Chapter 9
Jay awoke to the sound of her wristwatch beeping on the bedside table. 6 a.m. She cancelled the alarm and closed her eyes again, feeling as though she had not slept all night. Half-asleep, her mind was invaded by a confusion of memories: Merlin kissing her hand, a game of chess, the anger of a violent man. It was her erotic arousal by a scene of hand-to-hand combat and her urgent love-making with a man who had blood on his hands that told her these were not images from dreams, but memories.
In the next room Merlin awoke as he always did, without an alarm. He switched on the light. The bed was in a mess, blankets and sheets tangled. He stepped out and felt velvet beneath his feet. What he had thought was a dressing-gown turned out to be one of Jay’s stage dresses.
Merlin pulled on a pair of trousers and padded along the corridor to her room. He tapped on the door. ‘Jay!’
No reply. He tried the door. It was locked. He rapped louder.
‘I’m awake,’ she called back.
‘Five minutes,’ he whispered.
They crept quietly downstairs into the grey light of dawn. As Merlin packed the bags inside the boot of Jay’s car, she stretched both arms high and breathed a lungful of the clean cold air. He waited for her to make some reference by word or gesture to the midnight visit to his room. She had taken the crumpled velvet dress with a nod that meant nothing and stuffed it into one of her cases. Her eyes had not met his. Drowsily, Jay scanned the open ground opposite the pub, where a series of grassy mounds poked their way through the clinging ground-mist. Further away, remnants of walls loomed indistinctly, intermingled with some trees. It was all that remained of Salisbury Tower.
*
Memories flooded back into Jay’s mind. She felt giddy and clutched the car roof. ‘That wasn’t me,’ she muttered, suddenly recalling their love-making. It was not the pleasure that she remembered, but the feeling that someone else had been using her body.
‘Are you okay?’ Merlin hurried round to her side of the car. As he came close, Jay clutched his shoulders, the anguish that she felt showing on her face.
‘Oh, Merlin,’ she shuddered. ‘Take me away from here!’
*
In a sparsely furnished room above an all-night kebab stall in Torremolinos, Kassim and Salem Chakrouty were arguing in low voices, trying not to wake up their cousin’s wife and children on the other side of the flimsy partition wall. The cousin himself was still downstairs, cleaning up at the end of a long night’s work serving kebabs and falafel and shwarma to the hungry insomniacs of the Costa.
‘Instead of helping me, you spend all your time hanging round the new mosque in Marbella and the coffee shops, my brother,’ accused Salem. ‘What is the point of spending all night drinking coffee and talking with Arabs? You could do that just as well in Lebanon.’
‘Ever since I was a child,’ replied Kassim levelly, ‘you have criticised me for being an Arab. But an Arab is what I am, brother. What good did it ever do that our father tried to make us into Europeans? Tell me that.’
‘Here in Europe it is a great advantage,’ insisted Salem. ‘Unlike most of your friends, we can pass as Europeans. We don’t have to listen to bazaar rumour.’
‘You do what you like,’ Kassim cut him short. ‘And I shall do things the Arab way, by talking with friends, exchanging a thousand courtesies and gleaning a little here and a little there. Then we shall see who finds it first, this mysterious vale of muses, of which our ancestor wrote. Will it be clever, European Salem Chakrouty or his Arab little brother Kassim, I wonder?’
*
On the ferry Merlin walked Jay around the deck of an hour, trying to keep her awake, before giving up and hiring a cabin where she could sleep for the rest of the long crossing. He sat in the bar, wondering what to make of his experiment in taking her to Old Sarum.
Once on French soil, he did all the driving while Jay slept in the passenger seat. They arrived in Chartres as dusk was falling. Driving into the first of the towns mentioned in the Dürnstein sirventès, Merlin wanted to stay in an old hotel near the cathedral but Jay refused quite adamantly. It was the first time she had spoken for hours.
‘I hate old hotels,’ she said vehemently. ‘They’re always draughty and cold and the beds are too soft.’
‘What was wrong with the Castle Mound?’ Merlin hinted. ‘I like old-fashioned hotels. They have atmosphere.’
