The Devil's Crossing

by Hana Cole

  ‘If anyone knew about this place, I wouldn’t still be here,’ Agnes reassured her. ‘There’s a forester nearby, a good man. He keeps an eye out. You’ve walked a long way. Please, sit.’

  Octavia lowered herself reluctantly onto the chair by the fire, knees knocked together as though honouring a half-recalled etiquette lesson.

  ‘My Lady asked me also to give you this,’ the nun whispered into her satchel, rummaging until she found a chunk of bread wrapped in cloth. Carefully, she picked apart the hard crust to reveal a bundle of scrolls. The girl turned up the corners of her mouth as she handed the package over, but her eyes held an apology. Agnes felt the cauldron of dread stir, thick as tar, in her belly.

  The first two documents were extracts from a ledger of household accounts, for the purchase of Moorish house slaves. They were dated the summer of the previous year. Agnes paced backwards and sat on a wooden chest:

  “One boy, two girls, 12 years, 8 years, 10 years, Mohammedan, 20 livres; three girls, Mohammedan, 25 livres.”

  The sober lines of Yolande de Coucy’s face appeared in her mind’s eye. Moorish boys and girls. How quickly they came and went. It was him. Amaury de Maintenon. Agnes looked over at Octavia, now sitting on her hands, eyes to the ground. There’s worse, thought Agnes.

  The next sheet was a remittance for goods transported overseas for the sum of five thousand, six hundred livres tournois. Appended to it was a letter in the same hand. Agnes’s heart gathered pace before her eyes had even met the page.

  “Amaury, Lord of Maintenon and Chatelain of Gazeran, Greetings. I am detained in the Occitaine but have now secured a fair contract for the transport of the shepherds’ merchandise from Marseille overseas…”

  Her eye sank to the end of the document. The signature was an elaborate design of interlocking circles but the name it spelled out was so well known to her that she needed no scribe to decipher the clerical flourish: Bernard de Nogent.

  Her chest felt as though it were being crushed. She stared at the letter. Five thousand, six hundred livres tournois…. transport of the shepherds’merchandise from Marseille. She flicked back to Maintenon’s ledgers: slaves. Her mind didn’t need to make the reckoning. The documents shook in her hand. The goods from Marseille were shepherd boys, sold as slaves. Hundreds of them. Dear God. Etienne.

  She clapped her hand over her mouth. Her stomach heaved. Another convulsion and the acid rose up.

  Octavia sat, her arms hovering, readying for action, unable to take it.

  ‘Madame Agnes?’

  Water ran, silent, from Agnes’s eyes. She wiped a bile-covered hand on her apron. Picking up the parchments now fanned out across the floor, she stared at them as though they were a keepsake. ‘My son,’ she breathed. ‘They sold my son.’

  ‘Merciful lord.’ Octavia crossed herself.

  Agnes tried to stand, but her gut felt as though she had ingested poison, forcing her to remain doubled over. Through the tunnel of pain she felt an invisible presence cloaked around her, shrouding her from the world. ‘Gui,’ she mouthed. His face appeared, exactly as it was when he left her on her sick bed outside Marseille. Dark, serious eyes that were trying to shut out the fear. He knew it, she thought. He knew Etienne had been sold. ‘Can you bring him home?’ she implored the empty space.

  ‘There now, Madame Agnes,’ the girl consoled. Crouching at her side, Octavia laid her her small, child-like palm cautiously on Agnes’s arm. Awkward in such intimacy, but insistent. The wimple-framed face squinted with concern. ‘There now. ‘You must drink a small sip of this,’ Octavia said resolutely, in imitation of her Abbess.

  The command brought Agnes back into the world. She blinked. I am still here. She took the tinest sip of camomile as the child-nun instructed, then exhaled through her mouth; a deep, shuddering breath that carried away some of the shock. Nothing has changed, she told herself. Except now you know. Once she was sure another torrent of bile would not erupt from her stomach, she said to Octavia, ‘Where did Lady Yolande get the documents?’

  Octavia gave a small shrug. It was not a denial.

  ‘Does anyone else know you are here?’ Agnes tried another way.

