‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said coldly. ‘You cannot understand the will power it took for my determination not to weaken during the long wait in limbo. You, fitz Mercadier, could never do what I have done. Perhaps no one else ever will.’
Kreuz disagreed. ‘It is you who do not understand. There is so much to explain. Because history is written by the winners, this modern world misunderstands what my leaders sought to achieve. Today the SS is judged by a few isolated excesses and failures, but to give us the proper historical perspective, you must see our organisation as one of the military orders of knighthood you knew so well.’
Eleanor yawned again.
‘In 1930,’ Kreuz continued, ‘Germany was in as much chaos and flux as was Europe in your day. I joined the SS in the same way as an ambitious and intelligent young man went into the church in the thirteenth century. It was a ladder which I could climb to reach the top rung of society without any great initial advantage of birth or acquired wealth. To those like me, the wilder excesses of National Socialism were irrelevant. We never talked of Jews and Final Solutions, any more than Henry’s Becket or King Louis’ confessor Suger bothered their heads with the rights and wrongs of crusade.’
With the masseuse’s help, Eleanor sat upright and let the girl slip over her head a cotton nightdress from Jay’s luggage, which they had removed from the Alpine before leaving Fontevraud. A new feeling stole over Eleanor as the girl helped her to stand: there was a softening of the spasmed muscles. She yawned again and stopped listening to Kreuz, concentrating on identifying the sensation. It was drowsiness, pure and simple.
‘I’m tired, fitz Mercadier,’ she closed her eyes.
‘But I have so much to say.’
Eleanor stretched like a cat in the sunshine, revelling in the thousand sensations of the flesh. ‘Then talk to yourself,’ she said. ‘For me, it’s been a damned long day.’
Chapter 8
Merlin drove Jay’s car to the local Renault garage where the owner agreed to store it until called for. There was no particular point in the exercise, but he felt better performing that small task than sitting, watching the rain. On the way back to the cafe where Leila was waiting, he stopped to buy a large scale map of the area. A few parking spaces away from her old deux chevaux he noticed a new Renault 25 but paid it no particular attention. Through the rain-spattered windshield, the two men sitting in it looked like a pair of sales reps waiting to make a call.
‘It’s one thing,’ argued Salem, ‘to come here and claim what is ours by right. But this shadowing of people, this changing of clothes and cars, all smacks of dishonesty. Why is it necessary, my brother?’
‘That girl we interviewed – the archaeology student,’ said Kassim. ‘She would have gone screaming to the police if I had not flashed my fake Renseignements Généraux card. You have to look the part. For that, the right car and clothes are vital. Now, thanks to her, we know as much as the American does. We know that the German from the Valley of Songs was here, and still is somewhere around, with the blonde woman. All we have to do is sit tight and follow the Yankee when he moves.’
Unhappily, Salem cleaned a hole in the condensation on the window and watched in the wing-mirror as Merlin greeted Leila in the cafe. It was almost dusk. As the lights came on above the façade of the cafe, he gasped.
‘What is it?’ asked Kassim.
‘The name of that cafe. Can you see, my brother? It is called Café Alianor. And Yussef El-Kebir wrote on the tile, Then shall arise my sons to wrest from the brood of Ali Anor what was my due. Remember?’
He was talking to an empty seat. Kassim was out of the car and walking across the square. He ordered a coffee at the bar, keeping his back to Merlin and Leila but watching them in a Coca Cola mirror by the cash register as he chatted in Arabic with the North African boy serving behind the counter. Merlin was poring over the map which he had spread across the table.
Leila lit herself another cigarette and one for him. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘we could just be like anyone else and go to the police. Or is that too obvious?’
Merlin took the cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘To tell them what exactly?’
‘That Kreuz has kidnapped Jay.’ Leila saw the anguish in his eyes.
‘You know what happens if you report to the police that an adult has gone missing? One way or another, they tell you to mind your own business unless there’s proof of foul play. On the face of it, Jay went with Kreuz of her own free will. We can’t prove otherwise, so why should the police intervene, even if they knew where to look?
