I
Ja nus hons pris ne dira sa raison
Adroitement, se dolantement non;
Mais par effort puet il faire chançon.
Mout ai amis, mais povre sont li don;
Honte i avront se por ma reançon
—Sui ça deus yvers pris.
II
Ce sevent bien mi home et mi baron–
Ynglois, Normant, Poitevin et Gascon–
Que je n’ai nul si povre compaignon
Que je lessaisse por avoir en prison;
Je nou di mie por nule retraçon,
—Mais encor sui [je] pris.
III
Or sai je bien de voir certeinnement
Que morz ne pris n’a ami ne parent,
Q uant on me faut por or ne por argent.
Mout m’est de moi, mes plus m’est de ma gent,
Qu’après ma mort avront reprochement
—Se longuement sui pris.
I
No prisoner can speak truthfully
Unless he speaks as one who has suffered injustice;
To console himself he may compose a song.
I have many friends, but they have fowled me.
They will be shamed if I am confined for the ransom
—For another year.
II
They know full well, my barons and my men,
Of Normandy, England, Gascony, Poitou,
That I have never had a vassal
Whom I leave in prison for my own gain;
I say it not as a reproach to them,
—But a prisoner I am!
III
The ancient proverb now I know for sure;
Death and a prison know nor kin nor tie,
Since for mere lack of gold they let me lie.
I grieve greatly for myself; for them still more.
After my death they will be tainted for ever
—If I am a prisoner long.
It is the story of his betrayal in a fickle and shifting world. He was deeply affected by this disloyalty.
Walter travelled from England to Normandy and on to Poitiers. I have been making charts of all his and Richard’s movements. They cover one whole wall of my cramped bedroom in Ed’s house. As I colour the journeys and revise the information endlessly, my charts look like the contents of my aunt’s knitting basket. Walter’s well-documented journey south, as far as Limousin, suggests that his aim was to meet the knights escorting the cross. I have established that when Richard took to the galleys, Huntingdon, Roger de Saci, Hugh de Neville, Raoul de Mauléon, Gerard de Furnival, and Master Robert, the clerk, were ordered to stay on the Frankenef to deliver the cross.
I have decided to say nothing about the letter to Saladin for the moment. After all, nobody has taken any notice for nearly a hundred years. The description of the contents is sketchy, handwritten in about 1895 by one of the Huntingdon family, I would guess. The truth is I don’t want anyone else to see the document. I know that I have no excuse for keeping secret a valuable document from this venerable library. I will announce its discovery when I am ready.
I have hidden the letter in a neglected box. Its label reads: Domestic Accounts of the Bishop of Winchester 1186–1199. It’s easy to become secretive; while I am down here in the stacks. I am not aware of the outside world or what’s going on there. I am like a mole burrowing blindly through old tunnels. The second Huntingdon box contains a copy of a letter, sent by Walter in November 1192, just about the time Huntingdon and Richard and the knights were embarking in Acre, clearly stating that Master Robert is to use the money they have been entrusted with for the holy cause. Causus sacris. And the knights are exhorted: Crux sancta sit vestra lux – Let the Holy Cross be your light.
What would Master Robert have done with the equivalent of £100,000? It was probably intended for bribery and to buy horses for the knights; it may also have been to pay off the crew of the so-called Frankenef when the knights disembarked for their journey to Rouen, via Arles. I see Master Robert as a sensible fellow, an administrator, a bean counter, a little scared of the knights, and perhaps just a little humble too. Huntingdon appears to have been an exceptionally resolute knight. He was also immune to disease. This was attributed to his blameless life.
North of Arles there would be pockets of trouble with armed soldiers and mercenaries along the road, subjects of various warring noblemen, trying to extort money or goods.
By the summer of 1193 the whole of Europe knew that Richard was to be released. Philip sent a premature message to John, Richard’s treacherous brother: Look to yourself – the devil is loose. While there was still time, Philip and John were securing as many towns and castles as they could in Normandy and fomenting rebellion further south. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the small group of knights bearing the Holy Cross to get to Rouen. There was a very real possibility that Philip would soon take the city.
