‘That’s a much more useful accomplishment. Sit, we’ll have some wine, and then you can go and visit Beatrice.’
We went downstairs to the small room where we usually met, and he produced some excellent wine, helping himself to a generous tranche of cheese.
‘Excellent, excellent – we don’t get enough good sheep’s cheese in our market here. The wine, by the way, comes from your friends at Barraigne.’
‘Etienne de Vallieres?’
‘From Etienne.’
I felt a sudden pang of guilt. I had given no thought to Etienne, Stephanie, Guillemette and Blanche for many months, and resolved to pay them a visit as soon as possible. As we finished the wine and cheese Baruch asked, ‘Did you find Arnaud Sicre?’
‘I did. We didn’t kill him,’ adding, as Baruch looked disappointed, ‘but he won’t be coming to Carcassonne as a witness.’ He was careful not to press me for further details.
I went to see Beatrice the next morning, bringing wine from Baruch and some of my cheese. The guard took his usual easement of a hundred sous, and insisted on cutting the cheese in half and tasting an overgenerous slice.
‘We’ve known visitors to bring in knives hidden in loaves of bread and rounds of cheese,’ he explained, licking his lips as he spoke.
‘Wash it down with a swallow of wine from the wineskin,’ I offered. It seemed only sensible to ingratiate myself with Beatrice’s jailers. He took several swallows, pronounced it good, if a little lacking in body, and passed the wineskin back to me reluctantly.
He showed me up to Beatrice’s prison room, and I felt a surge of joy as she came to me and held me tight for several minutes. She had put on some of the weight she had lost in the dungeons below, although she still looked drawn, still anxious.
We sat down together on her bed (I remember thinking that the Beatrice of old would have seized such an opportunity, guard or no guard); she held my single hand in both of hers, stroking my fingers and intertwining them with their own. I wanted then to declare, exactly what I was uncertain, but I didn’t have the words to express my new, changed, intense feelings. When she moved her head to kiss me for only the second time I felt that words were not necessary.
‘Were you able to find the documents Baruch wanted?’ she said when we had finished our embrace.
‘I was. He seemed pleased with what he saw, although he is busy reading through them all. He’s a careful man, Baruch. He liked the seal of the King of Aragon – but some of the seals had become detached. Everything was in Latin, quite beyond me. I tracked down Arnaud Sicre for the second time. He told me he was too busy,’ and here I looked at the grille in the cell door, ‘too busy to come to your trial.’
These words made Beatrice smile, as did the cheese and wine. ‘They bring me proper meals twice a day. I’m getting plump again,’ patting her stomach.
‘I know what a week of bread and water can do to the appetite, never mind three weeks. Much more of that…’ I didn’t finish the sentence. We both knew that The Wall would bring much more of that, and we both looked sombre for a minute. Then the guard rattled the key in the door and came in.
‘I have complete faith in Baruch. You will be free in a few weeks’ time,’ I said in a confident tone of voice. ‘They only allow two visits a week, so I’m off to Barraigne to visit my old friends.’
I had told Beatrice only a little about Etienne, Stephanie and Blanche. She was particularly intrigued by Blanche.
‘She slept with the Inquisitor? That’s worse than me sleeping with Clergue. How is she free?’
‘She was never charged. She tried to break free of him, came with me on part of the way to Compostela, and the Inquisitor sent a gang of monks to bring her back.’
‘And, you told me, you never slept with her? ‘
‘I did not. I had always looked on her as an object of courtly love, not of desire. She was old enough to be my mother.’
Beatrice snorted and said, ‘A beautiful mother by all accounts. I remember you knew the song praising her beauty well enough to sing it with me.’
We sat in silence until the jailer came to escort me out; we clung to each other for a final moment. As Beatrice turned away I could see she had begun to cry.
