Certain it is that the cross was made from a fragment of the true cross on which Our Lord suffered. Blessed Saint Peter, our first Holy Father, wore it when he took ship and crossed the great sea to spread the word of God. And he gave it to Tiberius Maximus, a citizen of this town and a good Christian before he, Peter, suffered death at the hands of the unbelievers. The people of God kept the holy relic safe through centuries of war and persecution, until it passed out of recorded history at the time of the invasions from the North, when this holy city was sacked by the barbarians.
Yet I have long believed that the cross survived and that it is the same as the famous jewelled cross that the great king Charlemagne kept in his royal chapel at Aachen in the eighth century. Many years ago I was working in the French king’s library in the city of Paris when I came upon an inventory of Charlemagne’s treasury made by a Frankish scribe. I attach a copy, and you will see that he speaks of the cross of Charlemagne as being the holy rood of Saint Peter made from the wood of the true cross.
It was adorned with gems, the like of which the world has never seen before or since. The great diamond at the centre of the cross was said to be the same white stone that Caesar once gave to Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, to seal their illicit union, and the four red rubies were taken from the iron crown of Alexander the Great. The Franks believed that the cross had magical powers. Charlemagne used it on feast days to heal his sick subjects. It was truly one of the wonders of the world.
My brother, I have traveled in many lands during my long life, and I have never found any other written record of the cross of Saint Peter. I had thought that perhaps it was lost when the pagans came into France four hundred years ago, but I do not now believe this to be true. There are men that I have spoken to in the city of Rouen who say that the monks of Marjean kept the cross of Charlemagne in a reliquary behind the high altar of the abbey church for generations, until an unsuccessful attempt was made to steal it and the cross was hidden.
The fate of the community at Marjean was no different than that of so many of the other monasteries of France. The great plague that many called The Black Death came there out of the east in the year of our Lord 1352, and there appear to have been no survivors. Marjean is indeed a desolate place, and I have taken no pleasure from my visits there. Some of the monastic library was preserved in a château nearby, but I found no record of the cross there or anywhere else. Only this. I passed through the town once more last year and found an old man living in the ruins of the monastery. He said that his father’s uncle was one of those monks killed by the great plague and that his father had told him when he was a child that the hiding place of the cross had been recorded in a book made by the monks. I asked the old man many questions about the book, and I formed the opinion that he was speaking of the holy Gospel of Saint Luke. I now feel sure that he was referring to the famous Marjean codex of which you will have doubtless heard yourself. But it too is missing, and I am no nearer to finding the cross of Saint Peter, if it does indeed still exist.
I am old in years, and I must turn away from the love of this world and make myself ready for the next. I leave to you this account, which is all that I know of Saint Peter’s cross.
May God be with you.
Andrew finished reading and handed the paper back to his daughter.
“I remember when I first read that,” he said. “In Rome before the war. I had gone there with Cade for a conference, but he wasn’t in the library when I found it. There was this little room at the back, and I don’t even know why I went in there. It was more like a cupboard, really. Shelves of old dusty religious commentaries and John’s letter neatly folded between the leaves of one of them. God knows how it got there. All I know is that it had been there for a long, long time. I remember it was early evening and I sat at a table in the summer twilight and made this copy, and then I showed it to Cade back at the hotel. I was excited. The city was ablaze with fires. Mussolini had just conquered Abyssinia, and I had found John of Rome. But Cade made me lose belief. The cross was an old wives’ tale, he said. An invention of jewel-crazy adventurers. It was a waste of time to even think of it.”
“But he was lying. You knew that already, Dad. After all, it was you who told me that he was in Marjean at the end of the war. You thought he’d gone after the cross.”
“I said it was possible.”
“Well, it was more than possible. That was what he was doing. This diary proves it.”
“I thought you said that it stopped in 1940.”
“It does. But by then he’d visited Marjean twice and was planning a third visit. The war stopped him, but then the end of it gave him the opportunity to take what he wanted by force. That was when he stole the codex.”
“Who from?”
“From a Frenchman called Henri Rocard, who was the owner of the château at Marjean up until 1944, when he and his family were all murdered. Allegedly by the Germans.”
“But you say it was Cade who did it?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it. Him and that man Ritter. Look, go back to John of Rome’s letter. See near the end, where he talks about visiting Marjean? He says that some of the monastic library was preserved in a château nearby.”
“But he also says that he found no record of the cross there or anywhere else,” countered Blayne, reading from the letter.
“Perhaps he didn’t look in the right places,” said Sasha. “Cade realised early on that that was the most important sentence in the whole document. He says so in his diary. The year after you found the letter he went to Marjean and visited the château there. Henri Rocard was away from home, but Cade spoke to the wife. He describes her as proud and rude.”
“Is that all?” asked Blayne, laughing.
“Pretty much. She didn’t invite him in. Said she knew nothing about the codex. Cade didn’t believe her, of course.”
“So what did he do?”
“He went to the records office in Rouen and settled down to do some research.”
“On the Rocard family.”
“Yes. And he got lucky. Not to begin with, but he was persistent.”
