by Paul Sussman
Emerging from the station building, therefore, she hailed a taxi and ten minutes later was walking through the arched gateway of St John's. A porter in the lodge informed her that Professor Topping's study was on I-Staircase Second Court and, thanking him, she set off through the college, crossing one large, silent court – neatly clipped lawns, red-brick Tudor buildings, an ornate, arch-windowed chapel – and passing into a second.
I-Staircase was in the far left-hand corner, with an in-out board screwed to the wall just inside its entrance bearing the names of all those with rooms above. The shutter beside Professor Topping's name was pushed firmly to the 'out' setting, causing her a moment of panic – Christ, she thought, have I come all this way for nothing? – before a burly student in a red-and-white hooped rugby shirt came clumping down the stairs and, in response to her query as to the professor's whereabouts, assured her that he was definitely in his rooms.
'I heard him shouting,' he explained. 'Don't take any notice of the board. I've lived below him for two years and he's never once had his name on "in".'
Relieved, although not exactly reassured – the professor didn't sound at all like the sort of person who would welcome unexpected callers – she started up the stairway, the wooden boards creaking and groaning beneath her feet, continuing right to the top of the building where she found a door with PROFESSOR M. TOPPING painted onto the wall beside it.
She hesitated, picturing, as she had done the previous afternoon, a crusty old academic with half-moon spectacles, tweed jacket and whiskers sprouting from his ears, then stepped forward and knocked. No response. She knocked again.
'Not now!'
'Professor Topping?'
'Not now!'
His tone was angry, harassed. She wondered if perhaps she should go away and get a cup of coffee, come back later when he was in a better mood. But she hadn't come all this way to pussy-foot around so, gritting her teeth, she raised her hand and knocked a third time, knuckles rapping insistently on the wooden door.
'I would appreciate a moment of your time, Professor Topping,' she called.
There was a brief, threatening pause – the calm before the storm – then the sound of rapidly approaching feet. An inner door was yanked open, then the outer one on which she had knocked.
'Don't you bloody understand English? I said not now! What the hell's wrong with you?'
For a moment Layla was too taken aback to speak, for rather than the fusty old scholar she had been expecting she found herself confronted by a tall, handsome, dark-haired man, early to mid-forties, in Bermuda shorts and a denim shirt, a fuzz of black chest-hair exploding from the shirt's open neck. Her surprise lasted only an instant, then, riled, she launched into him.
'Fuck you, you pompous arsehole! I've come all the way from Jerusalem because you haven't got a fucking telephone like any normal human being, so you just show me a bit of fucking respect.'
She fully expected the door to be slammed in her face. As it was, the professor merely stared at her, a mildly impressed look in his eyes, then, with an arching of his eyebrows, turned and padded back into his room. She remained in the doorway, uncertain what to do.
'Well, come on,' he called over his shoulder. 'I might be a pompous arsehole, but at least I know when to back down gracefully. And close the door behind you. Both doors. I don't want this setting a precedent.'
Too surprised to debate the matter she did as she was told, pulling the outer and then inner door shut, and following him into the study.
The place was a shambles, every available inch of space – floor, mantelpiece, windowsill, desk – subsumed beneath teetering drifts of papers and books, as if the room had been hit by a particularly violent tornado. Such was the all-enveloping chaos it was a moment before she realized that two chair-shaped mounds over by the window were in fact exactly that – a pair of armchairs encased in a barrow of discarded clothes and heavily thumbed volumes of the Cambridge Medieval History. Topping picked his way over to them and started clearing a space for her to sit down.
'I don't think I caught your name.'
'Layla,' she replied. 'Layla al-Madani.'
'And you're a . . . ?'
'Journalist.'
'Didn't think you were an academic,' he said, stepping back and indicating the chair, now stripped of its camouflage of books and dirty laundry. 'Far too good-looking.'
His tone was so ingenuously matter-of-fact he managed to carry this off without it sounding like a bad chat-up line. She came over and sat down while he got to work clearing himself a space on the other chair.
'Coffee?' he asked, nodding to a small doorway in the corner of the room through which Layla glimpsed a cramped galley kitchen. She declined the offer.
'Drink?'
'It's a bit early for me.'
He seemed faintly surprised by this response, as if the idea of a connection between drink and the time of day had never occurred to him. He didn't push the point, just finished clearing his own armchair, then went through into the kitchen and fetched himself a bottle of Budwar from the fridge, banging the bottle's cap off on the edge of the sideboard.
'And you've really come all the way from Jerusalem?' he called. 'Or were you just trying to make me feel bad?'
She assured him she had been telling the truth.
'I suppose I ought to feel flattered,' he said, coming back in and sitting down opposite her. 'Half my students can't even make it here from the other side of college.'
He took a swig of his beer and stretched out his legs, staring at her.
'So?'
Their eyes held a moment – he really was very good-looking – then she leant down and started rummaging in her bag.