‘Well, I need a good night’s sleep.’
They booked into a new hotel on the ring road and strolled around the old quarter of the windy town, coming back to the hotel for an early dinner. Over the meal, Merlin made most of the conversation. Jay seemed far away.
‘You know the oddest thing about this second poem?’ Merlin pulled out of an inside pocket the photograph of the yellowish parchment with the writing in faded ink. ‘I was thinking about it as I drove along the autoroute this afternoon.’
Listening, Jay could not remember anything about the journey. She rationalised her torpor as a reaction to the recording at Oakham. She was always tired after a big show like the television recording.
Merlin touched her hand. She still had not made any reference to the night before. His chest and shoulders were sore from the scratches. ‘I was trying to find some hidden meanings to fit Kempfer’s poem,’ he continued. ‘On the face of it, this sirventès doesn’t make much sense, but the uncanny thing is that it had to be the second or a subsequent one.’
‘Why?’
‘There’s no mention of gold or treasure.’ Merlin waved the photograph to make his point. ‘This poem was never intended to set anyone off on a treasure hunt. It’s useless as a first clue. If we hadn’t fooled around that day at Châlus, deciphering the sirventès you found on the keep, Baron Kempfer’s parchment wouldn’t have meant a thing to me, or anyone else for that matter.’
‘It meant something important to the Kempfer family, though,’ Jay disagreed. ‘Otherwise why did they preserve it so carefully through eight centuries?’
‘A point,’ he conceded. ‘But, against that, why did he show it to me?’
‘We’re going round in circles.’
‘I’m trying not to.’ Merlin sounded frustrated. ‘There seem to be so many things to think of at the same time.’ He let Jay take the photograph from him. ‘Eleanor’s your ancestor, right? But somehow all this tangle involves me too.’
‘You mean the references in the first poem to the great seer of Arthur’s court and the man from Atlantis or Atlanta?’
‘Not just that.’ Merlin shook his head. ‘Think about it. How many other people could have been at Châlus that day and clicked on Dürnstein? The odds must be pretty long. And even if some medieval history buff was into Richard the Lionheart’s story and bracketed the two places together, he wouldn’t have known anything about Kempfer’s SS connection with Oradour, would he? So he might have gone to Dürnstein and roamed around the ruins, but he’d never have found the baron’s heirloom, and it would have been a dead end.’
Jay was trying to follow him but her brain kept slipping out of gear. She wanted to beg Merlin to leave Chartres right away but could not get the words out. Her paternal grandfather had had a stroke; she wondered whether he had felt like this – urgently wanting to say something but unable to form the words.
‘So what have we got here?’ Merlin leaned over the photograph of Baron Kempfer’s poem and read aloud: ‘The heathen maze is straight beside / the trail that you must follow / to a stone that is hollow / and the dome of the bride. / Like a pilgrim onward go / to Bordeaux, Chartres and Fontevraud.’
‘The pilgrimage is the treasure hunt,’ suggested Jay. ‘And somehow we have to connect a maze, a dome and a stone with the names of three places that Eleanor knew well.’
‘A maze, a dome and a stone that were there in her day, eight centuries ago,’ he reminded her.
‘Hang on.’ Jay grabbed the sirventès from his hand. ‘I know what the dome of the bride is. It’s Bordeaux cathedral.’ She spoke excitedly, h
er mind clearing for the first time that day. ‘Not now, but then.’
‘Run that by me again!’
‘Eleanor was married there in 1137 to her first husband, Louis of France. Since then the cathedral has been enlarged and the roof rebuilt, but then it was domed.’
‘How do you know?’ Merlin was curious.
‘I bought some books in Bordeaux the day you disappeared off to Austria. And I paid a visit to the cathedral.’
‘What did you see there?’
‘I don’t know.’
Merlin was disappointed with her answer. The conversation rambled on getting nowhere until Jay picked up her room key and said: ‘Bed.’
She was almost asleep when Merlin knocked on the door. ‘What is it?’ she called.
‘May I come in for a moment?’
