*
Etienne
I HAD ALWAYS BEEN a little wary of Guillemette. It was thought in Montségur she was something of a witch, even though she had helped many of us to recover with her poultices and infusions. She became our leader, as Francois had, at least for the time being, withdrawn into an inner world. Her knowledge of the countryside and her down-to-earth attitude to our plight was exactly what we both needed, and she spent little time dwelling on the terrible things that had happened to us.
I asked Francois to describe her to me on the first night of our journey. Guillemette was asleep, untroubled by the cold and the hard ground.
‘She’s a typical Languedoc farmer’s daughter; doesn’t use two words when one will do, says what she thinks, unimpressed by rank, tough – she’s buried two or three husbands. She looks like she sounds. Earthy.’
‘Is she a witch?’
‘I hope so. She’s on our side.’
I was determined to find out what had happened to Stephanie and our child. If indeed the child had been born, if both had survived childbirth. Stephanie was a devout Cathar, far stronger in her faith than I. I feared she would have been prepared to face the stake rather than swear an oath and recant. Except for the child. And when she and Blanche had been taken away she had not received the Consolamentum, would not have been prepared to face the next world. I struggled with hope and fear as we walked along; although my hand was on Francois’s shoulder, much of the time he seemed far away.
I made a few attempts to console him but soon gave up. Our roles had reversed. I was sustained by the possibility that Stephanie might still be alive. He had lost Sybille forever.
*
Francois
I BRUSHED AWAY ETIENNE’S well-meant attempts to console me. His hand on my shoulder gave me some kind of contact with reality, but was not enough to stop the turmoil in my mind.
What should I have done differently? Run after Sybille and pull her back? Join her and her mother in the flames? Sybille and Claire were inside the palisade within a few seconds; and it was only as the gates closed that I realised Sybille was joining, not bidding a final farewell to, her mother.
She had not looked back. Perhaps she had planned her escape, although that is a strange word, as we walked down the path to the Field of the Burned. It was painful to realise she preferred to die with her mother than to live with me.
I found it hard to banish terrible images of Sybille burning, screaming, perhaps wanting to change her mind and leave the palisade. Were the screams I had heard, the burning flesh that I had smelled, Sybille’s?
I wished I had joined them in the Field of the Burned.
I shared these tormenting thoughts with Guillemette.
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Better a live dog than a dead lion. It was a sudden impulse, she was determined to join her mother. All three of us were taken by surprise. It was over in a moment.’
‘She had sworn an oath, she was no longer Cathar, she had no hope of eternal life.’
‘You must think that the God of the Cathars is as uncaring as the God of the Catholics. Of course she will be with her mother in heaven.’
Guillemette’s confidence gave me some respite from the terrible dreams I had by day as well as at night. Fatigue and hunger played their part in dulling my pain, and I gradually found I still had the desire to live, a desire that had brought me, battered but alive, through two sieges. It was to live that I had abandoned my Cathar faith, sworn an oath and persuaded Sybille, for a brief moment, to do the same. On the last part of the journey I acquitted myself of cowardice, began to torture myself less, and recognised that Sybille was gone, was ash and bone on the Field of the Burned. Did I believe in reincarnation? I wasn’t sure.
*
Guillemette
IT TOOK US some time to find our way to Barraigne; Etienne was of little value as a guide, and Francois, who was beginning to regain his interest in this world, took us along several wrong paths. We got there in the end, meeting a woodcutter on our way who gave us good directions. We must have looked like harmless pilgrims, for he did not run away the moment he saw us.
‘There’s nothing and no one there any more,’ he said. In spite of this disappointing news, we decided to press on. We would at least find a roof for a few nights.
Barraigne from the hill above looked small, a square block of a castle without towers and an apology for a courtyard whose walls were crumbling in several places. There was a gatehouse; one of the gates was hanging off a single rusted hinge. All in all, the place did not measure up to Etienne’s many quarterings, which he had been kind enough to list for me when I was nursing him and the others in their first days at Montségur.
