The Moneylender of Toulouse

by Alan Gordon

  “What about Raimon de Mireval?”

  “He’s at the court of Pedro the Second. He has a commission to constantly praise the king’s current mistress.”

  “Sweet arrangement,” I said. “All right. To Toulouse.”

  “There will be one stop to make along the way,” he said. “Pack your gear, then stop by after the evening meal and Brother Timothy and I will give you all the details.”

  “Very well, Father.”

  He patted Portia on the head and held her up to me.

  “One more thing, Theo,” he said as I took her. “Two more, now that I think of them.”

  “Yes, Father?”

  “The last time I sent you on a mission, I promised that I would be alive when you came back.”

  “And you kept that promise,” I said.

  “I did,” he said. “I won’t be making it this time.”

  I reached down and grasped his hand. He held mine tightly and pulled me down to whisper, “And I expect to hear your confession tonight. It’s my last chance. And yours.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Tonight, then,” he said, letting me go.

  * * *

  Our new rooms were appreciably cleaner when we returned, and Helga commensurately dirtier.

  “Good job, Apprentice,” I said.

  “At least I wasn’t wearing whiteface,” she said, coughing dramatically. “How is Zeus?”

  “Being fed a steady diet of stableboys,” I said.

  “Stableboys?” she said, brightening under the dirt. “I should visit him.”

  “Easy, girl,” said Claudia. “They wouldn’t like you.”

  “Why not?” she asked indignantly.

  “Because you’re an unstable girl,” said Claudia. “It would never work. Now, go back to the well, fill that bucket once more, and wash everything on you that sticks out.”

  “Yes, Domina,” she said, curtseying.

  “Call her Maman, daughter,” I said. “You must stay in character. You never know who is listening. These walls are so thin we could be overheard in Toulouse.”

  “Yes, Papa,” she said.

  The men from the furniture shop arrived. Claudia inspected the pallets carefully before allowing them to grace our rooms. Portia waved and burbled at them from her cradle. A substantially cleaner Helga returned from the well, climbing the steps with a bucket of water balanced unaided on her head, which prompted impressed exclamations from the men. She smiled at them as they left.

  I got a fire going in the brazier. Claudia tossed me a sack of white beans. “Your turn to cook,” she said.

  “This will be our last meal of just beans,” I grumbled. “Tomorrow, I will go to the market and—”

  “Tomorrow is Sunday,” said Claudia. “The market will be closed.”

  “Tomorrow will be our last meal of just beans,” I said.

  She produced two loaves of dark bread and tossed them to me.

  “Just beans and bread,” I said.

  “What else shall we do tomorrow?” asked Helga.

  “Well, since it’s Sunday, I think we should go to church,” I said.

  The looks of astonishment on their faces gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

  * * *

  In the morning, we brushed our clothes to a close semblance of neatness. When I deemed that we were presentable, I turned to Portia, who held out her arms and chirped, “Up! Up! Up!”

  “Up, up, up,” I agreed, tossing her into the air and catching her. She shrieked with delight. I placed her on my shoulders, and she grabbed my hair with both hands.

  “Gently, poppet,” I urged her, and she loosened her grip slightly.

  Some parents might look askance at a man climbing down a stairway with his infant daughter on his shoulders. But we are fools. Claudia pulled the trapdoor shut and padlocked it.

  We walked past the cemetery toward the Garonne river.

  “Is that the church?” asked Helga, pointing to a bell tower.

  “That is a church,” I said. “Saint Nicholas, the local church. I’m sure it’s fine enough for everyday sinners, but I will settle for nothing less than a cathedral for my family.”

  “Because we are sinners on a grand scale,” explained Claudia.

  We had ridden to Saint Cyprien on the east bank of the river to avoid notice. As a result, we had only seen Toulouse from a distance, the view dominated by the three towers of the Château Narbonnais.

  The river was wide but not particularly deep. Indeed, it was more of a marsh than a proper river on the west bank where we now lived. There was a low bridge connecting our new neighborhood with the city proper, built on hexagonal supports made largely of thin red bricks. On the other side and downstream was a narrow island, the Ile de Tounis, every foot of its shores covered with mills vying for the available currents. More mills were nestled between the arches of the bridge, perched on boats and barges anchored off the island, their wheels turning lazily in the water.

  The city itself was dotted with a number of towers, indicating the locations of the wealthy and the means they took to protect that wealth.

  “It reminds me of Pisa with all the towers,” commented Claudia. “Only they favor brick here.”

  “Stone is scarce, clay is cheap,” I said.

  “It makes everything pink,” said Helga. “It’s pretty. I like it.”

  The bridge took us to an opening in the city wall. There were some terraced vegetable gardens descending from an abbey to our left. Beyond them, the banks of the river stopped at a low cliff which was protected in turn by the city wall. To the north, the river curved away from the city, a massive dam stretching across it to an island by the bend. More mills hugged both shores of the island and the bank north of the walls. An immense fortification loomed beyond them.

  “Test time, Apprentice,” I said. “We have crossed the Daurade Bridge. Where would you expect the cathedral to be?”

