My work on Crusader art has been made easier, because there is essentially just one person who knows all about it, and I have plundered his work ruthlessly and added some bits and pieces from the Rockefeller Museum and little-known stuff that Father Prosper put me onto, in his big shoes. But in the meanwhile I have discovered a letter totally by chance, which suggests that Saladin gave Richard the True Cross, also known as the Holy Cross, as part of the deal for Richard to go home to save his lands. I think I am quite close to discovering where the True Cross ended up, which will be very big news if I can find out. I have become obsessive and fraught, partly because I was so strung out worrying about you that I couldn’t bear to go to bed where the demons would attack me. Why is it that at four o’clock in the morning everyone is a pessimist? I am sure you wouldn’t, but please don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. One day, one year, I think I will be able to stand this up. You probably wonder why I should care about the True Cross at all, given that it is almost certainly nothing to do with the piece of wood Christ was crucified on. But the important fact is that to Richard the Lionheart, and to many Christians, it was accepted as just that, miraculously discovered by Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, in ad 328 in a well under Golgotha. When the cross was lost in 1187, the Cistercian monk, Henri of Albano, described it as a second crucifixion of Christ. Reality doesn’t come into it: belief is everything. The more deeply I get into this story, the more I see that symbols of something, anything, that suggested hope, were of profound importance in life as it was lived. It seems to me this is still true for many people, maybe for the majority.
Our father – sounds like the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer – our father, who art in heaven, was one of these people, always looking for the miraculous. His take on the world – I hope I am not upsetting you by speaking ill of your father – was that mind-expanding drugs would create a new reality and a better world. When you write that you think our role is to offer an example or an option to others, I am with you. When Obama talks about the American Dream, as though it is something real and wonderful, rather than what it is, just a figure of speech, I can’t help thinking that this contains within it the assumption that the dreams of other nations, say Palestine or Britain even, are not in the same league. Only America is in the major league of dreams. As far as we can tell, Afghans have no interest in the American Dream. They have their own aspirations and longings and sense of what is right.
From my point of view, much more can be understood from the literature and culture of a country than from the phrases of politicians.
Forgive me for this bombast – I have fallen back on my own thoughts too much in the last weeks. I may even be becoming a crank.
As for your remark that you will agree to anything I decide, I’m afraid that I can’t accept the burden of that. We have – let’s be honest – a terrible dilemma to resolve, and the question is, can we make a life together now? I love you in every possible way, but even I can see that it won’t be easy. My suggestion is that we wait patiently until you are better, and, when you are ready, we escape somewhere, say Greece, for a month or two and make any decisions then. Whatever we decide, you will always be my sister. Ask Haneen for her advice. I will try to speak to her in London. She’s the only one who knows everything. I feel as though we need her onside.
Noor, I am like the blindfolded boy you described, dipping his hand into a bowl. Our lives have taken the strangest possible turn, but I believe something good and wonderful can emerge out of this.
All my love,
Richie xxx
18
Oxford
I am walking up the Banbury Road to the FedEx depot in Summertown. For my last year as a student I lived up here in North Oxford. I know every road; I know the house where T.E. Lawrence lived, No. 2, Polstead Road. Strange to think that he sprang from these Victorian Gothic houses in this solid suburbia. How would you adapt to desert and camels after this?
There is something satisfying for me about sending this parcel. It is on its way to Moose Creek; this simple act seems to be an affirmation that I live in the world; at times I have felt myself drifting away. Although I still have a few questions, Noor’s letter has calmed me. Things seem simpler. Perhaps I was depressed. Richard the Lionheart became depressed and ill when he was torn two ways, to take Jerusalem or to return home to secure his lands. He lay in his tent outside Jaffa for days, unable to move. Even the peaches and pears and melted snow that he requested from Saladin failed to revive him.
If I am honest, I can’t see how Noor and I can live together, and I can imagine the whispers that would follow us. And I can’t bear the notion that she might feel she has been shamed in some way. There are plenty of instances of women being blamed for their own rapes. I wonder if this kind of attitude doesn’t linger in her family in Toronto, as she seemed to suggest.
I want to ask Lettie just how she came to find out what was going on in Cairo. I think that she must have been passing information from me back to her contact. Ed must have mentioned what had happened to Noor, and she would have suggested a meeting. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a direct line to Mr Macdonald.
Back home, I am trying to translate Henry of Huntingdon’s letters from the museum in Ashby; one contains the word ‘tesaur’, which is ‘treasure’ in Occitan. There are some lines addressed to Hubert Walter, but these appear to be an extract from a poem, or a chanson de geste. I transcribe this letter (if it is a letter) onto a large sheet of unlined white paper and stare at it:
mes qui le porte, et chier le tient
de s’amie li resovient,
et si devient plus durs que fers;
cil vos iert escuz et haubers
et voir einz mes a chevalier
ne le vos prester ne baillier,
mes por amors le vos doing gié.
Or a mes sire Yvain congié:
Word by word I translate with the help of my dictionary:
But he who carries it, and cherishes it
Remembers his friend,
And thus he becomes stronger than iron;
This will be your shield and hauberk
And truly never before have I wanted
To lend it or give it to a knight,
But because of my feelings of love I give it to you.