‘But she wasn’t herself,’ Leila tried. ‘I saw her yesterday. She was under the influence –’
‘– of a woman who died eight hundred years ago!’ he finished. ‘Great story, isn’t it? Try telling that to the cops. Next thing you know, you’ll be in an ambulance, with a nice guy in a white coat giving you an injection.’
‘So what are you looking for on that map?’
‘Inspiration, I suppose.’
‘Can I help?’
‘You could if I knew what I was looking for.’
Leila was baffled. ‘If you don’t know what you’re looking for, what are you looking for?’
He stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. ‘Is that what they call feminine logic?’
‘Perhaps.’ Leila stood up. ‘So’s this. It’s dinner time. We’re both worried about Jay, but there’s nothing we can do right now and I’m hungry. There’s a hotel across the way. So let’s check in for the night, eat and get some sleep.’
*
Merlin finished his meal and left Leila downstairs in the hotel bar in the company of the two polite businessmen who had been dining at the next table. He wanted to be alone in order to think. It did cross his mind that the couple to whom Leila was happily chatting were undercover cops of some kind. They had a lot of questions and fitted exactly the classic two-man police team of Mr Nice and Mr Nasty: the older man with the sad eyes was softly spoken and friendly enough while the younger one was a mean little bastard, by the look of him. It didn’t matter what they were, Merlin decided, because neither he nor Leila had anything to hide from the authorities. Upstairs in his room, he dismissed them from his mind and took a piece of hotel stationery to start making notes, more as a way of ordering his thoughts than because they meant anything.
Jay, Jay, Jay, he wrote.
On that magic morning in St Denis he had felt that their souls were one. But a couple of days later all the magic was gone. As soon as Kreuz fixed his crazy blue eyes on Jay, something had changed inside her. Did he have some hypnotic power over her?
Merlin had heard the rumours about the SS involvement in black magic, astrology, necromancy but never come across any hard evidence. So stick to the facts, he told himself. He laughed ironically at the idea. Facts? There weren’t any. Or were there? Write the headings down, Freeman, one by one, like you were trained. See where that gets you.
Chapel, he wrote. The visit to the chapel lost in the woods, somewhere between St Denis and Fontevraud, irked Merlin still. Why had Kreuz taken him and Jay there and shown them over the place so proudly? Correction, he hadn’t shown them over all of it. The building was quite large and they had seen only a small part: the little chapel itself. What was the rest used for? Was it a safe house? And if so, had Kreuz taken Jay there? Under normal circumstances, Jay would never have left her precious car unlocked in a strange town. Had she gone with Kreuz because she was ill or under duress?
Elise. She had said that the woman she had seen in the abbey church was ill. But against that Elise had also said that she had been talking with Kreuz in Latin. Why? For privacy Jay could have used English or old Langue d’Oc, so why choose Latin? As far as Merlin knew, it was Jay’s least fluent language. A dead end, unless …
Is she mad? Was it possible that the whole tangle of events was due to some emotional disturbance in Jay, maybe connected with the childhood hypnosis sessions?
A mental
breakdown? No, there were too many coincidences and certainly the sirventès were genuine. Jay could neither have written them nor known about them in advance. She could not have found her own way to Dürnstein and the second poem or met up with Kreuz without Merlin’s help.
Experiences at: Chinon Castle, Canterbury Cathedral, Bordeaux Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral, Fontevraud Abbey, Old Sarum and Oakham Castle. Every one of Jay’s inexplicable experiences had happened at a place with which Eleanor had had powerful connections. That could not be coincidence. It added up to …
Possession!
Leila had first voiced the possibility. However hard Merlin tried to find another explanation, it was the only one that accounted for everything that had happened so far, but why should it be happening to Jay?
Rejection. Jay had rejected him in favour of Kreuz in Granada, but Merlin had to admit that he had set himself up for it.
