‘She’s tired?’
Merlin knew he was onto something now. ‘You have to use a stronger word than that. Look, normally Jay has more vitality than a team of athletes, you know that. She’s a performer with the energy it takes to magnetise a couple of thousand people in a concert hall, but after …’
He ticked them off on his fingers, one by one. ‘After that night at Old Sarum, she slept most of the next day while I drove her precious car. And after what happened at Chartres, she slept for hours and was still like a sleepwalker for the rest of the day until we got to your house. You saw what she was like then. Something happened to Jay that night I tried to ring her from Vienna, you remember? She couldn’t tell me exactly what. A dream of torture, she thought it was.’
‘She had a nightmare?’ Leila passed him a lit cigarette.
‘Much worse than that. After it, Jay slept through about half a dozen of my calls. There was nothing wrong with the phone; I had the operator check out her line. Jay just slept through.’
‘I saw her the next morning,’ said Leila. ‘She looked drained.’
‘Drained is the word,’ he said. ‘Drained of all energy, but by what?’
‘That brings us to Theory Number Three.’ Leila wanted to laugh at what she was about to say, except that she had an awful feeling that it was true. ‘Perhaps there is some supernatural explanation for everything that has happened: the coincidences, the contradictions, Jay’s experiences, your irrational acts. The lot.’
‘A unified theory?’ Merlin wanted her to finish. ‘Come on, Miss Einstein, let’s have it, this one explanation that covers everything.’
Leila took a deep breath. This was not really her scene at all. ‘If this ancestor of Jay’s really was such an extraordinary and powerful person, then perhaps her ghost – let’s say her spirit – is reaching out from the past to get her hands on Jay. Crazy, I know.’
‘Why?’ Merlin snapped.
Leila spoke hesitantly: ‘If Jay’s drained of energy after each happening, then perhaps this phenomenon from the past takes her energy. Maybe that’s what Eleanor wants, I don’t know. Like the vampire legends, you know, sucking not blood but vitality from the victim.’
Merlin smoked in silence. Around them, cars and trucks were pulling up and others were driving away. It was a normal everyday scene of twentieth-century life.
‘The only thing my theory doesn’t cover,’ said Leila, ‘is the good Dr Kreuz. Where does he come in? Or is he some fluke outsider just after the golden treasure of Châlus?’
Merlin wound down the window and breathed clean air. ‘He’s no fluke. Kreuz is descended from a crook called Mercadier who worked for Eleanor and King Richard. So he’s a part of it all.’
‘And what is the hold he has over Jay? When did it begin?’
Merlin thought back. He felt calmer now, talking to Leila. Everything was falling into place, although he still had no idea what to do when they arrived at Fontevraud. ‘I’d say it began at their very first meeting.’
‘That lunch the two of you ate with him at Dom’s restaurant?’
‘Right. There was a kind of conspiracy between him and Jay, right from the start.’
‘Conspiracy’s a big word,’ said Leila.
Merlin’s gesture conveyed the frustration he was feeling. ‘All I know is, I felt excluded, as though the two of them had a secret I was not privy to. I can’t put words to it better than that.’
‘If you sensed what was going on, why didn’t you warn Jay?’
‘I tried to do that a hundred times but she made out I was exaggerating and said I was paranoid or jealous. And, as I told you, when Kreuz is around, I do everything wrong. I’m aware of it, but I can’t help it.’
Leila was silent for a moment, then: ‘I wonder if Kreuz’s influence over Jay is anything to do with all that creepy hypnosis business with her father when she was a kid?’
‘Someone as habituated to hypnosis as Jay was, must become very suggestible.’
‘But I never met a stronger-willed person than her,’ Leila objected. ‘Have you any idea what guts and drive it took to fight her way up the showbiz ladder? So that’s another contradiction.’
‘The only thing I know about Kreuz,’ Merlin burst out, ‘is that I hate the guy!’
‘Because of the hold he has on Jay?’
‘It’s more like we have an old score to settle.’
