Philippe shrugged again. It would be almost a pleasure to work without the old man breathing down his neck.
But as he listened to his father’s uneasy movements and ragged breath, that moment of sinister tingling came creeping back. Quiescentem ne moveto—had he heard the phrase before, or was he just imagining that it had something to do with not disturbing what rested? That it was in the nature of a warning. He decided to copy the inscription next day. He might run across someone who would translate it without inquiring too closely into its origins.
Henri Taillou remembered his flask, took several long drinks, and then grudgingly handed it to his son. In the familiar safety of the bouncing, rattling truck, he remembered to hope that no one would happen along to discover what they had done.
But as he stared down at the hand that had gone into that loathsome cold mouth, he knew beyond doubt that he would face trouble, fines, even prison, before he would ever set foot on that mountainside again.
PART ONE
Philosophy is odious and obscure,
Both law and physic are for petty wits,
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile;
’Tis magic, magic that hath ravish’d me.
Christopher Marlowe
On the patio of his newly rented villa, John McTell washed down a last tart bite of blue cheese with a swallow of chilled Vouvray, pushed his chair farther into the shade, and settled back to survey the domain that would be his for the next months. Around him as far as he could see rose the steep craggy hills of the Alpes Maritimes, soil baked to the deep-rust color of a ceramic glaze, forming a bright mosaic with the thick green vegetation. The sky was like a polished slate of sapphire. No other dwellings could be seen, nor, the realtor had declared, could any others see this one. Though the heat was intense, the villa’s tiled oval swimming pool was filled with cool clear water, procured mysteriously during this season of drought.
McTell’s gaze moved to the woman who stood beside the pool: My wife, he thought. In the eleven months of their marriage, he had yet to get used to the term. Her name was Linden, and she, too, was taking stock of their new home; her eyes were hidden by sunglasses, her arms folded critically, her mouth compressed.
CHAPTER 1
He turned back to the postcard-perfect ruin that topped the highest peak, dominating the countryside like an ancient, failing, but still grand lord—built against the Saracen invasions of the seventh and eighth centuries, he supposed, when the faith of the Prophet had swept like a tidal wave of fire and blood across the known world. The great stone walls, sparkling with mica, were the color of old bones. He wondered again if the ruin and the forever-lost times it symbolized, times of romance and mystery and faith, were the real reason he had held out for renting this house over several others, closer to the social life of the coast, that Linden had preferred. But she had given in with good grace, and all was well, with the place, with the marriage, with his career—with his life.
Why, then, the touch of melancholy?
The telephone rang inside the house, a harsh buzzing that fell off at the end as if it could not quite sustain itself. Linden hurried inside, sunlight catching auburn streaks in her pulled-back hair, outlining her shape through a loose white linen blouse. McTell glanced at the remains of lunch before him, bought that morning at an epicerie in Saint-Paul de Vence—pates, cold chicken, fruit, and cheese—and braced himself to clean up. The inside of the house was a clutter of boxes and clothes delivered earlier in the week; the car was still full of traveling gear. Once he began the process of organizing, of shelving his books and arranging his desk, he would enjoy it; but beginning was hard, and the wine and heat were no help.
The brisk slap of Linden’s sandals brought his head around. She was a striking rather than pretty woman, her face a little too severe, body a little too spare, except for the generous breasts nature had almost cruelly given her; a malformation of mysterious organs would keep her forever childless. “That was Monsieur Colet,” she said. “He’s found us a cook and gardener.” Colet, the realtor, was a sad-eyed little man with a drooping mustache, who had reminded McTell of Charlie Chaplin.
“And filled the pool.”
“Yes,” she said—with a trace of displeasure?
“You need to take some time for yourself, Lin,” he said. “Lie around a little. Get bored. You never stop.”
