Labyrinth (36 page)

Although now in his forties, de Montfort was still as strong as an ox.

Moody, introspective, he inspired extravagant loyalty in his men, but was distrusted by many of the barons who thought him devious and ambitious beyond his status. Evreux despised him, as he despised all those who proclaimed their actions as the work of God.

Evreux had taken the Cross for a single reason. As soon as he had accomplished his purpose, he would return to Chartres with the books he had been hunting half his lifetime. He had no intention of dying on the altar of other men’s beliefs.

What is it?“ he growled to the servant who’d appeared at his shoulder.

“There’s a messenger come for you, my lord.”

Evreux glanced up. Where is he?“ he said sharply.

Waiting just outside the camp. He would not give his name.“

“From Carcassonne?”

“He would not say, my lord.”

Bowing briefly to the top table, Evreux excused himself and slipped away, his pale face flushed. He walked quickly between the tents and animals to the glade on the eastern boundary of the camp.

At first, he could pick out only indistinct shapes in the dark between the trees. As he got closer, he recognised the man as a servant of an informer in Beziers.

Well?“ he said, disappointment hardening his voice.

The messenger dropped to his knees. We found their bodies in woods outside Coursan.“

His grey eyes narrowed. “Coursan? They were supposed to be tailing Trencavel and his men. What business had they in Coursan?”

“I cannot say, my lord,” he stammered.

At his glance, two more of his men appeared from behind the trees, their hands resting lightly on the hilts of their swords.

What was found at the site?“

“Nothing, my lord. Surcoats, weapons, horses, even the arrows that killed them were… were not there. The bodies had been stripped. Everything was taken.”

“So their identity is known?”

The servant took a step back. “The talk within the
castellum
is all of Amiel de Coursan’s bravery, not so much of who the men were. There was a girl, the daughter of Viscount Trencavel’s steward. Alais.”

“She was travelling alone?”

“I know not, my lord, but de Coursan escorted her personally to Besiers. She was reunited with her father in the Jewish quarter. They spent some time there. In a private house.”

Evreux paused. “Did they indeed,” he murmured, a smile forming on his thin lips. “And the name of this Jew?”

“I was not given his name, my lord.”

Was he part of the exodus to Carcassonne?“

“He was.”

Evreux was relieved, although he did not show it. He fingered the dagger in his belt. Who else knows of this?“

“No one, my lord, I swear. I have told no one.”

Evreux struck without warning, plunging the knife clean into the man’s throat. Eyes alive with shock, he started to choke as his dying gasps hissed from the wound and blood, pumping red, sprayed the earth around him.

The messenger dropped to his knees, clawing frantically at his throat to remove the blade, lacerating his hands, then fell forward.

For a moment, his body lay jerking violently on the stained earth, then he gave a final shudder and was still.

Evreux’s face expressed no emotion. He held out his hand, palm up, waiting for one of his soldiers to return his dagger. He wiped it on the corner of the dead man’s tunic and returned it to its sheath.

“Get rid of him,” Evreux said, prodding the body with the toe of his boot. “I want the Jew found. I want to know if he is still here or is already in Carcassonne. You have a physical likeness?”

The soldier nodded.

“Good. Unless there is news from there, do not disturb me again tonight.”

CHAPTER 39

Carcassonne

WEDNESDAY 6 JULY 2OO5

Alice swam twenty lengths of the hotel pool and then had breakfast on the terrace watching the rays of the sun creep above the trees. By nine thirty she was waiting in line for the Chateau Comtal to open. She paid and was given a leaflet in eccentric English about the history of the castle.

Wooden platforms had been constructed on two sections of the battlements to the right of the gate and around the top of the horseshoe-shaped Tour de Casernes, like a crow’s nest on a ship.

A stillness descended over her as she walked through the formidable metal and wooden double doors of the Eastern Gatehouse and into the courtyard.