  ‘No. Lady Yolande told the Mother Superior she was taking me to collect my sister’s belongings.’ She paused. Sensing there was more, Agnes pressed her gently.

  ‘She came in person to tell you when your sister passed?’

  The novice nodded. ‘When Isobel went missing. She’d been in service with Lady Yolande for six years. She loved her. She’d never have run away. There were rumours...’ Octavia’s eyes flickered away. ‘My lady said she’d made some inquiries, that she had an important task for me.’

  Mouth parched, Agnes steadied her hand well enough to draw another sip from the beaker.

  ‘Rumours?’

  Octavia hesistated, eyes rolling heavenward.

  ‘Please,’ said Agnes. ‘If you can.’

  ‘Isobel had been sighted…near the chateau Maintenon.’

  ‘You know?’ Agnes searched the girl’s face. ‘About Maintenon?’

  The novice pressed her lips tight. Agnes followed her gaze to the fire. For a moment it seemed as though the hypnosis of the flames would transcend the need to speak. But it did not. The time for silence was over.

  Octavia drew breath as though she were inhaling ice. ‘He brings them to the woods at the back of the convent.’

  Agnes exhaled audibly. The Saracens at Houx.

  ‘Moorish girls.’

  The girl nods, wordless.

  ‘Mother Agathe tried to chase him away. She went into the village one morning...We never saw her again.’

  Agnes marked herself with the cross. Girls shipped from foreign shores and slaughtered alongside the poor woman who had the misfortune of an attractive enough dowry. She rubbed her forehead, trying to comprehend how, by the incalculable Grace of God, she had been one of the lucky ones.

  ‘The week after, he took a novice from the orchards,’ Sister Octavia continued. She took a weather-chapped hand to her face.

  ‘You saw him?’

  A single nod. ‘I was seeing to the hens. I hid inside the coop. But I saw.’ Her knuckles whitened around her habit. ‘I saw it all but I didn’t say anything.’

  The pain on the girl’s face had Agnes searching for words of consolation, but they all clanged hollow so she held her tongue. What the girl really needed was for her to be another witness.

  ‘When the new Mother Superior arrived it got worse. She pretends not to notice but we all have ears. We all have eyes.’ She let out a tremulous sigh. ‘He hunts the heathen ones through the woods at night… hunts them for sport like dogs.’ Her voice broke. ‘We found one once, Sister Clarissa and I. We were collecting brushwood. Naked in the woods. She was beaten so badly, her face...’

  ‘Dear God.’

  ‘How can it be true?’ The small, plump face looked at Agnes gravely. ‘Sometimes I think I have gone mad.’

  ‘It’s not you.’ Agnes folded the girl’s hands into hers.

  ‘I didn’t think anyone would believe me.’ Sister Octavia said urgently, ‘I am so frightened.’ Then, before Agnes had a chance to react, she launched herself into her arms.

  ‘You’re safe here,’ Agnes repeated, rocking her gently. It seemed aeons since she had held a child in maternal consolation and it made her heart burn; for the son she might never see again, for the daughter she was denied, for the children stolen from their homes and sold on foreign soil. She lifted her eyes skyward. Guide me, Mother Mary. There will be a lifetime to grieve.

  Dabbing her cheeks with the sleeve of her habit, Octavia turned her face to Agnes and said, ‘You are afraid of him too, aren’t you?’

  Agnes scrunched her eyes shut. Even now, cocooned in this dwelling, unnoticed by even the closest passers by, was fear really a better master than hatred? The thought of it made her want to scour out her insides.

  ‘I am more afraid for my soul if I do nothing,’ she whisphered. ‘My son
joined a group of shepherd boys from the Chartraine who wished to take the cross and was taken by slavers. Maintenon’s slavers.’

  ‘The Pastoreux. I’ve heard talk of them. He must be brave.’ Briefly, panic moulded her face - was it the wrong thing to say? ‘To have joined them I mean.’

  Finding a smile, Agnes nodded. ‘He is that. My husband left in pursuit, but I’ve had no word. I don’t know whether I will see either of them again. Likely as not I won’t.’

