by Cathryn Hein
At the study boards, she stopped. Mounted above them, between the maps, hung one of the most extraordinary paintings in the collection: the dying Roland. Even now, after she’d admired it so many times, it remained magnificent and moving. The death of the greatest knight the world had ever seen and the creation of a legend that had brought her all the way from an Australian farm to a cellar in France. A legend that had called her to Raimund and love.
She looked over her shoulder. He watched her, but for a fleeting moment, his poker face slipped and she glimpsed the man behind the mask, the one she had fallen in love with. The one she had to save from himself.
Full of tenderness, she smiled.
He stared at her, and for a breath she was certain his expression had melted into one of pure longing. Then his gaze went flat and unlocked from hers, and he regarded the file in his hand with such intensity it was if he held the secret of the world in his hand. Silently, she urged him to look up again, and although he must have felt her need, he resisted her unspoken plea. Seconds passed but he remained resolute.
Shaking away her disappointment, she moved down the wall, inspecting the artworks, searching for inspiration. As always, she halted at the broken painting, the one that had held her fascination from the first moment she saw it.
It affected her intensely, although she could not say why. Imperious as ever, Charlemagne regarded her with wide eyes, almost as though he was daring her to solve his mystery. Bending towards him were the warped strangers, adoring eyes fixed on their king, their bodies contorted by the join. She took a step closer, scrutinising the repair, and felt a slow buzz of premonition heat her veins.
‘Raimund?’ Her tone must have alerted him. In seconds, he was at her side. She pointed to the painting. ‘This came from Vauvert?’
‘Yes. It was in the coffin.’
‘Did Patrice know anything else about its provenance?’
He frowned at it, shaking his head, but she could see that he understood where she was heading. ‘You think it belonged to Le Chevalier Gris?’
‘He left the cup for his son at Vauvert. Why not this?’
He took a step forward and inspected it closely for a full minute, then stepped back to her side. ‘There’s no symbol.’
Olivia tapped the timber, at the point where the crooked repair mangled the bodies of the strangers. ‘We can’t see it all.’
He blinked. ‘You want to break it?’
‘As insane as it sounds, yes.’
He blew air through his lips in that uninterpretable, idiosyncratic French way but said nothing. Then he looked at her and shrugged. ‘Okay.’
She smiled. ‘That was quick.’
‘The archives contain more valuable items than this.’ He regarded it again. ‘Patrice was also intrigued by this painting. Perhaps he sensed something, as you do.’
From his actions, it was apparent the subject needed no further discussion. He grabbed the painting by its edges and lifted it from its hook, then carried it towards the study area. Olivia trailed behind, dismayed she could treat an artwork of this age so cavalierly but nagged by the thought it might contain a clue to the Honourables’ path and itching to test her theory.
As she passed the centre climate-controlled cabinet, Dame Elizabeth looked up from the codex she held, her face as bright as if she had been illuminated by moonlight.
‘Have you seen this?’ Her cut-glass voice had a child-like quality, tempered by overawe and wonder.
Olivia glanced at the page and recognised the illumination. The codex was one of her earliest discoveries and was truly breathtaking, but then the entire collection was breathtaking. Everything in the archives was precious. Although given she was about to break a seven-hundred-year-old painting in half, it appeared some were more precious than others.
She nodded at the codex. ‘Have you found something?’
‘Found something?’ Dame Elizabeth didn’t appear to know what Olivia was talking about, but then she scowled. ‘I have found incalculable treasures. Relics many thought lost forever. Relics the scholarly world never knew existed.’ Her voice rose, queen-like and dictatorial, every word enunciated in expression of her outrage. ‘Relics that belong in a museum. Relics that do not belong here!’
Olivia shrugged. ‘They belong to the Blancards. Their fate is in Raimund’s control.’
‘I beg your pardon!’
‘Appreciate it while you can,’ she said, then moved off to catch up with Raimund, leaving Dame Elizabeth mouthing like a suffocating fish.