The Cour d’Honneur was mostly in shadow. Already, there were lots of visitors, like her, wandering around, reading and looking. In the time of the Trencavels, apparently an elm tree stood in the centre of the courtyard under which three generations of viscounts dispensed justice.

There was no sign of it now. In its place were two perfectly proportioned plane trees, the shadow of their leaves cast on the western wall of the courtyard as the sun peeked its face above the battlement walls opposite.

The far northern corner of the Cour d’Honneur was already in full sunlight. A few pigeons nested in the empty doorways and cracks in the walls and abandoned arches of the Tour du Major and the Tour du Degre. A flash of memory - of the feel of a rough wooden ladder, the struts lashed with rope, clambering like an urchin from floor to floor.

Alice looked up, trying to distinguish in her mind between what was in front of her eyes and the physical sensation in the tips of her fingers.

There was little to see.

Then a devastating sense of loss swooped down on her. Grief closed around her heart like a fist.

He lay here. She wept for him here.

Alice looked down. Two raised bronze lines on the ground marked out the site of where a building had once stood. There was a row of letters set into the ground. She crouched down and read that this had been the site of the chapel of the Chateau Comtal, dedicated to Sainte-Marie.
Sant-Maria
.

Nothing remained.

Alice shook her head, unnerved by the strength of her emotions. The world that had existed eight hundred years ago beneath these sweeping southern skies existed here still, beneath the surface. The sense of someone standing at her shoulder was very strong, as if the frontier between her present and another’s past was disintegrating.

She closed her eyes, blocking out the modern colours and shapes and sounds, imagining the people who had lived here, allowing their voices to speak to her.

This once had been a good place to live. Red candles flickering on an altar, flowering hawthorn, hands joined in matrimony.

The voices of other visitors drew Alice back to the present and the past faded as she resumed her circuit. Now she was inside the Chateau, she could see that the wooden galleries constructed along the battlements were open to the air at the back. Set deep into the walls were more of the small, square holes she’d noticed on her tour around the
lices
yesterday evening. The leaflet told her they marked the joists where the upper floors would have been.

Alice glanced at the time and was pleased to see she had enough time to visit the museum before her appointment. The twelfth- and thirteenth century rooms, all that remained of the original buildings, housed a collection of stone chancels, columns, corbels, fountains and tombs, ;dating from the Roman period to the fifteenth century.

She wandered, not much engaged. The powerful sensations that ; Swamped her in the courtyard had disappeared, leaving her feeling ^vaguely restless. She followed the arrows through the rooms until she id herself in the Round Room, rectangular in shape despite its name.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. It had a barrel-vaulted ceiling and the remains of a mural of a battle scene on the two long walls. The sign told her Bernard Aton Trencavel, who had taken part in First Crusade and fought the Moors in Spain, had commissioned the at the end of the eleventh century. Among the fabulous creatures , birds decorating the frieze were a leopard, a zebu, a swan, a bull and something that looked like a camel.

Alice looked up in admiration at the cerulean blue ceiling, faded and cracked, but beautiful still. On the panel to her left, two chevaliers were fighting, the one dressed in black, holding a round shield, destined to fall for ever more under the other’s lance. On the wall opposite, a battle between Saracen and Christian knights was being played out. It was better preserved and more complete and Alice stepped closer to get a better look. In the centre, two
chevaliers
confronted one another, one mounted on an ochre horse, the other, the Christian knight, on a white horse, bearing an almond-shaped shield. Without thinking, she reached up to touch. The attendant tutted and shook her head.

The last place she visited before leaving the castle was a small garden off the main courtyard, the Cour du Midi. It was derelict, with only the memory of the high arched windows left standing. Green tendrils of ivy and other plants wound through the empty columns and cracks in the walls. It had an air of faded grandeur.

As she wandered slowly around, then back into the sun, Alice was filled with a sense, not of grief this time, but regret.

The streets of the Cite were even busier by the time Alice emerged from the Chateau Comtal.

