by Tom Harper
I knew the history of the Normans before I came here: how they conquer everywhere they go like a plague. First their own duchy, then Sicily, England, Antioch. Now that I’m in their heartland, I understand why. There are no safe havens in Normandy: their entire kingdom is a frontier. There are Bretons to the west, Angevins and Poitevins to the south, French to the east and Flemings in the north. Hautfort is in the north, a particularly troublesome region near Flanders. It breeds hard men. Guy de Hautfort is a squat, barrel-chested man, a flint protruding from the chalky Norman soil. He sparks easily if struck.
Guy’s seneschal is called Gornemant. His arms are a quartered shield, each a different colour, like a fool’s coat, so we call him the jester. It’s ironic: he’s a grim, stern man who never smiles. His beard is grey as steel, and his eyes as hard. He rode with Duke Robert and the Army of God on crusade; he was there when Jerusalem fell. We often beg him to tell us those stories, but he never does. His face stiffens and he blinks, as if a speck of that desert dust is still lodged in his eye.
Gornemant takes charge of our instruction. Day after day, he teaches us when to rein in the horse and when to prick him with our spurs; how to hold the shield so that it rests on the horse’s neck and how to fewter a lance so that it doesn’t glance off the enemy. He watches our swordplay and tells us how we would have fared with real weapons: this blow would barely have scratched his arm, that one would have stuck him through or taken off his head. Very rarely, he lets us gallop through the orchard and tilt at the bladders he has strung from the apple trees, or crouch in the branches and try to leap on to a passing horse. These are my favourite days. For the rest, we practise on each other. We wear quilted cloth armour, but I think its only benefit is to mimic the cramping effect of chain mail.
If it were only practice at arms, I might enjoy it more. But there are other duties. My lord Guy must be dressed and undressed, armed and disarmed; he needs his food served, his meat sliced, his cup filled. I have to fight even to win the right to perform these chores – all the squires want the privilege, to attract his attention. You must be first outside his bedroom door in the morning, the first to his stirrup when he rides in, last to leave the great hall at night. Then you must attend to your own chores: sew up the tears in the cloth armour and try and stuff more rags inside, hoping it will hurt less tomorrow; wash clothes; sweep the grate. The other squires have servants of their own, but my uncle says there is no money for servants for me. He has my father’s castle to rebuild, after all. I think he means to build it in stone.
When I lie in my bed, I tell myself stories to get to sleep. My adversary is always the same – the black knight as tall as a house. In my stories I meet him in a glade, in a waste forest, a withered heath: I shatter his lance, break his shield, dent his armour and finally cut off his head with a single blow and mount it on a stake.
I always defeat him. But he returns in my dreams, and there he has the upper hand.
Guy has a son called Jocelin, two years older than me. If he wasn’t there, I’d be less unhappy. Guy may be as cold and hard as quenched steel, but his son is still in the crucible, hot as the fire that surrounds him. His mood changes with the wind, the same way iron flushes and pales under the bellows. You touch him at your peril.
Indisputably, Jocelin is the leader of our pack of dogs. Like all leaders, he affirms his power by exercising it on the weakest – me. He encourages the other boys to play pranks on me. One night he hid a rat in my bed. Another time, when I’d spent two hours painting a boar on one of Guy’s shields, he walked by and tipped the bowl of paint across it so that my work was ruined. If I achieve anything, a few words from him can make it feel worthless. If I fail, which I do often, I never hear the end of it.
I hate all the other boys, but I hate Jocelin the most.
My one solace, in my few spare moments, is reading. It’s something else they tease me for. Guy’s chaplain is supposed to instruct us in the rudiments of reading and writing: most of the boys ignore him, or threaten to practise their swordplay on him. I have no need of him – I’m already more literate than I’ll ever need to be as a knight – but I still seek him out. He gives me books. Not prayer books and breviaries, but proper stories. One day, when I’ve saved him from a cruel prank that Jocelin was planning to play, he rewards me with a particularly rare book. The pages have been worn thin by many hands, the binding’s frayed and one of the gatherings has come unstitched, but the words are like honey on my tongue. The author is called Ovid, and the stories are fantastic concoctions of myth and wonder. I wonder how I have lived this long and never heard them, why they are not as common as water. I think even my mother didn’t know them.
