Well in Time (6 page)

He paused to poke at the fire with an ornately wrought poker. “After that, we lost track of them. Oh, we’ve received various announcements of marriages, births, commencements, and deaths over the decades. Announcements, I might add, which are no longer handwritten but purchased from stationery companies, with lines to be filled in with pertinent information. I fear this branch of the family, therefore, has succumbed to the American way, as it is called, and cannot be entrusted with what we are about to reveal.”

Maria-Elena listened, bemused. How interesting to speak of the generations of one’s family in the multiple
we
, as if each generation were party to and answerable for the decisions and deeds of all preceding and succeeding generations. She wondered if she unconsciously yielded such total identification to her own family.

The Count continued to lay out his argument: “
Non!
I distinctly feel that this information is for someone who comes of generations of careful breeding and rearing. Rarefied genetic stock. Call me a snob. Tell me I am unbearably ultraconservative. This has nothing to do with politics nor the rights of the poor.”

He leaned forward from the shadows of his wing chair and peered at her. “I understand from your
Grand-mère
that you are psychic? Is that true?” His eyes glowed within their pools of shadow as he stared at her.

“Oh
, oui, monsieur!
” she stammered. “It is true. Since childhood, I have had dreams. In them, a beautiful lady comes to me and tells me things. The information is always, it proves, correct. I can’t take credit for knowing what I know. It is she who tells me. But I suppose you would call me mildly psychic as a consequence.”

The Count nodded his head slightly in approval, so that Maria-Elena hastened to add, “But I must tell you that these dreams are extremely rare. And as I become older, they are increasingly so.”

The Count regarded her now with a fixity that was almost trancelike. The atmosphere between them, within the little circle of firelight, was charged with potent expectation and a mysterious immanence. Saladin groaned at his master’s feet and shifted restlessly.

“As you may know,” the Count began again, “my family is extremely ancient. We have been present for every major turn of French history at least since Charlemagne’s grandfather was walking this Gallic soil. What you do not know, because no one outside the family has ever been allowed to know, is that we have a family secret even more ancient than our lineage. And because there is now no one left in this family to receive this secret, I am passing it along to the Mansart clan with my blessings,” he said with a momentary surge of his former charm. “So bear with me, while I tell you a story that will amaze you…Do you need coffee?”

“Coffee? Oh, heavens
, non!
How could I possibly drowse through
this?
” Her heart felt swollen with anticipation and curiosity. Only vaguely in the back of her mind, where unpleasantries so often are deposited, did she wonder if this gift the Count was about to bestow were something she might actually want and not, at some future date, regret possessing.

§

“As you may know,” the Count began, sinking so deeply into his chair that Maria-Elena could no longer see his face and so perceived his voice to be issuing from a shadowy void within its wings, “there was once a region in the south of France referred to as the Languedoc, because the tongue—
langue
—of its people pronounced the word ‘yes’—
oui
—as
oc
. The area was ruled over by the Count of Provence, and the speech of one of his vassals, upon his arrival in Paris, would be almost unintelligible in that more northerly city.

“I am telling you this because it is difficult for us in this modern age of relative stability to imagine the divisiveness of the thirteenth century, which is where my tale begins. It seems that every petty chieftain who could raise a scruffy army could set himself up as a count or a duke.

“Consequently, the waging of war was endless. City fought against city and duchy against duchy. If they were lucky enough to have a strong leader who could unite a few of these warring areas, then there would be war of nation against nation.

“It was a terrible time. The clergy alone, and a few of the nobility, could read and write. The vast majority of the populace existed in the starkest ignorance and superstition and were really little elevated above the beasts they tended.

“It was against this flood tide of desperate ignorance and violence that a strange phenomenon arose in the Languedoc region. A group of people deliberately separated themselves from the Catholic church. These heretics, as people deemed them, called themselves the Cathari, which simply means ‘Pure Ones’.