'I wanted to ask you about a talk you gave a few weeks ago,' she said.' "Little William and the Secret of Castelombres".' She straightened, clutching her notepad, pen and the print-out she'd made of the St John's College History Society web page. 'I've been trying to look into this whole Castelombres thing for an article I'm doing, but I don't seem to be getting anywhere. I've managed to pick up a few vague pieces of information from the internet, but. . . well, from the description of your talk it sounded like you might be able to give me something a bit more detailed.'
He raised his eyebrows, surprised. 'And you've come all this way for that?'
'Well, it obviously would have been easier if you'd been on phone or email. . .'
He gave a half-smile, acknowledging her point, and, hunching forward, took another swig of beer.
'I should say straight out that the talk was more by way of light relief than serious academia,' he said. 'Cultural identity in medieval Languedoc, that's my area of interest, with a specialism in thirteenth-century Inquisition registers, so all this stuff about secrets and buried treasure and mysterious goings-on with Nazi archaeologists – I take it all with a slight pinch of salt.' He stared down at his bottle. 'Although it was interesting. Very interesting. Important, maybe.'
There was a brief pause, the professor momentarily seeming to sink into his own thoughts. Then, with a shake of his head, he held out a hand.
'What have you got so far?'
She pulled out the page of notes she'd taken the previous day and passed it over. He ran his eyes over it.
'To be honest, I'm not sure there's really an awful lot I can add to this. As I told you, it's not my specialist field. And even if it was . . .' He shrugged, handing the page back to her. He must have noticed the disappointed look on her face, however, because he added almost immediately, 'Still, I dare say I can fill in a bit of the background. Give you the context and all that. It's the least I can do given that you've come all this way. Whether it's any use or not . . . well, you'll have to be the judge of that.'
He heaved himself up and picked his way over to his desk where he began burrowing into a huge mound of papers.
'Have you ever been there?' he asked as he worked his way through the papers. 'To Castelombres?'
She admitted that she hadn't.
'It's worth a visit. Not much to see, admittedly. A stone window, a few tumbled walls. All completely overgrown. Atmospheric, though. Has a curiously melancholy feel to it. The Castle of Shadows. That's what the name means. Appropriate. Aha!'
He yanked a sheaf of papers out of the pile.
'The notes for my talk,' he explained.
He flicked through them, perching himself on the edge of the desk, the movement causing the paper pile behind him, already rendered unstable by his rooting, to slump and cascade to the floor. He ignored it.
'OK,' he said, 'let's start at the beginning. So far as we can tell from the contemporary sources, and those are sparse to non-existent – just a couple of incomplete genealogies, a few extant land charters, wills, that sort of thing – there was, at least until the end of the eleventh century, nothing remotely out of the ordinary about Castelombres. It was just a typical minor Languedoc estate. Its lords owned land and property, intermarried with other local gentry, made bequests to religious institutions, owed allegiance to the Counts of Foix. Consummately normal. Then, some time around 1100, things suddenly seem to change. Quite dramatically.'
Layla came forward onto the edge of her seat, a ripple of excitement echoing down her spine. If her research was correct, and she had no reason to think it wasn't, some time around 1100 would have been exactly when William de Relincourt discovered his mysterious treasure beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and sent it away to his sister at Castelombres.
'Again, the sources are scanty in the extreme,' continued Topping. 'Just a few troubadour poems, a couple of fleeting references in contemporary chronicles, and, most importantly, two fragments of letters written by the contemporary Jewish scholar Rashi. They all seem to agree, though, that from the early twelfth century onwards Gastelombres starts to attract an increasing amount of attention. And the reason for this is that rumours start flying around that it's the repository of some extraordinary treasure of unparalleled power and beauty.'
Another, stronger, ripple reverberated through Layla's body. 'Power and beauty' were exactly the words de Relincourt used in his letter.
'Do we know what it was?' she asked, trying to keep her voice steady.
Topping shook his head. 'No idea. Even the sources don't seem to be entirely sure. Some refer to it as "Lo Tresor" – the treasure – others simply call it a secret or a mystery, which implies some sort of allegorical or symbolic meaning. It just isn't made clear.'
He downed the last of his beer and launched the bottle into a bin five feet away, where it landed with a loud clatter.
'If we don't know precise details, however, two things at least do seem to be certain. Firstly, whatever this mysterious object or secret was, it was intimately associated with Esclarmonde of Castelombres, wife of Count Raymond III, who from the outset seems to be regarded as some sort of guardian or protector figure. Secondly, it appears to have had some profound significance for the Jewish faith. As early as 1104, according to Rashi, we have the leaders of Languedoc's main Jewish communities in Toulouse, Beziers, Narbonne and Carcassonne – visiting the castle. By 1120 you've got Jews coming from as far afield as Cordoba and Sicily. And by 1150 the place seems to be well established as a centre of Jewish pilgrimage and cabbala study. Again, I have to stress how meagre the sources are. Even bearing that in mind, however, it's clear that something very unusual was going on at Castelombres during this period.'
Layla was sitting right forward on the edge of her chair.
'Go on.'
Topping shook his head. 'Unfortunately, from the mid-twelfth century the sources go completely silent. The next thing we hear of Castelombres, the last thing we hear, is in something called the Chronicle of Guillaume Pelhisson which records how in 1243, during the Cathar Crusade, the castle was razed to the ground by the forces of the Catholic Church, its lands redistributed and the House of Castelombres wiped out. Of the mysterious treasure or secret or whatever the hell it was, nothing is ever heard again.'
