by Tom Harper
‘There is another reason I brought you here.’
He removed a small leather box from the vault and presented it to her. She fumbled with the leather strap that bound it. The moment she had it off, the two halves of the box fell open like wings. Cupped between them, resting on a cushion of raw wool, lay a gold ring. A red stone the size of a hazelnut bulged from its setting.
‘I wanted you to have this.’
Blanchard slid the ring on to her hand. It was too loose on her ring finger, but fitted her middle finger perfectly. Ellie stared at the dull gold against her white skin, the way the smouldering ruby trapped the light deep inside. Her guts churned, she felt faint. Could he be …?
‘This is not a proposal of marriage, or something like that,’ said Blanchard, in such a way that mere engagement sounded trite. ‘This is an old ring of my family’s. It solemnises our attachments, brings us luck.’ He smiled. ‘A ring of power.’
A roar filled the chamber, as if a long-dormant dragon had woken in his lair to find a piece of his hoard missing. The walls shuddered. Ellie grabbed on to Blanchard in terror. He put an arm around her and grinned.
‘The Central Line travels very close to this place. When they dug the tunnel in the nineteenth century we had to lodge a special application to re-route it so it would not disturb our vault. As Mr Saint-Lazare likes to say, the present always intrudes on the past. And vice versa.’
He leaned forward and kissed her. His cold lips made her tremble, but his mouth was moist and warm. She tasted tobacco on his tongue. He hugged her tight and pulled her against him, so that the hard points of his body dug into her.
‘Do you like the ring?’
Ellie lifted her hand, enjoying the weight on her finger. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘I will not tell you how old it is. But – keep it safe.’
The vault door clanged like a bell as he closed it. He took her hand and began to lead her back to the lift, then paused.
‘The Finance Ministry in Luxembourg will announce the Talhouett decision next week, December twenty-second. Michel Saint-Lazare has invited me to spend Christmas with him afterwards at his home in Switzerland. He has asked specifically if you would come too.’
He said it casually, but the whole weight of his gaze suddenly switched on to Ellie. She felt caught, an exotic butterfly on the point of the collector’s pin.
‘It would mean a lot to me,’ he added. He’d dropped the detachment he usually wore; his words were almost painfully frank. ‘Christmas in the Alps is magical. To share it with you would be … perfect.’
Ellie had never seen a white Christmas. She tried to think of her mother, the promise she’d made and the disappointment if she didn’t go. But Blanchard’s stare had a hypnotic power, a gravity that skewed everything beyond its field. Other obligations seemed only dimly important. She started to answer, and realised she’d already begun composing the excuses to her mother.
Luxembourg
Christmas brought out the German side of the Grand Duchy. In the Place d’Armes in the heart of the city, a giant fir tree loomed over the Christmas market that filled every corner of the square. Wooden cabins festooned with lights and fake snow offered a psychedelic array of brightly coloured sweets, obscenely long sausages, carved nativity scenes and ornaments. Steam rose from vats of mulled wine, mingling in the air with the smells of gingerbread and frying onions, the sound of carols and fairground music and laughter.
Inside the conference room at the Ministry of Finance, the only concession to the season was a plastic tree with a few tired baubles at the back of the room. No one paid it any attention. There were no smiles in that room, only tense faces and brittle anticipation as the rival bidders milled about, waiting. Blanchard was there, Christine Lafarge as well, and a number of the bankers she’d met doing the due diligence. Across the aisle, Ellie saw Lechowski. His jaw rose and fell as he worried at a piece of gum.
An official called the meeting to order. The Ministry people sat at a long table across the front of the room, fat men with thin hair and shiny suits. No one looked at them. All eyes were on the double-padlocked metal box that stood on a lectern in front.
The official invited representatives of the two bidders to come forward. In turn, Lechowski and Christine Lafarge each went up and undid one of the locks. The official opened the lid and turned the box upside-down. Two sealed envelopes fell on to the table.
