‘You are not so disabled as you make out to be,’ I commented on one occasion when we stopped to rest.
An impish look came onto his face. ‘My arms and legs have not the co-ordination that they once had, but yes,’ he agreed, ‘I have more ability than I pretend to others.’
‘Why do you wish to appear more infirm than you actually are?’
‘It’s useful if you are a spy. I’ve found that most people viewing my injuries assume that it must follow that my mind is equally compromised.’
‘How very patronizing,’ I said.
‘How very convenient,’ replied Giorgio. ‘When you have an infirmity like mine people do not see you as a threat. The common perception is that body and brain are as one. The conversations I have heard in taverns, the secrets that patients have told me, they would never have divulged if they thought my wits were not as disjointed as my limbs.’
‘Did Master Nostradamus know?’ I asked him.
‘I’m sure he did, else he would not have trusted me to measure and mix his recipes. He never commented, but he put me through a strict apprenticeship where he watched and checked everything I did. We were both aware that if I did not have a degree of accuracy in my work I might terminate the lives of half the noble houses of Europe! Now let us go on.’ Giorgio stood up and lifted the knapsack that Lord Thierry had given him. ‘The Duke of Marcy’s troops will not come near the swamp because it is thought to be impassable and also for fear of evil spirits. But if daylight comes and they see two figures moving across it they might send soldiers to try to cut us off on the far side. I want to be out of this and under the cover of the edge of the forest before daylight.’
‘What do you think will happen to Lord Thierry and the castle of Valbonnes?’ I asked.
Giorgio shrugged and did not answer. But when the sun rose early the next day there was no need for me to ask again. It was plain to see the fate that awaited the beautiful castle and all within it.
We’d come to the end of the swampland and had climbed quite high on a thickly wooded slope. As the sun cleared the tops of the trees we stopped to look back.
On the plain in front of the castle an army was mustering, with cannon and siege engines.
‘Lord Thierry’s castle cannot withstand an assault by cannon for very long,’ I said.
‘Long enough that we might be far away before it falls,’ said Giorgio. ‘Let us use the time as he wanted us to, and get you to the Isle of Bressay as quickly as we can.’
So I was going to the Isle of Bressay. I should have realized that. Where else would I go? Where else could I go? My heart lifted at this thought. In some way I would be nearer Chantelle and my father. The tenants on the land would welcome me. I wondered if they’d had any news of what had happened recently to threaten their livelihood.
It was well that the weather was warm, for in the time that it took us to reach my true home we never once spent a night inside. We had a haversack of food and blankets that Lord Thierry had given us. Giorgio avoided towns, farms and any type of habitation. Once when it rained heavily he would not even shelter in a remote barn.
‘These are the type of places that Huguenots use to come together for their worship,’ he told me when I begged to be allowed to rest inside until the downpour stopped. ‘It would only take one nosy traveller or farm worker to notice us and make comment at the next inn for a spy to pick up a piece of information.’
‘I’m travelling as a man now,’ I pointed out, ‘and would not be so easily identified.’
‘But I would,’ he said. ‘Spies know other spies and it would be simple to link a limping Italian from Salon to two people hiding as they travelled on the road away from Valbonnes.’
After that I did not protest. We walked and rested and walked, and on the way I told Giorgio the bones of my life history, my connection to the Isle of Bressay and why Lord Thierry had instructed him to take me there.
‘Before this day is done I think you might see your father’s land.’
Giorgio said this to me just after noon one day while walking through a meadow. We came over a gentle hill and there before us was a lake. Around the edge were small wooden houses where the fishermen lived and near to these was a causeway leading to an island. On the island among meadows and gardens stood a large house with its tall chimneys reflected in the peaceful waters. My tiredness sloughed from me. I began to run.
Giorgio flung himself after me. ‘Hold back!’ he cried. ‘Hold back!’
He gripped my arms and hurried me into some bushes. ‘Don’t you see that the house gate is locked? That there are armed men guarding the entrance to the causeway?’
We knelt down, and then, keeping low, went closer that we might better see what was happening.
‘Was it your father’s custom to have soldiers patrolling his boundaries?’ Giorgio asked me.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t believe so.’
We waited and watched for a while. Then a messenger rode out from the house. He was challenged by the soldiers but allowed to pass. His route was near to where we were hidden and he galloped close enough for us to see the colours on his tunic.
They were royal blue, quartered with the lily of France.
The coat of arms of the Count de Ferignay.
Chapter Fifty-five
GIORGIO AND I ran to the foot of the hill and in among a small group of trees.
Giorgio was clearly agitated. ‘That could have been disastrous.’ His face was white and he was trembling. He gave my arm a shake. ‘You must never rush away like that again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I sobbed. ‘I’m sorry.’
My tears were genuine. I’d had a bad fright, but I was also crying because I knew that I would not be able to go onto the Isle of Bressay, or sit at the window of our music room, or play in the gardens. I wept for the fate of my home with the Count de Ferignay’s soldiers trampling everywhere.