  “To the south,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because the Château Narbonnais is to the south, and you would expect the cathedral to be close to where the count lives, so he doesn’t have to walk too far to church.”

  “More or less correct,” I said. “This is the old city ahead of us. The bourg is the newer part to the north. We’ll be walking through it later so you can learn where everything is. The cathedral is actually near the southwestern wall.”

  Saint Étienne was not huge as cathedrals go. I don’t know when it was built, but at one point they had enough money to bring in some stone for its construction. At least for the front, where the paying customers could see it. There was brickwork at the sides, more of those thin bricks that were favored by the Toulousans. A large rose window dominated the front, but the main doors were to the right of center, so everything seemed thrown off as a result.

  There was a cemetery in front of the cathedral, an odd location for the dead. Most churches tuck them out of sight in the rear so they won’t disconcert the living, but here they served as a constant reminder of what was coming up next. To the right of the cathedral was a cloister, and a smaller church beyond that. In between the cemetery and the cathedral were statues of the Apostles, their legs crossed as if they were about to start dancing. Behind them, flanking the main doors, were two female figures bearing shields on which were sculpted the zodiacal figures of the lion and the ram. It never hurts to back up religion with a little old-fashioned astrology. Just in case.

  “I wonder if there is room for us,” said Claudia as we approached.

  “I have a feeling there will be,” I said.

  The churchgoers were not exactly pouring through the doors. It was more like a sporadic trickle, mostly elderly folk whose feet were dragging them there out of habit.

  The benches inside could hold several hundred people, but only if several hundred people decided to show up. I counted the crowd—maybe eighty all told. We sat near the back.

  The interi
or may have been grand at one time, but they hadn’t kept it up. The plaster in the walls was several years away from its last coat of whitewash, much of it chipped and crumbling. The benches were cracked, with names of long-grown schoolboys carved into them dating from some other dull long-forgotten Sunday.

  The choir entered and took their seats to the right. Then the Bishop came in, accompanied by three priests and some sleepy altar boys. The choir began singing without any real enthusiasm. Several of them lost their place halfway through the opening hymn and clammed up, looking embarrassed or trying not to laugh. The rest finally stopped, though not all of them at the same time.

  The Bishop, suddenly aware of the silence, stood up hastily and began leading us through the service. He had a decent speaking voice and an adequate command of the Latin. However, his perfunctory readings of the text did little to keep the aging congregation awake, and those of us who were, felt like we were aging more rapidly by the minute.

  His vestments were richly trimmed and must have been grand when new, but they had not been kept well in the few short years of his reign. Neither had he, if his face was any indication. He was puffy around the eyes, with a broad, florid nose dominating a tiny, thin-lipped mouth and little chin to speak of. Whoever was in charge of shaving him must not have liked him very much, for his cheeks and neck were nicked in several places. His neck seemed to wobble under the weight of his miter, or perhaps it was his state of indignation that did that.

  “It is appalling that now, as we approach the holiest time of year,” he began, “when we celebrate the birth of Our Savior, that His Church is in such dire straits. It is embarrassing that in these prosperous times, when the taxes have been lifted and the money is flowing everywhere, that not one trickle of it comes into our collection box. Why, there is so little in our treasury that our own sick parishioners, whom we have maintained in our hospital for years, have sought out other establishments for their convalescences, because we no longer have the means to feed them at the same level as our brethren with the Benedictine abbeys. Even our lepers have been complaining, and you know how they never complain. Now, I know that many among you have already paid for your funeral masses, and I am grateful to you, and will celebrate your eventual demises with all due solemnity. But many of you have not provided for this inevitable occurrence. Do you hope to avoid fate by postponing payment? I assure you that your days on earth are numbered, and if you die unprepared, you cannot count on your survivors, in their grief or distance or dotage, to consider your needs at that time. The proper prayers at your death may be crucial, and yet you blithely go on about your daily lives, blissfully ignoring the risks.”

  He stopped to swallow dramatically, his Adam’s apple trembling in terror.

  “Should we purchase our funeral masses?” whispered Claudia. “We might be able to get a bargain rate today.”

  “I am not planning to die here,” I whispered back.

  “That’s a relief. Where, then?”

  “In some other woman’s bed if you do not cease this yammering.”

  “It is not the finances of the church so much as the appearances that concern me,” continued the Bishop. “If we fail to attract the sinners, then we fail in our mission. These are dangerous times. Those heretics known as Cathars lurk in the shadows of our very doorstep, seducing the unwary with their false beliefs and their perjurious attacks on us. Will you deny yourself the Kingdom of Heaven because a false prophet denies himself meat and calls himself pure? Or because he promises salvation through the mere touch of his hand, though you have done nothing to merit it? Yet the simpleminded and the sinful have flocked to these devils as sheep would to a…”

  He gulped, having wandered into a metaphorical dead end.

  “What evil would attract sheep?” whispered Helga.

  We all pondered this weighty question as the Bishop recovered and simply moved on.

