Cathar

by Christopher Bland

  Bernard paid a high price, a fine of a thousand crowns, and he was forced to hand over half his lands, including Beaufort, to the Church.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to me. ‘But you hadn’t taken possession, and the property reverted to me when your father died. There will always be a place for you and your men at Roqueville.’

  I didn’t understand the details of feudal law, but there was little point in arguing, as one of the so-called crusaders had already occupied and garrisoned Beaufort on his way up the valley.

  As a final humiliation, Bernard had to perform a public penance in the great cathedral in Toulouse. Naked except for a loincloth, he crawled from the West Door up to the high altar, while the Bishop scourged him on the way with a heavy bundle of birch twigs, refreshed at regular intervals. He was watched by several hundred men and women, laughing and jeering at a great man brought low. There was an extraordinary contrast between the grandeur of the cathedral’s soaring Roman arches and the sordid spectacle below that had been arranged for the greater glory of God.

  Many years earlier Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, had been forced to undergo a similar humiliation, but the scourging then was largely symbolic. On this occasion the Bishop, a burly Prince of the Church, laid on with relish and a heavy hand, drawing blood at the third stroke and making Bernard cry out many times. Perhaps worst of all, his wife, his daughter, his son and twenty of his own knights, including me, were made to line the aisles. I watched Blanche, who had been made to stand with her daughter on the opposite side of the aisle. She closed her eyes after the first savage blow and kept them closed until it was all over.

  We took Bernard back to Roqueville an impoverished, humiliated and broken man. He died a year later.

  2

  The Dovecote

  ROQUEVILLE WAS A different place, quieter, less exciting without Bernard. While he was alive there was always something happening, neighbours invited for a joust, a hunt for wild boar, a feast to celebrate an ancestor’s birthday, a horse race through the valley, an evening with a new troubadour. Armand, his only son, took his place. He was only three years older than me, but had little opportunity to show he was as good a man as his father through success at tournaments or on the battlefield. He resembled Bernard in looks, but soon acquired a careworn expression that rarely left him. I could tell he wished he had been with us at Avignonet.

  At the beginning much of the power rested with Blanche, who set about rebuilding the fiefdom. The forfeited land lay mainly to the east, a source of rents rather than crops or animals; most of the valley of the Baise still belonged to Roqueville.

  For a year the crusader who had been given Beaufort remained in uneasy occupation, an alien figure from northern France who spoke no Occitan. His taste was for warfare, not husbandry. He killed most of my pigeons and then lived off the cattle, ignoring the need to breed as well as to slaughter. No one would work for him apart from his soldiers, and they were all warriors as useless as their lord. After twelve months he left; his parting gesture was to fill the hall with straw and torch the place. Beaufort burned for several days. It was no longer mine, but it was the place where I was born and raised, and I found its loss and later destruction hard to bear.

  Armand, I suspect at Blanche’s suggestion, asked me to go back.

  ‘Thank you, but it’s sequestered land now, it no longer belongs to Roqueville, so it cannot belong to me. I’d rather remain here.’

  Armand grunted.

  ‘I suppose you’re right; you’d be vulnerable to the next crusader who came along once you’d rebuilt Beaufort. My father promised you a place here and we’ll honour that.’

  Gradually Blanche replaced the lost cattle, buying heifers in the market at Carcassonne; she found two good bulls at Aubiet. At first much of the land was ploughed for corn, which gave us plenty of bread, although meat was scarce in the early years. The vineyards continued to do well and we sold or bartered a third of the wine.

  I was one of more than thirty Roqueville knights; half of us lived in the castle, the rest in their own houses or in the little hamlet close to the river, although even the outliers looked to the castle for food and drink. I was the youngest and would probably remain so, as it seemed unlikely that more knights would be created.

  In the castle I shared a room with three others. Although they were polite enough, they were ten or fifteen years my senior, and were less than enthusiastic about having someone allocated to their already cramped accommodation. After some months I moved out to a small house in the village, vacant for some time as the previous occupant had died of a black fever. It seemed safe enough to me, although I took the precaution of cleaning the place thoroughly and burning what little furniture was left behind. Its bareness suited me; I had a bed, a chair, a table, a rushlight and a fire in the ground-floor room, where I slept in the winter. In the heat of the summer I needed the cool breeze in the upstairs chamber.

