It was in this book on that journey that I learned that Eleanor had been on the Second Crusade and had fallen in love with the art and architecture of Byzantium and the freedom of the Latin Kingdom. She saw that Byzantium was a far more sophisticated and elegant place than Paris, where she had lived for many years. She was astounded by the art, the luxury, the clothes, the jewellery and the manners of the people. I have incorporated all this in my dissertation. Finding without seeking. It happens quite often, in my experience.
When she set up her court in Poitiers after she had left Henry of England, Eleanor was determined to improve the huge hall the Plantagenets had built next to the castle. She also intended to improve the manners of the locals. Soon she had licked them into shape:
Here there was no disordered bivouac littered with the straw bedding of a feudal soldiery; no depot for the forage of routiers; no draughty harbourage with unglazed mullions and flapping hangings lighted with the slant beams of flares and traversed by wind-blown smoke; no armoury for shield and helmet, trophies of the chase, the litter of hounds and falcons. Here was a proper setting for majesty, a woman’s place in the sun, a fit stage for the arts, a foil for beauty, a comfortable house . . .
At her court, Eleanor and her eldest daughter, Marie of Champagne, fostered the idea of l’amour courtois, loosely based on Ovid’s Ars amatoria. Here, topics were argued semi-formally, such as the possibility of love after marriage. (Decision: not possible.) Eleanor’s ideas spread to many of the courts of Europe.
According to my book:
It had the effect of freeing woman from the millstone which the Church of the first millennium hung about her neck as the author of man’s fall and the facile instrument of the devil.
Where men in Poitiers, including the Bishop, had previously been content to dress in sheepskin and fox pelts, they now took up the new fashions. One disapproving chronicler wrote:
Today the humblest would blush to be seen in such poor things. Now they have clothes fashioned of rich and precious stuffs in colours to suit their humour.
Eleanor insisted that her court should have an artistic sensibility; men were required ‘to be purged of the odour of the kennel and the road, and to be free of spurs and falcons’ when they entered Eleanor’s halls. They were also encouraged to see themselves as belonging in the realm of romance, and to think of themselves as the property of women. They were to see themselves as supplicants to women, through poetic addresses.
Eleanor brought up Richard in this extraordinary place, from where he was paraded as her favourite son around her lands so that her people could see their future lord. I find it impossible to get a clear or consistent picture of Richard from the chronicles; only episodes of his life are vivid to me. But it is clear that he acquired some of his mother’s sensibility. At the same time, he was also an utterly implacable and ruthless enemy, and it is difficult to reconcile this ruthlessness with the ideas of her court. His treatment of Alice, who lived for years at the court in Eleanor’s custody, certainly owed little to the precepts of the courts of love. But how do we know that Richard’s reluctance to marry Alice did not spring from having seen her running around the court as a young girl, more little sister than bride, for years? It may be that Westermarck’s theory, that young children brought up in close proximity, related or not, develop a natural taboo against incest, applied to Richard.
As for Richard’s belligerence, it can be traced to Poitiers’ famous season of tournaments, which were patronised by:
the rabble of soldiers, fighting cocks, jousters, springers, riding masters, troubadours, Poitevin nobles and young châtelaines, adolescent princes and infant princesses in the great hall of Poitiers.
The tournaments became so violent and involved so much money as ransom, that they were eventually curtailed. Still, these tournaments, virtually small wars, produced a crop of renowned and brutal knights every year. One of the most famous products of this training was William the Marshal, Richard’s friend and companion, described as the greatest knight who ever lived. There is an effigy of him in the Temple Church, London. He had skinny shins, I noted.
As we raced through the countryside it appeared to me that France was sleeping. Looking across the fields and copses and stunned villages, with the occasional church steeple breaking the horizon.
I was struggling to fix Noor in my mind; she had become a memory, a phantom . . . I didn’t in truth know what she had become, but it was not substantial. She was now part of a story, a story that involves someone who was, as in a fairy tale, my sister.
I checked in to my cheap hotel, quite close to the station of Limoges. The station has an impressive spire, which, from the train, I had mistaken for the tower of the cathedral. It was eight fifteen when I presented myself in the lobby. Nobody could be more suspicious of a stranger than a receptionist in a small French hotel: she told me with joy in her heart that dinner was not served after eight. She said that I was en retard, but she might as well have said I was a retard for negligently missing my dinner. Just to rub it in, she reminded me that dinner was part of the formule I had paid for. I told her the train was late. She shrugged: ‘It is not our responsibility.’ Before I could ask the question, she told me that there would be no refund.
Outside on the empty boulevards, a few people in taupe or pink anoraks were visible, looking in shop windows cautiously. Pink seems to have become the sub-prime of colours. A chicken rotisserie van was standing in a small square near the cathedral and I ordered half a chicken. The rows of chickens rotated steadily and aromatically; the effect was almost balletic. I sat down on a bench beneath some brutally pruned plane trees and ate the chicken with plastic cutlery from a styrofoam box. Juices ran down my chin. I could see elderly, bowed couples, and a few African women, entering the cathedral for an evening service; I guessed they would be huddled in the vast interior like the small bands of Native Americans painted on the endless prairie by George Catlin. I walked down towards the river and across St-Martial Bridge, built on the supports of the original Roman bridge. Richard the Lionheart’s father, Henry, had destroyed it in 1182 to punish his disobedient vassals. St Martial, I had read, was an important saint in these parts, and the first Bishop of Limoges.