One afternoon, I’m lying on my mattress reading when Jocelin comes in. The story’s captivated me: I don’t notice him enter until suddenly the book is snatched out of my hands, tearing the corner of the page. I leap up, outraged, but Jocelin’s already running out the door. If I let him get away, he’ll throw the book down a cesspit or into the moat for sure. I race after him, brandishing my wooden sword: along the corridor, down the twisting stair and across the courtyard. A flock of geese squawk in alarm as I push through the door into the great hall – straight into the back of someone.
He’s too big to be Jocelin. It might be a servant laying fresh rushes on the floor, but servants don’t wear camelin coats trimmed with fur. He turns angrily. He’s used to collisions on the battlefield, but not in his own hall.
I stammer an apology. ‘Jocelin stole my book.’
Guy’s eyes switch to his son. ‘Did you?’
Jocelin, standing by the hearth, shuffles in his place and flushes. He’s embarrassed his father has not immediately taken his side – and angry. He opts for defiance.
‘Perhaps you want me to kneel down, put my hands between his and swear fealty. Become his liegeman.’
‘I want you to give back his book.’
‘If he wants it, he can fight me for it.’
He’s six inches taller than me, broader and stronger. Whenever we spar, he beats me. But on a battlefield, you can’t choose your adversary. I put up my wooden sword.
Jocelin grabs the blade and twists it out of my hand. He throws it into the fireplace. ‘If you want to fight me, fight like a man.’
Gornemant goes to the armoury and fetches two small bucklers and two old swords. They’re iron, immensely heavy: their point and edges have been made blunt, but the weight alone could break someone’s neck. The other boys push back the tables and stand on them, an impromptu grandstand. The servants forget their chores and gather at the back of the hall. One of them tries to take wagers, but he doesn’t get any offers. The result isn’t in doubt.
We face each other down the length of the hall. Jocelin swings first; I block the blow with my shield and my arm goes numb. It leaves me too dizzy to counter-attack. I step backwards and Jocelin advances. I see the smirk on his face and wish so desperately I could wipe it off. I sway to my left then drive forward. He thinks I’m going for his sword-arm and turns; instead, I swing the flat of the blade like a club, right across his face.
Blood swells from his cut lip. I wanted to break his nose, but perhaps I’ve dislodged a tooth. Some of the crowd gasp. Gornemant scowls: if I’d done it on the training ground, he’d call me a Welsh savage and hit me.
Jocelin spits out a gob of blood. His eyes are wild, but he knows how to control himself. With terrifying force, he gets his shield rim inside my guard and pushes my sword out of the way. It opens me up: he batters my ribs with three hammer blows, then punches me in the gut with the pommel.
There’s no point resisting – it’ll just hurt more. I let my legs go and fall to the floor. Jocelin’s poised for another blow. He looks as if he’s ready to break my neck, but his father steps in and puts his hand on the blade.
‘That’s enough.’
Give me a javelin, I think, and I would make you regret it.
It’s not the last time Jocelin and I fight. But later, the swo
rds are sharper – and the consequences catastrophic.
XI
Luxembourg
‘YOU’RE WHERE?’
Doug’s voice, hazy and confused. A silence followed, so long Ellie thought she’d lost the connection. ‘Sorry. For a moment I thought you said you were in Luxembourg.’
‘They gave me ten minutes’ notice. I tried to call but you didn’t answer.’
‘What are they – the Gestapo? Nobody has to go that quickly.’
‘I know it’s mad. It’s just the way it works.’
A yawn came at her down the phone. ‘Did they put you up somewhere nice, at least?’
Ellie glanced at the designer wallpaper and the fifty-inch television on the wall. ‘It’s OK.’
‘That’s good. You know where I spent the night?’
