The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Dürnstein, just below the castle where Richard was locked up.’ Merlin looked pleased with himself. ‘Now how’s that for a coincidence?’

  ‘Creepy.’

  ‘…is the word. Kempfer was his name. I think I’m going to drop in on ex-Major Kempfer and ask him what he and his pals were doing, hanging around here on June tenth, 1944, instead of racing northwards to push the Allies back into the sea.’

  ‘D’you think he’ll answer?’ she asked.

  Merlin grinned, ‘You’d be amazed what questions people will answer if you roll up out of the blue and catch them off their guard.’

  ‘Why?’

  He laughed. ‘Well, rationally I should say: Because we newsmen always promise to protect our sources.’

  ‘But in fact?’

  He paused. ‘You’d make a pretty good reporter yourself, you know that? I suspect it’s because, as every taxman, detective and priest knows, a lot of people just want to spill the beans. The right question at the right moment and they’ll tell you how they killed their wife or swindled the shareholders or rigged an election. You’d be amazed what secrets people have freely divulged to me in off-the-record conversations.’

  Merlin squatted down to bring his head level with Jay’s. ‘How d’you feel about coming along for the trip? It’ll be fun.’

  ‘Just like that?’ she asked, to gain time. ‘You take off for the other end of Europe on the spur of the moment and expect me to come with you?’

  He seemed impatient to be off. ‘I like to move fast when I get an idea.’

  Jay could feel him willing her to say yes. To break the eye-contact she turned and picked up the notebook which had fallen out of her hip pocket when she sat down. He was still waiting for an answer.

  I’m on holiday, she thought. I can do what I want. There’s no reason not to go. But it seemed better to play safe with: ‘Thanks, I’m supposed to be taking a break. Catching planes and staying in hotels is something I can do without for a while.’

  Chapter 10

  Like most musicians, Jay frequently drove long distances and normally had a good sense of direction. She had gone several miles along the Paris-Bordeaux motorway before she realised from the road signs that she was heading in the wrong direction. She pulled her car into a service area and opened the window to breathe some cold air, wondering what she had been thinking about to get lost in a part of France she knew well.

  Merlin, was the answer. He was not like any other man she knew. But then, she reasoned, they were all musicians or connected with the world of music, whereas he was … What was he? Just when she thought she had him pigeon-holed, he revealed another aspect of his complex personality.

  She had known him only forty-eight hours and yet she missed him already. At Châlus she had jumped into her car and driven off without saying goodbye properly because she had felt an irrational anger at the way he had suddenly decided to head for Vienna on the spur of the moment. And yet, she thought rationally, why shouldn’t he go to Austria if he wanted? He didn’t owe her anything, any more than she owed him, so why had she been angry? It didn’t make sense, but then nothing made sense about Merlin.

  Ah well, she sighed, if he wanted to play reporters, she could do that too and research the sirventès carved on the castle at Châlus. There was a specialist bookshop in Bordeaux which Jay remembered visiting with her father years before when they were working on the family tree. If she pushed the three-litre turbo-charged engine of the Alpine to the limit, it should be possible to get to Bordeaux before the shops closed. She broke all the motorway regulations, enjoying the thrill of speed and the concentration of overtaking everything else on the road. Arriving in Bordeaux, all the lights were green. She sailed through the outskirts and headed by memory into the maze of narrow streets that made up the old quarter of the town, to find the shop with ten minutes to spare before closing-time. There was a space on a yellow line right in front of the door, where she left the car unlocked and ran inside.

  It was the right place. A pale and monkish assistant unearthed three books from a top shelf and blew the dust off them. Jay left the shop clutching Amy Kelly’s scholarly biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine and two books of early medieval poetry which included a number of sirventès attributed to Eleanor and to Richard the Lionheart.

  She began the drive back to St Denis, only to find every light red and every street blocked solid with rush-hour traffic. It was easier to park and let the commuters get away than fight them for road space so she pulled up in a part of the town she had never visited to order a cup of coffee on the glassed-in terrace of a pavement cafe. There she fidgeted with the books, unable to concentrate on them, putting her mood of suppressed excitement down to the adrenalin of the long drive against the clock.