  “With every new heretic, the church is diminished in life, and in tithes,” he said. “With every diminution in income, we become more and more of a laughingstock. We cannot demonstrate the path to Salvation when we cannot even keep ourselves in bread. Why, when our brother bishop came all the way from Osma on his holy mission, we were unable to show him the hospitality that one bishop should provide another. We could not feed and house his entourage, and they were forced to put themselves up at their own expense in a common tavern.”

  “Where they were forced to drink common wine and consort with common whores,” I muttered.

  “Poor dears,” sympathized my wife.

  “So I say unto you, my children, poverty of the church will mean poverty of the soul,” he concluded. “We must restore this house of God to its former glory. Amen.”

  “I find no satisfaction in my soul today,” murmured my wife as the choir stumbled through the concluding hymn. “So, that’s Bishop Raimon de Rabastens. Seems like a nice fellow. I suppose he means well enough for a bishop.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Too bad we have to get rid of him.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Brother Timothy tapped me on the shoulder after the evening meal. We slipped away to join Father Gerald, who was sitting on a boulder by the edge of the stream that ran past the farm. The old priest lifted his head and cocked it toward us as we came up.

  “Toulouse,” he said. “It is our belief that things are building to a crisis there.”

  “They always are in Toulouse,” I said. “What’s different now?”

  “The Church,” he said. “If they came after the Fools’ Guild after all we have done for them, then they will go after anyone they find displeasing.”

  “Toulouse has displeased Rome?”

  “In many ways,” he said. “Did you meet the current count when you were there?”

  “Raimon? Yes,” I said. “It was right before his father died, so he wasn’t count yet. He had this very pretty wife, Bourguigne, who was from Cyprus. She was his third, as I recall, maybe fourth. I forget what alliance was being forged with the union. His father would marry him off to any woman who was useful to him back then.”

  “Raimon, son of Raimon,” said Father Gerald. “Now the sixth count of that name, with a few more wives and territories notched on his belt since then and another Raimon of his very own, courtesy of wife number five.”

  “Feckless, irresponsible, and so on?”

  “Surprisingly, no,” said Father Gerald. “Seems to be an astute man, at least when it comes to keeping the competing powers at bay. But he’s like a juggler who is tiring—you know that sooner or later, he’ll start dropping the clubs.”

  “You want me to be there to catch them.”

  “Among other things,” said Brother Timothy. “We also see an opportunity to help the Guild get back in the good graces of the Church.”

  “How? And how much do we have to compromise our mission to do it?”

  “Always a problem,” sighed Father Gerald. “If our mission is to continue at all, we must end this papal interference. Someone close to Pope Innocent is working against us, for whatever reasons. We have to start building up our own influence to counter it. That means getting our own people inside.”

  “How does sending me to Toulouse help us get inside the Church? Why don’t I just go to Rome and tell Innocent a few jokes?”

  “Your jokes aren’t that good,” smirked Brother Timothy.

  “There is a bishop in Toulouse, Raimon de Rabastens,” said Father Gerald. “We think he may be vulnerable. We want to replace him with one of our own people, then use the bishopric as a stepping-stone to Rome.”

  “Who do you plan to install?”

  “Do you remember Folquet, the troubadour?”

  “From Marseille. I met him once.”

  “He’s a Cistercian abbot, now. We need you to persuade him to work for us again, and then find a way of forcing Raimon de Rabastens to resign his office and bring Folquet in to replace him.”

  “Is that all?” I laughed. “I was hoping for something challengi
ng. Tell me that this isn’t our only hope.”

  “We will be working on many avenues,” said Brother Timothy. “This is just one.”

  “In fact, you may receive some assistance from an unexpected source,” added Father Gerald. “Don’t be surprised by it.”

  “Nothing surprises me anymore when you start making plans,” I said. “Any suggestions as to where in this bishop’s life I can start?”

  “You’ll find something,” said Father Gerald, turning to listen to the stream rush by again. “Everyone has something.”

  * * *

  Bishop Raimon de Rabastens stood in front of the cathedral, greeting the congregants as they shuffled out.

  “Good to see you, good to see you,” he said continuously. “How is your poor mother doing? Tell her that she is in my prayers. Hasn’t that leg of yours healed yet? Did you try that balm I gave you? You did? Strange, it worked wonders for my shoulder.”

  As the line came to us, he looked quizzical for a moment, then brightened.

  “Why, do we have some new parishioners among us today?” he exclaimed. “Welcome to God’s house, my friends. I am Bishop Raimon.”

  “Your Holiness,” we murmured, bowing.

  “Yes, yes, always good to see new blood at our cathedral. Are you recently come to Toulouse?”

  “Just this past week, Your Holiness,” I said. “We have taken up residence in Saint Cyprien, near the Saint Nicholas church.”

  “Ah, lovely little church,” he said. “The parish is under the aegis of the Cluniac brothers. Of course, there is nothing like coming to a cathedral to worship, and I thank you for taking the trouble to join us today. I did note your contribution at collection. And did I see you add to the poor box as well?”

  “In thanks for our safe journey and arrival,” I said.

  “Goodness, how rude of me, I have neglected to ask your names,” he said.

  “I am Tan Pierre,” I said. “My wife, Gile, and our daughters, Helga and Portia.”