Exposure to the archives and its mind-boggling wealth had made her unforgivably nonchalant, but at that moment she didn’t care. She was about to break apart a thirteenth-century painting just to see if she could find a symbol in the crack. Her descent to heresy was complete.
But at the table, as she gazed at Raimund, she knew she was driven by a greater force than academic passion. She had told herself before that some things transcended them all. Back then, she had thought that was Durendal. Now she knew differently. Love was the craziest of insanities, and she had gone mad with it.
He laid the painting on the study table and looked at her, waiting for instruction. Olivia wasn’t sure what to tell him. Like all decent historians, she knew art, but the actual intricacies of restoration and conservation was not her field.
She stared at the painting, conscious of his proximity, at the heat emanating from his body, and tried to concentrate. There were details too small to see properly, tiny depictions the naked eye couldn’t define. Not looking up, she asked Raimund for a magnifying glass. Within seconds one was in her hand.
It brought the painting to life. What had once appeared as patterns on fabric became minute lines of script, words from the Song of Roland. Her heart pounding, she hovered the glass over the faces of the two unidentified strangers, interlopers on Charlemagne’s coronation. An idea tugged in her mind, but it seemed too fanciful. That the artist would depict both Roland and the Grey Knight in the same painting was too fantastic to be true, yet that’s exactly what she was beginning to think he had done. Needing more proof, she inspected their magnified bodies, the twisted wreckage left by the repair, then stopped at the first stranger’s hand.
It could have been her imagination or a trick of the light, but Olivia thought she saw a fist, and poking out from the top, the hilt of a sword. She looked up, blinking, clearing her eyes and mind, then returned to the picture. The magnifying glass exposed what the naked eye missed. It wasn’t conclusive—it would be miraculous if the sword hilt proved to be Durendal—but it sent her hopes soaring.
Taking a deep breath, she inspected the second stranger, greedy for another sign, another justification for cracking apart the painting, but his body was so tucked into the timber seam it was impossible to see. She handed the magnifying glass to Raimund.
‘Take a look at the first stranger, at his hand, and tell me what you see.’
He bent over the painting as she had done, then glanced at her before returning to study it more closely. He laid the glass on the table.
‘You think that is Durendal he holds?’
‘Perhaps, but it could be the hilt of any old sword.’ Her finger traced the crude seam in the timber. ‘Everything about this painting bothers me. It has from the first moment I saw it. And now I see the Song of Roland forming the pattern on Charlemagne’s robe and the hilt of what could be Durendal and in my heart I know there’s something here.’
‘So we will break it open.’
‘It’s worth a small fortune.’
He eyed her. ‘Everything here is worth a small fortune.’
‘What if I’m wrong? What if we find nothing? No symbol, no clue.’
‘Then you will have eliminated another possibility.’ His hand strayed to her face and he stroked the back of his knuckles down her cheek. ‘I will not think you reckless. I will not think you anything other than having the courage to prove your convictions.’
His hand lingered, caressing her skin, s
liding to her hair as though he was about to cup her head and draw her to him in readiness for a kiss. Then it fell away, and his jaw set.
Without warning, he picked up the painting, swung it away from the table and raised it over his knee, ready to smash it down.
‘No!’ She grabbed his arm. ‘Not like that.’
‘It’s the quickest way.’
‘But not the best. Please, Raimund, put it on the table. We need to lever it apart over a surface. Splinters and flakes of paint could be lost otherwise. Valuable clues that might tell us something.’
The board remained suspended, but then he relaxed, dropped his knee and held the painting loose in his hands. Quickly, Olivia rolled out a fresh sheet of blotting paper.
‘I don’t suppose Patrice kept a hammer and chisel anywhere?’ she asked, searching through a filing cabinet for Patrice’s archaeological tools.
‘Edouard will have something.’
She opened a kit and inspected the contents. ‘We’ll see how we get on with these first.’