  She took a breath that was steady and furious. It was the first time she had allowed herself to say it aloud, express the nagging fear she had tried so many times to vanquish. How many times had it woken her in the small hours of the night, robbing her of sleep for weeks on end? Now she had exposed this terrible half thought to another, she was surprised that a river of tears hadn’t come pouring from her eyes. Instead the bold, sad truth of it felt like ballast, a weight of constancy on the roiling seas of doubt.

  ‘There is nothing more they could take from me,’ she said. ‘Once a mother has lost her child, what else is left? My life?’ She scoffed at the thought, and a queer elation bloomed with the realisation that she was impervious to the blows of Amaury de Maintenon. Should I cower in this cottage until my hair turns white and my fingers too gnarled to work? She looked at the girl in front of her - another victim of Maintenon in her way. How many more, Agnes? How many more will you allow?

  Rising to her tiptoes, she reached for the shelf where she had put her father’s wooden box.

  ‘I begged Lady Yolande to tell the count. I found the bodies of those poor girls buried with her daughter and I begged her.’ She sprang the lock on the box and gently lifted out the miniature book. ‘I found this tangled up among the bodies. I believe it is the Mohammedans’ holy book. Only the Lord knows how she managed to keep it about her.’

  Octavia crossed herself and instinctively drew her head back. Agnes laughed gently, and, hovering her finger over the sweeping script, said, ‘I remember my father telling me once the first line in it says, “There is no God but God.”’

  She stared into the hearth flame once more, entranced, allowing her thoughts to become one with the darting tongues. She wasn’t sure where the words came from, if she was speaking to Octavia, to herself, or to God but as the words came, they were forged steel.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to change Lady Yolande’s heart. Perhaps your sister’s death was one too many. There is only so much blood a person can wade through. But I do know this. On my heart, and on the heart of the Virgin herself, I will do all I can to ensure Amaury de Maintenon never takes another innocent again.’

  Octavia looked down. ‘Would that God grant me your courage.’

  ‘Did it not take courage to come here? A day’s travel, alone. With nothing but the vague promise of an address, a monster in every shadow?’

  ‘I was so scared,’ the girl said. ‘It didn’t feel courageous.’

  ‘It never does.’

  Agnes smiled warmly at Octavia. ‘Lady Yolande gave you no further instruction other than to come here?’

  ‘No, Madame. Only to tell you she is ready.’

  ‘Then she must means for me to...’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To stop him.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘I must ask you another courage, dear, brave, Sister Octavia. Go back to your convent. Get word to Lady Yolande. She must find word as to when the next shipment of Moorish children is arriving. Send word here via forester. I will take you to meet him tomorrow. He will let me know. Tell the good Lady Yolande that in the name of Margueritte, your sister, and all the others who could not be saved, that I will go to that same place as bait to try and draw out Maintenon in person. Tell her that if she be so pleased, to send the bailiffs that night to my aid.'

  The inflated loops of de Nogent’s signature stared up at her from the pile of parchments. And if I have to face you and your dungeons too, she thought, then so be it.

  *

  There had not been many moments when Bernard de Nogent was sure that God loved him, but this was one. He folded away the letter, and sighed out the first lines of the pater noster. For weeks his scouts had scoured the roads for news. Finally, they found a suspiciously-armed wagon of vagabonds heading to the convent at Houx. Then all it had taken was one careless slip and a weak-minded local bailiff who was only a few whores and a night of gambling away from the debtor’s prison. The result was a copy of an intercepted letter from a barely literate nun to Le Coudray via some hovel on the banks of the Eure that, irritatingly, appeared unoccupied.

  Bliss poured through his veins. Now I have you both, he sang it softly to himself. The Le Coudray whore and, more importantly, everything she knew about Amaury de Maintenon. Judging from the sketchy details he gleaned from the poorly copied letter, it would be enough to finish him. He closed his eyes and he could see every detail:

  He stands over Bishop Reginald of Chartres at his desk. The bishop’s face is black as thunder as he signs over title to the Maintenon Abbey. Chartres looks up, finds a thin smile as he offers up the quill. Savouring the triumph, he adds his own signature: Abbot de Nogent. He can hardly bare the ecstasy as the man who has insulted him more times than he can recall signs away his authority to the Bishop of Rome.

