Yes.
Chapter 24
It stormed during the final days of our outbound journey. The mainsail ripped in two and perilous amounts of seawater were taken aboard. Much of the food was soaked and ruined and our supply of drinking water was contaminated. Luckily all of my containers of the oils I needed for trade were safe. Then, one day, all was calm. The crew set about repairing the sail, the oars were manned, and just before dusk the skies opened and the setting sun appeared bringing great relief to all. Then we sighted land.
We sailed into a bay familiar to me the following morning. By the time we came ashore a delegation from the nearby village, all of them men I knew and traded with – Athain, Casdarth, Phenbir and Kraugh – were gathered on the strand. Out of respect for the local population and for their emperor, Octavius and Lucca came off the ship in full battle gear, including breastplates, capes, and plumed helmets. I introduced them as my friends. The local men had heard of the Romans from the time of Caesar’s invasion, and they were more alarmed than pleased. But I was able to explain our relationship and our hosts were impressed. Then they enquired about Yeshua who stood just behind me. Try as I might, I could not make it clear he was my nephew, and in the end, it was left that, in their eyes, he was my son.
We walked to the village, passing over streams of clear fresh water. This and the sighting of cows and sheep grazing in meadows, and then fields of wheat blowing in the morning breeze, filled our captain with great consolation. It made the Romans hungry.
What I remembered as a simple village from just a few years earlier was now a proper town – still primitive in many ways – but comfortably supporting numerous families and tin streamers come to work and settle there from other regions of the isle. Our arrival caused considerable excitement and we were shown to our accommodations straight away. The news that went from mouth to mouth, along with the fact that I had two Roman soldiers in my employ, was that I had brought my most handsome son to walk among them. After a repast of mutton, meal, and goblets of mead that left us all well sated, we were taken on a tour of the nearby mines. It gave me pleasure to show Yeshua the large ragged veins of tin mixed with rock and soil, and the small deposits of lead, copper, and gold that burst forth upon the surface of those coastal territories the way palms and date trees sprout near our deserts.
As the days passed, the captain went about repairing the ship and refilling his barrels and amphorae with fresh food and water. After a week he bid us farewell promising to return in a month’s time to collect us and to load in my ingots. We adapted to life in the new town. Lucca found himself a companion, a rugged tin man from afar. Octavius found himself a comely widow with two small children he was not averse to entertaining. And Athain, the chieftain and town leader, invited Yeshua and me to a special supper.
The general conversation during the meal centred on the lands and cultures we came from. Each of us ventured guesses as to what an accurate map of the world might look like. The Roman Empire, its reach and power, was also discussed, as was the topic of religion. To my relief, and for the first time that I could remember since our departure from Nazareth, Yeshua said nothing. Perhaps this reticence, that I was hoping to ascribe to maturity, had more to do with what was clearly the main reason for this special repast. For all the while we were waited on by Athain’s two beautiful daughters. Though not hidden from view during the course of a normal day in the town, they were always dressed from head to toe in dark vestments. That evening they wore white gowns that clung to them and their heads were uncovered revealing long tresses of golden hair. To our host’s obvious pleasure, it was difficult for us to keep our eyes off of them. As the evening drew to a close, he escorted us out of his home. Thousands of stars bore down through gaps in the low-lying clouds, and with the scent of ripening wheat wafting through the air, he made it clear that he would be honoured were we to take his daughters as our brides. I told him I was far too old, even for the elder of the two, the one called Canlia, who was probably eighteen. Venusha, the younger one, was all of fifteen. But he brushed this qualm aside. I imagine he saw it as an advantage to him and to his future. He had no sons. By marrying them off to us he would have my business guaranteed for many years, and he would avoid igniting rivalries among other leading families with eligible sons. We promised to consider his offer and bade him goodnight.
Chapter 25
Over a year had passed since Laura had taken the IRT line uptown. During her stint at NYU the Upper West Side fell off her normal itinerary, and Nathan was claustrophobic, so even trips to and from Lincoln Center were always by taxi. She remembered how often they used to fight over the meagre tips he gave the drivers, and his small-town indignation with respect to tipping, period. The last time she had taken the local train this far up Broadway was to see Pierre when he was on his way back to Paris from California. Pierre had wanted some real New York Jewish food, Pierre who flirted with her so openly and innocently that it never bothered her. She took him to Barney Greengrass on Amsterdam and 87th Street, the famous Jewish deli, the ‘appetizing’ store renowned for its sturgeon, whitefish, and Nova Scotia. They had scrambled eggs with kippered salmon and strong coffee, and he had kidded her about her heritage, being half Palestinian and mad for Jewish food.
She got off at 116th Street and came up onto the pavement by the main entrance to Columbia University. The day was so lovely and romantic, smelling of fall and the river, and the foot traffic of students and professors so appealing, she was tempted to stroll through the campus. But she was running late. She had tarried at the spa and fallen asleep on the massage table and then she had stopped at Astor Place Liquors to get a bottle of wine. She crossed Broadway and headed down the hill to reach Bonnerive’s building at 448 Riverside Drive. It was the sort of solid, elegant, pre-war campus housing that was unlike anything at NYU, and unlike anything Columbia would probably ever have again. The graceful, granite, ten-storey apartment building, one of two that were identical, faced Riverside Park and the Hudson.
