September Castle

by Simon Raven

  Ego Theobaldus Episcopus Lacedaemoniae, Pontifex domicilis Principis Guilliami…

  …I, Theobald, Bishop of Sparta and Chaplain in the Household of Prince William…carnem laceravi et mentem pertundere fortissime sum conatus…have rent my flesh and made most mighty effort to rack through my mind, to ensure that what I write is sooth and springeth not from trifling nor from false understanding and makes not affront to my God. For I write of this Mistress Xanthippe, and of what she brought with her hither and bears with her on her way hence. About her and it I have sensed that which must cause good Christom man to shrink as from the Fiend Himself; and I pray that God may deliver this amiable Lady, who in her soul is innocent, from the horror which voyages always with her and which (I fear me and despite this my prayer) numquam a corpore ejus separari volebit… will never willingly be parted from her flesh.

  It had taken the Despoina Xanthippe the better part of a week to proceed, under the Lord Geoffery’s escort, from Mistra to Karyteina. Every night a camp was set up, in a forest in the hills or by a stream bed in a valley or near a crooked church; and on the sixth afternoon after they had left William’s castle (as the Chronicle relates) she came ambling on her mare along the road from Megalopolis and into the Vale of Karyteina, riding side by side with Sir Geoffery at the head of his mesnie knights. The summer weather had been fine and the company (particularly Sir Geoffery’s) had been fun, but she was not sorry (or so the Chronicle, the Chronicle of Avallon, affirms) to see Geoffery’s substantial castle, which rose out of a rocky hill almost as though it had been part of it. She and her maidens were to spend three days there before again taking the road with Geoffery, this time for Chlemoutsi (Clermont) and Glarentza (Clarence).

  It took Ivan Barraclough and his Land Rover about two hours to make the journey by much the same route, with one brief stop for a picnic by a small lake near which (had he known it) the Princess Xanthippe had spent her third night out from Mistra. He too climbed into the hills north of Sparta, then descended into the Plain of Megalopolis, then took the road north-west into the Vale of Karyteina, where a sharp hill rising from the floor of the valley still holds the castle up to Heaven. He too mounted by a winding rocky path through the village hovels to the castle gate, and he too made for the guest chamber (what was left of it), intending, however, to spend only three minutes where Xanthippe had passed three nights.

  Adjoining the guest chamber was a little oratory and behind its altar was a crude reredos, carved in low relief out of the wall itself. Although time, damp, decay and dereliction had spoiled the work almost beyond interpretation, it was just possible to make out a paunchy St George in the act of sticking a ratty dragon (always a popular theme in Greek churches) and a maiden on her knees who was presumably praying for deliverance. Greek capital letters scratched above her made , a plausible abbreviation of Xanthippe.

  It was Ivan’s belief (and also that of Ptolemaeos Tunne) that the Lord Geoffery, well known for his gallantries and sentimental turns of fancy, had chosen to romanticize his brief acquaintance with the Lady Xanthippe, to see himself, and later to have himself represented, not as her mere guide and guardian on the road, but as her Protector against Perils and Monsters, her True and Embattled Knight. When, therefore, he had delivered her to Hubert of Avallon at Glarentza and returned to Karyteina, he had ordered his mason (so Ptolemaeos and Ivan surmised) to carve the legend of St George above the altar in the oratory, and to portray him, Geoffery, as the Saint and Xanthippe (whose name was carved above her head to ram the point home) as the Lady in Distress. The mason, having a hankering for satire, gave philandering Geoffery a middle-aged spread and rendered the dragon a scabby saurian beneath contempt. He had also thought fit, inspired as he was by his native shrewdness and informed by close observation of his subject during her residence at Karyteina, to play the fool with Xanthippe herself: if one looked at the kneeling figure with attention, one could see, concealed in the folds of her robe, a tiny imp or demon, who was either snarling or grinning (decomposition had made it impossible to tell which) and was also probing with a spear the size of a bodkin in the region of the Lady’s Mons Veneris. What the Lord Geoffery’s reaction had been when these impertinences were unveiled for his inspection (as Ptolemaeos remarked to Ivan) must now remain forever obscure. But what was beyond any question (Ptolemaeos used to add) was that the mason, like the Prince William’s Bishop Chaplain, had received and had vividly recorded the impression that the Lady Xanthippe had one attendant too many. Unlike the Bishop of Sparta, the mason expressed no opinion as to her guilt or innocence: her carven face provided no clue, being totally vacant.