Perhaps a second too long passed before she smiled. “Of course you’re right. Well. Ready to tackle the chaos inside?” He stretched. Colet had mentioned that the fortress—Montsevrain, he had called it—had once been a stronghold of the Knights Templar. That was all it had taken to fan McTell’s professional curiosity into flames. He squinted at the ruin, gauging its distance. “Actually, I was thinking about some exercise.”
“Yes?” She leaned a hip into him. “It has been a while.”
He let his hand drop to caress her ankle. “I meant the vertical kind. How about it—up for a hike?”
She shaded her eyes and followed his gaze. Her mouth settled into a line. “It looks like hard hot work.”
“So does unpacking.”
“That’s productive hard hot work.”
McTell sighed. “Always the pragmatist.”
“It got you through your last book, didn’t it?”
Though her tone was teasing, her words annoyed him. “You’re a one-woman Salvation Army, Lin,” he said.
For a moment neither spoke—sensing, he knew, that the dance had gone as far in that direction as it comfortably could. Then, too casually, she said, “Let’s cut for it.”
He glanced up, about to argue. Her luck at games of chance was a standing joke between them, and she kept a pack of playing cards in her purse to settle good-humored disputes. It amused him and exasperated him about equally. But, he reminded himself, it was she who had made the real concession in agreeing to rent this house. “The stakes, specifically?”
“If you win, you do what you want. You know, climb around that hot old mountain with the bugs and poison oak. I unpack.”
“And if you win, I unpack. What do you do?”
“I might be persuaded to help,” she said, smiling, “if the offer was sweetened. Want to shuffle?”
“It never makes any difference.”
He watched her fingers hover over the spread cards as if they could read the hidden faces; then drop and draw one out. “Read it and weep,” she said, and turned over the Queen of Diamonds. She folded her hands, looking demure.
He stood to conceal his annoyance, and paced. Abruptly, on a whim, he crouched beside the pool, dipped his cupped hands, and splashed water on his face. “Baptized,” he said. “Now I’m ready.” He slid a fingernail under the first card he touched—
And as he began to lift, he suddenly understood that he was going to win.
It was the King of Spades.
He stared down at it. His premonition had not been a hunch but a certainty: something that was suddenly there in his mind, unasked for but unquestionable. About to tell her, he saw that her disappointment was plain; and he hovered on the edge of relenting, of spending the afternoon with her and their baggage.
But his desire was urgent—less to see the fortress, he realized, than to have a few hours alone. He had been a solitary man for most of his adult life, but was increasingly aware that he had married a woman who required little privacy herself. The constant companionship of travel had tightened the strain.
“You’ll find that I’m magnanimous in victory,” he said with mock formality, “unlike certain people I could name. You’re free to do as you please while I’m gone.”
“You’re a prince,” she murmured.
He leaned forward and quickly kissed her unmoving cheek. “I’d better find my walking shoes.” As he turned, his glance caught the cards. For an instant he imagined he saw complicity in the king’s handsome unblinking face.
He hurried through the villa, gaze averted from the havoc of clothes and luggage
on the floor; rummaged through the BMW until he found his rucksack and camera; changed quickly, slipped a bottle of chilled white wine into the pack, and went back out to the pool.
There he stopped in surprise.
Linden was prone on a lounge chair, wearing only sunglasses. Her clothes lay on the deck in a tangled pile. She was smoking a cigarette and reading a copy of Paris Match while a glass of Vouvray sweated in the shade beneath her. It was nearly the first time he had seen her abandon herself to indolence.
“Are you magnanimous enough to oil my back?” she said, and he heard with relief that humor had returned to her voice.
He knelt beside her and began to work in the scented lotion, feeling her muscles relax under his fingers. She was travel-weary too; they both needed rest. Her skin was pale, hot now with the sun that rarely touched it, slick with oil; her flesh just beginning to acquire the delicate softness of a woman leaving youth. He slid his fingertips lightly up the insides of her thighs to their joining. She made a deep contented sound.