Bonnerive buzzed her in. The man she saw standing in the doorway of his eighth-floor apartment was close to ninety. He was trim and dapper, with horn-rimmed glasses, liver spots on well-manicured hands, and thinning grey hair that was a bit too long. He wore a herringbone jacket in need of mending over a classic work shirt with an ascot, in short – un jeune premier. She greeted him in French.
‘Now I see why Pierre is so in love with you,’ he said, ‘why he has kept you from me all this time.’
She handed him the bottle of wine, ‘Pierre is a married man.’
‘You can qualify the noun with whatever modifier you wish,’ he said, ‘but the noun is what counts.’
He took the bottle with both hands and admired it, holding it up to her, ‘Shall we?’
‘It’s a bit early in the day for me.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said, showing her into the main hallway that was lined with abstract paintings that looked to have been done by students. He took her coat. ‘If I can handle it, you certainly can.’
‘What was it that Audrey Hepburn once said?’ Laura declared. ‘It must be cocktail hour somewhere in the world.’
‘Precisely,’ he replied, ‘and in fact it’s coming up on five here in New York.’
He gave the bottle back to her, ‘There are glasses and a corkscrew in the kitchen.’
She decided not to be offended and surmised that at his age he might find pulling the cork embarrassingly difficult. The apartment at first glance appeared neat and orderly, but on closer inspection she saw it was simply frozen in time and in need of a thorough cleaning. She wondered if he had anyone who came in to help, but she was not going to rain on his parade by asking. The only thing visible in the huge yellowy-beige kitchen that might accompany the wine were some Ritz crackers she arranged on a beautiful chipped plate from Schoelcher et Fils.
She found him in an immense living room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves where three wide windows, chipped paint on their sills, looked out ove
r the Hudson and at New Jersey across the way. It was an afternoon that cried out for them to be opened but she was not there to rattle the man’s routines. The wine, highly recommended to her by a store employee, was delicious, and they sat across from each other in easy chairs that still wore summer slipcovers adorned with a faded flowery print.
‘How long have you been here?’ she asked.
‘Here in this apartment? Probably since the day you were born.’
‘It’s a magnificent space. Maybe I should try to come here and teach. Do you think they’d give me one of these if I did?’
‘Very doubtful. But you could live here with me. There’s lots of room.’
‘Is that a proposal Jean-Paul?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ve hardly met.’
‘I still have eyes my dear, and nothing would please me more – just imagine how green with envy Pierre would be.’
She took another sip.
‘You’ve not been tempted to return to France, to retire there? New York can be such a tough place.’
‘When my wife was alive, we mostly lived in France. I only had to teach one semester here per year. It was a wonderful and generous arrangement. But she was from New York and wished to be buried here and when she died, I brought her back here, up to the Catholic cemetery in Westchester where Lorca’s father is buried. And – this must sound very silly – I’ve been unable to leave her, to put an ocean between us, ever since – and that was fifteen years ago.’
Laura swallowed and, maddeningly, tears came into her eyes. She did all she could to stop it. ‘You loved her very much.’
‘I did. I do. And she loved me. We were very fortunate.’
‘Yes, you were.’
‘Do you love anyone like that?’
‘You’re a direct young man, aren’t you?’
‘When time is short one goes to the grain, my dear.’
‘No. I don’t think that I do.’
‘You’re young still.’
‘Not that young.’
‘Let’s just say you are younger than Mary was when she met me.’
‘So, there is still hope.’
‘Absolutely.’
A shiver of displacement passed through her, akin to the sensation one is said to feel when an angel steps over your future grave. What and where was home? Joseph of Arimathea had asked the question too. She assumed the answer had less to do with place and more to do with being part of a large family – a sensation she had no experience with.
‘Did you say Lorca’s father? Federico García Lorca?’
‘That’s right. This used to be their apartment.’
‘My maternal grandparents and my mother were born in Granada.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘My grandparents were very right wing I’m afraid.’
‘It happens in the best of families, in fact, mostly in the best of families.’
She raised her glass to him.
‘After Lorca was killed,’ he said, ‘his family fled to New York. I collaborated with his brother Francisco who taught Spanish literature here and when he retired in 1975 the family moved back to Spain and I inherited the apartment.’
‘That’s quite something.’
‘Yes, but they left the patriarch here in his grave in American soil, because when he escaped from Spain in 1939, with what was left of his children, just before their ship left Bilbao he said, ‘I never want to come back to this fucking country ever again.’
‘I’d no idea. And yet Spain is OK now.’
‘History is fate and timing. We’ve no choice about the era we’re born into.’