  ‘The great point to remember,’ said Ptolemaeos Tunne, ‘is that Ivan will follow Xanthippe’s route exactly – provided that everything goes to plan. In every single place Ivan stops he will be able to confirm that an unbroken trail leads from Ilyssos to the end of his journey – to the castle then known as Arques, later, much later, as Arques-la-Bataille, on the Norman coast. September Castle, as the poet called it in his day. This confirmation, this reminder of the firm and continuous thread that runs from place to place all the way from Ilyssos to Dieppe, will fill him with renewed confidence for the final task.’

  Ptolemaeos was briefing the Marquess and Marchioness Canteloupe, with Jo-Jo in eager attendance. Earlier he had taken his guests to one side for some time and rather pointedly excluded Jo-Jo, who had wondered what he was up to; but then he had assured her that he had only been advising Canteloupe about the Stock Exchange, which would have bored her silly, and anyway here she was now right in on everything.

  Lord Canteloupe, who had inherited his marquisate from a distant cousin and had previously been called Detterling, was a stringy and sardonic man of sixty-six. His Marchioness, like Jo-Jo, was sixteen, a lively little girl with esculent limbs, generally known as ‘Baby’ but henceforth, as Ptolemaeos had informed Jo-Jo at their conference a few nights before, to be called by her given name, ‘Tullia’, in order to render her less volatile and bring her into a suitable mood for the very serious work that would soon be at hand.

  ‘Quite apart from that,’ Ptolemaeos continued, ‘he may discover something new, something that could assist him in assessing the…nature of the problem…and later in confronting whatever is to be confronted and removing whatever is to be removed.’

  ‘And just what might that be, Ptoly darling?’ asked Baby Canteloupe in a boisterous voice.

  ‘More of that later,’ said Ptolemaeos, rather evasively. ‘Please, Tullia, do not interrupt.’

  ‘Baby and me want to know now,’ said Jo-Jo, standing up and prancing about.

  ‘Sit down and shut up,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘or you’ll be turned out. Now then. Ivan will also be kept informed of any new knowledge that might come our way, of any new developments in our region. If necessary, agents will meet him to give him detailed accounts of what is toward.’

  ‘At the risk of seeming dim-witted,’ said Canteloupe, ‘might one enquire why you set so much store on such a painstaking and pedantic re-examination of the Despoina’s route? It is, after all, going to take up a lot of valuable time. And I can’t believe that it is so essential to Barraclough’s morale to confirm what he very well knows already.’

  ‘As for time,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘I have allowed ample margins…though there is one very mild cause for anxiety of which I shall apprise you all later.

  ‘As for Ivan’s morale, I agree that it is not essential that he should go over the entire course in detail, but I think it highly desirable. And there are considerations other than Ivan’s morale. Whoever and whatever came with the Lady Xanthippe from Ilyssos to Arques obviously came by the same route as she did and halted at the same lodgings. Might not some part of them or their esprit have rubbed off (so to speak) on those locations? Or might not some wave or vibration have lingered on – some wave or vibration to which, with luck, Ivan might respond? We know that the Despoina, in her journey, made strong and peculiar impressions on her hosts and the
ir servants, notably at Mistra and Rouen. Why should not similar impressions have been left on the places themselves, on their genius or their atmosphere?’

  ‘Such impressions would be difficult to detect,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘liable to mislead, and of no assistance as guides to practical action.’

  ‘I disagree. Anyone can sense some impression from the stones, for example, of Mycenae, nor is it in the least misleading. Correctly and without equivocation it proclaims murder and misery and lust.’

  ‘Mycenae is an exception.’

  ‘Nonsense. Delphi, the Colosseum, Ephesos, Nemi… Not the same messages as those of Mycenae, I grant you, but equally vivid.’

  ‘All of them put out signals which could only confuse or intimidate the visitor were any kind of action required of him – as usually it is not. In Barraclough’s case action is required; and I suggest to you that if he should pick up the sort of…residual oscillation…which you envisage, then it will at best be disquieting and at worst quite paralysing.’