“Disgusted by the many degeneracies of the church, these people sought after holiness by attempting to dispense entirely with the material side of life. In the extremes of their belief, many refused to marry, giving rise to terrible rumors of debauch among them, which I believe modern scholars have largely refuted. They were, as well, vegetarians, refusing to eat flesh, eggs, or cheese.”

Maria-Elena, already engrossed in the tale, gazed into the fire, quietly sipping her Cointreau. Like the rising wind outside, the Count’s deep voice, lubricated by eloquence, seemed an element of eternity.

“Now, you would think that such people would be so completely harmless and inoffensive that no one would bother them and that they would be able to live long and peacefully, communing with God. But like most true innocents, they failed to consider the power of politics in the larger world over their very small and local existence.

“Now, the First Crusade occurred in 1094 or thereabouts. It had been very successful in uniting the squabbling clans of Europe and in directing their warlike energies against a common enemy in the Holy Land. So after Urban the Second, succeeding Popes used the same ploy when their political fortunes seemed shaky or when it suited other of their purposes.

“Pope Innocent the Third—and if ever a man were misnamed it was he—was the head of the church at the time of which I speak. And he had not one, but three Crusades at his command at the opening of the thirteenth century. These were directed, however, not against the Infidel in the Levant but against the inhabitants of Europe, for the pope now applied the name ‘crusade’ to all wars in which he was interested.

“One war was waged against unbelievers in Eastern Europe, the Prussians. In the West, there was a Crusade against the Saracens in Spain. But of the three, the Crusade against the Cathari, called the Albigensian Crusade, was the most terrible and unjust.

“The spirit of the times was such that the church, and the church alone, could decree one’s beliefs. The Cathari, who despised marriage and sex because it perpetuated life on earth, were viewed, therefore, as a cult of madmen. They committed the ultimate heresy, as well, in believing that an individual might commune directly with God, without the intermediary of a priesthood.

“Now nothing could be more an anathema to a bureaucrat—and the church is the most pernicious sort of bureaucracy—than the notion that someone is trying to do away with his job. The purpose of any bureaucracy is, after all, self-perpetuation and maintenance of the status quo. To Pope Innocent, this Albigensian madness seemed so dangerous that he decided it must be suppressed by force. He therefore ordered a Crusade against Raymond, Comte de Toulouse, who had the temerity to attempt to protect those among his subjects who insisted on rejecting the yoke of Rome.

“The Count’s realm was, at that time, the fairest and richest district in Europe, and so the prospect of plundering it soon raised an army of great size. A coarse and brutal man, Simon de Montfort, became their leader. He was called by the misnomer The General of the Holy Ghost. In the name of God, this man, who for all his brutality was a skillful general, began a reign of terror and persecution that is ghastly to consider.

“In battle after battle, he was victorious. After each of these, all captives were put to death. No one was spared. Women, children, and the elderly were equally murdered along with their defeated soldiers. It was a bloodbath. This was at the command of Pope Innocent, who, when asked how to tell a Catholic from a heretic, replied, ‘Slay all; the Lord will know his own!’”

§

The Count’s voice broke with emotion, as if the intervening eight hundred years had done nothing to dim the horror he recounted. To break the spell, he said lightly, “I hope I don’t make you feel as if you were plunged back into some dreary grade school history class. I simply am setting the stage, because it is during this time that the first coherent history of my family emerges.

“You see, we did not always have our lands here in the Loire valley. This castle is part of a property that was acquired much later. Originally, we came from Languedoc and it was there that the dark stain of fate seeped into the warp and weft of our family.

“We were not then, you see, MontMarans, because
this,
this chateau, sits on Mount Maran. We were then of the town of Muret. My ancestor was called simply Richard de Muret. He was a vassal under the Comte de Toulouse and so was under duty to his liege to raise an army to fight the oncoming Crusade. It was a terrible decision not only for him, I am sure, but for men like him who were both staunch defenders of the True Church but also loyal vassals to the Count. Richard chose to support the cause of the Count and paid, in the end, a high price for his loyalty.

