopardize my soul,” he said firmly. Which hurt, because don’t I have an immortal soul as well? I wonder what our Lord Christ would have said about our wish to marry. I am shaken by these events, and sometimes I climb up the hillside to walk past the beech tree that holds in the safety of its tangled roots my Holy Book, my treasure. But I do not dare to remove the book: my eyes are too weak to read those lovely pages anyway, the letters blur; and moreover, I don’t want footprints guiding people to my only possession. (No, I’ve not told Jerome everything.)
I pause only a moment, talking from a distance to the tree (because I don’t want some footprints to show deeper than the others in the snow, indicating that I stopped), and then I climb on in the snow, and all the while I’m puzzling in my mind the course of events. I’m no longer mad: of this I’m sure. When I was mad, the voices chattered in my head and people sometimes grew large or small, but now I hear no voices and I feel myself solidly on this earth. But I still understand nothing. Why did the Good Christians have to be burnt? Bertrand Marty told me at our farewell that with that pyre all our prayers were answered—the Cathars prayers, because they did not want to live any longer trapped in their bodies on this Devil’s globe; and the Catholic ones, because they wanted to have just one True Church. So both prayers came about, God giving us the desires of our hearts.
I want to understand. I want to know what the Good Christians saw that made them throw themselves into the flames; I want to know the Light of God, which they talked so much about and which I don’t think I’ve seen, unless it be the light that came sometimes with de Castres and Esclarmonde or the prickling in my hands when someone is sick nearby. Practical as a pine tree, I know nothing of these spiritual matters.
My thoughts turn to Jerome. The torment fell on him after he heard my story. Several times he has asked me about the treasure.
“Could you find the treasure again?” he asked once. Another time: “If someone wanted it, would you take him there?”
I bolted from the questioning. It’s not my place to steal the money of the Church of Love, but Jerome will ask again, I’m sure. What then? Should we go?
The weeks pass, and still no word from the priest.
Jerome asks again about the treasure, and this time I say yes, I’ll take him there; and the veil of darkness lifts from Jerome: he laughs with me again, and sometimes he gives me a kiss on the lips. Sometimes he lets his fingers trail down my arm or rests his hand on my lap, familiar as the tabby cat. We’ll be married in the spring, he says, he’s sure of it; and meantime we can mind our manners in our separate beds, slog our way to church, and keep our souls from hell. Some weeks we cannot make it to the church, but tha
t’s no sin, so long as we attend at Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.
Winter has fallen full force. The snow sometimes packs right up against the door. We have covered the windows with thick hides in addition to the wooden shutters; it’s cozy and dark with the fire going, and sometimes we add the bead of a light from the oil lamp and Miss Tabby curls daintily under the table, and the house smells of woodsmoke and oil, garlic, leather, wet wool, and strong body scents, as we talk.
Only once at church have we met the Domergues since Domergue père spoke out and stopped our marriage. To my surprise, Alazaïs turned aside before I could greet her. I started after her, but Jerome caught my arm. “No,” he said. He’s angry with Domergue.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say Alazaïs is holding a grudge, but perhaps she simply didn’t see us in the dark church, wrapped as we were like round mushrooms in skins so thick that only our noses showed. Besides, what grudge could she bear, when I’ve helped with her babies, brought herbs? Jerome bought her a new headdress too, but that was months ago. Or is she embarrassed at Domergue’s having spoken out? It doesn’t matter. At present the snow makes all roads impassable, and in the spring we’ll talk. I smile at myself, thinking perhaps I’m not yet finished with being mad: here I am making up stories about my friend Alazaïs. But I would have liked to speak to her; I miss her.
She scurried away right after the service, as if she’d left a pot on the stove. Domergue striding at her side, and none of the rest of the family with them.
Later, when the lanes are better, I’ll go visit.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Spring comes early this year. By the end of February you could go outdoors with just an undershirt and dress, no coat, but wearing wooden clogs against the mud; now the snow is melting in the pastures. On the sunny southern slopes green stems are poking up, forsythia and almond trees in bud, and mild breezes are caressing us. It’s so lovely I stand sometimes just to breathe and look.
Then one day Jerome comes in with news. “They’re burning a heretic on market-day next week.” He throws down his armload of wood. “I heard it from the shepherd, Belleperche. Next market-day.”
“I can’t get this smoke-hole open,” I shout, fighting the leather cover. I’m suffocating. I slap at the thick air with the end of my apron. In some new houses they have clean chimneys that carry the smoke—but also the heat—away, but not in old farmhouses off the beaten track. I yank the rope with all my might, but the hide sticks tight. “Get free!”
Jerome takes the line from my hand. “Stand back.”
“It’s stuck.”
“I’ll do it.” And gracefully, efficiently (as with everything he does), he jerks twice. The half-cleaned hide slithers silkily off the smoke-hole as if it had heard its master’s voice, and the gray smoke from my cookfire begins to uncoil from the ceiling rafters, to twist and sift and wind itself like a living thing out of the hole, drifting up into the sky.
“You shouldn’t build up the fire until you open the smoke-hole,” says Jerome. He stacks his wood, then moves to the bucket to dip a drink of water before settling himself on his bench again and picking up a leather rein and tools. All this while I concentrate on my cooking. I am boiling cabbages and apples, onion, garlic, turnips, herbs and roots, to make a vegetable stew. I have celery and carrots, some pulse. In the stew I shall put walnuts and seasonings, including my few precious grains of Oriental cumin and nutmeg, which go well with apples. To go with it, I’ll make some fried bread in the long-handled iron pan.
“What do you think?” he says after a moment.