For all the neglected grandeur, I thought that there was a sense of sadness in provincial cities like Limoges – the cafés serving the immemorial croque, the baguette with saucisson or cheese or ham, the poor coffee, the trees butchered in homage to some forgotten notion of rationality, the rows of dilapidated Mansard-style houses, the dreary shops. There was no joie de vivre here. A group of Algerian boys – I assumed they were Algerians – came towards me with their razor-cut hair and giant trainers, and I felt nervous. Strange that they appeared to be dressed just like the Palestinians I had seen in Jerusalem. All my better feelings told me they were just boys, out and about, but my instinct warned me to be wary. I have often had this feeling in Hackney. In Kensington – where, courtesy of Haneen, I am now living – we are all harmless strangers, although sometimes in the elegant garden squares I can hear the full, orotund English spoken, loudly and especially cheerfully on a Friday when these people are loading the Range Rover for the trip to the country house, enthusiastically supported by their congenitally cheerful Labradors.
As I walked along the River Vienne, I was wondering what I thought I might find at Châlus-Chabrol. Richard’s life had been appropriated by many of the local guide books, his heart, innards and skull – if you believed them – were scattered in local churches and crypts and even in a field. This appropriation of the glamour of Richard had reached a scientist, dubbed by the French press the Indiana Jones of pathology. He was granted a small section of Richard’s heart – a few cells, a thin slice? – to determine just what had killed him. He might, apparently, have been poisoned.
In Jerusalem Father Prosper had told me of a DNA test on the thirteen headlice found in Qumran. Headlice live only a few hours without blood, and the plan was to discover the DNA of the last p
eople the headlice were feeding on when the Romans sacked the place in ad 70, which would have provided, rather neatly, useful information about the inhabitants of Qumran. Unfortunately none of the blood in the headlice yielded DNA.
In bed in my small room I felt very alone, and plagued with doubts. What was I doing here? Was it to make a name for myself, or was I competing with my father, in some way that had not been revealed to me? I slept fitfully, waking up in this rabbit hutch every few hours, feeling miserably uncertain. Just before dawn I woke finally and I remembered one of Stephen’s favourite sayings: ‘Literature interprets the chaos of life and gives it meaning.’ I thought that I now understood what Stephen had tried to tell me in Cornwall; he was telling me to free my imagination to explore the chaos of life.
On my laptop I found two emails, the first from Noor.
Richie, I am a free agent. (Jeu de mots – get it?) Let’s go to Symi in May.
Noor xx
PS. More detail to follow. I love you.
My heart lurched, as though the ballast inside me had shifted in a storm.
The second email was from Keith Philpott; I had asked him if he had the time to look at any research done on the churches and abbeys of the region and their crypts or tombs. He said he would look through the data. He said that he could probably extract more information from the document and the map. He also said he had found the words ‘Saint Martial??’, only visible under a minutely focused beam, near the pictogram of the yglise. He had taken the liberty of doing some research on St Martial, and discovered that he was the patron saint of Limoges. The church on the map was certainly named after him, and it would have been an obvious hiding place, some miles from troubled Limoges, particularly as there was a dispute between the Viscount of Limoges and the Abbot of St-Martial; the Abbot would probably have been willing to help an enemy of the Viscount.
Keith also sent me a link to something called Les Ostensions. This, I learned, is a yearly ceremony to which the faithful are invited to view the relics housed by the Confrérie de St-Martin. They are paraded around the town and the priests in attendance implore God to intercede with the saints. It is an ancient custom, revived some years ago after St Martial’s crypt was discovered. As Keith put it, ‘This could be interesting, no?’
I emailed Noor and told her we would talk about Symi later when I got back to London. I told her how happy I was to hear that we would, after all these months, be together again. I emailed Keith to thank him for his work. I found myself plumped up with optimism. I thought how odd it is that often, just when you are at your lowest, the gloom can clear unexpectedly, even arbitrarily.
I took a taxi to a village near Châlus. The driver told me that Richard the Lionheart was killed in Châlus and that the English do tours of the castles of this region. ‘Mais Richard Coeur de Lion ne parlait pas même un seul mot d’anglais.’ I had an appointment with a woman called Cathérine Sieff, whose brother I had met in England. He told me that his sister owned a bookshop called Parola, Occitan for ‘words’, in a small village near Châlus, and she had become the local historian. She was very well known in the region and her bookshop was, as he put it, a ‘destination’; she had a café in the old mill that housed her bookshop where she made wonderful coffee, served with madeleines or friandises. She also loved exotic teas; Emily would have been right at home. Cathérine Sieff had been married for eight years to an Englishman who had died less than a year ago. Jean Sieff said she would be delighted to see me.
