‘Thanks, Luke. It’s good to talk.’ She dried her hands against the sides of her jeans and reached for his arm, her expression relaxed once more. ‘So, onwards and upwards?’
They were soon back on the road, heading up towards the mountains. Luke watched the massive snow-covered barrier in front of them coming ever closer and wondered just how daunting they must have appeared to a medieval pilgrim on foot. Beside him, Amy appeared to be thinking along the same lines. Her voice broke into his thoughts.
‘So our man must have come up this self-same road?’
‘No alternative. If you’re a pilgrim going to Santiago de Compostela, you need to get over the Pyrenees. And there’s only one pass at the end of this valley.’
‘What about the road? Would that have been there in those days?’ She sounded pensive, and he realised how important their invented story was becoming for her, although there was still a lot of detail missing. About all they knew was that they had a big strong hero who was trying to get away from somebody, but they still hadn’t decided who he was or just when the story was taking place.
‘I’m sure there would have been a road, but it certainly wouldn’t have been smooth tarmac. Whatever the road surface, though, if he’s trying to escape from the authorities, he wouldn’t have been able to use it, at least during daylight hours. He would never have dared run the risk of being seen. Remember his dark secret!’ Although at this stage they still had to establish exactly what the dark secret might be, she replied entirely seriously.
‘But how on earth can he get up the valley if he can’t use the road? Surely they would have set up roadblocks and so on.’
‘Absolutely. No, he must have either disguised himself or concealed himself to escape detection. I’ll tell you what, I bet he hid in a cart or carriage belonging to the authorities themselves.’
‘Sort of like Robin Hood hiding underneath the Sheriff of Nottingham’s carriage.’ The road ahead was empty so he risked glancing across at her again. Her eyes were half-closed as she tried to imagine the scene. He read the concentration on her face.
‘Mmh,’ he let his mind roam, ‘I’m not so sure about the Sheriff of Nottingham thing.’ He had her full attention now. ‘A ride up this valley, clinging to the outside of a carriage in the dark, wouldn’t have been that easy, especially at this time of year. And it would have had to be by night for fear of being seen. The area would have been crawling with soldiers on the lookout for him. Even at this time of year, the temperature drops to zero or below on a clear night. Remember the trouble I had this morning scraping the windscreen? Our chap would run the serious risk of getting hypothermia or worse. No, I reckon he would have been in the back of some sort of cart, maybe under a heap of straw or inside a carriage, either disguised or hiding amongst the luggage. But, who’s after him? We haven’t sorted that out yet, have we?’
He glanced at her face. She had obviously been thinking carefully about this. Her forehead furrowed with concentration, she started speaking slowly, as the ideas took shape.
‘If he really isn’t just a common criminal, then the only other authorities who could be after him in those days would have to be the church authorities. Maybe he was wanted for some terrible irreligious act?’ He could clearly hear the question mark. She paused for his reply.
‘I’ve been wondering about that too. But, to be honest, I’m not sure that I see him as a heretic or a blasphemer. Who knows? Whatever the reason, I’m sure you’re right. In medieval days the Catholic Church was every bit as much a temporal state as the national governments. After all, excommunication was a powerful arm to brandish at people. Don’t forget, the Middle Ages were a time when religious faith wasn’t an option, but a natural fact of life. God existed, there was no question.’
‘Not like these days.’
He hesitated before answering, choosing not to comment. They had briefly touched on religion in their talks so far and had established that neither of them was particularly religious, in spite of both having a Catholic priest as a close friend. ‘Anyway, I’m sure our man’s clever enough to get himself a lift up to the Hospital of Santa Cristina without being seen and without catching his death of cold. But what happens to him when he gets there? Is he going there for a reason, or is he just passing through on his way to the Spanish border?’
‘I reckon he was heading for the hospital of Santa Cristina for a specific reason.’ He could hear how hard she was concentrating and he knew the story was having the desired effect of involving her all the more in the trip. He listened as she went on. ‘He had to meet somebody there or find something there, don’t you think?’