  Across the street was the Cathedral of St André. To kill time, Jay crossed the street and plunged into the cold gloom within. She shivered and pulled the collar of her anorak round her neck. The dressing which Merlin had strapped to the back of her hand rubbed against her chin, reminding her of Châlus. The interior of the cathedral was uninspiring. Jay had played in many great churches but this building had none of the soaring elegance of Canterbury or the architectural poetry of Bourges. It was a hotch-potch of many periods of architecture, each fighting the others.

  A chord rang out from the massive organ which was being tuned for a recital. The noise drew Jay’s eye to the magnificently carved organ screen from which a life-size carved wooden flute-player gazed down at her. Another chord, louder. And another louder still. The entire volume of air in the building resonated, amplifying the sound to a level that hurt Jay’s sensitive musician’s ears. She made for the nearest door and was just passing a hugely ugly wooden pulpit when the organ-tuner pulled out all the stops. She stopped in her tracks, hands clamped over her ears, almost screaming with pain at the noise.

  A late shaft of sunlight from a hole in one of the high stained-glass windows led her eye along its golden path full of dancing dust motes to the head of a woman carved at the top of a column which was set into the wall behind the pulpit. In the silence after the organ chord died away Jay heard the echo of her books falling to the stone floor. The sound echoed back and forth across the nave of the empty cathedral. To her trained ear, that echo was frighteningly familiar; it was a harmonic of the door slam that had drawn a gauze veil over her eyes and left her spinning with vertigo in Canterbury Cathedral.

  *

  ‘Dear God, Chaplain Milo, to what have we come? The king stinks worse than a week-old corpse!’

  Queen Eleanor felt ill with fatigue. She clung to the arm of Richard’s chaplain outside the hovel in which the stricken king lay in agony on his deathbed. She had started from Chinon Castle within the hour of receiving news of the king’s wounding, and covered the hundred miles to Châlus in two days and two nights of nonstop travel on horseback, by boat and in a litter suspended between two horses, taking whatever means was quickest for each stage. The only stretch of paved carriageway had been the few miles where her route ran along an old Roman road. She swayed now with fatigue and clutched the chaplain’s arm more tightly. A harsh grating sound of metal on stone made her look up to where two bodies were suspended in chains from the battlements of the castle, where they swung grotesquely in the wind. Several dwellings in the village were burning. A cloud of sparks rose into the damp air as a cottage roof fell in.

  ‘I have cut the missile from the king’s flesh.’ The chaplain was eager to show that he had fulfilled his duty as physician to Richard’s body as well as his soul. ‘It took four men to hold King Richard down, though it was by his own command that I cut and gouged until I could pull out the bolt. By the time I was done, the king’s neck was nearly severed from his shoulder. I washed the wound with infusions of herbs, applied poultices soaked in unguents and bound it …’

  ‘He’ll die,’ she said.

  Milo bent his head. ‘God’s will be done, Madam.’

 
Eleanor’s face spasmed with repressed tears. A part of her mind wanted to throw herself on the bed where her adored favourite son lay wounded and simply howl with grief.

  ‘You,’ she had told Richard so many times when he was a child, ‘will be the greatest king that Christendom has ever known.’

  ‘You,’ she had caressed him by word and touch so many times as he grew into manhood, ‘are the bravest knight, the most handsome poet, the most gifted of musicians, most beautiful of men.’

  ‘You, chaplain,’ she said now, ‘went with Richard on Crusade.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You’ve dressed his wounds before.’ She caught the priest by both arms and shook him. ‘You are skilled in these things. Think once again, lest there be something else we can do for the king!’

  The chaplain spoke wretchedly, betraying his own love for his royal master. ‘Once the black evil has entered mortal flesh, there is nothing anyone can do, Madam.’

  Eleanor shook him with a man’s energy. ‘Think, Priest. Think hard. I’ll build you a chapel in Chinon Castle if you can save the king’s life. I’ll build you an abbey if you want, so think!’

  Milo gestured helplessly. ‘In the Holy Land, they say some Saracen magicians have the art to cast out the infection that stinks.’