Leila shivered. It was not just that the car’s heating system did not work well and they had left it too late to eat. ‘The first day you met on the tow-path,’ she said, ‘Jay looked at you like she was seeing a ghost. You made a joke about people recognising you because they’d seen you on television, but I thought at the time you looked like it was just as much of a surprise for you to see her.’
‘I thought for a moment we had met, like she said. But we couldn’t have.’
‘D’you ever have those things they call déjà vu?’
‘Never. What are you getting at?’
‘I don’t know if this is helpful or not,’ said Leila. ‘But if, as you say, Kreuz is a descendant of this Mercadier who served Eleanor and King Richard … Okay, it’s a big if. But if there is some kind of contact with the past going on, then …’
‘Then, what?’
Leila laughed nervously. ‘It’s getting crazier and crazier, Merl, but maybe you and Jay and Kreuz all knew each other in some past life? Perhaps you and Dr Toad were once deadly enemies? That would explain what you feel for him.’ She broke the tension by bursting out laughing. ‘Oh Jesus, Merl! I can’t believe I’m sitting here with you, talking with a perfectly straight face about ghosts. I don’t believe in them.’
Outside, the car park was nearly empty as the last lorries pulled out onto the highway.
‘I have to tell you something.’ Merlin’s voice was hoarse. His hands were locked on the steering wheel and his eyes fixed on a distant horizon. ‘I’ve just remembered where I saw Jay before that day she came running along the tow path to meet us. Oh, Christ!’
He saw again the veiled woman who had led him to safety on the day of his escape in Beirut. Against the sky her muffled face was indistinct but her eyes were Jay’s; there was no doubt of that. And her voice was Jay’s too.
Chapter 4
Jay’s breathing was growing shallower as she lacked the energy to expand the chest cavity. A different kind of panic came now, on top of the other. She was frightened of suffocating. Her brain cells clamoured for oxygen which the unresponsive lungs could not supply. There was also the sensation of being watched, as when she turned in a restaurant or on a street to find a man staring at her, but this had a thousand times more menace. Jay tried to move her head to find her observer, but could not. A smell of incense, very strong and pungent, assailed her nostrils. By looking out of the corner of her half-closed eyes, she could see only a narrow arc of the nave to one side of the column.
The floor was lower – level with the bottom of the archaeologists’ trench – and there were only two royal tombs, in their original places in a side chapel. The light coming through the small high windows was obscured by a pall of incense as a long procession of monks walked past, swinging their censers and chanting a Latin prayer. In the middle of the procession was a coffin being carried by six nuns. And on the far side of the aisle stood a woman and what looked like a cowled monk, staring at her.
Jay’s senses shut down and ceased feeding information to the brain as though a surgeon’s scalpel were severing the nerves, one after another. Hearing ceased, then the sense of smell and lastly vision. As swiftly as if someone had turned off the light, her field of view narrowed to a piece of stonework and then nothing but empty blackness. Wherever she strained to look was black. Not the blackness of velvet, soft and warm and cushioning, but a vast infinity of cold lightlessness, terrifying in its sheer inhuman emptiness. It was like having vertigo in every direction, for every direction was down. Jay felt herself falling, accelerating faster and faster into a bottomless pit, an
all-engulfing black hole where she, who a moment before had been a person of flesh and blood, shrank to nothing more than a lingering spark of consciousness, spinning in the abyss and waiting impotently for her final extinction.
I must cling on, she thought. I must fight back and not let go.
She had learned so many tricks to summon up will-power on stage and tried to use them now to regain her body, only to feel herself thrust aside by the psychic pressure wave of Eleanor’s indomitable will. There was a flash image of herself as nothing more than a piece of paper blowing helplessly along a platform in the wake of a fast express train.
*
‘Poor Joanna. Poor sometime Queen of Sicily. She’s dead.’ Eleanor stayed in her pew until the procession had left the church. Her voice was as matter of fact, as if she had said, I’m hungry. Since Richard’s death and the tears she had wept for her beloved son, nothing had touched her heart, and nothing would, ever again.