The president of the panel handed one envelope to each of the men beside him. They ripped them open and read the letters inside, then swapped with each other. The audience waited. The president collected both letters and confirmed their contents for himself. They conferred. Ellie twisted Blanchard’s ring on her finger. She hadn’t expected to be so nervous.
The president switched on his microphone. ‘The winning bidder is Groupe Saint-Lazare, three hundred and forty-seven million euros.’
In an instant, the Monsalvat team were on their feet, applauding and congratulating each other. Across the aisle, Lechowski and his backers sat stony-faced, the glares of men narrowly beaten and suspecting a foul. The men from the privatisation commission didn’t look much happier: they must be wondering why the sale had failed to attract a higher offer.
‘Well done, Ellie. Without you, we could not have done this.’
Blanchard kissed her full on the lips, the first time he’d ever done that at work. He must be pleased. Embarrassed and surprised, Ellie kept her eyes open, and so saw Christine Lafarge watching in the background with a knowing smile on her face. She remembered Blanchard’s story about Christine and Lechowski, and wondered if Christine and Blanchard had ever been lovers. The thought made her absurdly jealous.
Blanchard turned to murmur a few words to the commission president. Christine took her arm.
‘Vivian tells me you are going to Mont-Valois for Christmas. Michel Saint-Lazare’s chateau.’ Ellie nodded. ‘You are very lucky. It is a magical place.’
Ellie must have drunk more champagne that night than in all her life previous. The Monsalvat team drifted from bar to bar, hotel to hotel, ordering by the magnum. The group became a living organism: new faces appeared whom Ellie had never seen before; others disappeared, only to reappear two stops later with yet more hangers-on. The hotel clock had turned past 3 a.m. by the time she and Blanchard returned to their room. Blanchard ordered more champagne from room service, then set about demonstrating that it did nothing to impair his physical functioning. Ellie didn’t get to sleep until five. At eight, the telephone rang with an alarm call. When she opened her eyes, Blanchard was standing in front of the mirror tying his tie, shaved and dressed already.
‘What time is our flight?’
‘As soon as we get there.’
The airport was crowded with families heading off on holiday and ex-pat workers trying to get the last flight out before Christmas. Ellie thought she might faint if she had to queue for more than five minutes, but Blanchard pushed past all of them to an unmarked door at the back of the terminal. Inside was a parallel airport universe of friendly staff and no queues: an immigration official who glanced at their passports and wished them merry Christmas; a security officer who carried their bags to the gate; and finally a simple door that led straight on to the tarmac, up a flight of stairs and aboard a small jet.
It was like no other aircraft Ellie had seen. The eight seats looked more like leather armchairs than anything that belonged on an aeroplane, with seatbelts discreetly recessed out of sight. Ellie sank back into the chair and fell asleep to the sound of turbines and Blanchard talking on the phone in French.
At Lausanne a black Range Rover was waiting for them on the runway. They climbed in, their bags were thrown in the back, and before Ellie realised it they were on the motorway climbing towards the mountains.
‘Shouldn’t we have shown our passports or something?’ she wondered.
‘Mr Saint-Lazare has an accommodation with the Swiss authorities.’
Ellie supposed that
he would. According to Fortune magazine, he was Switzerland’s seventh richest man. Despite diligent research, that was almost as much as she knew about him. The combined weight of Who’s Who, the Lexis/Nexis database and the World Wide Web supplied little more than a reputation as a generous charitable benefactor and a ruthless corporate raider, buying and selling companies the length and breadth of the continent. ‘Who is Michel Saint-Lazare?’ a plaintive article in The Economist had asked a few years ago. ‘Behind an impenetrable wall of shell companies and cross-holdings, Groupe Saint-Lazare is reputed to be one of Europe’s largest privately held companies. Yet its owner, Michel Saint-Lazare, is so reclusive some claim he died years ago.’ The only photograph she’d found was fifty years out of date, a black-and-white playboy on a post-war beachfront. Nowhere did it mention his connection with Monsalvat Bank.