  ‘Would that such a magician was here this day,’ she groaned. ‘Oh, Richard, I would pay the devil himself all the gold in Christendom to save you.’

  Milo sank to his knees sighing, ‘Let us pray.’

  Instead of joining him, Eleanor raised her face to the sullen clouds scudding on from the Atlantic and addressed Him as an equal: ‘You bastard! You’ve taken away the only man this old woman loves.’ She pushed the priest roughly. Later she could be a mother and give way to grief for the suffering of flesh that was born of hers; first she had to be a queen. ‘Damn praying,’ she said angrily. ‘You’ve worn the knees out of your hose and it hasn’t saved my son’s life. As for Richard’s soul, you’ll have all eternity to pray for that, Chaplain. No, the time for praying is past. You’ll write instead.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘To history,’ Eleanor threw at him. ‘You’re a clerk, so go fetch quill, ink and paper. I’ll dictate you the king’s testament while he can still sign and press a seal on wax with his own strength.’

  She put a hand on the door of the hovel in which the King of England and half of France lay dying, then turned as another question struck her: ‘Where’s the gold, Milo? Where is the gold that lured my son here? Tell me that.’

  The chaplain indicated a house more substantial than the rest, one of the few that had not been plundered and burnt to the ground in the routine orgy of destruction that had accompanied the siege of the castle itself. It was here that Mercadier had quartered himself. There were candles showing behind the parchment in the window frames. A confusion of shouts, blows and screams came from within. On the doorstep lay a huddle of naked, broken, blood-streaked corpses.

  ‘Mercadier has the surviving prisoners in there,’ said Milo. ‘He hanged half the garrison and put the rest to torture but none have talked of gold. Or so I’m told.’

  *

  Jay felt a hand take her elbow.

  ‘Vos livres, madame. Vous les avez laissés tomber.’ It was Milo’s voice, or another similar: soft and priestly. The sacristan beside her was holding the books he had picked up off the floor.

  She took them from him with a murmured: ‘Merci.’

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ he asked. ‘You look pale. Perhaps you would like a drink of water?’

  Jay let him lead her through the gloom to a chair by the door where she sat down. On a small shelf by the offertory box stood a carafe of water and some glasses. As he poured the water there was a final chord on the organ. In quick succession she saw again the dying king, the kneeling priest, the bloodied corpses. As the last echoes of the chord reverberated and died, so the images grew fainter and vanished.

  ‘Whose head?’ she asked the sacristan.

  He smiled and passed her the glass. ‘Now that is one of the cathedral’s treasures. Perhaps the greatest. It’s a pity the pulpit hides it. I’m often asked to show tourists where it is. You English call her Queen Eleanor, and know her as the wife of your King Henry Il, but to the French she is the Duchess of Aquitaine.’

  Jay took a sip of the water. It tasted flat and stale. His voice had the monotone of men who spend their time whispering in churches, although he was obviously pleased to talk to someone interested. ‘The carving is supposedly an excellent likeness of Queen Eleanor. It was done from the life at the time of her wedding in this cathedral, to Crown Prince Louis of France. She was only fifteen at the time.’

  Jay could not understand what she was doing, sitting there, drinking stale water from a glass. Everything after the sight of Eleanor’s head was a smudge in her memory. The blare of a car horn brought her to herself in the middle of the multi-lane traffic outside the cathedral. A taxi-driver was leaning out of his window and shouting at her something about committing suicide without his help. She wondered how she had got there. She waited for a gap in the vehicles and hurried back to her own car, pulse racing. She sat shaking for several minutes, before turning her key in the ignition. Inside her head there was the sensation of something soft and heavy pressing down. Could one feel a tumour growing? she wondered. Would it press against the skull? How thorough had her father’s examination been?

  Chapter 11

  The cottage was damp and chilly when Jay reached St Denis. She had left two of the portable radiators burning but both were cold, the gas bottles empty. It was too late to change them at the local shop so she foraged in the barn for vine prunings to use as kindling and lit a huge log fire in the open fireplace of the kitchen. The cottage had been added to and rebuilt many times over the centuries. The kitchen wing was thought to be thirteenth century or possibly even older. There were the remains of a roasting spit cemented into the smoke blackened sides of the fireplace. A selection of heavy black wrought-iron fire tools hung from hand-forged hooks. A cauldron in which Jay’s mother sometimes made soup for visitors, hung just out of the flames on its thick, ratcheted iron trammel.