It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the group of knights bearing the Holy Cross to reach Rouen. Anyway, I have looked through the cathedral’s records online for that time, and there is no mention of a treasure or a relic arriving at the soaring, beautiful cathedral of Rouen, now sanctified by the wonderful and ethereal paintings of Monet. It is difficult to imagine what the world was like when Gothic Cathedrals were young. Rouen was one of the earliest, modelled on St-Denis in Paris, and greatly admired by Richard.
Assuming that Hubert Walter headed that way for a purpose, I would guess that the Cross was left in Limousin, near Limoges. I picture a small group of knights crossing the River Dordogne or the Lot to find the devastation of war and the bewilderingly changed alliances which had happened while they were on Crusade with Richard. I see them deciding to hide the cross and to travel because it would be dangerous to go on beyond Limousin. I try to imagine the turmoil that was in their hearts. They believed absolutely that this was the Cross on which Christ was crucified. Their king had charged them with returning it to Christendom; before jumping into the galley, he reminded the knights – was Master Robert excluded? – of their sacred duty. I search online the records of Hubert Walter both in Salisbury and Canterbury for some further mention or letter, but I can find nothing that provides a clue to where the cross was hidden.
The more I learn about these times, the more I find myself wondering how people managed to live in an age of fear, with the dark clouds of violent death, the plague and lawlessness always ready to rain thunderbolts on them. I doubt if it is fully possible to inhabit their minds. It is hard enough to understand the minds of others in your own time and in the same room. In the absence of any other places to turn to, myth, the Church and relics like the Holy Cross provided necessary comfort. People who do not have – or do not accept – rational explanations have always turned to whatever they could find to serve the purpose. My father was one of these.
At the same time I am becoming increasingly confused. Already my notes have filled ten Ryman’s wide-ruled pads.
Still I carry on: if I am right, Richard and Hubert Walter would have found time when Richard had exacted revenge on his enemies to dig up or seize the True Cross wherever it was hidden. Clearly they didn’t find it, but it must still exist. In the meanwhile, in my increasingly volatile mind, I see some bedraggled knights burying the Holy Cross in a southern churchyard, attached to a simple Romanesque church, before separating and heading for home.
But I can no longer follow all my own notes or my charts and maps.
14
Crack-up
Ed says he is worried about me. When I ask him why he’s worried, he says that I have been behaving erratically. Also, we no longer meet in the pub and I seem to be too preoccupied to watch the rugby internationals.
‘I know you have suffered and it must be terrible, but you must not work so hard. And you aren’t eating.’
His words are well intentioned, but they irritate me.
‘Ed, I am grateful to you. You’ve been a pal. But if you have had
enough of me, and I wouldn’t blame you if you had, I’ll go.’
‘I didn’t mean that at all. It’s just you have stuck all sorts of charts to the wall. A lot. And you are often up most of the night.’
‘Dates, Ed, key dates, key places. But I see that you and Lettie need some space. Some personal space. To grow, to grow boldly.’
‘Not at all. You’ve been wonderful for me.’
‘All good things come to an end. You’ve been great and I will for ever be in your debt, amigo.’
‘Why are you speaking like this?’
‘Like what? I’m telling you the truth.’
‘Lettie will be upset if you go.’
‘She is one in a million, Ed. Follow your destiny.’
‘Please, Rich. You are not well. Have something to eat. Have some cottage pie.’
‘Don’t mince your words, Ed. I’m fine, as good as gold. Right as rain. Like a pig in shit. Top of the world.’
And I know in one part of my mind that I am cracking up, but only on the rational level. Deep down I am fine. I am speaking important truths to Ed.