He thought about it for a few moments as he accelerated past a truck and trailer laden with timber. ‘You could be right. The question is who or what?’
‘So, come on. You’re the PhD after all. Think about it. Just who was he expecting to meet at the pilgrim hospital?’
‘I’m working on it.’
It was unusually quiet in the car from then on as both of them spent the rest of the morning turning the problem over in their heads. At just before noon, they stopped for a cup of coffee in Etsaut, just about the last bit of relative civilisation before the final climb to the pass. The café was warm and smelt of freshly-baked bread. From where they were sitting Luke could see into the bleak square of dour stone houses. Behind them were the mountains. He described the view to Amy and then their conversation returned, naturally, to their story.
‘We’re agreed that our medieval friend’s travelling through the mountains at this time of year. Right?’ He saw her nod and continued. ‘So, if we work on the basis that he’s trying to cross the mountains this same day of the year, albeit a good few centuries ago, he’s going to be in trouble. It’s still only April, after all, and the mountains are seriously high around here. The snow’s still up there on the pass, although it’s pretty much melted away down on the plains. I would say that the pilgrimage season, at least in the days before snowploughs and four-wheel drive, wouldn’t even have started. If that’s the case, then the person he’s going to see must’ve spent the winter in the abbey.’
She nodded again pensively and suggested. ‘So who, then? A monk? Could he be going up there to meet a monk?’
‘Yes, that could be it, although the question of why has to be answered.’
‘For help of course. Our man’s fleeing justice, temporal or spiritual or both, and he hopes to be able to hide in the abbey of Santa Cristina.’ It sounded a very plausible explanation, but neither of them was totally happy with it. It was a bit too simple somehow. He saw the concentration on her face and strove to give it serious consideration. He was sceptical.
‘Not that it would be that easy to do. A mountain hospice in the winter must have been a bit like a ship in the middle of the ocean. Everybody would have known everybody else, through and through, right down to the ship’s cat and a few of the rats. A new face would stick out like a sore thumb. In a month’s time it would be a different story. By then there would be hundreds of pilgrims coming and going every day, but not yet.’
He watched the expression on her face as she concentrated, desperately trying to find a solution. He did his best to help.
‘So rather than why, let’s think about who. Who is our man? And, for that matter, when is this all happening? The Middle Ages lasted an awfully long time. After all, the pilgrimages to Compostela have been big business since before the first millennium.’ He sipped his coffee and racked his brains for a solution.
Her voice interrupted his reflections. ‘I’ll tell you when.’ She sounded really excited. ‘I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you precisely, Mr PhD History Professor.’ Her voice was triumphant and her expression rapt. ‘This was all happening in exactly the year…’ There was a pause, while she did a rapid calculation. ‘It happened in exactly 1314. Yes, April 1314 it definitely was, and I even know why he was escaping up the valley and why they were after him.’ She gave him a challenging look and sat back to finish her
coffee while he struggled to find the answer.
In fact it wasn’t that hard. Here in France, if not the whole of Christendom, the first years of the fourteenth century were dominated by one main event: the fall from grace of the Knights Templar. Few people could have been unaware of the reputation of these warrior knights who had battled in the Holy Land for two hundred years. Their war cry of Beaucéant had struck fear into enemy hearts since the early twelfth century.
Luke made a suggestion that was far less tentative than it sounded. ‘So you’re saying our man is a Templar escaping from the clutches of the Inquisition? Could that be right?’
Amy’s face shone with the sort of expression normally reserved for Crufts winners in the presence of their victorious pets. She slapped the tabletop hard enough to rattle the teaspoons and leant towards him. ‘Okay so far, but why April?’ There was a distinct challenge in her voice.