“Always one of the professor’s qualities.”
“He had no qualities. Look, let me tell you what’s in the diary, Dad,” said Sasha impatiently. “There was no reference to the codex in the first place he looked. Land deeds and wills and the like from before John of Rome’s time right up until the Revolution. But then in 1793 there was something. Robespierre and the Jacobins were in power in Paris, and it was the time of the Terror, soon after the king was guillotined. Government agents sent out from Paris arrested a Georges Rocard as a counterrevolutionary, and a record was made of a search of his château at Marjean. Cade copied part of the record into his diary. It says that the government agents found no trace of the valuable document known as the Marjean codex.”
“Just like John of Rome, when he searched for it four centuries earlier,” said Blayne, sounding unimpressed.
“But that’s not the point,” said Sasha. “What’s important is that there were people at the end of the eighteenth century who believed that the codex was in the château at Marjean. There must have been some basis for that.”
“Maybe,” said her father, still unconvinced. “What happened to Georges Rocard?”
“He didn’t escape, I’m afraid. Almost no one did. He was guillotined in Rouen a few weeks after his arrest. But his family got away to England, and Georges’s eldest son returned to Marjean and the château when the monarchy was restored in 1815. After the Battle of Waterloo.”
“And this Henri Rocard was a descendant of his?”
“Yes. Cade went back to the château, and this time Henri Rocard was there in person.”
“Proud and rude like his wife?”
“Worse, apparently. Rocard told Cade that he knew nothing about the codex, and when Cade persisted, Rocard and his old manservant set the dogs on him.”
“Did they bite?”
“I don’t know. The
point is that the reception he got from Madame Rocard and then from her husband convinced Cade that they had the codex.”
“So what did he do?”
“He wrote to Henri Rocard offering to buy it. There’s a copy of his letter in the diary. He pointed out that the château was in a state of serious dilapidation and that the money could be used to carry out all the necessary repairs. But he got no reply. He wrote again but still heard nothing, and he was just about to go to Marjean again when the war broke out.”
“So he was cut off from the object of his desire for more than four years,” said Blayne musingly. “The professor must have been a very frustrated man by the time D-day came around.”
“Exactly,” said Sasha. “We know he went to that area in 1944 and the whole Rocard family died. I believe Cade killed them, and that he stole the codex at the same time. He’d already been there and done that, and that’s why he always acted like he was so uninterested in Marjean and the codex.”
“So where is the codex, if you’re so certain he had it?” asked Blayne.
“I don’t know. I thought you could help me. I’ve looked everywhere.” The frustration was back in Sasha’s voice.
Blayne looked hard at his daughter and shook his head.
“Leave it, Sasha. It’s dangerous. I can feel it. The man spent almost half his life searching for something, and now he’s dead. It’s not the first time he was shot, either. Somebody tried to kill him in France three years ago. You tell me it’s got nothing to do with the cross, but I’m not so sure. Let it die with him. Let it go.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she blurted out and then immediately turned away from her father, trying to clear her mind. Again she had that same fleeting sense that he knew more than he was saying. Why hadn’t he been more surprised by her revelations—more excited? No one had suffered more at the hands of John Cade than her father. No one except Cade knew more about the codex. The codex and the cross.
“I don’t understand why you’re so calm about all this, so accepting,” she said, challenging him.
“Because I’m old,” he said. “Old before my time. Can’t you see that, Sasha?”
Blayne put his hand out toward his daughter, but she turned away and walked over to the window. She looked down into the stony courtyard, and her resolve hardened. “I’ll leave the diary here,” she said. “You can call me if you think of anything. I’ll find the codex. And after that I’ll find the cross.”
“And then?” asked Blayne, looking up sadly at his daughter. “What happens then, Sasha?”
She didn’t answer. Just lay her hand for a moment over her father’s shaking hand and then walked out the door.
SIX
“Widen the net . . . somebody the jury can believe in . . . not some phantom foreigner . . . your brother Silas . . .”
Stephen couldn’t sleep. His mind kept turning over Swift’s words, twisting them this way and that, seeking a way out. However hard he tried, Stephen couldn’t believe it of Silas. Couldn’t or wouldn’t. Stephen didn’t know. What he did know was that somebody who was not his brother had tried to kill their father. It was no phantom who had come to their house threatening John Cade with a pistol, no ghost who had put a bullet in his lung. That man was real. He had a name: Carson, Corporal James Carson, once of the British army in France. The only problem was that he was dead.
Stephen remembered the first time he’d met Carson. How could he forget? He’d just turned thirteen and had been out running, practicing for the cross-country season at his school. The man had been standing in the trees across the road from the front gate, looking up toward the house, and he had called to Stephen as he went past.
“Cold weather to be out running, young man,” he had said, stepping out into the road. He was wearing a heavy black army greatcoat with its collar pulled up around his ears, and yet he still seemed cold. There was a shiver in his voice, and when Stephen looked down, uncertain of what to say, he noticed a hole in the stranger’s boot.
Stephen muttered something indistinct and would have turned away if the man had not spoken again.
“Are you the colonel’s son?” he’d asked.