The courtyard was deserted. The ground floor of Barraigne had a single chamber at the front; we paused at the door and I gave a shout, ‘Anyone there, anyone there?’ We waited for a minute or two, and then an old woman appeared at an upstairs window.
‘There’s nothing here, they’ve taken it all. Go away.’
‘We’re looking for the Comtesse de Vallieres,’ Francois said. His voice was more reassuring than mine, for the woman left the window, came downstairs and appeared at the door. She looked at us beadily.
‘I can see you are pilgrims,’ she said. ‘Although some pilgrims I’ve sheltered overnight have robbed me in the morning. You can spend the night here, but I’ve no food to offer you.’
Etienne had been listening carefully as she spoke, took a pace forward, stretched out his good arm and said, ‘It’s me. Your son. Etienne.’
His mother seemed about to faint, steadied herself by taking Etienne’s good arm, and said, her voice little more than a whisper, ‘I thought you were dead. I heard Montségur had fallen.’
She sobbed as she spoke and clung to her son for a long time.
We spent four days at Barraigne recovering from our journey. It turned out that the Countess’s sensible claim ‘There’s nothing here’ was not entirely true. In the stable block, which looked even more decrepit than the castle, there were four milking goats, several hens and, to Francois’s pleasure, sixty pigeons in the dovecote.
I continued to forage for ceps, but the Countess was generous with her eggs, encouraged Francois to take squabs from the dovecote and was dissuaded only with difficulty from killing one of the goats in our honour.
Etienne spent many hours with his mother. She had been living entirely on her own since Roqueville was taken, helped only by an elderly retainer who later emerged from the stables.
‘They tried to throw me out, said my land and this place were forfeit,’ she told us over our first supper. ‘I would have none of it, said I had never been Cathar, unlike you and your father. I said that we held this land not from Roqueville, but from the King of Aragon. That scared them off, I can tell you.’
I was surprised that greedy crusaders paid any attention to who held what from whom, but there she was, living proof that some feudal laws occasionally commanded respect. Or perhaps Barraigne was too poor to bother about.
She was distressed when we decided to move on.
‘I must find Stephanie and your grandchild,’ Etienne told her.
‘If they’re still alive. Carcassonne is a dangerous place. The Inquisitors are there; you’ll find vagabonds and thieves in the city and on your route. Promise me you will come back.’
‘We’ll come back.’
11
In Carcassonne
Francois
ETIENNE’S REUNION WITH his mother was moving; I even saw Guillemette shed a tear as they embraced. We were able to stay at Barraigne for several days in some comfort and build up our strength for the rest of the journey. Our diet of mushrooms had kept us alive, but not much more. And we hadn’t seen eggs or milk or cheese at Montségur for many months.
The journey to Carcassonne was uneventful. As we neared the city we met more travellers, most of them heading in the same direction. Some of them were friendly, some would happily have slit our throats
if we had appeared to have anything worth stealing. Guillemette’s insistence that we looked and behaved like poor and humble pilgrims was sensible. And I had the comfort of my dagger if poverty and humility failed.
I had never been to Carcassonne, and I was astonished at its size and the extent of its walls. It was a castellated city; the fortifications had been rebuilt after the capture of the city by Simon de Montfort. A village had sprung up below its walls, and we began by finding shelter there. Etienne’s mother had given us money which she had successfully concealed from crusaders and from vagabond bands. Guillemette guarded this little hoard carefully, never showing she had more than a few coins when we bought food or paid for our lodgings.
The village was a source of endless, unreliable rumour. It was known that Montségur had fallen, and that hundreds of Cathars had refused to recant and been burned. There appeared to be no Cathars in the village, which was hardly surprising given the widespread fear of the Inquisition. Gossip was common in our lodgings and the tavern which I visited in search of information; but the moment I asked questions I was greeted with silence.