  ‘We have more than enough men who can handle a sword or a lance,’ I heard Blanche grumble to Armand. ‘All they do is practise for imaginary battles, develop healthy appetites and go through our larders like locusts.’

  Blanche was right. Every morning there were men in the tilt-yard or practising swordplay in the armoury. Two of Bernard’s former comrades in arms were in charge of the knights. Geoffrey de Goncourt had been a famous jouster, fighting with my father in tournaments when they were young men. He could still unhorse an opponent when he wanted to demonstrate the right way to carry a lance, and could parry the fiercest attack on foot with deft use of his sword and shield. He was fond of me and took particular care that I knew how to handle my weapons. Armand valued his advice, and on more than military matters.

  He was Roqueville’s source of chivalric wisdom. He knew the fine points of etiquette, of challenge, acceptance, surrender, ransom, when it was appropriate to kill an opponent in battle and when to allow him to yield. He made it clear to me that he regarded Avignonet as insignificant and unworthy.

  ‘Your father deserved a better death,’ he once said to me.

  He was an expert on heraldry, and liked to refer to himself as Roqueville Pursuivant. He was dismissive of the simple Beaufort coat of arms.

  ‘If your mother had been an only child you could have added the Malet arms to your own. Eight quarterings, one of them the Duc de Beaujeu.’

  After a while I found this an unsatisfactory way of life. We were practising for battles that would never be fought, and the days of tournaments were over. I knew from my experience at Avignonet that fighting was a messy, confused affair that took no account of the courtesies of the armoury. My companions regarded the crossbow as an inferior weapon, best left to the men-at-arms. I did not share this view, and most of my practice hours were spent in the butts. I improved my accuracy and speed until I could regularly get seven or eight bolts into the centre of the target within three minutes.

  Although I fulfilled my obligations as a soldier, on many days I would ride down the valley, taking my crossbow in case I came across a roe-deer, and I made a contribution to the table after most of these outings.

  I never went to Beaufort, although I visited the great stone that marked my father’s grave. The place which now sheltered the bodies of my father and mother was well chosen. It looked out over a grassy valley that in the spring came alive with flowers and clover, the river just visible through the willows and scrub oak that marked its course.

  I spoke to my father regularly, more often than when he was alive. I had to imagine his replies, which wasn’t difficult as he had been a man of few words.

  ‘I suppose you’re already reincarnated,’ I said on an early visit, half expecting a wolf or a hawk to appear. I was disappointed but not surprised when nothing happened, and rode off wondering whether my failure to find Authie in time for the Consolamentum had condemned my father to an unhappy new existence.

  On another occasion I asked him about Avignonet. ‘Was it worthwhile? Killing those Inquisitors has brought nothing b
ut trouble. You’d be alive and Beaufort would still be standing if we’d stayed at home.’ Again I got no answer, although a kestrel was hovering above me as I asked the question. It flew off as I left, and it may not have been my father.

  There was no dovecote at Roqueville, and I suggested to Armand, as much from boredom as from a desire to replace the past, that I build one.

  ‘I’ll ask my mother what she thinks,’ he said, and later that day told me that she approved of the idea.

  ‘You can use the field where we used to grow turnips,’ he said. ‘I’ll lend you three men to help with the work.’

  We levelled the ground, baked the bricks, mixed the mortar, felled ash trees to erect scaffolding. I sent two of the men to Beaufort to see what they could find among the ruins, and they came back with roof tiles from our old dovecote. It took six months to complete the work; at the end we had a handsome little circular building sitting eight feet above the ground on four curved arches which we built from cut stone. The rest of the building was brick, with an oak floor and chestnut roof beams. Inside there were nesting hollows for three hundred birds. Just above the arches I set long strips of tin projecting outwards and downwards so it was almost impossible for rats to get inside. The dovecote was capped with a round of copper providing eaves over the entry and exit holes, and above the cap I instructed the blacksmith to make a weathervane of a wolf, the de Roqueville crest.