I arrived at Barraigne in the late afternoon; it had rained earlier in the day, and the summer sun had polished the leaves of Etienne’s vines to an even brighter green. The grapes were beginning to turn purple, although they had another two months of ripening ahead of them. The vineyards reminded me of how long it was since I had last visited Barraigne, as the mature vines I had seen on my last visit had been increased by two more plots, one that looked to be in its third year, one clearly planted that spring. As I rode up to the outer wall the gates were closed by an alert sentry. He called through the slit in the wall and asked me my business.
‘I am Francois de Beaufort, come to see my old comrade, Etienne de Vallieres,’ and I pointed to the stump of my right arm as proof. After five minutes the gates were quickly unbolted, and Etienne emerged to escort me inside. The smile on his face could not have been more welcoming; his ten-year-old son looked at me with considerable curiosity, holding tight to his father’s hand, then said,
‘You’re like Papa, you have only one arm. But you’ve got one good eye.’
‘I was the lucky one after Roqueville fell.’
‘It was Francois who led us to Montségur. Without him we all would have died. He was a great warrior with sword and lance when we were both young, and the best horseman in the valley.’
Stung by the past tense, I said, ‘I couldn’t handle a lance today. But I am still a good swordsman, and can fire off…’
‘… five crossbow bolts in three minutes,’ Etienne said, laughing as we walked together into the courtyard. Some pigeons scattered out of the dovecote in the square tower above the gate.
‘Those are my pigeons,’ young Bertrand said proudly, reaching across to take my left hand, which was looped through the reins of my horse, in his. The courtyard was immaculate, not a weed to be seen, the cobblestones in good repair. Above the main tower flew the flag of the de Vallieres with its six quarterings. I admired the flag, dug deep into the lectures about heraldry that Geoffrey, who liked to call himself Roqueville Pursuivant, had given us, and said,
‘You should have added the arms of Roqueville.’
‘Now you are showing off. Not while Blanche is alive. Which I am happy to say she is.’
We stabled my horse alongside three others. There were six stalls in all, fresh straw in each, and a stone water trough running the length of the stable block against the freshly whitewashed wall.
‘Barraigne is back to its former glory,’ I said.
‘I’ll show you round. But we must first meet Stephanie and Blanche.’
‘Guillemette? Your mother?’
‘Both dead. We have had some fierce winters.’
We went into the Great Hall where Stephanie and Blanche were sitting together, Stephanie sewing, Blanche spinning wool. When we had finished hugging each other, both women with tears in their eyes, when they had finished upbraiding me for deserting them for so long, Etienne said, ‘Let me show you everything while it is still light. We can gossip to our heart’s content over supper.’
‘I brought you a sheep’s cheese. I’m a shepherd, a cheese-maker now, the best in the Languedoc.’
‘It will be a good match for my wine.’
We walked out again into the courtyard, Armand running ahead.
‘He’s my pigeon master,’ said Etienne. ‘Although he’s too soft-hearted to kill the squabs. He leaves that to me.’ On the stable side of the courtyard there was a forge, and next to it a general workshop, both well used.
‘Our blacksmith and our carpenter are working in the stew pond.’
‘Where did you find them?’
‘They found us. They are, or were, both Cathar, one from Puylaurens, one from Carcassonne. But we’ve been through too much to be Cathar any more, and there are no
Perfects left.’
‘Authie is still alive.’
‘They’ll find him in the end and burn him. So we will all die unconsoled. I expect God will understand. We go to the valley church regularly, take Communion, make our confessions, and only we know what is in our hearts. We no longer talk about religion. Armand, show Francois your pigeons.’
We inspected the dovecote. I told Armand I had built the dovecote at Roqueville.
‘Yours is better. It is part of the castle and above a busy courtyard, and you won’t be at the same risk from hawks.’
Armand looked pleased, then said, ‘But we have rats. They come from the stables and take the squabs.’
‘Get your father to take several long strips of tin and set them at a downward angle in the brickwork all the way round, a yard below the pigeonholes. That’s where they are getting in. Your trapdoor is tight enough. Each tin strip needs to be nine inches wide, three inches to set in the wall, six inches projecting out and down.’