Help me! It was true that Jay had never once asked for Merlin’s help in as many words, but sitting in the car outside the truck-stop restaurant with Leila, he could have sworn that Jay was in the car with them, whispering: ‘Help me!’
There was a scratching outside as though a bird had flown against the bedroom window, attracted by the light. Merlin opened it and let out some of the fug. Above the noise of the rain and the gurgling of gutters and down-pipes he thought he heard a seagull cry. How far was Fontevraud from the coast? he wondered. Perhaps the bird had been blown inland on the gale? He closed the window again and looked at the last heading he had scribbled.
Treasure. Why hidden and where?
Somehow this had to connect, Merlin thought. ‘Oh my God!’ he drew a double-ended arrow linking Possession! and Treasure. Now, everything made sense: if Eleanor’s spirit was possessing Jay, then the treasure of Châlus was her bank account, the financial provision she had made for just this eventuality.
That explained the why. As to where … Wherever it was, it might be the last place he had a chance of catching up with Jay, ever.
Merlin lit a fresh cigarette. The likelihood was, from what he had learned of Eleanor, that she would have stashed away the treasure somewhere convenient to Fontevraud, somewhere she could swiftly get her hands on it after her return to earth. He opened the map, smoothed it out on the bed and marked the position of the abbey with a felt pen. The treasure was last recorded at Châlus, so he marked that with a second cross. Somewhere between the two marks lay a fortune in gold.
From Châlus, Merlin reasoned, Eleanor had departed on a route leading north-west to either Fontevraud or Chinon. He marked Chinon. Ah! It didn’t much matter which had been Eleanor’s destination, for they were only a few miles apart, so the route from Châlus was the same for a large part of the way.
With Mercadier and his greedy mercenaries tearing Châlus to pieces, it was unlikely that Eleanor would have left it in situ or reburied it there. So, she must have taken it with her.
Merlin ignored the straighter modern roads on the map and traced in red the queen’s probable route along twisting old back-roads through villages with ancient names like Beaulieu and Champagnac. It was twelve kilometres or eight miles from Châlus to Oradour-sur-Vayre, where legend had it the treasure was buried. Merlin ringed the name. Had that Oradour been the first night’s stopping place? Not much distance to have covered in one day, he thought. Even on horseback, surely it should have been twice as far? But Eleanor’s baggage train had included a waggon of some kind carrying the coffin containing Richard’s corpse, which would have slowed the pace considerably.
Outside the bedroom window, the spring rains slanted down on the roofs of Fontevraud. Merlin guessed that it had probably been raining in March 1199 also. From his own experience in the Vietnamese jungles, he knew what it was like manhandling wheeled vehicles through deep mud during heavy rain. That one heavy waggon would have cut down Queen Eleanor’s speed to a few kilometres a day.
He turned back to the map. If Oradour-sur-Vayre had been the first night’s stopping place, Eleanor might have secreted the gold there, but it was simply too close to Châlus for someone as wily as the old queen. She had too much nerve to panic and dig a hole for the gold at the first possible place, with Mercadier perhaps riding close on her heels. More likely she had ridden on a short way ahead, leaving the coffin to follow in the care of a trusted servant while she prospected a better hiding place.
Merlin rifled through the pages of the much thumbed book he had bought in New York. William the Marshal, that was the guy! He had served Henry and Richard and finally Eleanor as loyal retainer. The knight Henry had called ‘the only honest man in France’ had been with Eleanor at Châlus.
Merlin put down the book.
What had Leila said, to explain his instinctive apathy for Kreuz? ‘Perhaps the three of you knew each other in another life?’ If she was right, at Châlus, after Richard’s death, the three principal actors had been Eleanor, Mercadier and William. So, if Kreuz was Mercadier’s descendant and Jay descended from Eleanor, then Merlin Freeman was a son of a son of a son of William the Marshal!
He read again the chapter about Eleanor’s incarceration in Salisbury Tower. William had been appointed constable of the tower for several years. A man in his prime years, it was likely he would have founded a family there, one of whom – a yeoman farmer perhaps – could later have become known as Freeman, the progenitor of the line that emigrated to America. So, like everything else, it was possible. The more Merlin thought about it, the harder it was to account for the part he had so far played in any other way.