  Armand brought Blanche down to inspect the work when we had finished.

  ‘It’s very pretty,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you can work with more than the sword and the lance. But where are the pigeons?’

  ‘There are still semi-wild birds around Beaufort. We’ll trap them, bring them here and feed them inside until they are used to their new quarters.’

  ‘I would be happy to live here if I were a pigeon. Perhaps that’s how I’ll be reincarnated. What do you think, Armand?’

  Armand frowned at his mother’s indiscretion and said only, ‘I look forward to pigeon pie and squabs.’

  As I watched them ride back to the castle I thought that was an incautious remark about reincarnation, although I was pleased that Blanche trusted me to be discreet. There was an understanding that Catharism in the valley, though widespread, was not to be talked about and not to be practised openly. The fiction that we were Catholics since Bernard’s penance was maintained in the only church in the valley. The priest, an old friend of the de Roquevilles, was happy to see a large congregation every Sunday and turned a blind eye to the fact that the attendees were mainly Cathars who didn’t take Communion or go to him for Confession.

  The Perfect Guillaume Authie was a regular visitor. I always knew when he was about to appear because I was asked to produce fish from the stew pond, which I had built beside the river when we had finished the dovecote. Authie wore his green robes only within the castle walls and heard our Confessions in a small private chamber off the main hall.

  The moment of greatest danger was when a Cathar lay dying and a Perfect had to be found to administer the Consolamentum, followed by the Endura, the fasting to death that ensured Perfection. The Endura was sometimes too much for the relatives of the dying man or woman, as it often guaranteed a painful death. It made people unsure in their faith, too ready to gossip and grumble, which was all right in the valley but risky with strangers and at distant markets or fairs.

  Blanche was a strong believer, and always insisted that a Perfect be there even if the dying person was an uncertain Cathar. ‘It’s my duty,’ I once heard her say to Authie. ‘I need to save more souls than my own.’

  Nevertheless, she wore her religion lightly and was admired and loved. I worshipped her for her beauty, her energy, her gaiety, her subtle ability to manage Armand without undermining him, her determination to restore Roqueville to its former glory.

  I saw her once a week at the feast that all Roqueville knights and esquires were expected to attend. On other evenings she dined in her chamber with her daughter and her son. At the feast there was always music, and often a troubadour who would pay tribute to Blanche in words that I, besotted as I was, never thought too fulsome. There were moments when she seemed to pay me special attention, would call for me to sit beside her at or after dinner, would sometimes touch my hand to make a point, or pinch my cheek gently if I tried to outdo the troubadour in her praise.

  I watched jealously if others received similar favours; my passion was chaste and honourable in theory, fiery in practice. I had never known a woman. I embraced Blanche many times in my dreams and always awoke from them both exhilarated and ashamed.

  My only close friend at Roqueville was Etienne de Vallieres, who had been knighted with me on the same day at Chauvency. He lived with his widowed mother at Barraigne, a small castle much like Beaufort further up the valley. He shared my admiration for Blanche and we would speak appreciatively to each other of her virtues, both trying hard to believe in the purity of the other’s courtly love.

  Etienne would often ride with me in the valley, although he was a poor shot with the crossbow and always left it to me to bring back a roe-deer or a partridge for the table. I was Blanche’s favourite, he told me.

  ‘She calls you her useful servant; she remembers how well you did at the tournament and at Avignonet. Admires you for bringing food to the table, for building the dovecote and the stew pond.’

  This was sweet music, although I told Etienne it was simply her affectionate way of speaking. Secretly I hoped it was more, although I had no way of finding out.

  I became more than a troubadour and perhaps less than a knight when, one day, she rode down to the dovecote alone.

  ‘My daughter’s horse cast a shoe and she’s returned home. I’ve always wanted to look inside.’ She dismounted and tied her horse to one of the iron rings set into the nearest column.

  ‘The floor is covered in droppings and the smell is sharp.’