‘People use the Inquisition to settle old scores,’ we were told by our innkeeper. ‘You are denounced, then you are tortured, then you confess to whatever sin they require of you. You are lucky if you escape the stake. You cannot be too careful, too devout in your attendance at Mass.’
We heeded this advice; the pilgrim’s scallop shell wasn’t enough to ensure our safety. We took care to go to Mass regularly in the great church in Carcassonne, which was always crowded, the congregation swelled by those who saw attendance as security against arrest and interrogation.
After a week we moved from the village into the city; closer to the Inquisition, but also closer, we hoped, to better information. Our new inn was more expensive; Guillemette, our treasurer, kept warning Etienne and me that the money would soon run out. She tried to persuade Etienne to beg.
‘Blind, one arm, you’d melt the hardest heart. Francois is too healthy-looking, and they would never give money to a woman.’
Etienne refused indignantly, and Guillemette gave up trying. In truth, begging in Carcassonne was already an overcrowded profession.
Guillemette went off to the market and came back with food and a cousin from her village, a cobbler who had moved to the city five years before. He showed us where the Inquisitors were based, pointed out the prison and where heretics were taken to the stake; he seemed disappointed that there hadn’t been a burning for several months. I also found out where the Inquisitor lived, the man who had blinded Etienne, half blinded me and maimed us both. I put my hand on the hilt of my dagger, a reassuring feeling, when I saw his house.
Then I saw Blanche. I had gone to the covered market to buy bread, cheese and wine for our midday meal, which the three of us usually took in the big square by the church. She was talking to the man who sold melons. A striking figure even in that crowd, she was wearing a simple grey dress, her hair coiled up above her neck, and she wore an amber necklace; I didn’t remember her wearing jewellery of any kind at Roqueville. Any doubts I had were dispelled when she spoke; her accent always revealed that French, not Occitan, was her first language. She looked older than I remembered, tired, still beautiful. She looked directly at me, then turned away to bargain with the melon-seller.
I felt a moment of shock that she did not recognise me, then remembered that when she saw me last I had two eyes and two arms. My hair had been shorn by Guillemette down to a stubble, I was unshaven and dirty, my cloak torn – I was the picture of a poor pilgrim. Uncertain what to do, I kept my distance and watched her disappear out of a corner of the market square.
I went back to the melon man, waited till he and I were alone, and bought his last three melons.
‘The lady in grey,’ I said, ‘I think I used to…’ Love her, I thought, then: ‘… serve her husband.’
He looked at me carefully, lowered his voice to the whisper in which most people in Carcassonne answered direct questions.
‘She’s from Roqueville. So are you by the look of you. She lives in the Place des Pénitents. Good customer. They say she’s the Inquisitor’s woman.’
‘The Inquisitor’s woman?’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘It’s not possible, not Blanche,’ said Etienne when I told him. ‘Do you remember the troubadour’s song, praising her “virtue and wisdom and beauty”?’
‘I cannot find another one as fair.’
I remembered the words well, remembered those feelings, pure at first, then passionate when I washed her feet below the dovecote.
‘We were both her admirers,’ said Etienne with a smile. ‘In the finest tradition of courtly love.’
Guillemette snorted. ‘Courtly love? What’s that? Something you knights have dreamed up to cloak your lust?’
The three of us were suddenly silent, unsure what to make of this news. We had thought Blanche was certain to have been burned as a Perfect, and found it hard to believe that she, of all women, had recanted.
That evening I went to the Place des Pénitents and shared a shadowy corner with two beggars, neither welcoming until I gave each of them a coin to keep them quiet. I waited and watched; no one entered or left the house. The next night was the same. On the third evening I saw a tall man come to the blue door, knock and go in. He was still there two hours later.