With the implements she thought she might need arranged around her, Olivia settled on a stool in front of the painting and picked up the sturdiest leaf trowel in the kit. She glanced at Raimund for final permission to proceed. His dark-brown eyes were encouraging.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, and then smiled. ‘It’s not a very good painting anyway.’
It was a simple statement yet it made her love him even more. With one lazy smile, he had eased her disquiet and shown his trust. That he believed in her that much inflated her chest with happiness and sent a heady cocktail of love-induced hormones galloping around her body like wild horses. If it weren’t for the task ahead or the presence of Dame Elizabeth, she would have dropped everything and demanded he kiss the living daylights out of her.
But as tempting as it was to give in to her urge, she knew that indulgence would have to wait. Gaston could already be on the Honourables’ trail. With her heart hammering, she inserted the tip of the trowel into the repair and millimetre by millimetre levered her way down the crack, taking care to avoid the two figures.
At first, there was little movement. All she achieved was damage to the precious paintwork. It pained her to see the flakes of colour and chips on the trowel, but this had to be done.
She worked methodically and patiently, repeating the process but increasing the pressure on the trowel with each pass and always avoiding contact with the two figures lest she damage them. Raimund stayed at her side, murmuring softly, encouraging her to keep going, to not lose heart. Telling her he had faith.
By the fourth effort, when a sprinkling of sweat had appeared on her brow and frustration was bubbling hot in her head, the board cracked and the two halves broke apart. She dropped the trowel, her breath coming in pants, shocked at the sudden split, but even more astonished by what she thought she saw.
‘Regarde, Olivia.’ Raimund’s voice sounded as breathless as hers.
She looked at him, at first seriously, and then with a wide grin as pure elation took over.
‘I think we might have found our second clue.’
CHAPTER
18
Just visible in the cleft between the two halves of the broken painting, stained but intact, was the edge of a piece of vellum.
‘You found it,’ said Raimund, then, with a smile filled with unashamed pride, he draped an arm across Olivia’s shoulders and kissed her temple.
Despite his confident declaration, Olivia wasn’t so sure. Whatever ‘it’ was, they had yet to determine. For all they knew, this could turn out to be an elaborate medieval hoax.
‘Don’t count your chickens,’ she said.
Raimund raised his eyebrows. ‘Pardon? ’
She smiled. ‘Just a saying.’
From the cabinets, Dame Elizabeth let out another squawk.
Olivia peered over her shoulder to where Dame Elizabeth stood gaping at an unfurled length of parchment. ‘Should we tell her?’
‘No. Leave her. I think she’s enjoying herself.’
From the astonished expression on Dame Elizabeth’s face, that was an understatement.
Olivia returned to the painting and bent to take a closer look at what they had found. At some stage, either before or after the painting was made, someone had carved a hollow in the timber. It was small—approximately seven centimetres in length and only five or six millimetres wide—but large enough to accommodate what appeared to be a folded piece of vellum.
Only a single corner was exposed, pulled out when the two halves of the painting gave way. However, from the little Olivia could see, it appeared undamaged. Her fingers tripped over the archaeological tools, searching for tweezers or some other implement she could use to lever out the vellum, but nothing appeared suitable.
‘I will look,’ said Raimund, reading her mind.
He returned with an old pair of tweezers, retrieved from the filing-cabinet drawer where Patrice stored stationery items. They weren’t perfect—the steel was poor quality and lacked strength, and the tips were too sharp—but they would serve her purpose.
She tore off some blotting paper and fashioned pads for the tweezers’ tips. Satisfied the steel was sufficiently sheathed, she closed the tips around the exposed corner of the vellum and gently tugged. To her relief, it slid out intact.
She stared at it, amazed. The quality was extraordinary. There was very little grain and the skin had the kind of subtle translucency found only in the finest vellum. The Grey Knight—if this was indeed his handiwork—had used the best.
‘Slunk,’ she said.
‘Slunk?’
‘It’s a fine type of vellum, usually made from a calf foetus and very thin. Ideal for concealment.’