Armand looked pleased at my praise and my suggestion.
‘Papa, can we do that?’
‘Of course we can. The dovecote at Roqueville was rat-free. Although the hawks took plenty of Francois’s pigeons. Now let’s inspect my wine.’
The left-hand side of the courtyard was entirely given over to this.
‘We bring in the grapes using these comportes,’ said Etienne. ‘The grapes go straight into the press.’ The press was almost the height of a man, with an iron screw at the centre of a heavy wooden disc that fitted inside a circle of staves bound with two iron hoops. Around the base of the press was a circular stone trough, a foot above the floor.
‘We take the stalks off the grapes – one reason why my wine is better than the rest. It is well worth the trouble. Half the time you’re drinking sap from stalks if they are crushed along with the grapes. It makes the wine bitter, even though it increases the volume. Then the juice runs into the trough at the bottom; we catch it in buckets and put it into the stone vats to ferment. After three weeks the wine goes into the barrels, sits there for six months, and then we put it into hogsheads or leather wineskins.’ Fifty barrels lined the walls beyond the press and the three stone vats.
‘I’m astonished, Etienne. It’s even more complicated than cheese-making.’
Etienne looked pleased. ‘I’m known as the blind wine-maker. It was an insult at the beginning, as our first two vintages were undrinkable. Now we get the best price in the Carcassonne market.’ He unlocked the door of the room at the far end of the barn. There were at least eighty hogsheads, each just light enough for a man to carry, each with a wooden bung, and the same number of leather wineskins.
‘We make our barrels and our hogsheads in the carpenter’s shop. Our barrel-maker came to us from the Carcassonne jail. We buy the wineskins from Catalonia. Take two with you back to Montaillou.’
Over dinner I explained my presence in Carcassonne, said I needed to return there the following day, and without going into much detail made it clear that Beatrice was central to my life.
‘Whether I will ever see her again after the trial is uncertain. She has confessed to enough sins to be sentenced to as much as ten years in The Wall. She wouldn’t last two. Baruch’s argument may reduce her sentence, but they can hardly find her innocent.’
‘He’s a powerful advocate, a powerful intellect,’ said Blanche, seeing I was close to breaking down. ‘He recovered Roqueville for me against all the odds.’
‘What happened to Roqueville?’ I asked, relieved at the opportunity to change the subject.
‘I sold the land and the ruins quite well under the circumstances. The money helped to pay for all this,’ and Blanche pointed to the three good tapestries, the solid oak chairs and tables, the silver candlesticks that lit the room.
‘And now we live off wine,’ said Francois. ‘We miss Guillemette and my mother every day.’
We talked of how dependent the two of us had been on Guillemette after the fall of Montségur.
‘You lived on mushrooms?’ asked Armand, astonished that this was possible.
‘We did. We caught nothing in our snares. I had no crossbow, and I was useless, in a trance. Guillemette was a real countrywoman, and she brought us safely to Barraigne.’
We were all silent for a moment. Then I said to Armand, ‘Did your father ever tell you how we routed the crusaders’ advance guard? How later we burned their big trebuchet, which they called The Bad Neighbour? Your father and I were doughty warriors; we had four eyes and four arms between us in those days.’
‘You are both better off making wine and cheese,’ said Stephanie sharply.
I smiled, ignore the rebuke, and went on, ‘We were up here, twenty of us,’ and I made a little mountain with my napkin, ‘in the cover of a wood not far from my old home at Beaufort. The advance guard, fifty crusaders, half on horses, half on foot, came along the valley,’ and I made a little column out of breadcrumbs. ‘We waited until they were all out in the open, and then your father led the charge. It was the only time we ever used our lances in anger. We killed twenty of them, and the rest ran away.’ I swept half the crumbs off the table and spilled a little red wine over the rest.
Armand’s eyes were wide, and Etienne looked pleased at his son hearing about his warlike past.
‘Great warriors indeed. There should be a ballad to mark it, the Chanson of Etienne and Francois,’ said Blanche, smiling.