Jay opened the door to him, a housecoat thrown over her nightie. She slipped back between the sheets with no hint of invitation. Merlin sat in the chair farthest from the bed. ‘I need some help,’ he said, ‘with translation. I was puzzling my way through a little pamphlet I bought in the bookshop by the cathedral. Would labyrinthe be the French word for maze?’
‘Dormir is the French word for sleep,’ she yawned. ‘It goes: Je dors, tu dors, il dort.’
‘I know, I know. Tu dormiras très soon. But am I right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then its two down and one to go,’ said Merlin triumphantly. ‘According to this weird little book all about religious sites with magical properties, there’s a pre-Christian maze picked out in mosaic on the floor of Chartres cathedral which apparently marks a powerful concentration of telluric energy.’
‘What’s that?’ Jay mumbled, half-asleep.
‘I hoped you wouldn’t ask,’ he laughed. ‘I’m not entirely certain. It’s something to do with ley lines – the lines of force that girdle the earth. People think that menhirs and dolmens were set up to mark where these lines intersect.’
‘Sounds like a geometry lesson.’
Merlin was excited. ‘Which probably means that the stone that is hollow is a menhir with a hole in it.’
‘A what?’
‘A standing stone, pierced with a hole. They were used for healing magic before modern medicine. Country people used to pass sick children through the opening seven times by moonlight, to cure them of rickets – that sort of thing, you know.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You got a better idea of what we should look for at Fontevraud?’
‘Sleep,’ she turned over and stretched one arm out of the bed to reach the light switch. ‘Good night.’
Merlin stood up to leave. Jay’s reaction to what had seemed a brilliant deduction in his own room, now made it seem tenuous and contrived.
He stopped at the door. Fontevraud … What had Kempfer said Fontevraud was? An abbey where both Eleanor and Richard were buried … No, he hadn’t said that. He bent over Jay and shook her shoulder. ‘Hey, I got it! The hollow stone is a sarcophagus.’
‘Mm?’ she opened one eye.
‘I’ll lay you a thousand to one that Eleanor was never buried,’ he said excitedly. ‘In those days the bodies of royalty were placed in tombs, not holes in the ground! So the hollow stone at Fontevraud abbey will be Eleanor’s tomb. And now we’ve got all three clues worked out.’
Jay’s regular breathing told him she was asleep. Merlin stood awhile looking at her, so peacefully lying there. Apart from a small love bite just above the mole on her neck, there was no way he could have been sure this was the passionate woman with whom he had been making love only a few hours before in the sweating carnal frenzy they had shared in his room at the Castle Mound hotel.
Chapter 10
Jay was asleep when Merlin paid his first visit to the cathedral while early Mass was being said in a side chapel. Using the booklet he had bought the previous day to get his bearings, the maze was exactly where it was drawn on the ground plan; otherwise he would never have noticed it, covered by the rows of chairs. Inlaid in the stone floor, it was made up of concentric lines executed in grey and black marble with geometric precision. The chairs made the outline difficult to distinguish in the dim light filtering through the high stained glass windows.
He picked his way along a row of seating and stood on the centre of the maze, looking carefully in all directions in case it was not the maze which was important, but what could be seen from there. Then he prowled through the whole building for another half-hour but found nothing of interest.
Back at the hotel, Jay’s bags were beside his in the foyer, ready to leave. She was in the restaurant, enjoying a giant bowl of strong black coffee and croissants. When Merlin joined her, she showed him how to dunk his croissants like a Frenchman. She was so full of sparkle and smiles that Merlin wondered whether she had been ill the previous day. Looking at her in the sunlit restaurant, he saw again the woman he had wanted that first day they met on the tow-path at St Denis.
He let the conversation lead banteringly here and there. It was a more normal way of getting to know a girl than the intense dialogues he had had with Jay since flying back from New York. For that, Merlin blamed himself. Once he started working on a story, he tended to get obsessed with it. He stopped her getting up to leave the restaurant. ‘I have to say it, and I know it sounds corny, but you’re a very beautiful woman.’
Jay smiled. ‘I have nothing against being told that.’
‘Then may I tell you again?’