  The bells for Nones began to clang. Hurriedly, de Nogent locked the letter away in his drawer. Rising for the Office, he rubbed at the prick of emotion that had bloomed in the inner corner of his eye. Rome.

  PART THREE – Consolamentium

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  There is no shade from the glare of the sun. Beyond the bastions, the palms trees in the palace courtyard are visible. Somewhere within there is a waiting salon. Shuttered in cool, marble repose, basins of rosewater awaiting those whom governor wishes to compliment. But Gui is an uninvited visitor, a supplicant to be reminded at every moment that Al Kamil is a powerful man upon whose mercy his future well-being now depends.

  Shadows ripple on the inside of the arches; water from the courtyard pool. Gui tries to swallow but his mouth is parched. The heat of the day and the sweat of his anxiety are trapped under the robe he has borrowed from the Coptic priest. Black dots swim before his eyes. His head, robbed of the ability to form coherent thought, feels as though it is baking in an oven. How is he now to plead for his son’s life? Closing his eyes he tries to conjure up the brittle, mid-winter landscape of home; the throb of his frozen feet, the numbness of his rag-wrapped fingers as he walks home after evensong, but still the sweat runs, gluing his clothes to his body.

  Eventually a dainty man dressed in a crisp, white tunic appears from behind a column and beckons him. Gui falls in behind his host, averting his eyes from the glassy waters of the pool, fearful of the urgency with which he must slake his thirst. His guide holds up a perfectly manicured hand and halts Gui before a large double door, its iron-studded hinges polished to gleam. How many servants are there in the employ of the great governor? Gui wonders. Are these sparkling door knockers the handiwork of my son? The blood pools in his calves as once more he is left to contemplate his insignificance before the opulence of the governor’s wealth.

  Finally the doors open and a flood of cool air washes out from the high-ceilinged chambers. Gui can barely restrain the moan that escapes his throat as he steps over the threshold and the infernal exterior is banished behind him. Inside the reception room, latticed windows are shielded by date and citrus trees from the courtyard. A subtle scent of orange blossom perfumes the air. The floor is carpeted with an exquisite rug; floral motifs of red, white, black, green, framed by a series of ellipses and rectangular borders. Still dizzied from the heat, the pattern gives Gui the impression that it is expanding infinitely in an explosion of perfect symmetry – the mind of God, the glory of the governor. It takes several long, uncomfortable moments for him to traverse the hall to greet a second man who stands hands clasped in elegant expectation.

  ‘I am Ibn Al Tayyib, secretary to the court.’ The man
speaks the French of the Île de France. ‘I am told you seek information about a slave?’

  ‘Thank you for receiving me.’ Gui bows. ‘I am most grateful.’ A film forms on his palms and he fights the itchy compulsion to wipe them on his tunic. He knows he only has one chance to ask for his son back. A set of words that he will have no chance to reframe if they do not give him the result he needs. He draws a slow breath.

  ‘I believe that my son, who was unlawfully taken from his mother and I, may have found his way into this household.’

  Ibn Al Tayyib lets the room fill with silence. The call of exotic birds floats in from the gardens. The urge to embellish his speech compacts in a knot at the base of Gui’s throat. He is making you sweat it out, he thinks. That is a good sign. Patience.

  ‘All the members of the governor’s household are purchased legitimately.’ The secretary offers up the statement to Gui with open hands.

  The dry tickle in Gui’s throat forces a cough. ‘Forgive me if I do not explain myself. I have no wish to imply that the household of the noble governor is in the business of illegitimate trade. Merely that the boy came to be at the market on account of those men engaged in such traffic.’

  The other man’s eyes rove in slow contemplation. ‘It is true that we have acquired some boys from your lands.’

  Gui’s body sighs with relief. ‘Then it is possible that the one I seek may be among them?’

  Ibn Al Tayyib arches a thick, black brow. ‘His name?’

  ‘Is Etienne.’ Gui’s heart hammers to speak his son’s name. The dream he has hardly dared to hope for feels within his grasp. ‘I could easily identify him if you would permit me to view the boys that you have from my country?’

  ‘It is not in my power to grant such a request.’ The governor’s secretary purses his fleshy lips. Gui knows he is playing a game of hazard. Keep steady. He lowers his eyes to the spiralling rug.