  Jay was not hungry after the heavy lunch she and Merlin had eaten at Châlus, but opened a bottle of local wine and a packet of biscuits from the pantry which the mice had missed. The chill that had entered into her in the cathedral would not go. Wondering whether she had caught Leila’s bug, she pulled her chair closer to the fire, trying to get warm because most of the heat went straight up the wide chimney. She moved a reading lamp closer and nudged the chair closer still towards the warmth until she was sitting almost within the huge fireplace, sipping the wine and nibbling biscuits.

  It was hard to concentrate on the books; the words kept floating on the page as she tried to remember what had happened in the cathedral. She recalled standing in front of the pulpit, looking up at the carved head and the pain in her brain from the noise of the organ. She recalled her eyes following the sunbeam, but in her memory the carved features were unclear, as though there had been a veil in the way.

  The phone rang, startling her. It was Merlin, calling from a phone box at Vienna’s Schwechat airport. The line was not very good and he was having to shout: ‘Glad I got through to you, Jay. I’m just ringing to apologise for what you walked into yesterday evening at Oradour.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  The line was silent except for the ghost of another conversation.

  ‘I wanted you to know that doesn’t often happen.’ Merlin sounded awkward. ‘And I wanted to say it was fun today at the castle.’

  ‘I enjoyed it too,’ she said, aware that she sounded still and formal.

  ‘Did I wake you up?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I was reading.’

  ‘You sound a long way away, Jay. And I’m running out of coins. The airport change office is closed due to some kind of strike. I’ve just a few schillings they let me have at the Hertz desk. Oh, hell, I re
ally rang to say this trip would have been a lot more fun if you’d come along.’

  ‘I wish I was there,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll ring again,’ he shouted. ‘The money’s just …’

  Jay replaced the receiver. The thick biography of Eleanor had fallen to the floor when the phone rang. She picked it up, open at a random page, and found on it a detailed description of the siege of Châlus, including King Richard’s death at the hands of a crossbowman by name of Pierre Basile. It was unusual for common folk to have surnames at the time, but historian Amy Kelly seemed sure. The name nagged Jay. Then she shivered with fear as she deciphered another line of the sirventès. She wished Merlin had rung ten minutes later, so that she could have told him. Of course, in Greek basileos meant king. Hence basilica, originally the king’s house. Thus, the line Why King Peter did not grow old must mean: why Pierre Basile, the slayer of King Richard, had to die.

  A leaden heaviness fell on her. She sat, unable to move a finger, staring into the flickering fire in the large open fireplace with its heavy iron spit and blackened fire-irons.

  *

  The naked figure of a young man was hanging from an iron bar in front of the large open fireplace. His bloody, trussed feet dangled clear of the ground. His hands and arms were lashed with brutal tightness to the bar by leather thongs. His bruised and bleeding head hung down, like Christ’s upon the cross.

  He groaned as consciousness returned. Lacking the strength to raise his head, his field of vision was the nightmare bloodscape of his own chest and belly, whose skin hung in agonizing strips and folds, peeled from his body inch by inch. Through swollen, bloody lips and toothless gums, he repeated, as he had in each interval of lucidity: ‘I have the king’s pardon. I have the king’s pardon. I have …’

  Two thickset, sweating men – Mercadier’s specialists in the skills of the torture chamber – worked by the light of the fire and a brace of thick tallow candles stolen from Châlus church. Their job was to prolong the youth’s excruciating agony for as long as possible without actually killing him. A group of their comrades sat drinking looted wine and watching. One of the candles had been ringed at regular intervals, to serve as a rough time-keeper. The men were wagering with each other how many rings would have burnt away when the youth died. Apart from pleading that the dying king had pardoned him of the crime of regicide, Pierre Basile had said nothing – or at any rate, nothing that Mercadier wanted to hear.