The Range Rover turned off the highway, following a twisting road ever-upwards. Mountain peaks loomed in the near distance. Snow began to appear – at first small patches in the hollows of the bends, then spreading across the landscape until it drowned it completely. It dazzled Ellie; she wished she’d brought her sunglasses. In the grey, tired atmosphere of London, it hadn’t occurred to her.
The car turned again, this time onto an unploughed road through a forest. The chauffeur engaged the four-wheel drive. The trees started to fall away: when Ellie looked out the window, she saw they were on the edge of a precipice that plunged to a foaming river far below. She looked the other way for reassurance, but the mountain had disappeared. They were driving along a ridge, a thin spine of land along the top of a promontory. Ellie peered anxiously through the front window, looking for any glimpse of the house, but the low winter sun shone straight in her eyes. She hoped the driver could see where he was going.
And suddenly they were there. They rattled over a bridge, through a gate where portcullis teeth still pricked out of the arch, and into the courtyard of Michel Saint-Lazare’s home.
Christine Lafarge had called it a chateau. Blanchard described it, wryly, as a chalet. In plain fact it was a castle. It rose from a fist of rock at the end of the ridge, half severed from the mountain’s arm by a narrow ravine. A wooden bridge was the only access: on every other side, the rock face dropped three hundred feet sheer to the valley below. The whitewashed walls stood almost invisible against the snow: the steep black roofs seemed to hover in the clouds.
All of which Ellie only saw later. For the moment, she had only the vaguest impression of high walls and lofty turrets looking down on her; attendants hurrying out of what had once been stables to take their bags; a butler bringing cups of steaming wine almost before they were out of the car. The sun shone through an arch in the western wall, reflecting on the snow to fill the courtyard with light.
A dark-suited servant led them into the house, up a spiral stair to a long corridor. It looked like a museum: spears and shields hung on the walls, side by side with the trophy heads of long-dead game. But behind the doors the rooms were warm, with thick carpets and heavy curtains and an enormous four-poster bed swagged with lace. Peering out of the window at the snowbound valley below, Ellie felt she’d landed in a fairy tale.
‘Do you like your room?’
Blanchard had appeared. For a second Ellie thought he’d stepped out of the tapestry on the wall, until she saw the door beside it leading to the adjoining bedroom. She put her arms around his waist and linked her hands behind his back.
‘Do we need two rooms?’
‘Sometimes it is good to have your own space.’ He leaned forward, burying her in his embrace. ‘But not too much.’
‘Michel is away tonight,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘We will have to amuse ourselves.’
Ellie nodded, happy. Over his shoulder, she saw a stuffed wolf’s head set over the doorway, its jaw open and its eyes staring down.
She closed her eyes.
XXII
Normandy, 1136
I KNEEL IN front of Guy. The stones on the floor are cold and hard against my knees. On the altar, a burnished sword gleams in the candlelight. The white linen shift is smooth against my skin. Gornemant has drilled the symbolism into us since the day I came to Normandy. White for purity, for the law of God you will defend.
White as naked skin in moonlight. In the depths of the night, when I should have been keeping my vigil, I crept through the castle to the storeroom by the orchard. Ada was waiting for me. It’s never warm enough to remove our clothes, but we pulled my tunic and her dress down to our waists to feel each other’s bodies, nothing between us. The room smelled of last year’s apples, sweet and cidery. The barrels were almost empty, but the ripeness lingered in the air.
When we’d made love, we lay on a piece of sackcloth on the floor. The moon shone through the grated window; shadows criss-crossed Ada’s back. I stroked her bare skin, breaking the shadow bars. I heard snuffles in the darkness – her crying. The tears made tracks down her cheeks, a silver cage. I wiped them off.
‘We’ll be all right,’ I whispered in her ear.
Gornemant steps around me and fastens a red cloak over my white shift. Red for the blood I will shed in the service of the Lord.
Ada shed blood last night. Just a scratch, a cut on her finger where the scab had torn off. As she fumbled with my tunic, a few spots smeared on the white wool. I panicked; in a few hours I’d be standing in the chapel, the entire household watching me. Ada crept to the kitchen and fetched vinegar, a rag. By the time she’d finished, the stain was little more than a watermark.