The vellum appeared to be folded twice. Once in half and then in half again. Olivia did a quick calculation. Given the piece in front of them was approximately five centimetres by five centimetres, unfolded, the skin should measure ten centimetres by ten. Not huge by any means, but big enough for a map.
She put down the tweezers and tore off a large square of paper. Using it like a tray, she slid it under the vellum parcel and then picked up the corners, lifting the paper and parcel as one away from the mess on the table.
‘Can you roll out a clean piece of blotting paper, please?’
Raimund did as directed carefully moving the broken painting and all its fragments to one side and clearing a fresh space for her to work at. When the paper was laid, Olivia set down her makeshift tray on it. After hunting for and donning a pair of cotton gloves, she grabbed the tweezers and settled on a stool to open up the parcel. Alongside her, Raimund leaned forward, his weight on the balls of his palms, his absorption as deep as hers.
She took a few moments to survey the artefact, and then glanced at Raimund. He nodded, his expression eager, impatient, like her, to discover the vellum’s secrets. Focusing back on her task, she used the tweezers to open the first layer. It parted like it had been folded yesterday. Olivia had expected brittleness or at best, stiffness, but the slunk proved astonishingly well-preserved.
‘This is incredible. The humidity and temperature must have been perfect in the coffin for it to be in this condition.’
‘Le Chevalier Gris was wise.’
‘We don’t know it’s his yet.’
‘Come, Olivia. Where is your indomitable optimism?’
‘Being stomped on by my scholarly sceptic. Don’t get your hopes up, Raimund. This could be nothing.’
But Raimund was certain. ‘It’s something. You’ll see.’
The side facing her was blank, but just visible through the skin, like a pattern seen through frosted glass, were faint lines and curves. Something was drawn on the other side of the vellum. Something in faded ink.
More confident in the slunk’s resilience, she placed the tweezers aside and used her hands to turn the rectangle over. Again, showing through, delicate and pale, the way a blonde’s bluish veins tracked beneath her fair skin, were lines of ink.
Picking up the tweezers once more, she glanced again at Raimund. ‘Ready to see if you’re right?’
He nodded.
She took a few breaths, trying to calm the butterflies winging around her stomach, and then inserted the tip of the tweezers under the next fold. As before, the vellum parted with ease. Cautiously, she opened the piece of skin and then laid it out flat.
What she saw made her mouth broaden into one of the biggest joy-filled smiles it had ever made.
On the table in front of her, exposed to the light for the first time in over seven hundred years and signed by Charles Durand, Le Chevalier Gris himself, in elegant, fading script, was a simple hand-drawn map.
And in the centre, marking their treasure in the same way X marks the spot on a pirate’s chart, was the symbol.
They had found it. The hiding place of Durendal.
She looked at Raimund. ‘Kiss me.’
He blinked and frowned as if he didn’t understand what she said.
‘Kiss me, Raimund. Now, before I throw you to the ground and do it myself.’
With a laugh he cupped her face between his hands and brought his mouth down on hers in the most exquisitely passionate kiss she had ever experienced. It wasn’t that his mouth moved with blazing hot fervour which made it special, or that his lips tasted like something you’d only find in heaven. Or, as the kiss deepened, his tongue touched and twined with hers like a wanton lover. What made it so compelling was that he was kissing her at all. Raimund couldn’t ignore what had grown between them any more than she could.
And in that jubilant, triumph-filled moment, it seemed he didn’t want to.
Too soon, the celebration ended. He granted her one final, deliciously tender graze of his lips and then detached himself, leaving Olivia’s mouth tingling with want. Eyes glowing, he regarded the map. Almost instantly, his expression changed to something approaching fanatical desire.
‘Even if Gaston has determined who the Honourables are, he does not have this.’
‘No,’ said Olivia, catching her breath and wishing he’d kiss her again. Anything to remove that look of zealotry from his face. The look that spelled the destruction of Durendal.