“I’ll be back in two hours,” he said.
“What if the mailman or somebody comes while you’re gone?”
“That will give us both something to think about.”
“What if you run into bears or rattlesnakes?”
“They’ll just have to take their chances.”
“I’m doing this for you, you know—cultivating laziness. That’s what men really want, isn’t it? Naked, oiled, always-available women? Who don’t threaten them?”
McTell’s gaze scanned the mountainside until he saw what looked like an overgrown switchback. He patted her rump and stood. “I want you to be happy, Lin,” he said.
A graveled path led to the edge of the grounds.
** ** **
From the villa the ancient stones had seemed a mark of permanence, but as McTell approached, they brought to mind the boast that Shelley had reported, with such cruel irony, carved into the time-ravaged remains of a monument to a long-dead king: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! The mountain itself had been hewed off flush with the fortress’s walls on three sides, while a steep brush-choked ravine guarded the entrance. The archway had undoubtedly once held a portcullis, and McTell remained unable to shake the inner voice that whispered of being herded in at spear-point, prisoner of some savage feudal lord bent on revenge. It was a relief to step into the open courtyard. He crouched with his back against a shaded wall, opened the wine, and took several long swallows. It was tart and fragrant, and his head lightened suddenly.
The building’s outline was an approximate rectangle, perhaps forty yards wide by sixty long. The walls were many feet thick, largely crumbled away; in only a few places did vestiges of battlements remain. He paced the rough lichen-covered paving stones, footsteps loud in the silence. Stubs of what had probably been interior foundation walls were choked by squat, ugly nettles. He remembered that the Templars had built their great churches round; but this was a minor outpost, no doubt acquired either as a spoil of war or as a gift of a noble who had joined the Order. That the place had not been maintained was obvious, although an iron grate, badly rusted, was set over an opening in the ground—most likely a dungeon. But the south wall, and the vista it promised, called to him first. He climbed carefully to the top, testing for loose stones. There he crouched, safely back from the vertigo of the sheer drop down the mountainside, and raised his eyes.
Perhaps twenty miles south, thousands of feet down, shone the vast azure expanse of the ancient world’s sea of seas, horizon barely distinguishable from the lighter blue of the sky, as if it went on forever. The Mediterranean, he thought: the middle of the earth.
In Provence, more than anyplace else, he felt the almost boyish swell of wonder that had sparked his love affair with the remote past. Perhaps it had to do with the Roman remains that lay everywhere: the arenas, amphitheaters, aqueducts, built centuries before the great cathedrals, themselves ancient beyond his comprehension, had even been conceived. Before the Romans, the Greeks had colonized the southern coast of Gaul, and before the Greeks, peoples whose histories were shrouded in mystery and myth; and McTell recalled that when Schliemann had exhumed Homer’s Troy, dead and buried for three thousand years, he had found beneath it the ruins of six previous settlements.
It put a certain perspective on the self-preoccupation of the modern world.
He turned, taking in the mountainsides that sloped sharply into vast draws sweeping to the sea, rusty soil interwoven with emerald vegetation. To the northeast lay the handful of buildings that made up the village of Saint-Bertrand-sur-Seyre. The slender jade band of the river flowed through it, winding around the bases of the mountains, so nearly dried up that it had pooled in places. Back toward the sea were red tile roofs scattered in thickening clusters, black ribbons of roads with insect cars moving imperceptibly along, and the thicker traffic-clogged artery of the coastal highway. The gleaming mass of a city would be Cannes, with its harbor of swanlike yachts; and offshore, hazy spots of land could only be the lies de Lerins, where the Man in the Iron Mask had spent the last years of his wretched life. McTell reopened the wine, and, warmed by sunshine, slipped into the introspection he had been craving.
