Englishwoman in France (28 page)

‘We must make haste,' growls Lupinus. ‘We're losing the light.' He leans down, picks up the sandalwood box and puts it on his shoulder. He takes one of the beeswax flares, lights it from the dying fire and marches up the hill. We take two flares each and follow him. Above the hole we give light with our torches as Lupinus jumps into the hole and makes a new cradle for the casket. He works quickly, making the cradle with fallen columns and flat stones. Then he places the casket at the centre of the cradle and fills it with the pebbles before lying more flat pieces of marble across the top. Then on top of this he carefully places the rotting planks that have been the little girl's cradle these hundreds of years.

Then Tib and I hold the flares while Modeste and Lupinus work frantically to refill the hole from the soil and detritus all round its edges. They are both grunting and sweating by the time they have finished and the hole is roughly filled.

‘Look!' says Tib, pointing. ‘Trees walking.'

A torchlit procession of men, women and children is mounting the hill. On their backs they are carrying woven baskets with trees and branches poking out in all directions.

Léance comes first, carrying two torches. He stands before us and bows deeply to each of us in turn. Then he looks towards the hole, where Lupinus and Modeste are still working frantically to finish the backfill. He bows again. ‘Messires! We note that you decide to restore the mystery and are glad. Here are the men and women of Cessero come to help you to make good the ground with new trees of fig and olive. In this way no one will know the hill has been breached and the secret will remain with our ancestors.' He pauses and looks again at me and Tib, then back at Modeste. ‘Are you happy, messire, with your discovery in the shrine?'

Modeste nods. ‘We are content.' He pauses. ‘Are you not curious, Léance?'

The old man shakes his head. ‘Such things are the fancy of the men who flood across our land, messire, like water finding its own level. They stay for their own reasons and depart for their own reasons. They leech all our goodness away and plant their strange seed. But you, messire, and the boy doctor want nothing from us; you leech nothing away. At least you recognize that we live by older rules.' The light from his torch flickers across his face. ‘Now, messires, we must work on. The making good must be done before the night is through.'

The digging that had taken many hours during the day is now made good in what seems to be minutes by the men and women of Cessero, helped rather limply by the four of us. Then we stand back and hold new torches, one in each hand, as they set about planting their olives and their figs. They work quietly, by feel. It's too dark to see the whole effect but I know it will be good.

Finally we put our bags and tools together ready to trudge back to the camp. But Léance will not hear of our returning there. ‘Good friends, you should not – must not – return to your camp. Danger lurks there. They say there have been soldiers across the land, looking for you. Some may already be at your living place. Else they will be anchored on the river waiting for daylight. There's word of a new edict and your names on documents for arrest.'

So we end up this day – probably the most exciting of the whole of our lives – sleeping in one end of Léance's cowshed on palliasses of prickly grass. I go to sleep in a second, too tired to worry about tomorrow.

The next day Modeste shakes me awake before dawn. ‘We're going back to the camp,' he says. ‘If the soldiers come for us they must not find us here. The Cesseroneans risk their lives sheltering us. Come!'

L
éance was mistaken. When we got back to our camp there were no soldiers lurking in the undergrowth, no imperial barge on the river. All was peaceful in our hideaway. The bees, though, were angry, buzzing in clouds in the old olive tree and settling in heaving clumps on the roof of the shed.

In the days following our discovery of the shrine we settled into a kind of Heaven; a world in suspension. Day by day Tibery and Modeste offer their medicinal skills to all comers to the camp. The crowds of pilgrims swell; they come from far and wide. We hear tales of how long it has taken to walk here from Setus, from Massalia, from Biterre where the road is pretty decent, thanks to the Romans. They also tell tales of comrades killed there in the great Arena, sacrificing themselves and being sacrificed for their faith in the Way.

One of the women from Setus takes Modeste's arm and leads him to the other side of the great tree, talking swiftly in his ear. ‘Who was that?' I ask him later that night when all is quiet in the camp.

‘She's the one who sent me the map,' he says in my ear. We are lying spoon-like on his palliasse. Tib is down in Cessero, playing a bat and ball game with some of the travelling children.