  ‘Then we must agree to disagree. Ivan needs all the help he can get in identifying the nature of the forces which he must overcome and the prize to which he aspires…to which we all aspire,’ said Ptolemaeos with a sly pout. ‘If this slow journey north gives him any extra intuitions or inspirations, however slight, then it will have been worth while.’

  ’Is he the intuitive sort?’ asked glowing Tullia, while Jo-Jo gazed on, her eyes enormous.

  ‘When we were at Lancaster together he was a skilled collator of apparently random and unconnected events. He would say, “This, despite all appearance, has stemmed from that, and the result will be the other.” You’d be surprised how often he was right.’

  ‘That is not the same,’ said Tullia, while Jo-Jo gazed her fill, ‘as making accurate practical use of waves or vibrations from the past. As Canteloupe says, however strong these may be in particular places, they can only cause muddle – if not terror – when precise interpretation is necessary or the need for action is near.’

  ‘Do not insist too much on accuracy or precision,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘Ivan may get what I believe is called “a gut feeling”.’

  ‘And go berserk,’ said Canteloupe, ‘on the strength of it.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Ptolemaeos, lifting his right hand and slowly opening the palm as if to emit or deflect a ray into Canteloupe’s face, ‘we are now committed there. Ivan is on his journey. He has his instructions. He will make his visits. And that is all about that. Now let us discuss where you and Baby – where you and Tullia come in.’

  Baby and Jo-Jo exchanged melodramatic looks and held hands on the sofa.

  ‘The ship which carried the Despoina Xanthippe,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘took a devious route from Glarentza to Corfu to Dubrovnik, where there was a change of plan, back to Corfu and thence to Bari; from Bari round the heel and toe of Italy to Scylla and Palermo; from Palermo straight across the Mediterranean to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.’

  ‘Why was there a change of plan at Dubrovnik?’ asked Baby, and squeezed Jo-Jo’s hand in her excitement.

  ‘The plan had been to sail up to Venice,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘and take Xanthippe the rest of the way by land. But the Chronicle of Avallon tells us –’

  ‘Just how reliable is that?’ interrupted Canteloupe.

  ‘It was dictated by Messer Hubert of Avallon, the knight who accompanied the Lady Xanthippe, to a monk of the Abbey of Vezelay. There is no reason why it should not be reliable, if we allow for occasional lapses of memory; and indeed we had better pray that it is, as our whole enterprise is based on the information which it and its sequel contains. So,’ said Ptolemaeos patiently, ‘we assume that Hubert is telling the truth when he says that in Dubrovnik they heard a rumour that there was plague in Venice, “wherefore they strait turned the prow back to Corfu, and thence made sail to Bari”.’

  ‘Why not direct from Dubrovnik to Bari?’ said Baby, and again squeezed Jo-Jo’s hand.

  ‘Because the skipper was offered a fat payment to take a cargo of skins south to Corfu. There was, after all, no particular hurry. The speed of travel in those days was elephantine or at best equine, and a week or two more or less made no difference to anybody. So back to Corfu they went, thence to Bari, and thence, by the stages I have enumerated, to Saintes-Maries-dela-Mer, a small port on the south coast of France, so called because the Virgin and the Magdalen once landed there having sailed from Joppa in a miraculous skiff made of rock.’

  ‘South-east of Aigues Mortes,’ said Jo-Jo knowingly.

  ‘Yes: though at that time the ramparts were still a foot high. The town was building but didn’t really exist.’

  ‘Aigues Mortes means “Dead Waters”,’ said Baby; ‘they existed all right. Fever and cholera and God knows what.’

  Ptolemaeos hesitated, then said, ‘As you say, Tullia. “Dead Waters.” Treacherous and remote marshes. And, what was more, Messer Hubert and the Princess and her companions had to ride straight through them. There is more than a hint in Hubert’s Chronicle that they had some kind of unnamed and special protection, “Who ringed us round with his might”, as Hubert puts it, “against drowning, flux or pest.”

  ‘Ah,’ said Canteloupe. ‘Enter The Magician.’

  ‘No. Not a magician. Hubert is very cagey about it all, but he makes it plain that in his view the Lady Xanthippe, whether or not she knew it, was attended by some kind of guardian spirit who smoothed the way for them.’

  ‘Angel or Devil?’ enquired Jo-Jo.