At the age of twenty-two, John McTell had turned from the study of law—against the stern wishes of his family and of the professors who had overseen his honor-laden undergraduate career—to that of medieval history. The reasons he had been able to give at the time were unsatisfactory even to himself, and years passed before he understood the simple truth: that in his last year of college he had fallen in love, for the first and only time; had lost; and had gone into a lifelong retreat.
For a few months the world had been transformed, as if by a magic lens, into a place of wonder and beauty. But she had left him for another man; and when, over the unending year that followed, he found himself plunged back into a lonely, passionless world, it had been almost more than he could bear. His heart had turned away from practicality, from the mainstream of contemporary life, and sought comfort in the romance of the past. Its mystique provided an almost-adequate substitute for what he had lost.
He remained a brilliant student, and he channeled that brilliance into the study of history, mastering languages, cultures, eras. The honors continued: two well-received books by the age of thirty-five; a full professorship at one of the nation’s prestigious universities at thirty-eight; and last year, at forty-eight, the publication of the book that had raised his reputation from modest fame in academic circles to worldwide eminence. The Death of the Lance, a study exploring the end of the chivalric age and the seeds of the Reformation, had won the recognition of even the bitterest pedants. Though the territory was well traveled by previous historians, McTell’s book was profound, academically impeccable, lucid, and provided that rarest of commodities in scholarly research: a genuine insight into vastly overworked material, a fresh and important perspective.
But the real story lay in the ten empty years between receiving his professorship, at thirty-eight, and the publication of The Death of the Lance.
Once McTell had achieved the things he had considered so important—status, reputation, career—his world had not grown brighter still, as he had always assumed it would. On the contrary, it had begun to crumble—not from any cataclysm, but a little at a time—into apathy, boredom, and the suspicion that what he was doing was not after all so very worthwhile. A series of romantic involvements interested him progressively less. His popularity with students was undermined by his increasing sense that, at heart, all of them were toadying for grades. And the material he taught came to seem dull and unimportant in the context of the lightning-quick technologizing of the modem world. How was he supposed to impart weight to the teachings of Abelard or Aquinas when his students went home to computers?
McTell was not the sort of man to fall into bitterness, but he was easy prey to ennui. He liked to think of himself as a soldier who had fought too many battles, and who had at last come to understand tha
t winning or losing meant little—the result could only be more war. His publications ceased; he lectured from the same notes year after year; and he began to detect in the manner of his colleagues the sort of knowing condescension reserved for those who, once tenured, never exerted themselves again. But even pride could not rescue him. He lapsed instead into cynical passivity, and began to drink during the day.
Until one April afternoon, when a graduate student in journalism named Linden Sumner appeared in his office, asking to interview him for the school newspaper. When
McTell declined—wearily amused, a little drunk—the request became a demand. He had sat up then and taken a closer look at the woman confronting him: attractive in a severe sort of way; brisk and determined; in her early thirties, but seemingly undismayed at her late start on a career. He soon learned that she was recently divorced, and something of an heiress.
He consented to the interview. It took the form of several long conversations over a period of weeks, moving from coffee to drinks to dinner—and away from European history toward his personal one. Soon she decided that he needed a part-time assistant. With that same brisk determination, she took charge of his office and then of his life, and when she finally led him to bed, she demonstrated that she was just as efficient there as behind a desk. By then it was clear that his existence was infinitely simpler with her than without, and they were married. Linden finished neither the interview nor the school year. But under her firm influence he began to work again, and while she typed and researched and organized relentlessly, he found that the brilliance he had thought dead was only dormant; and he emerged from his ten-year decline stronger than he had ever been.
So here he was, at the peak of his life and career: healthy and vital, with the sort of rugged good looks that aged attractively; well enough off so that money need never be a problem; on the verge of producing another great work; and blessed, at last, with a wife.
Yet he could not escape the growing sense that while in his days of drinking and cynicism he seemed to have given up, he was really waiting—waiting for the person or event that would arrive suddenly and change his life; that would, if only briefly, ignite his world once more with the priceless flame of passion.
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