  ‘I’m a woman. I’m used to dirt and smells.’ She sat down on the bench, pulled her riding skirt above her knees, took off her soft brown boots and rolled down her stockings. I looked away. ‘Women have feet and ankles and calves too,’ she said. ‘We just keep them well hidden. Now I’m ready.’

  She followed me up the ladder and stood beside me barefoot, her skirt hitched up, her feet half covered in pigeon droppings. She looked up at the hundreds of birds sitting, or flying up to the roof and out, or dropping down from the top and going unerringly to their nests.

  ‘It is a strong smell, but no worse than cattle. I love the sound they make.’

  For the first time I thought of the low, rippling coos of the pigeons as background music to love, a feeling intensified when Blanche took my hand. ‘It’s a magical world in here. I shall be glad to come back as a pigeon.’ She let go of my hand and climbed down the ladder. I followed her down; she was sitting on the oak bench holding her stockings and looking down at her feet, white and grey with pigeon droppings. Two little grey feathers had caught in her hair.

  ‘Now what can I do? I can’t put on my stockings, and I can’t ride back barefoot.’ She was annoyed with herself.

  ‘There’s a rainwater butt,’ I said, got the leather bucket, filled it and knelt down before her. I took off my scarf, dipped it in the water and began to wash her feet. She had neat ankles and long, elegant toes, although the skin on her heels was tough and the balls of her feet were calloused. Her skin elsewhere was white and soft to the touch. I took my time, not daring to look up, using my scarf to wash carefully between each toe. She had a small white scar halfway up her left calf; it looked like the relic of some childhood accident.

  I dipped my hands in the bucket and rinsed her feet clean, stroking them in turn gently from heel to toe and pressing my hand up under her high arches. There was only the odd speck here and there on her calves, but I washed and rinsed them too. I breathed on my hands to warm them, then stroked her feet dry. When I had finished I held a foot in each hand, pressed them with my thumbs over her insteps, my fingers under
her arches, and looked up for the first time. Her head was back against the wall, her eyes shut. She opened her eyes, smiled, leaned forward and touched my cheek.

  ‘You are my most useful servant. Now I can ride back in comfort,’ and she put on her stockings and boots.

  I followed her out from the dovecote, helped her into the saddle and watched until she was out of sight. At the top of the hill she turned, gave a wave and rode on.

  I had never touched a woman intimately before, never seen a woman’s legs, never stroked a woman’s skin. And while I tried to persuade myself that washing Blanche’s feet was in the tradition of courtly love, my body told me something entirely different. I went back to my house in the village on fire and lay down on my bed. There I sought relief in my imagination, taking Blanche against the wall of the dovecote while the pigeons fluttered and cooed above us.

  There was no one I could confide in. Etienne, my friend and rival, would have been envious. He would not have believed that this was a simple duty, simply performed. And he would have been right. I did not want to share with him the images of Blanche’s feet and ankles and calves or tell him of the softness of her skin. These belonged to me.

  I could not bring myself to tell Guillaume Authie either when next he came to hear our Confessions. For the first time I had something to confess, and yet I was unable to get the words out.

  For a week or more I spent more time at the dovecote than was strictly necessary, hoping that Blanche would visit me again. She did not return, and at the feast at the end of the week she treated me as she had always done, with gentle affection, as though I was a son or a younger brother. I took confidence from the fact that she didn’t mention, or joke about, her visit to the inside of the dovecote. I hoped that was because my attention to her feet had more than a routine significance. I closed my eyes many times every day and thought of her foot between my hands, her elegant toes, her soft skin. It was a torment, a delight.

  In the spring Armand, who until then had ignored his father’s traditions, organised three days of hunting for wild boar. He asked his neighbours to bring their hounds; each day we quartered the woods with sixty men and almost as many hounds. We left our horses and crossbows at home. The boar’s charge was too swift, too fierce for more than a single shot. There was no chance of stopping a four-hundred-pound boar with a crossbow bolt even if the shot was accurate. We used strong ten-foot ash spears with a sharp iron point and a crossbar three feet from the tip. It was not unknown for a charging boar to break the crossbar.