  ‘He’s too discreet to specify. Anyhow, they all arrived safely at the nearest town of substance, which was called Saint-Gilles. There they procured lodgings and rested for a week or so, to recover from their voyage.

  ‘Now then. Villehardouin had long since sent word to his connections in Normandy that the Lady was on her way; and the Castellan of the Castle of Arques had been instructed to send an escort of knights to guard Messer Hubert and the valuable hostage in his care on the overland journey to Normandy, but the escort had, of course, gone to Venice in accordance with the original plan. This meant that for many weeks more Xanthippe would continue to be a wealthy young woman travelling with a friendly guardian rather than a captive Princess watched over by an official picquet. It might have been much better for her to have become earlier and therefore more gradually accustomed to the latter condition; for it is at least possible that much of the ill which befell her later was caused by the sudden and horrible shock of realizing for the first time, as the gates of Arques closed behind her, that she was indeed a prisoner and not just a little lass on a jaunt with a jolly old uncle. However, that is mere speculation: the plain fact of the matter is that Hubert was still totally responsible for her safety and it was now up to him to find them a bodyguard; and he managed to engage a mercenary squad of serjeants-at-arms to accompany them as far as Rouen, after which the rest of the journey would be too short to present much problem.

  ‘But what I particularly want you to remember, now, is this: that having landed at Saintes-Maries, and having crossed the sea marshes round Aigues Mortes, Hubert and Xanthippe rested a while, and Hubert made important arrangements at the town of Saint-Gilles, whither, in due course, will come Ivan Barraclough as he follows in their footsteps.’

  ‘Is he going to land at Saintes-Maries off a miraculous rock?’ said Jo-Jo.

  ‘No,’ said Ptolemaeos, po-faced. ‘Ivan will travel the whole way overland, except for the unavoidable sea crossings.’

  ‘Then he won’t be doing exactly the same as Xanthippe.’

  ‘He will positively visit all the places and the ports through which she passed. From Bari he will drive to Palermo, taking the ferry from Scylla; from Palermo he will return to the mainland, taking the same ferry back, and he will then drive along the Italian and French coasts to Saintes-Maries. He will miss the experience of Xanthippe’s sea voyages, but these days it is impossible to take ship as she did.’

  ‘Right you be, old bean,’ said Canteloupe. ‘One has the
picture. But just where do Baby and I come into it?’

  ‘You and Tullia come into it at Saint-Gilles, which is where you will meet Ivan. There is a modest but wholesome hostelry there, with one tower in the Guide Michelin –’

  ‘Only one tower in the Michelin?’ giggled Baby. ‘Canteloupe will do his pieces. He’s a four-tower-minimum man.’

  ‘A modest but wholesome and perfectly adequate hostelry,’ insisted Ptolemaeos, ‘where I myself have on occasion laid my head…and where you will meet Ivan Barraclough just seven days from now. You will remain with him, and he with you, over the rest of the Despoina’s route through France, right up to Dieppe and the Castle at Arques.’

  ‘September Castle,’ said Baby, and squeezed Jo-Jo’s hand once more.

  ‘September Castle,’ echoed Ptolemaeos grimly. ‘You will all three occupy rooms in the Hotel La Présidence in Dieppe. Three towers in Michelin.’

  ‘Still one off par,’ said Baby, ‘but things are looking up.’

  ‘Your primary function,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘is to provide cover for Ivan. You are a rich and titled couple at the end of a long European tour. Ivan is your courier. He can have no safer explanation of himself; it will render him almost invisible.’

  ‘Invisible?’

  ‘From the moment you meet him at Saint-Gilles, he will be playing the role of Confidential Upper Servant to the Marquess and Marchioness Canteloupe; by the time you arrive in Dieppe Ivan will be so totally camouflaged that even the most suspicious observer will absolutely overlook him.’

  ‘I suppose I’d better send my real man straight home alone from Saint-Gilles,’ said Canteloupe. ‘Perhaps he can give Barraclough a tip or two before he goes.’

  For a moment Ptolemaeos was wrong-footed.

  ‘What can you mean?’ he said.

  ‘What I say. I presume this Barraclough will be taking over as my valet along with all the rest of it. In which case I’d better send my own chappie straight home from Saint-Gilles. He might not like it very much, being replaced in the middle of a trip, but I daresay I can explain it all to him.’