He paused a moment, then looked up at her over the top of his notes.
'Or at least it wasn't until I found a rather curious reference to it a few months ago in an Inquisition register I was studying at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Which is how this whole thing got started in the first place.'
There was a dull clank as, outside, a bell chimed the half-hour.
'Do you know about the Cathars?' he asked.
She had skim-read a book on the subject during the journey over which, along with the stuff she had already picked up from the internet, had given her the basic background.
'A bit,' she said. 'I know they were a heretical Christian sect that flourished in Languedoc in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. That they believed' – she glanced down at the brief notes she had scribbled on the plane – 'the universe was ruled by a God of Light and a God of Darkness, and that everything in the material world was the work of the evil God. That the Catholic Church launched a crusade against them, the Cathar Crusade. That they made their last stand at the Castle of Montségur and that just before the castle fell they were supposed to have smuggled some fabulous treasure out past the besieging army.' She looked up at him. 'That's about it, I'm afraid.'
He gave her an impressed nod. 'It's a lot more than most people know, I can assure you.'
There was a momentary silence, the two of them staring at each other, then, with a cock of his head, Topping went through into the kitchen again and fetched himself another beer.
'You're sure you don't want one?' he called.
'Go on then.'
He opened two bottles and, after coming back in, handed one to her and sat down opposite, stretching out his legs – long, pale, honed – so that his bare feet were within an inch or so of her chair.
'The treasure of the Cathars has long been the subject of speculation,' he said, picking up the thread of his narrative, 'some of it academic, most just wild fantasy. All sorts of ideas have been floated as to what exactly it was, everything from sacks of gold to Gathar religious texts to the Holy Grail. The fact is, as with the whole Secret of Castelombres thing, the sources just aren't clear.'
He took a swig of his beer.
'We know about the treasure from a series of depositions given to the Inquisition by survivors of the siege of Montségur. When the castle fell to the Catholic crusaders in March 1244, about two hundred of the defenders refused to renounce their beliefs and were burnt to death. The rest were allowed to go free on condition they provided a full confession to the Inquisition interrogators. Twenty-two of these confession depositions have survived – over four hundred pages' worth – of which four mention the story of the mysterious smuggled treasure.'
Layla half raised her bottle to take a sip, but then lowered it again and instead scribbled a note of what Topping had just said.
'Then, last December, I turned up what seems to be part of a twenty-third Montségur survivor deposition. One that also mentions the treasure of the Cathars, but with some rather interesting extra details.'
He seemed outwardly relaxed as he said this, slumped in his chair with his beer bottle dangling from his hand. Despite this, Layla could tell from the brightness of his eyes and the slight speeding up in his delivery that he was as excited by the story as she was.
'The deposition had been bound, presumably by accident, into a register of much later documents,' he continued. 'It recorded the interrogation of a Montségur survivor named Berenger d'Ussat by an inquisitor called Guillaume Lepetit – William the Small, or Little Willy as I prefer to call him. In it, this Berenger describes how, some time around Christmas 1243, three months before Montségur fell to the Catholic besiegers, four Cathar leaders' – he referred to his notes – 'Amiel Aicart, Petari Laurent, Pierre Sabatier and a man named Hugon, managed to escape from the castle under cover of night carrying away some sort of important treasure. In itself that isn't particularly earth-shattering – the other four "treasure" depositions all say exactly the same thing. What comes next, however
, is fascinating, because when William, the interrogator, pushes Berenger for more information about this mysterious treasure, he says' – he glanced down at his notes again – ' "Credo id Castelombrium unde venerit relatum esse et ibi sepultum esse ne quis invenire posset." Which in translation means: "I believe it was returned to Castelombres, from where it came, and was buried there so no-one could find it."'
Layla's jaw dropped. 'They were the same thing! The Montségur treasure and the Secret of Castelombres!'
Topping sat up in his chair and took a swig of his beer, 'Well, admittedly it's just one piece of testimony,' he said, 'wholly uncorroborated. It's more than possible that Berenger was just trying to confuse his inquisitors, give them false leads. All the same, it's an intriguing notion. And not perhaps entirely unsurprising. Castelombres, after all, is fewer than ten kilometres as the crow flies from Montségur, so it's fair to assume there was some sort of interaction between the two castles. Also, the Cathars were renowned for their friendship with the Jews, so again it's probably fair to assume that in the face of a violently anti-semitic Catholic invading force the defenders of Montségur would have offered sanctuary to whatever secret or treasure was lodged at Castelombres. Whether the Lords of Castelombres themselves actually adopted the Cathar creed . . .' He shrugged. 'I doubt we'll ever know, although given their involvement with the Jews and the fact that their castle was destroyed by the crusaders it's a fair bet that they did. To be honest, it's neither here nor there. The important thing is that there do seem to be reasonably solid grounds for speculating that what have until now appeared to be two wholly separate mysteries are in fact one and the same.'