As he said this, she noticed that his right hand, the one holding the wine, began to quiver so he grabbed the glass with his left. He held forth for at least half an hour on the topics of history and the Spanish Civil War until he realized her interest was flagging.
‘But you’ve not come here to see me about Spain,’ he said.
‘No. But it is fascinating.’
‘Gerard of Amiens – what possessed you?’
She laughed, ‘What possessed you?’
‘For me he was a local hero. I was born in Abbeville. My family has been there for centuries. One of my ancestors worked for one of the Counts of Ponthieu.’
‘It was the part of France that Eleanor of Castile inherited.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And did Gerard of Amiens write a story for her?’
‘He did.’
‘I’d like to show you something.’
‘By all means.’
She took out her mobile phone and accessed a photo she’d taken before leaving Cornwall. It was of one of the vellum sheets from the French codex. She made it as large as possible and came over to where Bonnerive was seated, getting down on her knees next to his chair to show him the screen.
‘I’m sorry I don’t have anything larger for you to look at. I’m not supposed to show any of this to anyone yet. Do you recognize the handwriting at all?’
He looked at it carefully, ‘Where did you find this?’
‘Is it his writing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. For what it is worth, I am the world expert in this kind of trivia. But where did you see this?’
‘In a private house in the southwest of England. It’s part of a project I’m working on. But I’ve been sworn to secrecy at the moment so I can’t tell you all that much.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s an eighty-page codex that’s a translation of another from the fourth century written in Greek, which in turn is a translation from a completely dilapidated scroll from the first century.’
She rose to her feet and returned to her chair.
‘You are in possession of an eighty-page codex written by Gerard of Amiens?’
‘Translated and written down by him. And I think he did it for Eleanor of Castile.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the family that owns these objects are descendants of Eleanor of Castile and Edward I.’
He sat there, still, then took a bit of wine and began to sway one of his legs back and forth. ‘What I would give to see such a document,’ he finally said.
‘When the sale goes through – the owners are going to put it up for auction – I can send you a facsimile of it, in its entirety.’
His hand began to quiver again. To dissimulate he removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket and took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses. ‘Well I hope I shall live that long.’
‘Of course you will,’ she said. ‘Do you know anything about what sort of relationship Gerard had with Eleanor?’
‘I have an idea, yes, perhaps.’
‘Pierre mentioned you had some correspondence of Gerard’s, but that you’ve never published it.’
‘Pierre believes one has to publish everything. I am long past that phase in my life. What people do with what I have, after I’m gone, shall be up to them. But for now, I still keep myself alive by working on this correspondence. It amuses me.’
‘And perhaps you have something that might shed some light on all of this?’
He smiled at her, ‘Perhaps.’
‘Let me tell you one more thing,’ she said. ‘The text of the scroll, from what I can judge, was faithfully translated into Greek, but the version Gerard did from the Greek into Old French is different.’
‘How so?’
‘Names were changed, and, well all I can say is that his version is a censored version of the original – the original tells a very startling tale, especially in light of who the personages are. His version transforms it into a romantic saga with fictional characters. In everything I have read about Eleanor of Castile it says she was a devout woman and that she had a special affinity for the Dominican order, due perhaps to the friendship she nurtured while in Sicily with Thomas of Aquinas. But Gerard, correct me please if I’m wrong, was known as a bit of a heretic, right? As a man irritat
ed with religious orders, and someone who had a large library of classic texts, some of which were banned by the Church. Eleanor was also a great lover of books. I’m trying to find some kind of bridge between the two positions.’
‘I may be able to help you with that. But not today.’
‘I’d be so grateful.’
‘You are a most fortunate young woman, Laura.’
‘I know.’
‘Be careful. The academic world is as venal and nasty as it’s always been.’
‘I know.’
‘Good. And I promise to send you something that might help.’
‘Thank you, and I promise to send you a copy of the codex.’
She didn’t finish her glass of wine. By the time she got up to leave Bonnerive had downed two. As they left the living room, she was taken aback by the golden light reflecting off the river streaming through the windows. He noticed her expression. ‘As you can see, in exchanging the Somme for the Hudson, I’ve not done too badly.’
‘No, you haven’t.’
Laura put on her coat. He kissed her on both cheeks, giving her forearms a brief squeeze. She could smell the wine on him plus a dab of cologne, all of it mixed with a faint scent of moth balls.
Chapter 26
She took a taxi back down to the hotel and texted James en route:
Could you bear another Italian meal this evening and might I make the reservation? I have my reasons. Laura
He answered within the minute:
Of course.
Unable to think of a single uptown restaurant that was appealing or cosy, and knowing Nathan's preferred downtown haunts, she got them a table at the insanely expensive Cipriani's on West Broadway – inside – knowing it would be the last sort of place he would go. She met James once more in the hotel bar at seven.
‘Ahoy there,’ he said as she came in. He got off the bar stool and gave her two kisses.
‘Bonsoir,’ she said. ‘What’s that you’re drinking?’
‘I believe it’s referred to as white wine.’
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