Now Lord Yvain gives you permission to leave.
When I have finished my translation, I am sure that these must be lines from a chanson de geste. ‘Qui le porte’ could mean ‘whoever wears it’ or it could mean ‘whoever carries it’. Perhaps Huntingdon is quoting a poem that is familiar both to him and to Hubert Walter. Suddenly the penny drops: this is a form of code. They are about to carry the Holy Cross to its destination. But who is the Lord Yvain who has given his permission?
I email my text to Father Prosper, along with my translation, asking him to identify the piece if he can. Within ten minutes he replies:
Mon cher Richard, what you have translated, quite good, is from Chrétien de Troyes’s ‘Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion’.
It is a narrative poem. In this geste, Yvain is the knight with the lion. Does this help with your question? Email me some more if you have questions. Lionheart, the ‘knight with the lion.’ Is this a coincidence?
I hear from our mutual friend that the one in Canada is recovering slowly.
Have patience, my son. Father P
This is the way Hubert Walter and Henry of Huntingdon agreed to communicate. ‘Yvain’, as Father Prosper suggests, can only be Richard; they are saying that they have set out with the treasure, the cross. The second copied letter appears to have been sent from a Templar commanderie. I have discovered that there was a commanderie on an island near the port of Marseilles, and another outside Arles, which still stands. Here Huntingdon’s letter is just one sentence: Sire, ne sait que face, which means, ‘My lord, I don’t know what to do.’
The third note seems to refer to this plea: Pensez de tost venis arrière a tôt le moins jusqu huit joz apr�
�s le Saint Jean. This translates, more or less as, ‘Be sure that you come back in time eight days after the Feast of St John.’ On June the 23rd. I compare this note with Chrétien de Troyes’s text. It has been subtly changed to answer Huntingdon’s cryptic message. I think it suggests that Huntingdon and his party should wait until midsummer, after Richard’s release. We know from the chroniclers that Hubert Walter was headed for Angevin to stiffen the resolve of Richard’s vassals by assuring them that Richard would be released and he would immediately go on the attack. He, Archbishop Hubert Walter, was the King’s man, the Regent.
My theory is made more likely by the communication between Huntingdon and Hubert Walter about a treasure, and it is hard to imagine what that treasure could be if it were not the True Cross.
After 1193, there are no letters and documents in the Huntingdon cache because Henry of Huntingdon died that year, soon after he reached home, his reputation for never becoming ill on account of his blameless life intact. His horse slipped and fell on top of him.
But there is a letter in that year from Hubert Walter to the Master of the Templars in Arles. It is mentioned by a chronicler in his biography of the great man: it asked the Master to aid the friends heading for Rouen and home. Hubert Walter says – quite possibly an adornment by the chronicler – that it is the duty of all Christians to help these knights who served the Lord in the Holy Land so steadfastly. Huntingdon, spelled ‘Huntington’, is mentioned as their leader and as a relative of the Master of the Templars in England.
After a troubled night I call my former tutor, Stephen Feuchtwanger, and I ask him if I can come to see him. I tell him I am running out of money and that I am confused. He is delighted to help. Come for the weekend. He gives me directions: he can no longer drive, but I should take a taxi from the station. He adds that his partner, Larry, is there, and he is a marvellous cook.
‘The weather is bracing. Cold, with high winds off the sea, but dry. I can just about manage a short walk these days. You can tell me all about what is worrying you. And I will see if I can get you some more money from the college.’
He is related to the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, author of Jud Süss, one of Weimar’s finest, which the Nazis appropriated for anti-Semitic propaganda. His family emigrated, some to America, some to England. There is still just a trace of German in his voice after all these years. He said to me once, ‘I am one of the last of the Kindertransport children who revived the English intellectual and artistic worlds.’ He loved to be numbered with Karel Reisz, Frank Auerbach and Vera Gissing. He is an emeritus fellow of the college and much loved. He told me that when he came to Oxford and stood in the Broad outside our college, he thought he had woken up in heaven.
The taxi veers down a narrow, enclosed lane and at the bottom of it the sea is crawling dark green and grey. Off to the left a hill rises, almost conical, like a small, extinct volcano, and seagulls are swooping and crying out. We pull up at a small Victorian cottage. Stephen Feuchtwanger, author of Hovering. Towards an understanding of the Poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins, appears at the door as I pay the driver, who has entertained me all the way from the station with his impressions of London, where he has just been for the first – and last – time. It’s a shithole, is his considered opinion.
Stephen’s hands shake a little. He is a still wonderfully good-looking eighty-one-year-old, with clear intelligent features and imposing grey hair, as if he were a judge of the Supreme Court or the president of a Swiss bank. His partner, Larry, stands behind him, looking over Stephen’s shoulder at me. He was once Stephen’s graduate student.
‘Larry has made a cake in your honour. I have told him that you were one of my most talented students ever.’
Inside the cottage is all lightness, with light blue-painted floorboards and colourful curtains. I guess this is Larry’s work. One whole wall is taken up with blond bookshelves and neatly stacked books.