‘I can still sing the ballad in your honour,’ I said. ‘Etienne will remember the words too.’ And we sang the old tribute:
‘Lady Blanche, your virtue and wisdom and beauty,
Your elegant speech, your sweet laughter
Draw me to you with a pure and loving heart;
In you lie all my happiness, all my desire,
I cannot find another one as fair.’
As we sang I thought of my old, intense love for Blanche, remembering the extraordinary experience of washing her feet and calves below the dovecote.
‘Easy enough to find another one as fair today,’ said Blanche. ‘But I’m pleased you both remember the words.’
I spent the next morning, with Etienne’s blessing and Stephanie’s acquiescence, in making a small crossbow for Armand.
‘You are only to use it when your father is there,’ said Stephanie. ‘It won’t be a plaything. I don’t want you killing your sisters.’
‘It’s to be used for killing rats,’ I said. ‘Etienne will be in charge of its safe keeping.’
Stephanie looked somewhat reassured.
Armand was pleased with the finished product. The workshop and the forge were able to produce all the materials we needed, including enough for three iron bolts. We tried it out and it was accurate to about fifteen feet.
‘You’ll need to get quite close to kill a rat,’ I said. ‘You will have to ambush them in the stables. And never, ever, point it at anyone, even when it is uncocked or unloaded. Break that rule and it will be taken away.’ Armand promised to be careful, and I set off back to Carcassonne warmed by their good wishes.
*
IT WAS ONE of those beautiful early autumn afternoons in the Languedoc, with a sharpness in the air just short of frost that heightened the colours and the senses. My gelding felt it too, giving a couple of quick bucks, joyous rather than malicious, when I mounted, and used any excuse, a startled rabbit, a flock of starlings wheeling low to the ground, to skitter sideways. I was in no hurry, as I would have to break my journey at the inn this year; I had left Barraigne too late to make the trip in a single day.
I had time to think. I thought about Stephanie’s words, and recognised their truth, that wine-making and cheese-making were both less dangerous and more useful than being able to couch a lance, draw a sword or cock a crossbow. I was, in spite of myself, proud of being a knight, proud of my lineage, even proud of my ability to survive all I had been through at Avignonet, Roqueville, Montségur, and on the road to Compostela.
That was all over. I resolv
ed to stop boasting about my warlike skills and my warlike past (and, God knows, it had ended in disaster every time – my father dead after Avignonet, the blinding and maiming after Roqueville, the burning of the Cathars, including my beloved Sybille, after Montségur). From now on I would content myself with herding sheep and making cheese.
I also thought of the binding strength of old friendships, which was hardly surprising, given all that we had been through. I had known the three of them at Barraigne most of my life, and the terrible times we had experienced together made that friendship unbreakable except by death.
How many friends do you have? I asked myself. Other than Etienne, Stephanie and Blanche? Guillemette is dead. Andre Belot, no one else in Montaillou. Arnaud the shepherd is dead, but I never knew whether he liked me or simply tolerated me. Perhaps a little of both. The friar, but he’s back near Lyon, five hundred miles away. Baruch the Jew, but our relationship has been entirely professional. And, of course, Beatrice.
I thought at length about Beatrice as I rode. At the beginning our relationship had been founded entirely on physical passion. And there had been moments, for example when I knew she was with Pierre Clergue, when I hated her, and myself, and wanted to break free.
Looking back, all that changed after we routed the English band. Beatrice had dismissed Clergue from her bed, not because I asked her to, but perhaps because – I wasn’t sure – perhaps because I had become enough. She had lost some of that confidence in her own judgement, her self-sufficiency, when she gave the order to lower the drawbridge, and she had gained more confidence in me.
My feelings for her had intensified on seeing her in jail, on realising there was a strong possibility that the courts would take her away from me forever. Our kisses, even under the eyes of a jailer peering through the grille, meant something new and strong. Not just to me, I thought, but also to Beatrice. I felt determined to put my thoughts into words when I next saw her.
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