‘I thought you’d go back to Oxford.’
‘I spent it on a chair in the lobby of your tower in the Barbican. I must have rung you twenty times. I tried the bank, the college in case you’d gone back. I was about to call the police.’
‘I fell asleep,’ Ellie admitted. She’d finished her bath and lain down on the bed, waiting for Doug to get out of the library. The next thing she knew it was six-thirty and the hotel phone was ringing with an alarm call she hadn’t ordered.
‘Did you sleep well?’ Exhaustion slurred his words, but the sarcasm came through sharp and clear.
‘Listen, I’m so sorry. I swear I’ll make it up to you. We knew it was going to be like this in the beginning.’
‘That’s why I told you not to do it.’
‘I promise it’ll settle down.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘It’s six in the morning.’
‘Seven in Luxembourg. I’ll call you tonight.’
‘When are you coming back?’
‘I don’t know.’
His voice became more distant. ‘It’s like you’ve stepped through a door and I don’t exist any more. You’re in your world, and I’m nowhere.’
‘I’ll make it up to you,’ she repeated.
‘I’m going back to Oxford. You know where to find me if you want me. Whenever you’re back in England.’
‘I love you.’ But he’d hung up.
Ellie’s textbook defined due diligence as the careful examination of a company’s records to ascertain all the material facts regarding its financial position. Pry before you buy, the lecturer on her course had called it. In fact, Ellie thought, it was more like trawling your hand through a haystack and seeing how many needles pricked you.
Talhouett Holdings SA occupied one of the big glass blocks overlooking the gorge, just up the street from the hotel. The views might have been stunning, but Ellie didn’t see them. The moment she arrived, a guard led her like a prisoner to a windowless room at the back of the building, the data room. The Monsalvat team – five men and an empty chair – huddled around a plastic table at one end of the room piled with files and cups of coffee. The rival bidder’s bankers had the other end. In between, and all around, stood racks of steel shelving, overloaded with boxes, folders, discs and papers. The entrails of the company for capitalism’s priests to pick over, and read the signs as best they could. They took up so much space that there was no room for aisles between the shelves: instead, the company had invested in library-grade rolling stacks, digitally controlled shelves on wheels, which rolled and rumbled apart like magic doors to open a path to the shelf you needed.
It was like being stuck in a mundane corner of hell. After an hour, Ellie wanted to run screaming from the room – except the door was locked, monitored by a security guard who picked his teeth. By lunchtime, when a sullen girl brought sandwiches and soft drinks, she would have paid back her entire salary to be out of there. Her colleagues all came from the local Monsalvat office: they ignored her, and talked amongst themselves in the Luxembourgeois dialect. She got more attention from their rivals. One in particular, a thin man with a greying ponytail and a tie that drooped well below his collar, seemed to be staring at her every time she looked up. He chewed gum incessantly. That afternoon, as Ellie was coming back from the toilet, she met him going the other way. She tried to brush past with a smile, but he angled himself across the corridor to block her path.
‘Lechowski,’ he introduced himself. He took a pack of gum from his pocket and offered her a stick. ‘I must apologise if I stare at you, but you are the only beautiful thing in that room to look at.’
Ellie had heard similar propositions in every walk of her life, from the streets of South Wales to the hallowed quads in Oxford. She knew she wasn’t extraordinary to look at, but she had some unwanted aura that gave men the impression they had a claim on her. It’s because you look kind, her mother had said, tart as ever. Whatever it was, she still hadn’t got used to it.
‘There’s a lot to get through,’ she demurred. She tried to edge forward, but Lechowski stood firm. He wore a cologne that he’d probably bought in Duty Free. It made a sickening confection with the minty air blasting out of his mouth.
‘You are staying at the Sofitel?’
Her heart sank. Blanchard had said the other bidders were staying there too. Perhaps you can get to know them.
Reluctantly, she nodded.
‘Maybe I see you in the bar this evening. Luxembourg is a graveyard at night, but I know some places to have fun.’