Yussef coughed, a racking spasm that had bothered him since he crossed the Pyrenees into the dampness of Aquitaine. He was dressed in the cowled robe of a monk, a costume in which he passed unnoticed among the fifteen thousand lay and religious brothers and sisters of the huge community after being introduced by the queen on her return from Spain as her new confessor. Brought up as a Muslim, he was fascinated by the behaviour of women in the Christian kingdoms north of the Pyrenees, especially in the community of Fontevraud where both monks and nuns were subject to the rule of the abbess – a thing unthinkable in a Muslim country. Eleanor herself conformed to no norms of her time, as he had learnt many times since leaving Granada with her.
As for the nun whose body was in the coffin, Eleanor’s daughter Joanna had been a very worldly princess and a queen who had travelled to the Holy Land on Crusade. Hers had been no cloistered life of prayer. After being divorced by the King of Sicily, she had returned to her own country, only to be carried off and ravished by a robber baron. And it was less than three weeks since Yussef in his capacity as the queen’s supposed confessor had attended a ceremony during which Princess Joanna had piously professed her vows as a virgin bride of Christ although visibly in the last weeks of pregnancy! Now at last, he thought, she had conformed to the lot of woman by dying in childbed.
Yussef coughed again and pulled his robe closer, more against the cold than as a disguise; the church was empty now, save for Eleanor and himself. He was careful not to speak when anyone was near. His Latin, although fluent, bore the accent of the Holy Land where he had been born and anyone who had been on Crusade would recognise the Arabic intonation. As he stood up to leave, Eleanor was still seated and intent with her head cocked on one side as though listening to the distant chanting.
‘Stay!’ she hissed, catching at Yussef’s sleeve to pull him round and face the direction in which she was looking. ‘Look there, Moor! What see you there?’
She rose and dragged him with her through the swirling incense smoke to the centre of the nave. There she stood behind Yussef and took his head in both her hands, turning it until he was looking at one of the columns behind which sat a shadowy form.
‘Veni!’ she ordered. ‘Come forth and let this doubting pagan behold what I can see!’
On the queen’s command, the faint pre-echo of Jay’s body rose and glided forward through the smoke.
‘Look!’ Eleanor commanded.
‘I see nothing,’ Yussef protested. ‘Only smoke and shadows.’
‘Look harder!’ The queen willed him to see what she was conjuring up by sheer will power. ‘Your mind is turned too much towards the past where you have searched for knowledge all your life. You see the present only darkly and the future hardly at all. So look hard – upward, where the future will be – and see what I discern there. Look where the sunbeam cuts a path through the dust motes! There!’
I see only shadows,’ said Yussef, ‘and sunbeams playing on the smoke.’
From her reticule Eleanor took a small painting half the size of her hand. It was portrait that had been commissioned by Count Henry on their marriage in 1152 and showed her as a young woman.
‘Ecce!’ Eleanor thrust the portrait in front of Yussef’s face: ‘Look on this. Now tell me what you see!’
She jerked the portrait away and tilted his bearded chin, forcing him to look up until he found himself gazing at the shadowy outline of a long-haired boy, or so it seemed to the old man – a faint figure, half hidden by the pillar and rendered insubstantial by the wreaths of smoke that hung unmoving in the damp and heavy air.
‘Reveal your countenance!’ cried Eleanor. ‘Show yourself to us!’
Jay’s wraith turned so that the sunlight fell full on her face. There was a tremor in Eleanor’s voice which sank to a whisper. ‘Now, Moor, tell me whose likeness you behold!’
‘It is the face in the portrait.’ Yussef strained his eyes, the better to see against the light. ‘It is yourself when younger. Is this some shade you have conjured from the past, Madame?’
Eleanor laughed triumphantly. ‘This is the shade I have magicked from the future, Moor. Look again! Was ever a Christian queen thus attired?’
A draught parted the clouds of incense smoke and for a second Yussef saw Jay dressed in jeans and anorak, her long blonde hair tumbling freely down over her shoulders, unconstrained by wimple, veil or braid. Then the smoke thinned in a draught and cleared completely. The image summoned by Eleanor’s will quivered and vanished before his eyes.