We sit down in the small living room which looks out over a low stone wall towards the sea beyond. Larry is tall and thin. He wears mustard-yellow jeans with a preppy belt and loafers. I would say that he is a youthful forty-year-old. He came to Oxford from Michigan, he tells me, and he has never once been back to Battle Creek, the home of Kellogg’s. It’s the sort of statement that we provincials utter, expecting, but never receiving, applause. He produces a glossy chocolate brownie cake and pours the tea. Stephen watches me solicitously as I take a slice of the cake: ‘Brilliant. The best chocolate cake I have ever eaten.’
We settle down comfortably to talk. I have a longing for a warm and kindly home life. I imagine Noor sitting next to me in a room like this. After half an hour, Stephen stands up.
‘Now, young Richard and I are going for a walk. A short one along the sand dunes and back via the beach.’
Stephen pulls on a huge green anorak, he takes my arm and off we go down the lane. He points out the church where Betjeman is buried: minor poet, major self-publicist. The conical hill is called Brae Hill and crops up in some of Betjeman’s poetry.
‘Now, Richard, tell me your problems. And before you start, I have some good news, the college will pay to give you more time, another four months.’
I hear that familiar, faint, Germanic note: ‘Mo-ar time.’
‘Thank you. I honestly don’t think I deserve it.’
‘You are highly talented. The college is honoured to help you. Don’t forget that. You seem to be a little down. Here I am, with Parkinson’s, eighty-nine years old, and still eager. For what exactly, I don’t know, but eager nonetheless.’
I tell him everything as we walk along a path in the sand dunes between the beach and the sea before we skirt Brae Hill on another path directly above the sea, which is lapping the base of the hill. I tell him about Noor – without the incest – my breakdown and my problems with the quest – even as I use the word I feel uneasy – my quest to discover the True Cross. I tell him why I think Richard was given the cross by Saladin and that I believe it reached Marseilles while Richard was in captivity in Germany. I tell him my problems of translation, and I tell him that I can’t go any further.
After a few minutes he says, ‘I think I have the answer for you.’
He doesn’t say what it is. We walk back along the beach. At the cottage Larry is cooking. He is wearing an immense apron, embroidered with three red chillies.
‘Do you like fish? I have some beautiful sea bass from Padstow, straight off the boats.’
‘I love fish. I used to be a ghillie.’
This is not one hundred per cent true: I hate salmon after having gutted and cleaned them and looked into their glassy, vacant eyes.
‘Larry is a wonderful cook,’ says Stephen. ‘He spoils me.’
We sit down with a glass of wine: for the first time in weeks I am completely relaxed. Stephen tells me he only goes up to the college about four or five times a year nowadays, for meetings or various dinners. Outside it is very dark, the deep rural dark. In the cottage I feel as though Peggotty is caring for me.
Stephen’s eyebrows are vigorous, probably nourished by the rich intellectual matter within. He seems wonderfully pleased to see me and, eager as I am for human warmth, I am grateful. He is a very old man, but he is still relaying something sacred, which I first heard from him, the belief in the transformative power of literature. I see that Larry has made him happy. Larry reads to him and cooks for him. In return, Larry receives the help and advice in his own writing from a great man, who is generous and unselfish.
Later, Larry shows me to my bedroom under the roof. A small fire burns in the grate. The bed is covered with a patchwork quilt, and a blue bottle of Cornish Natural Spring Water stands by the bed.
‘He often talks about you.’
‘I don’t deserve it, but I need his approval just at the moment.’
‘He told me he wanted you to sit for the prize fellowship.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t think I was up to it. How is he, by the way?’
‘It comes and g
oes. At the moment he seems very happy and well.’
‘I can see you are good for him.’
‘I hope I am. Anything you need? No? Well, sleep tight.’
I have a bath and jump gratefully into bed. In my bedroom at Ed’s house, now on the market, everything is damp and soiled. Here, all is crisp and clean. I have six pillows with embroidered pillowslips and there is a bowl of tulips by the mineral water. I sleep untroubled for the first time in weeks. My aunt would have said it was the fresh air, or the ozone.
After a late breakfast, Stephen suggests we go for another walk. We head up a lane, and emerge on the golf course, and cross a fairway, heading towards the stumpy, isolated church.
‘Stephen, I didn’t tell you the whole story.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘I have to tell you that Noor, who was kidnapped, is my half-sister.’
‘How exciting.’
‘Well, when I met her I didn’t know and she didn’t know either. But after she was taken, her mother, who lives in Jerusalem, told me. My father and her mother had a relationship a year or so after I was born. Haneen – her mother – felt she had to tell me when she realised we were proposing to get married.’
‘Quite common amongst the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns, of course. What are you going to do?’
‘We’re not going to get married, obviously. She’s in Toronto having counselling and psychiatric treatment, as well as internal operations.’
‘Dear boy, what an extraordinary and awful thing.’
‘I really wasn’t meaning to involve you, but I thought it was dishonest not to tell you.’
A man in plum-coloured trousers and red fleece comes down the hill, led by his Labrador, which is pulling hard on the leash.
Lion Heart Page 17