Modeste goes on. ‘It seems she got it from a man of Corinth who called there some years ago. When she heard of my searches and that I was also from Corinth she sent me the map.'

I'm suddenly afraid. ‘What did you tell her, Modeste? Did you tell her about the shrine? About the baby?'

I can feel him shake his head. ‘No,' he says. ‘I told her the map made no sense to me. That its contours must refer to another place.'

I'm relieved by that. I want that baby left in peace. I feel as well that although Modeste found no answers for his intellectual quest in our discovery of the shrine, he too is at peace now; no longer striving.

And still people keep coming to the camp for help. As far as I can tell the cures offered by Tib and Modeste are mainly down to knowledge of herbs, reassurance and care, cleanliness and order. Always, though, they offer prayers. Tib's special caring is for the possessed, the convulsed, the disturbed. It's with them that I witness his personal magic. His very presence seems to calm these people, to drive the light of madness from their eyes. Many go away tranquil and clear eyed. It would be comforting to say that there's a rational explanation for what happens. But there isn't. Like the people of Cessero and the whole province now, I've come to accept Tib's gift as God-given.

As I say, since our discovery of the shrine and its contents, since the planting of the new forest of olive trees to protect it, Modeste has become quieter, less driven. He's more loving, more childlike, and somehow much less powerful. We touch each other lovingly even when Tib is around and sometimes we go off to our secret garden to make love. But the passion is fading. These are wonderful, quiet times infused with a kind of mournful grace.

The only blot on our landscape is our bees. They have finally buzzed off in a swarm and no matter how hard we look we cannot find them. I miss them. They have become part of my life, pointers in the day. And I feel now that they have something on their communal mind.

Then one day, Peter the seaman brings the Governor's barge up the river. Watchers on the banks run to Cessero with the news and Léance comes to tell us, his face worried. Then, with warnings and anxious shouts he herds the pilgrims still milling around our camp like distracted sheep, back to the village.

Modeste, Tib and I run with Lupinus to the landing place and wait for the boat to dock. It moves with its splashing raw grace in its familiar livery, brightly painted and immaculate. In minutes the oarsmen are standing to attention, their oars held vertically, like halberds. Then Tib shouts with delight and runs forward as he watches old Peter lead his mother Lady Serina down the double plank. She's clutching Misou to her bosom. On dry land she puts the little dog down and he scampers across to me to lick my hand with his soft, rasping tongue. Then she turns and draws her son to her and embraces him in an excess of emotion I've never seen before. Tib has tears in his eyes. Over his head Lady Serina's eyes – the window also to the soul of Madame Patrice – meet mine. They are dark and full of sorrow. She speaks to me. ‘My husband is travelling in the north of the province pronouncing judgment on the . . . people of the Way.' She turns her gaze to Modeste. ‘I'm forbidden to come here, dearest friend, but time is so short now.'

She pushes Tib from her and looks into his face. She has only to bend slightly now to kiss his round brow. ‘My, you have grown, dear Tibery! And your face is thinner.' She pauses. ‘Good Fortune is alive with news of you. Of your mission. Of the mission of the good Modeste and Florence. Many of the people travelling through Good Fortune, to and from Massalia and Setus, sing your praises.' She looks across at Lupinus. ‘And who is this, Tibery?'

Tib smiles at her. ‘And here is our friend Lupinus, Mother, who came with us from Nicomedia and has proved a true friend. Lupinus speaks little but he knows all. He makes us feel safe and carries us along when we are tired. Lupinus, this is my mother.'

Lupinus bows deeply to her. She bows her head in return and then smiles up at him. Then it's Lupinus who leads the way back to the camp and it's he who sweeps the papers to one end of the big trestle table so we can sit there.

In minutes Léance's wife appears with a big jug of beer and pours it into the round jars that serve us as cups. Léance hovers under the olive tree. Tib sits close to his mother, his arm around her waist; the urgency of the moment has wiped out their more formal ways. It's as though we're all holding our breath. We wait for Léance and his wife to leave and at last the table becomes alive. Serina turns again to Modeste. ‘So?'

He nods. ‘We found it, my lady. We found it.'