I went back and told Etienne and Guillemette what I had seen. Feeling sick as I spoke, I said, ‘I cannot be certain, it was too dark to see his face, but he was the right height and came from the right direction. He didn’t leave. And my new beggar friends knew all about the two of them. I’d like to kill him.’
‘Don’t be foolish,’ said Guillemette. ‘You killed two Inquisitors at Avignonet. I don’t think the Montségur pardon would stretch to a third.’
‘How could she do this? Look at Etienne – she’s given herself to the man who took his eyes and his arm. And burned the body of her dead son.’
‘You can’t eat that piece of bread a second time,’ said Guillemette. ‘Nothing will bring back your eyes and your arms. Blanche sounds like a sensible woman to me, not like Claire and Sybille. She’s used her body to save herself, and perhaps your wife and child as well.’ She looked at Etienne as she spoke.
‘She’ll know if they are alive and where they are.’
‘You two should call on her in the morning. Leave me behind. We don’t want her thinking I’m your shared fancy woman,’ and Guillemette laughed for at least a minute at this idea. Etienne and I were not in a joking mood.
The next morning the pair of us called on the house with the blue door, knocked and waited till Blanche appeared. She saw us, looked uncertain, then put her hand to her mouth, swayed and steadied herself by holding the door. We stood there and said nothing.
‘I’d heard you were dead, that they’d killed all the Cathars at Montségur. Thank God you’re alive,’ and she stepped forward and embraced Etienne, then turned to embrace me. I took a pace back, and her face changed.
‘You’ve heard the gossip in the city, I see,’ she said to me. ‘Perhaps you won’t want to come inside.’
‘We want news of Stephanie,’ said Etienne, reaching out to Blanche. ‘Lead me into the house.’ I followed him in. The room was simply furnished; we sat at a small table and waited while Blanche left the room, returning with a pitcher of water and three glasses. Etienne wept when Blanche told him that Stephanie was alive and had borne him a son.
‘He’s called Bertrand, after his grandfather, looks exactly like him. They are being well looked after by the nuns. Stephanie and I parted on bad terms. I told her I had recanted, and of my bargain with Mathieu.’
Mathieu. She called him Mathieu. How could she use his Christian name? What had she become? I left Etienne and Blanche to do the talking; I watched Blanche carefully, aware of her beauty and of the power it once had, perhaps still had, over me. Her face had a few more lines than I remembered at Roqueville, but her
hair was still glossy and black and her skin unblemished. She didn’t look like a victim, a prisoner. Only her hands, which she clasped and unclasped, showed she was nervous.
‘Stephanie thought I should have chosen to burn as a Perfect. I would never have seen her again, never held my grandson. She felt it was a price I should have paid.’
‘Perhaps it was,’ I said, regretting my words the moment they were uttered.
Blanche looked at me and held me in a steady gaze until I looked away.
‘You don’t know what it is to have children,’ she said. ‘Etienne is about to find out.’
That was a sharper blow than she realised. Sybille and I had talked about having children, argued whether three or four was the right number, even discussed names, although she was sure our firstborn would be a daughter, and thus couldn’t be named after my father. All these children had perished in the Field of the Burned. I got up, left the room and walked round the square.
When I returned Blanche stretched out both hands to me and I took them, but only for a moment.
‘Etienne has told me what happened to your wife. I’m sorry.’
I did not reply and there was silence for a while. Then Blanche said, ‘I will speak to Mathieu about the necessary arrangements, and get word to Flaran. It’s a day’s journey from Carcassonne. Come back tomorrow and I’ll give you directions and money for the journey.’
Etienne looked overjoyed, stood up and embraced Blanche. I offered a little bow.
I went back the next day without Etienne. I was stiff and uneasy talking to Blanche, who confronted my unspoken disapproval.
‘You make it clear you agree with Stephanie. Yet you recanted quickly enough, as did Etienne.’
‘I wasn’t a Perfect,’ I said. ‘You’ve done more than recant. You’ve given your…’ I didn’t finish.
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