Exhausted, the queen thrust the portrait into Yussef’s hands. ‘Take this,’ she said. ‘Gaze on it night and day in your cell. Thus, and in no other guise, I will return to life, surrounded, as the pharaohs planned it by the faithful servants who have ministered to me in this earthly life.’
Yussef compared the painting with the ephemeral figure he had just seen. They were identical.
‘Tell me one thing, O Queen,’ he said. ‘Why this insistence on physical resemblance? Surely to return in any human form would be enough?’
Eleanor snapped at him, angry that sometimes his brain was so much slower than hers. ‘D’you think I want to return to earth a drivelling lunatic, my spirit confined in the wrong flesh? No, I’ll return as me in the flesh of an identical descendant. Or not at all. Once I was beautiful and will be so again. Look at me now, a bent and wrinkled old hag fit for charity! Would that my brain was enfeebled so I did not know how the living flesh decays.’
‘It is the way of all creatures,’ Yussef consoled her. ‘I too was once young and handsome, or so men said.’
‘But no one stole the best years of your life,’ said Eleanor bitterly.
‘Who can steal time?’ he wondered.
‘My husband, for he was the king of thieves!’ Eleanor’s angry voice echoed off the bare stonework. Her outstretched arm pointed accusingly at Henry’s tomb. ‘He stole fifteen years of my life, Moor! With the result that I who changed the face of Europe will go down in history merely as the wife of Henry Plantagenet and the mother of Richard and John – as though I were some cow-like creature of womb and tit who suffered coupling, bore his offspring and was fit for naught else.’
Eleanor’s voice was quivering with rage. ‘The years that Henry stole from me would have been my years of achievement! When he locked me up in Salisbury Tower, I was past child-bearing and thus as free as any man to rule my domains and build an empire. I was still physically strong enough to ride all day and all night for a week without sleep. I was still beautiful, able to charm a poem or a song from handsome prince and troubadour alike.’
She fell silent as the anger passed, shrinking into herselfas she recalled the scenes of which she spoke. Tears ran down her cheeks. Then her mouth tightened, the tears stopped and her green eyes flashed fire again. ‘Henry no longer wanted me. I’d given him the sons he needed to ensure the succession of the monarchy and the daughters he could trade for an alliance here or there. Yet he knew me too well to divorce me and leave me free to raise rebellion in the lands that owed allegiance to him only
through my blood. So he locked me away from the world – away from life itself – for a decade and a half.’
Yussef watched her, fascinated by the swift changes of mood.
‘For fifteen years I was dead,’ Eleanor hissed, her long, thin arthritic fingers clenching the air as though she wished to claw back the time lost. ‘I want those years back, with interest! I want to live again the years out of which Henry cheated me. I want to thrill once more to the sound of music, to dance and hear poetry by moonlight, to feel a lover’s caress excite my skin.’
‘I have told you many times,’ Yussef protested, ‘what you seek has never been accomplished. Not even the pharaohs were so arrogant as to hope for what you want!’
Eleanor grabbed the portrait from Yussef and held it in front of his eyes. Her voice was powerful for so old a woman. It rang through the empty church. ‘That’s how I’ll walk the earth again, Moor. I don’t care if it takes ten thousand years. I should rather wait in the anteroom of Hell throughout millennia in order to return as myself in the years of my prime than come back in five years’ time as Cleopatra or the Queen of Sheba!’
Chapter 5
Between the death of Richard in 1199 and her own death four years later, the chroniclers recorded nothing in Eleanor’s name. In England her son King John showed genius only for alienating his allies and strengthening his enemies. In Aquitaine the duchy went to rack and ruin as each petty lordling vied with his neighbours in greed and violence and the country as a whole slipped back into another Dark Age. Eleanor did not intervene. Night and day, for she needed little sleep at eighty-two years of age, the old queen bent her still formidable energies to driving Yussef el-Kebir further and further along the mystic paths which led to her goal. Not that he needed persuasion to bum the midnight oil; with a pupil as apt and determined as Eleanor, any teacher would have excelled himself. Yussef laboured hard, slept little, grew leaner, ate less and coughed more.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 28