A narrow belt girds the shift around my hips. Gornemant says it’s to remind me to shun the sins of the flesh. I loosen it so it hangs lower, covering the worst of the stain. When the priest comes to the part of the oath where I swear myself to a life of purity, I hope he doesn’t look down.
You swear by almighty God to defend the church, your lord, and to protect the defenceless from the mighty.
I repeat the oath. Guy lifts the sword off the altar and holds it above my head while the priest says his blessing. For a second I see the image of Guy as he was in the copse that day, the hiss of air as the sword cut through the knight’s windpipe, the drip of blood falling on leaves. If he knew what I’ve done with Ada, he’d cut my throat right here in the chapel. Instead, he slides it into the scabbard and buckles it around my waist. I stand, so that Gornemant can fix my gilded spurs on to my boot.
My leggings are brown, brown for the dust that is every man’s destiny, proud or humble. I’m no stranger to dust and earth these days. Dust on the flagstones in the storerooms and cupboards; dust in the stable straw; damp soil under the rock where we first kissed. We are creatures of earth, and the gold rings or spurs we wear to flatter our nobility mean nothing but vanity. The spurs aren’t even mine, only borrowed for the day. Tomorrow they’ll be iron.
Guy swats my shoulder with the palm of his hand.
‘Receive this blow in remembrance of Him who ordained you and dubbed you.’
I don’t need to be taught the symbolism to know what it all means. It means I am a knight.
Gornemant suspects. Last week, he told me a long story about a Flemish count. One of his knights had been sleeping with the count’s wife: when the count discovered them together, he had his butchers beat the man raw, then held him upside-down in a latrine until he suffocated. Or choked on effluent – no one could tell afterwards. Gornemant gives me a heavy look. ‘A lord must be able to trust his knights in all things,’ he says, ‘as much as his own right arm.’
In the Bible it says, ‘If your right arm offends you, cut it off.’ We both know that.
I want Guy to be able to trust me. I want to honour my oaths. I thought that sleeping with Ada might be an ending, that possessing her body would cure my desire. Instead, it’s only made it worse. From the moment I met her, my love has been a wound. Now, a fever is spreading. The more often I have her, the more often I want her. Instead of being grateful for the times we have, hasty and snatched, I resent the times we’re apart
. On the nights when I see Guy leave the hall to follow her to her room, I want to snatch a candlestick from the table and ram it through his eye.
*
My frenzy makes me reckless. Last week, one of the grooms surprised us in the stables as he came to fetch a cropper. Thankfully, the hinge on the stable door squeaks. We were able to cover ourselves, and made a great production of having come to show Ada Guy’s new colt. But servants gossip. I know I should rein myself in, temper my passions unless we can be absolutely safe. Next time, we wait until Guy’s away visiting one of his outlying tenants. We meet in the guard room at the top of the north tower: you can bolt it from the inside, and since Athold’s death Guy hasn’t bothered with a sentry there. It’s as safe as can be had.
I get there first. It’s a cloudless night and the moon is full: it shines through the windows and arrow slits, gleaming off the heads of the spears in a rack on the wall. The whole room is filled with silver light. I spread a cloak on the floor and wait.
I see Ada’s approach by the candlelight creeping up the doorframe. The stairs are steep and uneven: she doesn’t trust them in the dark. When she appears, she’s wearing a spotless white shift. No coat or dress, just a mantle of marmot fur.
The candle she carries lights up the tower like a beacon. Anyone could see it. I pinch out the flame with my fingers and hug her close, pressing my mouth into hers. She doesn’t reciprocate. There’s a stiffness in her, a withdrawal. I step back.
‘Are you all right?’
She stands so still that in the moonlight she looks like a statue of herself, a stone Ada. It reminds me of a telling of the Tristan story I’ve heard, where Tristan builds a wooden likeness of Yseult in a cave so he can stand and watch it hour after hour while she’s separated from him.
‘We have to stop.’
Perhaps Tristan was wise. The statue would never have said that. They’re words I’ve dreaded hearing since our first touch.