‘Reality as we know it, Ed, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed or otherwise immaterial. I copied that from Wikipedia, Ed. My Noor has been raped by five or six towel-heads, Ed; that’s not immaterial. Or do you have another view? Do you come from another school of philosophy? Ed, my advice is, fuck this thesis about Adam Smith. Fuck Lettie, metaphorically speaking – I wouldn’t want to intrude on your personal life, what goes on tour stays on tour – but she looks like trouble to me, if I am honest. Fuck your thesis. Ed, I’m worried about you, mate. You don’t give a toss about Adam fucking Smith and his touchy-feely side – nobody does – but you were hurt by your rejection by the City, deeply hurt, so you are trying to rebuild your shattered self, because only by putting the self together again can you be happy. Solipsism, Ed, is what you need to study, that’s the theory that the self is the only reality. Am I right? You have been schtupping Lettie the Lettuce, ace spy by the way, my contacts tell me, a woman seeing forty approaching like a fucking express train on the wrong track. The age that frightens women – prospects of childbirth low et cetera, and you’re thinking she’s a halfway house to my full recovery from humiliation, which will only be complete when I have a worthy thesis accepted by the owl-aspected examiners – that will show those hedgies and shorters and gamblers – a well-received, even acclaimed, Ph.d., or D.Phil. as we like to call it in old Oxford, Ed my old chumba-wumba. And your rehabilitation will be complete when some foxy publisher’s editor with nice little tits, not too large and not too floppy and common, but nicely perky, and wearing just the right clothes from Joseph, sexy but not obvious, asks you to write a small book, for a modest advance, less than some of your lunch bills at Nobu, a book expanding on your thesis, and putting it into the kind of accessible language every dim-shit can understand and use to big himself up with his unspeakable friends – no women will buy it – and you will have a tumultuous sexual experience with this young woman, who falls for you totally, introduces you to the real Italian food in her tasteful flat in London Fields – not far from the Lido, once a green and frog-loud relic of outmoded thinking – get the little thin-chested, consumptive Cockneys out in the fresh air – now the Mecca of the not-quite-rich-enough middle classes – this woman with the nice tits invites you to the Groucho Club where you will meet interesting people who never talk about medium-term gilts – in fact they haven’t a fucking clue what they are – but about life, its meaning, and what a lot of shits publishers are and mine’s a Sauvignon Blanc, no, I said big glass. Bingo – pig in shit. I know these things, Eddie, because down the road in the old wank factory that is Bodley, which made me the unscrupulous opportunist I am – those are your words, Ed, one day to be spoken – yes, down in the bowels of the Bod, another loser is trying to come to terms with the fact – the material fact – that his fiancée – horrible chavvy word, “fiancée”, you are thinking, am I right? – has been raped by gyppo beardies and that our baby was terminated by doctors in Toronto after a departmental conference, the bland leading the bland. They could have done a DNA test, but no, that would have involved the alleged father giving some samples, and that would have been messy, in both senses.’
‘Stop, Rich, stop.’
So it seems I am actually speaking to him.
‘Ed, this is the talking cure that you – and I – have been avoiding for so long. While we were watching rugby over a pint down at the old Red-Arsed Ferret, on the ninety-inch plasma screen, we were really thinking we’re both fucked. Lettie the Lettuce confirmed it. We are both vulnerable. She said it. The Ace Spy said it. Maybe her contact told her. I would watch out for him, by the way, he’s dodgy.’
‘When did she say this?’
‘Oh, off the cuff. Totally impromptu. Unpremeditated. But she smacked the monkey, didn’t she, eh, Jimmy, know wha-ah mean, pal? Richard the Lionheart, three lions on his chest, that’s the story. The genocidal ten-foot-high ginger-haired anti-Semitic poofter is my fast track to fame. Just like your bright idea of a thesis which isn’t going to happen by the way, we both want to produce something, an actual, actual something in this world to tell them we are here. That we exist. Somos màs. But, Ed, you’re ahead of me: you’re already on Google, admittedly only because you and your pal lost nearly a billion, but I am not. I haven’t registered a flicker on the public consciousness, not even a mouse’s fart. I must go to bed, Ed.’
Wheh – wheh-wheh-wheh – w-hooop-w-hooop.