‘I am become careless that I didn’t think he would have already sent soldiers to strengthen his claim to the property. Or else,’ Giorgio mused, ‘he might have thought that if you were alive, this is where you would go and he has placed men there to watch for you.’
‘What can we do now?’
Giorgio sat down upon the ground. ‘I must give this matter some thought,’ he said.
As Giorgio pondered our situation I stood under the trees, staring at the Isle of Bressay. Memories began to stir in my mind. The house was always full of glorious sound and brightness. Its setting on the island, surrounded by the sparkling lake, meant that light poured in through the windows from dawn until sunset . . .
I swivelled round and stared at the hill behind us.
From my bedroom window I had been able to see this hilltop.
The Hill of the Standing Stones.
Rising in the morning and going to bed at night, I would gaze in fascination at the circle and the huge cairn that stood within it. Every day I saw the sun rise and set upon the stones. And the middle of the summer after my ninth birthday I had gone to the hill one evening . . .
‘What day is this?’ I asked Giorgio.
‘It is late June,’ he replied. ‘The exact date I could not tell you. But listen to me, Mélisande,’ he went on, ‘there is a place where I have some contacts and you might be safe, but it will have its own dangers and—’
I was not listening to him. I had begun to walk away and up the incline of the hill.
He got up and came after me. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I must go and look at the stone circle,’ I told him.
‘There is not enough time,’ said Giorgio. ‘We should put some distance between ourselves and this place before another day passes.’
I shook my head and kept walking. ‘First I must see the stones.’
I had no idea why I said this. When he saw that I would not be dissuaded, Giorgio urged me to ascend from the other side so that we might not be seen by any watcher in the house. He glanced around but he went with me up the hill u
ntil we both stood beside the cairn inside the circle of giant monoliths.
Giorgio was uneasy and kept urging me to leave. I hardly heard him. There was another sound ringing in my head. The air moved around me as if I were inside a huge cathedral with every bell pealing.
I had been nine years old when I’d last stood here . . . on Midsummer’s Eve.
I had gone to bed that night but had got up again. The sky was still light, it being the longest day of the year. The sun, sitting on the rim of the horizon, spread long fingers of light over the earth. I had risen and walked from my house and climbed the hill of the ancient stones as if in a dream. When I got there, one red ray of sunlight was touching the huge stone slab around which the central cairn was built. I went towards the beam of light and placed my hand on the spot where it rested on the ancient stone.
The stone had rotated and I had stepped into a secret chamber . . .
The door had closed behind me.
But I had not been frightened.
It was not totally dark. Along the sides of the door was enough of a gap to allow slices of light to come through to illuminate the walls that surrounded me.
A wedge of gold sunlight slid across the far wall, and as it moved, the surface was revealed to me. I stretched up and with my fingers I touched the lines inscribed there; the grooves imprinted by stone on stone.
Then I’d heard Chantelle calling my name, and also the voice of my father, fraught with anxiety. So I’d turned and pushed the keystone, and the cantilever was so well balanced that, even after the space of a thousand years or more, it swung open. I appeared behind my father and sister. They thought that I had been sleepwalking. And in the morning I believed it to be a strange dream which I then forgot about.
Now, here with Giorgio standing beside me, I raised my hand to the collar of my cloak. I had not known myself how deeply this pattern was imprinted on my mind. It was this same design that I’d drawn and pinned as a template to stitch and embroider my cloak.
And also . . .
Nostradamus!
His visions of the massacre in Paris had begun in the year of my ninth birthday.
‘At the time of the summer solstice.’
The year of my ninth birthday, 1563, added up to 15. The year of my birth, 1554, added up to 15. The year of his prediction of catastrophe for France, 1572, added up to 15.
I thought of the papers concealed in the hem of my travelling cloak and I drew it closer around my shoulders.
Giorgio took my movement as coming out of some reverie. ‘Now that you have seen the stone circle,’ he said, ‘can we go?’
‘Giorgio,’ I said. ‘There is something here for me and I must wait until I find it.’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Do you recall on the second day we left Valbonnes we looked from a mountain slope and saw huge columns of smoke in the sky? I believe it meant the castle had fallen. With my broken body I can only travel slowly, and you merely have the stamina of a young girl. Those who are probably following our trail are armed and experienced horsemen with fresh horses, good food and supplies. No matter how careful I am they will pursue us. While you live, the Duke of Marcy’s life and position are threatened. He will keep at least one of the inhabitants of the castle alive until they confirm that a girl of your description arrived in Valbonnes at the time that Master Nostradamus died. He will find out that the same girl disappeared just before the castle fell. Then he will deploy men in an ever-widening circle to seek you out and kill you.’
‘None of Lord Thierry’s staff would betray him, not for all the money in the world.’
‘Not for money, no,’ Giorgio conceded. ‘But there are persuaders more powerful than money. I suffered the strappado, which is reckoned to be the most civilized method of torture. After a few sessions of it I would have told my questioners everything without them quizzing me further. Believe me, when they heat up the pincers in the furnace fire and lay out the torture implements where you can see them, and you smell the burning flesh and hear the screams of the others being questioned, you speak out what you know.’