He wouldn’t let her pass without some concession. She offered a false, desperate smile.
‘That would be nice.’
London
Like the City itself, the Monsalvat building had grown and spread over centuries. You could pick out individual items and date them – a twelfth-century stone still bearing the marks of the chisel that cut it; an eighteenth-century brick baked in the kilns at Southwark; a twenty-first century steel beam designed by computers – but the whole, the way it knit together and functioned, was indivisible, the sum of its history.
In one of its oldest, darkest corners, a filthy figure lay huddled on the floor. His hands were chained together and so were his feet, and those chains were themselves chained together to keep him in an awkward, doubled-over position strung up like a puppet. He couldn’t move one limb without moving them all – and to do so was agony. Both his arms were broken. His legs were a mess of scars and dried blood; the only places you could see skin were where they’d swabbed it clean to attach the electrodes.
But he wasn’t defeated. They’d thrown everything they could at him and he hadn’t broken. He’d held firm to his training, his cause. He hadn’t given them what they wanted.
The door swung open. The thick-set man with the broken nose and the tattoo creeping out from his collar stood in the opening, framed by a wall of sodium-orange light. The face from his nightmares.
‘Let’s try this one more time.’
The knife glimmered in his hand as he advanced into the room.
‘Tell me about Mirabeau.’
Luxembourg
Ellie left at six thirty, the last of the Monsalvat team to go. She’d packed up her files fifteen minutes earlier, but sat and waited until Lechowski had disappeared into the stacks before she slipped out. Dusk had already fallen; an autumn chill nipped her cheeks, biting life back into her. She couldn’t face the hotel, so she strolled across the Pont Adolphe to the old town. Far below and out of sight, police tape flapped in the evening breeze.
Ellie hadn’t heard anything from Christine Lafarge, so she assumed their shopping trip was off. She didn’t mind. She wandered through the streets, looking at the bright windows and the passers-by. Many of the shops were familiar, the same chain stores and fast-food franchises you’d find in any major city. But somehow, filled with people speaking other languages, they felt foreign.
The lights and crowds faded away as she moved east, into the oldest part of the town. Here the cobbled streets were narrower and the walls taller, with high-set windows far above the street, as if they still distrusted the world outside. Remnants of the old fortificati
ons began to appear: the stub of a rampart hacked off like a limb; a gateway without gates arching across the road.
The night was getting cold and Ellie had no coat. She decided to go back. She’d reached the bottom of the hill, a small enclave in the ravine where gabled houses peered over a still river. She wasn’t sure if she could get up on the other side; she turned to retrace her steps. And that was when she saw him.
A dim figure stood on the bridge at the bottom of the hill. He wore a white plastic rain cape with the hood pulled up, though there was no rain about. She didn’t know how long he’d been there.
You’re in the middle of a big city in the heart of Europe, she told herself. Of course there’ll be other people about. Except he was the only one, and the bright lights on the plateau above seemed far away, like passing aeroplanes.
The man lifted his head. He seemed to be staring straight at her, though in the shadows of his hood it was impossible to tell. He raised an arm as if in greeting. The plastic cape spread like a bat’s wing. Slowly and deliberately, like a child stalking a pet, he began walking towards her.
Ellie turned and ran. Back up the hill, back towards the lights and safety. Her shoes were impractical: the heels skidded and teetered on the uneven cobbles. She pulled them off and ran in stockinged feet, feeling the damp ooze between her toes. There was no one to see her. Through the gateless arch that was no protection, along undefended ramparts, until she came out in a square between the looming blocks of some government ministry. She glanced back, but there was no one, no rush of pursuing footsteps or shadows advancing along the wall.
She looked around to get her bearings. Which way was the hotel? It couldn’t be more than a quarter of a mile away, but she was desperate for a cab. She had a cramp in her side; her legs burned and her feet ached.
And there he was.
She couldn’t believe it. He’d appeared like a ghost, like a vampire out of the air. The spectral white coat flapped in the breeze as he walked towards her across the square.