‘How far is it from Paris to here?’ Now it was his turn for the mental arithmetic. ‘Say about seven hundred kilometres. At an average of, say, twenty, maybe even thirty kilometres a day, how many days would it have taken a man on foot to get here from Paris? I never was much good at that sort of problem at school.’
‘Twenty into seven hundred goes about thirty-five times.’ She was happy to supply the answer as he worked it all out in his head. ‘If my memory serves me right, although the Order of the Temple was officially suppressed in 1312, nobody much outside France paid a lot of attention until the Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, was executed in mid-March 1314.’
‘Burned to death over a slow fire on an island in the Seine, along with the Preceptor of Normandy, Geoffroi de Charny.’ She was showing off a bit now.
‘Quite so.’ He decided he might show off a bit as well. ‘And I presume you know the significance of the slow fire. That way, they really burnt to death, with all the agony you can imagine. Normally on a big bonfire, most people actually died of asphyxiation, when the fire consumed all the oxygen, before the pain of the flames really bit.’
Her cocky air left her and she looked bleak. He didn’t notice, as he was still caught up with his calculations.
‘Anyway that was the moment the whole of Christendom realised that the Templars’ time was finally up. The last few still at liberty would have made for safety elsewhere.’ He did another calculation and realised it really did fit. ‘So four or five weeks from the middle of March brings us pretty close to where we are now in April.’ There was amazement in his voice. ‘So that’s what it’s all about.’
‘But why was he heading south, and who was he going to see?’
‘Remember that the kings of Spain and Portugal took scant notice of the order to arrest the Templars. They owed a great deal to the Templars, who’d helped them over the years to rid the Iberian peninsula of the Moors. Escape through the Pyrenees wasn’t such a bad idea.’
‘All right then, he was a Templar escaping from Philippe le Bel.’ She didn’t sound totally convinced. ‘But who was he going to see at Santa Cristina?’
She leant forward on her elbows towards him. His eyes fell upon the open neck of her shirt, presenting him with an unsettling glimpse of white lace and shadowy curves. He cleared his throat guiltily, swilled the remains of his coffee, and did his best to drag his thoughts back to who on earth could have been waiting for a fleeing Templar in a mountain hospice.
Chapter 4
Abbey of Santa Cristina, Spanish Pyrenees, April 1314
The carriage pulled into the arched courtyard of the Hospital of Santa Cristina just after first light. Sleepy monks came out and took charge of the exhausted horses and the equally tired escort of soldiers. The noise of their arrival attracted the attention of virtually everybody. Above all, it announced the fact that the road was now well and truly open. Their period of hibernation was over. The younger monks welcomed the arrival of fresh people with new tales to tell, while many of the older men regretted the fact that their peaceful winter routine was once again to be disturbed.
For Aimée, it brought mixed feelings. On the one hand it meant renewed contact with reality, with all the problems and troubles that could bring. On the other hand, this very break in the regular routine of the abbey was welcome. She had very soon worked out that life of a nun was not for her. A changeless daily ritual did not give her the solace that it gave others. She badly needed the stimulus of contact with the outside world, however frightening the thought of this might be.
She rubbed her eyes. It was a habitual, if futile, gesture. She knew she would never see again, and she had even ceased to hope any more. Instead, in her own characteristic forceful way, she was pushing herself to learn to see with her other senses, just as quickly as she could. She already knew her way around the hospice without the need for any more than the most cursory of touches. Her nose told her whether the kitchen doors were open, her ears whether there were monks in the church. The skin of her cheeks could sense whether it was day or night, freezing or thawing. You can learn a lot in three months.
Aimée listened to the noises from the courtyard. The sounds were funnelled upwards by the sheer stone walls to the window where she was standing. She counted at least six horses, maybe eight. She felt the air on her face and knew that dawn had broken and the temperature was already above freezing. The snow must have melted off the road that led from the Somport pass. If it was possible for this carriage to get through then, before long, pilgrims would again be streaming across. Memories of what she had come to think of as her previous life crowded uninvited into her mind. She shook her head angrily to chase them away, but still they came pouring back in unstoppable waves.