On the map he drew in the probable line of the second day’s travel for the coffin and marked the end with a question mark. There was no town or village where the royal party could have spent the night, but there was a place name: Chassenon. Beside it were three dots.
He consulted the key to the symbols used on the map. Three dots signified a ruin. Merlin’s pulse quickened. Was this a twelfth century castle, another safe house where Kreuz had maybe taken Jay? No, slow down, Freeman. One step at a time. Back to Michelin. He found Chassenon in the index, to learn that the ruins were a Celtic temple complex and a Roman baths. The modern road running past was built over the east-west Roman highway known as the Via Agrippa that had led all the way across France from Lyons in the Rhône Valley to Saintes on the Atlantic coast. At Chassenon, he read, excavations had uncovered Roman baths and twenty or more underground chambers, cisterns and reservoirs.
Merlin closed the guide book. Everything fitted. A woman of Eleanor’s intelligence would have chosen to hide the treasure near or in a landmark that would survive the centuries, to ensure she could locate it when she returned. But she would not have picked a castle, for she knew all too well that fortresses were built one year and mostly razed to the ground a decade or two later. Even Richard’s supposedly impregnable castle at Château Gaillard had been totally destroyed by the French king a few years after the Lionheart’s death. However, a deserted ruin in which nobody was interested in medieval times … That was something else! For someone as crafty as Eleanor, a Roman ruin made a much more likely hiding place.
Merlin lay back on the bed and lit his last cigarette. If it was as easy as that, why had the SS Division Das Reich not found the treasure when they scoured the area in 1944?
Merlin went back to Michelin once again, to find that the excavations at Chassenon had only started in 1958. He let out a loud sigh as everything clicked into place: on 10 June 1944 when the Panzers of SS Das Reich had roared past Chassenon on the way to Oradour-sur-Glane, the ruins had been just a series of grass-covered mounds in a field.
He opened the window and stood for several minutes, his mind blank, breathing clean air. The rain had stopped and the night sky was washed clear of dust. The moon had set and the stars were bright, hard pinpoints of light in the pure black void. Again he thought he heard a seagull cry very faintly in the distance.
He closed the window and put out the light. His last thought before falling asleep was: Help me, Jay! Help
me to help you!
Chapter 9
William the Marshal started awake as his mount whinnied, scenting other horses nearby. He had been dozing in the saddle for miles, letting the animal pick its own way between the pot-holes, of which there were many. The Via Agrippa had not been mended since the Romans left a thousand years before and the disrepair was made worse by the local peasants’ custom of using the ancient carriageway as a quarry for building material.
In the moonlight he saw, a stone’s throw to the south, the ruins of the Roman baths, still rising five and six metres high in places. There were the best part of fifty men-at-arms camped there, clearly divided into two parties. Mercadier’s men, lifelong campaigners, were sleeping in wagons and makeshift tents while those in the queen’s retinue were huddled in ones and twos, wrapped in their damp and muddy travelling cloaks, wherever the ruins offered shelter from the weather. They lay beneath Roman arches and on stone benches below mouldering frescoes that told of a more gracious age.
William dismounted stiffly and handed the reins to a sentry. The queen, he learned, had made her quarters in the caldarium or hot room of the baths. It was the largest and most solid part of the complex still more or less intact. The gaping arch at one end had been closed with a sheet of coarse cloth that flapped and cracked in the wind, like the mainsail of a ship in irons. The Marshal drew the cloth aside and walked in. Two torches jammed into cracks in the masonry cast an uneven, flickering light over frescoes of a hunting scene. Showing in places through the layers of cow dung on the floor, was a delicately inlaid mosaic of the four seasons. The current season, spring, was depicted as a cherub with pouting cheeks blowing puff-ball clouds across the sky half-obscured by the queen’s cloak.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 31