Lion Heart (35 page)
He hugs me, unexpectedly. Although it’s March, it is snowing lightly outside on the square, and the snow and the arrival of the ice princess seem to be connected.
38
Dearest Noor
,
Tomorrow I am going down to Limoges to look at the castle where Richard was killed to see what I can find. It was a very minor siege, and Richard was there to find hidden treasure, definitely not just to demolish the castle of his enemy, the Viscount of Limoges. My research suggests that it could have been the Holy Cross, as Richard would have known it.
I have been working in the House of Lords, doing research for Lord Huntingdon on the European Union and its follies – as my boss sees them – and writing speeches for him. You will be as excited as I am to hear that we are about to deliver a knock-out blow to the bureaucrats who are wasting our money in Brussels. This is the raison d’être of my employer, who is charming but deluded. I don’t have to believe anything much – my job is simply to bring up the bodies.
Rumour has reached me via Father Prosper that you have left hospital. I am so happy to hear this, but I wondered why you hadn’t told me yourself. Are you on the way to recovery? I hope so, because I have made enquiries in Symi and I have provisionally rented a house for three weeks overlooking the main harbour, starting on the 1st of May. Are you going to be able to come to stay? We will have a small boat moored outside and we will chug around the island to my favourite beach, the one I mentioned which faces a small island with an even smaller chapel just out to sea.
Write to me as soon as you can. I haven’t seen Haneen for a while, but I think she is in Jerusalem. She once told me – when we came back from Kerak, I think – that you don’t find treasures or lost manuscripts or paintings by looking for them in the obvious places; they are almost always neglected and unrecognised in collections or museums or private houses. Anyway, my dissertation on Crusader art should soon be sent off for judgement.
I have to tell you that I dread the idea that we are drifting apart, not because we want to, but because it seems too difficult (and perhaps too painful?) to meet up. Please give the idea of going to Symi a chance. We will work something out.
Noor, I think of you every day, sometimes five or ten times. Strangely, it is only thinking of our time in Jerusalem that keeps me sane.
Love from your brother and lover,
Richie xxxx
39
On the train
down from Montparnasse, heading south towards Eleanor’s and Richard’s dominions, I was reading a book, published about eighty years ago, which described Eleanor’s Courts of Love. Outside on this winter’s day the French countryside rushed past the window of the
train à grande vitesse
. The countryside seemed to be deserted. For miles the only movement I could see was flocks of scavenging crows.
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 people 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.