She sits quietly as he describes the sandalwood box. He says, ‘This poor baby, whoever she was, had somehow not been allowed to shed her earthly body. By broaching the hill, and opening her grave box, we began that process. She'll be free now.'

‘We think now that this is why Modeste was driven to find her,' says Tib. ‘To set her spirit free.'

‘And this child, then? Who is she? Who was she?'

Modeste shrugs. ‘That's merely to be imagined, madam,' he says. ‘But the way she was buried tells us she was important. The purple cloth is a tribute to Tiberius, perhaps. The old story of those women who came to these parts tells me something else. As does the fish carving.' He hesitates.

‘We think it might be the woman from Magdala, Mother. The Magdelene,' says Tib. ‘Florence saw her in a vision. We've all talked about this. The baby is from the woman from Magdala and the Nazarene. I'm certain what Florence saw was true.' He speaks with authority. ‘The baby was placed there for safety perhaps but was somehow imprisoned and we had to set her free. And in exchange she showed us that we must believe what we believe.'

‘So . . .?' Serina looks at me with steady eyes. ‘The community would value—'

‘This baby must remain a secret,' says Modeste firmly. ‘She must be left in peace. Else she'll be the plaything of charlatans and will remain in limbo forever. No child should suffer that fate.'

Lady Serina looks at us, one to the other. Her glance lingers on me again. Lupinus and I have been silent during the storytelling. Then she shrugs her shoulders as though throwing a weight from them. ‘The child will be left in peace. There are more pressing matters today.' Her gaze fixes on her son. ‘I am the bearer of bad news, Tib. The Emperor has signed yet another edict proscribing followers of the Nazarene. In every part of the Empire writings, scrolls, places of worship are being destroyed. That's what Helée is doing even now, in the north of the province.' She looks around our humble clearing and our lean-to hut. ‘Followers of the Nazarene are not allowed to meet, anywhere. They cannot appeal to the courts; they can be freely tortured under this new law. Senators and soldiers who praise the Way are deprived of office and rank. Freedmen who follow the Way are to be enslaved again. This is all so very serious, Modeste. My husband the Governor is bidden to root out such people across this province.' Her despair ripples like acid through her voice.

‘Poor Mother,' says Tibery. He pauses. ‘And poor Father,' he adds.

‘There's worse,' says Serina. ‘People are being killed in numbers. They say the Emperor has no blood lust. But his advisor Galerius, an iniquitous man, is very thirsty for blood. He encourages judges to use their powers and execute these people of our faith. This means the sword for citizens of Rome but, even worse, burning alive for others.'

My blood freezes.
Others.
I am the only
other
here.

Serina's voice thickens with remorse, with sorrow. ‘And even worse. Your father has received a document from court specifically condemning all three of you. The deed is done.'

Tib pulls away from her. ‘But my father—'

‘Can – and
will
– do nothing. He may be a hero in the field but he is a coward in the family. In the end accounting he loves his Emperor more than he loves his son.' Her voice is dry and hard and Tib clutches her waist more tightly. Misou jumps from my grasp to go and slink round her ankles in an attempt to comfort her.

Modeste, who has been listening quietly, comes to life. ‘We must travel north! Get your bags together, Tib, Florence. Lupinus! We will go north.'

And this is when we hear the creak of leather and the jingle of metal and the whinnying of a horse. I turn around to see foot soldiers surrounding our camp. There seems to be one behind every tree. Hundreds! Well, a hundred at least. I think we must be very important quarry.

Then a single soldier on a sturdy brown horse trots down the narrow path. He is built to impress with his heavy tabard of leather petals woven with copper wire, his red cloak and the red plume on the helmet that glints in the sun. We are enclosed in the clatter and rustle of men and armour as the soldiers stand up straight away from their trees and their other hiding places. So many of them.

The Centurion (as I suppose he must be) steers his horse right up to us. He bows and speaks directly to Lady Serina. ‘With regret, madam, I've orders to come for your son and his companions.' He extracts a document from inside his leather jerkin. ‘It's ordered here . . .' I notice one of my bees creeping up the leather petals of the man's jerkin.