“What do I think about what?”
“Market-day. Do you want to go?”
“Go!” I stand up, hands on my hips, and turn to face him. “Go see a poor man burnt?”
“It might be a woman,” says Jerome. Watching me. His eyes glow in the firelight.
“Poor woman, then! It’s all the worse!”
“I’m only asking because it’s market-day. I thought you’d like to go. We have eggs to sell, and wood, and sausages.” He drops his leather in his lap, eyes boring into me.
“Then you go. I’ve seen enough. Who hasn’t? They burn them all the time, and not all of them heretics by any means,” I continue in a rush of passion. “They burn anyone who ever knew a heretic, anyone who ate in the same house with a Good Christian—even if sitting at a different table, if you can imagine; that’s how afraid they are! They burn anyone who has ever bowed to a Friend of God, anyone who’s accepted a piece of bread from one, blessed with the very Pater Noster that we say each Sunday in church. They’ve killed one million of us so far, an entire population, anyone who shows some Christian charity.”
I stop, breathless, shocked by the shock on Jerome’s face. He stares at me, mouth agape.
“They’ll burn us too, when I tell them what I know,” I add, throwing up my hands.
We look at each other in horror. Something has been said that can’t be unsaid. A door has been opened that cannot now be closed. It was this that we have been walking around these months.
“What do you know? Why would you tell?”
“I have work to do,” I grumble, turning back to my fire. “As if we haven’t all seen heretics.”
“I suppose,” he says humbly. “Yes.”
“Well, suppose,” I answer sharply. “You can’t live in this day and age and not have come in contact with the Friends of God. They weren’t bad people, not bad enough to burn. They’re only heretics in the eyes of the Catholic Church, haeretici perfecti, indeed.”
I mutter at the cookfire. Slam the pots and pans.
They are burnt one by one, like this poor man (or woman), or else in twos or tens or in whole companies: four hundred at Lavaur, four hundred and forty at Minerve, one hundred eighty-three at Marne up north, two hundred ten more at Moissac. Not long ago they threw three women in a well to drown, but that was a mistake, poisoning a good well. At Minerve they burnt them on a bonfire surrounded by a palisade of sharpened stakes. Afterward they pushed the ashes and bones off the cliff and into the river below, to the surprise of those downstream, as bits of blackened corpses filtered to their drinking water or filled their fishing holes or washed up on their laundry-beating rocks—corpses eaten by the fish that are eaten by the men.
“Can you imagine being downstream?” I laugh out loud, but it’s a bitter, caustic sound.
“What?” asks Jerome, unaware where I’ve traveled in my thoughts.
Furious with myself, I slash at the tears with the back of my hand and lift my head to the smoke-hole, cursing the smoke that’s made me cry. Jerome glances at me quietly and returns his attention to his leather. The cat jumps lightly to the tabletop, sniffing to inspect his work.
But I’m thinking of the black-robed ones who even at this minute are shoveling up the bodies of the dead and scattering the bones to the dogs—great-grandmothers buried fifty years in consecrated ground, dug pitilessly out of their eternal sleep so the Inquisitors can line up the skeletons to hear their posthumous trials. Then they burn the bones. No bodies left to rise at the last trump. On Resurrection Day. Well, it doesn’t harm the Good Christians who’ve already gone into the Light. But I want to be buried in the good sweet earth when I die, just in case, and at a church, in hallowed ground, and not dug up. Just in case. Because I don’t know what happens to us, if there’s really a resurrection for the likes of me. But I know I don’t think they should dig up bodies dead for fifty years.
“Bernard told me once,” says Jerome, “that some years ago there was a perfected man. It was the same year that they made the Spanish friar, Dominic, a saint. They’d held a big burning at Moissac. Perhaps you remember it. Afterward, the consuls and the people rose up and arrested the Inquisitors. Remember? They protested to the Pope. Even the other Catholic orders disapproved. I remember hearing that one Cathar heretic took refuge in a monastery and the monks disguised him as one of their own and refused to turn him over to the Inquisitors.”
“
You’re saying there’s hope,” I answer after a moment. “And perhaps there is, if we could all band together. Well, we tried for forty years. They’re too strong for us.” Then I give another laugh: it’s all too much for me. “Maybe, when we wake up on Judgment Day, we’ll discover all of us together, friars and preachers and ordinary people, Cathars and Catholics, all standing at the feet of Christ. Or maybe we’ll all come back, reincarnated as the Friends of God assert,” I continue brightly. “Maybe we’ll return in the jongleur’s Future-time, when everyone is happy, and houses fly and people have heat without having to chop the wood or build the fire up, and in that age no one will kill another person or massacre whole populations. There won’t be the need, because there won’t be prejudice and hatred anymore. They won’t go to war for ten years over a faithless woman, as they did at Troy. They won’t butcher twenty thousand citizens in Béziers—men, women, babies, running screaming from the sword and club—or kill two thousand innocents who’ve taken sanctuary in a church. There won’t be atrocities in that Future-time, when everyone will have enough. I wish I lived in that time. Yes, I do.”
“Hmf.” Jerome glances up at me. “They’ll probably have developed new and better ways to kill by then. They’ll still have massacres.”
“No, it will be better. People will be rich, and everyone will have enough to share. Everyone will be educated.”
“It’s the knights and nobles that wage war now,” says logical Jerome, “and they have enough to eat. It’s not the likes of us that go to war. But the lords are all family, married to one another, and they like to fight. It’s in their blood. They’re the richest of us all, with their lands and castles and tithes and taxes. It’s not the peasants who are busy waging war.”
The Treasure of Montsegur Page 28