The taxi pulled up in a small square, priested by plane trees, with a fountain in the middle. I walked through an old, rounded doorway that might once have been the main entrance to the mill. The bookshop was just as a bookshop should be: roof to floor it was stacked with books in those evocative and serious paperback French covers. There were photographs and paintings of local interest, there was a small art gallery upstairs and there were giant pots of bougainvillea on the terrace at the back, which looked over the stream that had once powered the mill. A half-sized piano rested in a corner of a room on a lower level.
She appeared from the café.
‘You are Richard, I am sure. I am Cathérine. It is wonderful to meet you. Come, my brother says you like good coffee, à l’Italien.’
‘I do. And he says you make great madeleines.’
‘I hope. I have just made some.’
She was wearing a simple light dress in blue cotton, and her hair was long and darkish blonde, falling down to her shoulders, artfully natural. She was in her early thirties, I guessed, very young to be widowed. She was slim in that French way. I was reminded of a picture of a 1960s singer, Françoise Hardy, with my father. She is holding his arm lightly in the picture. He hinted that he had had an affair with her in St-Tropez. It’s not impossible: after all it was the 1960s and he was one of the new species of laughing freemen, complete with Jim Morrison hair, poised silkily on his head. His hair had a life all of its own.
Cathérine made me a latte and decorated it with two hearts. She watched my reaction. Wonderful, I said. The bookshop had been financed by her husband and they had a house in the countryside near by, where she now lived full-time. He was a banker – not a crook, not at all – and she was devastated when he died suddenly of pancreatic cancer, aged thirty-six. He died within three weeks of diagnosis. I had another coffee. I was beginning to feel the effects of the caffeine: I was overrun by the possibilities a life could offer and, despite my plans for Symi, one of these was to have sex with Cathérine. We talked in general terms about my mission here. I told her that I was writing a dissertation on the art of the Latin Kingdom and its influence on Eleanor, and that some treasures of Jerusalem were sent to Normandy, but documents I had read suggested that they had been held up near Limoges. I needed her help to locate a church, only identified as St Martial, just south of Châlus-Chabrol. Now that, thanks to Keith, I knew something of Les Ostensions, I asked her if she could help me get to see the relics in storage.
I had two madeleines. They were the shape of a scallop-shell, quite large and destined to rest in the memory for ever.
Cathérine knew about the church of St Martial. She told me that there was nothing much to see, because it had been destroyed during the Hundred Years War, but I would be able to walk the outlines of the building and look at some collapsed parts of the crypt. I thought this crypt might be the grotte profonde on Huntingdon’s chart. She told me about Les Ostensions, which she described as kitsch: the relics and bones of various saints, some of them local, were processed around town. A reliquary holding St Thomas’s finger bone was one of the main attractions, as well as various other reliquaries, one containing a piece of the lance that pierced Christ’s side.
‘It makes me a little mad to see them parading this stuff around the city. Anyway, what exactly are you hoping to find?’
‘I am looking for reliquaries of Latin Kingdom or Byzantine origin, which are being recognised as important artworks. They demonstrate that, over a hundred and fifty years, artistic fusion was going in Outremer. It may be that one or more of these ended up here. I am sure you know that when Richard besieged Châlus-Chabrol, just before he was killed, he was looking for hidden treasure, which the Viscount of Limoges would not surrender to him?’
‘Yes, I do know the story, but in those days hordes of treasure were often mentioned in a miraculous way to explain things. You know, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or by a mythic holy quest. The story of the treasure that the Viscount would not surrender is fiction. It was supposed to be a fabulous horde of Gallo-Roman gold. But it is strange that it was never found, no? The treasure of Rennes-le-Château is another example. This crooked nineteenth-century priest, Bérenger Saunière, made a huge amount of money from selling thousands of indulgences, but the source of his money was said to be from some treasure he had found in his church.’
In the afternoon, she drove me to Châlus-Chabrol. The remaining tower was quite small and unimpressive. She told me where Richard was supposed t
o have been killed; nobody really knows for sure, because a new castle was built on the site.
‘Most of the original castle, except for the keep, has been demolished, and this later castle, these ruins over there, was also destroyed,’ she said. ‘OK, I must go now.’
She smiled, and shrugged apologetically. I thought I could detect sadness, a certain wariness about the eyes. As I stepped out of the car she said, ‘Do you have a hotel reservation?’
‘Yes, in Limoges.’
‘Would you like to stay at my house? I can come with you to the church tomorrow. I am free in the morning.’
‘That would be great. My room is a dog-kennel. But, by the way, I have no clothes. Obviously.’
‘You can have a clean shirt from my husband’s cupboard. There are many. I haven’t been able to throw anything of Harry’s clothes away.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Now I will try to persuade the Confrérie to let you see the relics. They have no idea what they have and they don’t really care as long as the – how do you say? – the credulous, come out to look.’
I was leaning on the windowsill of her car, looking across at her, and for a long moment, as she leant towards me, I saw her breasts; small but not negligible. It was impossible to look away, because that would have suggested guilt. Instead I tried to look serious.
‘Thank you for that. I will see you later.’
‘OK, Richard, that is great. I will come and get you here just after six when the shop will be closed.’
Lion Heart Page 26