She still had time to kill before her meeting with the solicitor, so she turned in the opposite direction to last night and walked to the Place St Nazaire, which was dominated by the Basilica. It was the fin-de-siecle facade of the Hotel de la Cite, understated but grand all the same, that caught her eye. Covered by ivy, with wrought-iron gates, arched stained glass windows and deep red awnings the colour of ripe cherries, it whispered of money.

As she watched, the doors slid open, revealing the panelled and tapestried walls, and a woman appeared. Tall, with high cheekbones and immaculately cut black hair held off her face with gold-rimmed sunglasses.

Her pale brown sleeveless shirt and matching trousers seemed to shimmer and reflect the light as she moved. With a gold bracelet on her wrist and a choker at her neck, she looked like an Egyptian princess.

Alice was sure she’d seen her before. In a magazine or in a film, perhaps on television?

The woman got into a car. Alice watched her until she was out of sight, then walked to the door of the Basilica. A beggar stood outside, her hand stretched out. Alice fished in her pocket and pressed a coin into the woman’s hand, then went to go in.

She froze, her hand on the door. She felt as if she was caught in a tunnel of cold air.

Don’t be stupid.

Alice once more tried to make herself go in, determined not to give in to such irrational feelings. The same terror that had overwhelmed her at Saint-Etienne in Toulouse held her back.

Apologising to the people behind, Alice stepped out of the line and sank down on a shaded stone ledge beside the north door.

What the hell is happening to me?

Her parents had taught her to pray. When she was old enough to question the presence of evil in the world and found that the Church could provide no satisfactory answers, she’d taught herself to stop. But she remembered the sense of meaning that religion can confer. The certainty, the promise of salvation lying somewhere beyond the clouds had never entirely left her. When she had time, like Larkin, she always stopped. She felt at home in churches. They evoked in her a sense of history and a shared past which spoke to her through the architecture, the windows, the choir stalls.

But not here.

In these Catholic cathedrals of the Midi she felt not peace but threat.

The stench of evil seemed to bleed out of the bricks. She looked up at the hideous gargoyles that leered down at her, their twisted mouths distorted and sneering.

Alice got up quickly and left the square. She kept glancing over her shoulder, telling herself she was imagining it, yet not able to shake the feeling there was someone at her heels.

It’s just your imagination.

Even when she left the Cite and started to walk down rue Trivalle towards the main town, she felt just as nervous. No matter what she said ItiO“herself, she was sure someone was following her.

The offices of Daniel Delagarde were in rue George Brassens. The brass on the wall gleamed in the sunlight. She was a little early for her appointment, so she stopped to read the names before going in. Karen Fleury was about halfway up, one of only two women.

Alice went up the grey stone steps, pushed open the glass double doors found herself in a tiled reception area. She gave her name to the woman at a highly polished mahogany table and was directed to a waiting area. The silence was oppressive. A rather bucolic looking man in his late fifties nodded to her as she walked in. Copies of
Paris Match
,
Immo Media
.and several back editions of French
Vogue
were neatly stacked on a large table in the centre of the room. There was an ormolu clock on the white marble mantelpiece and a tall, rectangular glass vase filled with sunflowers in the grate.

Alice sat down in a black leather armchair next to the window and pretended to read.

“Ms Tanner? Karen Fleury. Good to meet you.”

Alice stood up, immediately liking the look of her. In her mid-thirties, Ms Fleury exuded an air of competence in a sombre black suit and white blouse. Her neat blonde hair was clipped short. She wore a gold cross at her neck.

“My funeral clothes,” she said, noticing Alice’s glance. “Very hot in this weather.”

“I can imagine.”

She held back the door for Alice to pass through. “Shall we?”

“How long have you been working out here?” asked Alice, as they walked down an increasingly shabby network of corridors.

We moved here a couple of years ago. My husband’s French. Loads of English people are moving down here, all needing solicitors to help them, so it’s worked out rather well.“

Karen led her into a small office at the back of the building.

“It’s great you could come in person,” she said, gesturing Alice to a chair. “I’d assumed we’d conduct most of our business over the phone.”