A small frown crossed her face. ‘I feel good with you today.’
‘And yesterday?’
She pushed her hair back from her forehead. ‘I wasn’t quite myself. It’s amazing what a good sleep can do.’
‘Perhaps you had a bug?’
She shrugged. ‘Was I a bore? I can’t remember a thing.’
He took her hand. ‘I like today’s girl a whole lot better.’
Jay felt his finger tips glide over the back of her hand. The small touch left her almost breathless. His touch was so arousing that she closed her eyes and murmured, ‘You shouldn’t do that to a girl in public.’
Merlin looked around the now empty restaurant. ‘There’s no one watching.’
They kissed. Minutes later, Merlin whispered, ‘It’s a pity we’ve already checked out of the rooms. But we could check back in.’
‘It’s too obvious,’ said Jay. ‘I’d be embarrassed.’
Their faces were close, each searching the other’s eyes. She eased herself away from his embrace and shook her head. ‘No, Merlin. Let’s not hurry things. I feel so … I don’t know what I feel, but I want it to go on.’
Merlin felt desire surging. He wanted to make love to her then, not later. This was the way he had thought it would be with her: sunshine, smiles and getting to know each other in the best possible way …
‘They change colour,’ he said, meaning her eyes. ‘Today they’re so green, it’s like looking down into a rock pool at the sea side.’
‘And yours are so brown.’ Jay traced the line of his eyebrows with one finger. ‘Your irises are the colour of freshly turned earth.’
‘Earth and water,’ he joked. ‘Beware, the third element is fire when the first two come together.’
Touching Merlin and being touched made Jay want him physically, but not with the belly-wrenching ache she had felt when he walked into her flat or in the pub at Old Sarum. This was a gentler, floating sensation. She felt warm and caressed as they walked out of the restaurant holding hands.
They strolled in the sunshine along the river and uphill to the old quarter, dominated by the huge bulk of the twelfth-century cathedral.
Jay wanted to idle outside in the warm spring sunshine, so Merlin, still irritated by his failure to find anything on his earlier visit, left her and went into the building alone. He picked his way along a row of empty chairs and stepped onto the centre point of the maze for another look round, to see whether the sunbeams pouring through the high stained glass windows showed something that had been in sha
dow earlier that morning.
There was a flash of light as though a pure white sunbeam had momentarily shone directly in his eyes. A shiver ran up his legs to his head, to leave his hair standing on end. At that second there was the loud bellow of a vehicle horn outside, a door crashed open and slammed shut again and a woman screamed something in Dutch.
With a reflex that had kept him alive on the battlefield, Merlin leaped over the chairs and pushed past startled worshippers. Camera at the ready, he thrust his way through a group of tourists from the Netherlands standing in the doorway. He barged the baize-covered door open and ran outside to find Jay lying on the cobbles of the cathedral square, half of her body underneath the rear of a tourist coach with Dutch plates. The driver was apologising in fluent if eccentric English to anyone who would listen: ‘Excuse, but I tell you the lady was not there. One second I am reversing the bus. In all three mirrors, nothing I see. Then, by God, from corner of eye I see lady running backwards. Truly so, backwards. My foot is so hard on the brake that cases are falling off the rack you can see.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ Merlin halted the stream of words. He could see Jay’s legs were not damaged. They lay a couple of inches clear of the huge double rear wheels of the coach that would have crushed them flat. Her face was white as chalk, the eyes open but unfocused.
‘Help me get her up, will you?’ Merlin ordered.
The driver helped him half-lift and half-pull Jay clear of the coach and sit her on the boarding step of the open driver’s door.
‘Shut up,’ Merlin snapped at the Dutchman who was still muttering his account of what had happened. ‘Nobody’s blaming you and she doesn’t seem to be hurt, so just shut up.’
He took a handkerchief and wiped Jay’s brow. What looked like a huge bruise came off, leaving a smudge of dirt right across her forehead. He felt her head through the hair but found no swellings or cuts. He moved her hands and arms, which seemed normal. Certainly no bones were broken. Throughout, Jay sat staring at the cathedral doorway through which Merlin had just run.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 17