I shuddered. Lord Thierry would die bravely, but I thought of the old nurse Marianne and hoped that her death had been merciful.
‘I would rather my name was absent from that particular guest list,’ said Giorgio. ‘So you see why we must press on.’
‘It troubles my mind that I have brought misfortune to people who have tried to help me,’ I told him. ‘But for that very reason I must wait a little longer in this place. Otherwise they have died in vain.’
He gave in to me for he could do nothing else. Although not as disabled as he had pretended in the past, he was not fit enough to force me to go somewhere against my will. As he sat down upon the ground I said, ‘Today is Midsummer’s Day.’
‘If you say so,’ he answered me. ‘I have no reason to doubt you.’
‘So now this is the summer solstice?’
‘Ah, yes. A significant date.’ He looked around at the stones.
I sat down beside him. He studied my face with interest.
‘I do not understand what you meant when you said that these people will have died in vain.’
I almost told him then of the papers that Nostradamus had entrusted me with. I was tempted to share with him the secret of my mission. Only the promise I’d made to the prophet prevented me.
‘We will wait,’ I said. Although I did not know what I waited for.
We ate some food as the sun began to go down. Then suddenly Giorgio lifted his head and said, ‘Can you hear anything?’
I too listened and then shook my head. The lowering sun’s long rays slanted across the sky from the west. They inched along the ground before us.
‘There is no birdsong,’ said Giorgio.
He was right. The chirruping had ceased as the shadows crept over the grass. A cloud passed across the sun and we both shivered.
Giorgio got up and paced to the edge of the hill. He knelt down and stretched out on his stomach on the grass to look at the Isle of Bressay. ‘Nothing seems amiss,’ he called back over his shoulder.
His voice came to me from far away. In idle fancy I had counted the number of stones.
15.
The number Nostradamus had puzzled over.
3 times 5.
15.
The clouds parted. A red line of light blazed out. It struck the central stone of the cairn.
I stood up. Giorgio was keeping watch and had his back to me.
I walked forward. I touched the stone. It swung open and I went through.
Chapter Fifty-six
THE CHAMBER WAS filled with rosy light that made it vibrate with energy.
Now sixteen years old, I was much taller than I’d been at nine, and I could both see and reach into the farthest corners. The complex pattern inscribed upon the walls throbbed with life. It was the design that had been in the cave of the Knights Templar. The intertwining circles. The writhing, roiling lines flowing into each other, the slanting ellipses, the snake-like coils crossing and recrossing. I stretched out both arms trying to grasp it all, to encompass and memorize and draw it to me and within me.
I felt my head swim and I sank to the ground.
The pattern was a force of life.
It pressed down on my head. And on the knights assembled in a circle there.
Each knight was dressed in a pure white surcoat with a large red cross emblazoned across his chest.
One by one they stepped forward and as they did, each one drew his sword from its scabbard and kissed the blade. And then they spoke, their voices rolling like summer thunder in the mountains.
‘Let me not be judged on the ill that I have done, but on the good that I intend to do.’
The Lord Thierry was the youngest among them. His face illuminated from within, his shining spirit so dazzling that when he stepped forward I did not at first recognize him. With firm hands he too swore the oath of fealty and justice.
‘There is a pestilence upon
the land.’
‘The prophet has shown the way.’
‘He has passed on. His time on earth spent out.’
‘Another has been given the prophecy to safeguard.’
Then their voices began to overlap and clamour. And the noise was the sound of a thousand wooden clappers and I could make no sense of any of it. And I clutched my ears with hands and pressed hard on each side of my head to keep my mind from splintering into madness.
It was the smell of the artema flower that brought me to my senses. I opened my eyes in the utter darkness and the soft fragrance of Chantelle’s wedding posy drifted into the enclosed space. I rose to my feet. I groped my way towards the door and outside.
The sun was lying just below the western horizon.
Where was Giorgio?
Above me the canopy of the heavens was a cloth of midnight velvet sprinkled with vibrant pulsating light.
Giorgio still lay on his front on the grass. He was so deeply asleep I had to shake him awake.
‘I will go now,’ I said to him.
He put his finger to his lips. ‘Speak quietly,’ he whispered, ‘for sound carries over water.’
As we gathered our things together we could hear the voices of the sentries, then a wailing child from one of the fishermen’s dwellings.
Using the stars as our guide, we turned south.
‘We have only a few hours of near darkness before the sun rises again,’ Giorgio whispered. ‘Then I think we should hide during the day.’
So that was how we travelled for the next week or so. Giorgio would not move at all in daylight. As the weather was fine it was no hardship to walk by night and hide during the day.
It was on the afternoon of the fifteenth day that Giorgio pointed out a rocky mountain range in the distance and said, ‘Hopefully on the other side of that lies safety.’
I ventured to ask, ‘Where is it? Where have you taken me?’
‘The only place I can think of where we might find refuge,’ he answered. ‘The kingdom of Navarre.’
Chapter Fifty-seven
The Nostradamus Prophecy Page 25