There had been six of them in the group; three men, two women and a little girl. All of them, for various reasons, had been desperate to get across the pass, despite the arrival of heavy winter snows. She had known little or nothing about any of them apart, of course, from Bertrand; Bertrand her husband with the secret mission that had cost him his life.
Even now, two full months later, she found it hard to think of Bertrand without breaking down. They had been married for so long, and been through so much in the last few years, that she still could hardly believe that he was gone. But he was. Of that there could be no doubt. She had watched him die in a vain attempt to save her after the other four, even the little girl, had been butchered by the bandits who had been waiting at the top of the pass. If her eyes had seen anything after that moment, her mind had mercifully blotted it from her memory forever. After his death there had only been the horror, the defilement, and the pain.
She wiped her eyes again and found her hand wet with tears. The irony was that the attack had come from ordinary bandits, rather than the massed forces of the King of France. And she and Bertrand had been so close to their goal. Angrily, she rubbed her face with her sleeve and tried to break the train of thought. There had been times during the first weeks in the hospital when she had come very close indeed to taking her own life. It was only the knowledge that she had a mission, Bertrand’s mission, to accomplish, that stopped her. Deep in her heart she felt sure that, when she had finally done what he had sworn to do, she wouldn’t hesitate to leave this lonely life and join him. But first she had to carry out the mission. And there was no doubt that her blindness complicated things a thousandfold.
She leant back against the carved stone window surround and took deep breaths of ice-cold air.
‘Ah, there you are, Aimée.’
She started. It was the abbot. She had been so preoccupied with her thoughts that she hadn’t heard him approach.
‘I thought I saw you up here. I came to warn you that the soldiers have told us there’s a desperate, dangerous man coming our way. It would be best if you stayed inside for the time being, until they’ve apprehended him.’ His tone became drier. ‘The information comes from a distinguished source. Amazingly, it appears we’ve been visited by His Grace the Archbishop of Sens.’ Aimée jumped as if she had been stung. If the abbot noticed, he gave no
hint of it in his voice. ‘I just thought you might be interested to know.’ With that, he carried on down the long corridor, leaving her in disarray.
The Archbishop of Sens; Aimée knew his name so well. He was none other than Philippe de Marigny himself, the brother of the Royal Chamberlain. He was the man responsible for the terrible deaths of so many Templars, often as a result of inhuman torture. And now he was here in the high Pyrenees in person. What would a senior church dignitary be doing in pursuit of a dangerous criminal, unless…?
There could be no other explanation: they knew about Bertrand’s mission. And they would soon know, if they didn’t already, of her survival. She had no illusions as to the treatment she would receive from them when they apprehended her. She shuddered. Her alternatives had suddenly become brutally simple. She had to get away, or she had to take her own life. Either way, there was no time to lose.
She racked her brains as to what to do. There was no way she would be able to get far without assistance. To make matters worse, even if she managed to get out of the abbey unchallenged, the thought that the same gang of bandits might still be in the neighbourhood was terrifying. She clenched her teeth and forced herself to consider her options logically and rationally. Of the monks in the hospital there were few, if any, to whom she could turn for help.
That left nobody – apart from, she thought with a surge of excitement, apart from the man they were expecting to come up the valley towards them. Of course! Her pulse quickened. If such a high-ranking figure as the Archbishop of Sens was here in person, there could be no doubt about it. The dangerous, desperate man who was expected had to be a Templar like Bertrand. And there was only one man to equal him that she knew, at least the only one she knew still at liberty. Luc, could it be Luc? Of the very few Templar knights left after the arrests, he was far and away the best. There was no doubt in her mind that he, when he arrived there, would prove to be her salvation. Her spirits soared for the first time in months. She turned and hurried back to her cell to collect her few belongings. She needed to be ready to leave as soon as she made contact with him.
Chasing Shadows Page 4