“The colonel,” Stephen had repeated, not following the stranger’s meaning.
“Colonel John Cade. He used to be a military man like me. But perhaps he’s too proud to remember old comrades.”
“Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Yes, I’m one of his sons.” Stephen had stumbled over his words. The man had made him nervous, as if Stephen realised even then that this stranger’s coming would cause trouble.
The man hadn’t stayed long after Stephen had walked with him up the drive and knocked on the door of his father’s study. The professor had not been pleased to see his visitor. That much was obvious. Carson had raised his hand to his forehead in a mock salute, but Cade had not returned the gesture. He’d just stared angrily at Carson for a moment or two, and when he eventually spoke, it was his son he addressed, not his visitor.
“Go to your room, Stephen,” he’d said. There was a harsh edge to his father’s voice that had frightened Stephen, and he had backed away into the corridor. A moment later his father crossed to the door and shut it with a bang that reverberated right round the east wing of the house.
Stephen had done what his father told him to. He had gone to his room and stood by the open window, looking down into the courtyard where the rain had started to fall. And it was no more than ten minutes later that the french windows of his father’s study opened and Carson came out. Cade had stood on the threshold behind him, and Stephen had heard his father say quite clearly:
“That’s all, Corporal. Don’t you come back here, because there’ll be no more. Do you understand me?”
“Right you are, Colonel,” the man had said, giving the same mocking salute that Stephen had seen earlier. Then he had walked away up the drive, making no effort to protect his head from the falling rain. Stephen had stood watching him until he disappeared from view.
Nearly a year passed before Stephen saw the man again. It was May, but he was wearing the same old greatcoat, and he had come into the courtyard shouting and waving a pistol in the air. He’d obviously been drinking. His sunken cheeks were bright red, and there was an alcoholic slur to his voice.
“Come on out, Colonel,” he’d shouted. “And bring your pretty wife too. I’ve got something to tell her about France. About being a war hero.”
Stephen had watched the pistol, wondering if it was loaded, but he never got to find out. His father came out of the front door holding a rifle and fired it twice, aiming just above Carson’s head.
The shock caused Carson to drop his pistol, and Cade walked over quite calmly and picked it up.
“You could have killed me,” said Carson, and Stephen, standing in the corner of the courtyard, could hear the fear and the anger equally present in the man’s voice.
“I will. Next time I will,” said Cade, and in one fluid movement he turned the rifle in his hands and hit Carson with the butt, full on the side of the head.
Carson fell to his knees, but amazingly the blow did not knock him out.
“You’ll have no more from me. I won’t tell you that again,” said Cade. “Now get off my property.”
Carson got up, holding his head, and began to stagger away down the drive. But after no more than a hundred yards, he turned around again.
“Watch your fucking back, Colonel,” he shouted. “I’ll find you when you aren’t looking. You’ll see.”
Stephen knew better than to ask his father about what had happened. Instead he had told his mother when she came back from the hairdressers in Oxford later that afternoon. Silas was away at school.
She had wanted to go to the police, but Cade wouldn’t hear of it.
“He needed to be taught a lesson. I’ve done that, and now he won’t come here again. You can trust me, my dear.”
And Clara had left it at that. She had always trusted her husband, and there was no reason
to stop now. Except that Stephen felt sure that his father did not believe his own optimism. It was only two weeks later that electronic gates were installed at the manor house and Sergeant Ritter began work on a new security system. Not that that saved Stephen’s mother.
Stephen did not want to think about that black Christmas. He did what he always did when he started to remember it. He began to count quickly, thinking about anything except that. The day the lights went out.
After the funeral he’d been sent away to school. Stephen knew what his father was thinking. He looked too much like his dead mother, and if it hadn’t been for Stephen’s Christmas present, she’d still be alive. Cade had stayed in his room when the car had come to take his sons away, and when they came back at the beginning of the holidays, Sergeant Ritter was installed in the east wing with his silent, frightened wife.
Stephen thought that Ritter would have come to live at the manor house earlier if it hadn’t been for his mother. Clara had always had an aversion to the sergeant, and it was an aversion her sons shared. Particularly Silas. Ritter was an expert at identifying a person’s weaknesses and then probing them relentlessly until his victim could stand it no more. Except that Silas never allowed his obvious anger to get the better of him. Ritter called him Silent Silas, or sometimes just Silence, and the name became increasingly appropriate.
Stephen could never forget those long horrible evenings around the dinner table at the manor house in the years after his mother died. Ritter, with his short curly black hair and his huge double chin, dominated the conversation, asking Silas when he was going to get a girlfriend, wondering why he didn’t have one. Stephen felt desperately sorry for his brother but powerless to protect him. The sergeant was too clever, too frightening.
Cade, meanwhile, would sit at the top of the table with a half smile playing across his features, and Ritter would watch him out of the corner of his eye until the professor gave an imperceptible nod, and Ritter ended his performance for another night. Stephen wondered if Silas had noticed their father’s control over the obnoxious sergeant. He must have. Perhaps Silas did hate his father. Perhaps Swift was right.
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