“But there was more to it than that. There was a secret that influenced his decision, I am sure—his wife, Eleanore, came from a Cathari family. Not only that, but despite her decision to marry and bear children, she practiced, in secret, the heretical forms of worship in the family chapel and her husband, while not completely won over, had great sympathy for her pure and simple ways.

“These two had two children, a son named Godfrey and a daughter, Blanche. As the army of the Crusade advanced, burning, looting, and murdering as it came, Richard and Eleanore made a desperate decision. Sensing that their cause was already lost before it was truly undertaken, they arranged to have the children removed from the south to St. Denys, near Paris, where his brother was a member of the bishop’s staff.

“The children, both under the age of twelve, were mounted on swift horses and given into the responsible hands of Richard’s closest lieutenant. They left Muret in the middle of the night, leaving behind heartsick parents whom they would never see again.

“That was in 1212, and one year later, you see, the Battle of Muret put an end to all organized resistance on the part of the Cathari. The banner of the Cross waved in victory over a devastated land; the armies of the General of the Holy Ghost performed unspeakable atrocities and orgies, surrounded by their booty; and Pope Innocent was informed that false religion and immorality had been extirpated. Isn’t it ironic how inextricably mixed are tragedy and comedy?”

§

The Count paused in thoughtful silence. Outside, the night wind was rising sharply as the leading edge of the storm advanced. Despite the warmth of their fire-lit circle, the peaceful crackling of the hearth fire and the slow, lambent flame of the candles, the wind’s incessant violence created a background of eerie tension.

The long French doors and windows rattled in their casements. Waves of air rolled against the castle walls, crashing like the sea. As the night wore on into the early hours of the next morning, its bass voice rose to a shrieking wail that was a Greek chorus of woe, underscoring the tale of terror and loss related by the Count.

Maria-Elena had worried at first that with a fine, rich dinner and two glasses of Cointreau behind her, she might fall into a stupor of relaxation and fatigue. But the Count was a fine raconteur. His deep voice was nuanced and compelling, rising and falling contrapuntally with the wind.

She leaned back in her chair and its deep and brocaded wings sheltered her like guardians standing watch. Her imagination was electrified and she could almost see the terrible doings of 1213 enacted amidst the fierce embers on the hearth.

Saladin wheezed in his sleep and turned, groaning, onto his side. A log shifted on the grate and collapsed in a wave of lava-red coals. Shadows reached out of the corners of the room as the fire burned low and the candles guttered in an errant draft.

It was a timeless scene. She felt it might actually be 1213. It would not truly surprise her to hear music of lutes from the hall or laughter of a banqueting crowd. Time had a limen here, she sensed, a flexible portal where the centuries could mix and pass one another, like celebrants at a masked ball.

§

The Count cleared his throat and recommenced his tale: “Because they were members of the nobility, Richard and Eleanore were given more important deaths than the run-of-the-mill citizen, who was simply put to the sword. Eleanore was burned at the stake in what was left of the town square. And Richard was drawn and quartered before her, as she stood awaiting her fate. These are terrible matters and I don’t wish to distress you, but this is how it was at that time of unbelievable barbarism.

“The children, however, arrived safely in St. Denys and were welcomed kindly into their uncle’s home, only to fall into a still more curious fate. It is, in fact, one of the strangest occurrences of that strange time, in which those two children were full participants.

“It is hard to imagine now just what it was that motivated the Crusades. Pilgrimage was an important part of Christian worship then, and to go to the sacred shrines of the East and to the Holy Sepulcher itself was, of course, the ultimate such journey.

“Since the First Crusade of 1094, the Holy Land had gradually fallen again into the hands of the Infidel and Christian pilgrims, while still allowed access to the sacred sites, now returned home with reports that the shrines were being desecrated by the Musalman and that by virtue of being under their rule, these sacred places were in jeopardy.