When I wake some time – some days later – it takes me time to understand what has happened. I am, I decide, after a long, detached inspection of the pale blue curtains and the tubes attached to my arm, in a hospital. To judge by the strange hyena cries, it’s probably a mental hospital. I have read about the powerful drugs they use in these places and I wonder how long I have been sedated. Some hours later, the cries die with the dawn light and a doctor comes in to see me. She tells me I am in the Warneford Hospital, Headington. She is a tall and blonde woman of about my age. Despite the chronically tired, greyish skin that hospital doctors acquire, her eyes have come through unscathed. They are friendly, ceramic blue, like Delftware, like new-born babies’ eyes.
‘Ah, you are awake, Mr Cathar. I’m Dr Wettinger – Ella – and I am in charge of your case.’
‘My case.’
‘You, yes. It looks as though you have had what we call a psychotic break. We like a label; it’s just a convenient term. A psychotic break is most usually brought on by extreme stress. Now that you are with us, I want to take your history. Particularly I want to ask you about stress. Have you had bereavement or other catastrophic disruptions to your recent life? And have you had this kind of episode before?’
‘Yes, to the catastrophe, and no, I have never had this kind of episode before.’
‘Can you tell me about it? I will probably need to talk to you again tomorrow, and by then you should be out of bed and walking around the grounds.’
‘I feel very strange now. Am I heavily sedated?’
‘No, not heavily. Your motor was racing too fast when you were brought in, so we gave you some beta blockers and benzodiazepines. You needed a period of calm and sleep. And boy, did you sleep.’
‘How long?’
‘Two whole days.’
‘Am I going to be all right?’
‘In what sense?’
‘I mean, I’m not officially bonkers now, am I?’
‘No, no. A psychotic break is usually a temporary condition as I said, and often a one-off event. Do you want to tell me now what happened in your life?’
‘Can you tell me who brought me in?’
‘An ambulance, and your friend Edward Laing brought you in. He was very worried about you. Apparently you were ranting for an hour.’
I am touched. Big, lonely, chubby Ed. I am the lodger from hell. He was looking for friendship. He was looking for empathy.
‘Last thing I remember, I was shouti
ng loudly, screaming in fact, at Ed and telling him he was a loser.’
‘Don’t worry, he didn’t take it to heart.’
She smiles. She has a nice smile. A nice smile is not a meaningless cliché. Hers is warm and interested and she has lovely regular teeth. I am grateful for it. For a moment, which I am sure seems like ages to her, I stare at her smile. I desperately want her help and approval.
‘As we doctors say, are you ready to answer some questions?’
‘I’m certainly ready to ask some.’
‘It doesn’t really work like that.’
‘Oh, sorry.’
I feel that I can trust her. It’s a relief to hand over to her my self, some of it, anyway. I see that she’s not going to subject me to that sub-Freudian nonsense which I had inflicted on Ed.
‘One last thing, can I ask you if my friend was really not angry with me?’
‘No, not at all. He was just very concerned about you. In fact he came in yesterday and sat by your bed for an hour.’
‘Thank you. He is one of the good people.’
‘Surprisingly, there are lots of them around, I find. OK, let’s carry on.’
I decide right away that I must answer almost all of her questions. My medical notes are open in front of her and she has a notebook.
‘Do you take drugs?’
‘No, I never have. Probably because of my father. He did.’
‘Before this incident, were you more or less stable in your life?’
‘I think so. I’ve been working on a project in the Bodleian Library and in London. I went to Israel to do some research and I met a Canadian journalist, and we fell in love. We were planning to get married. But she was taken captive by an armed group in Cairo. That was very stressful. She’s been released, but there are all sorts of things I don’t understand and haven’t been told. She was raped and that has really upset me. I don’t mean on my own account, but on hers. I can’t imagine what hell she went through. Actually I can. That’s the problem.’
Slow down. Slow down. I am gabbling.
‘Where is she now?’
Lion Heart Page 13