by Simon Raven
‘We are given no precise measurements but we do have some notion of spatial relations. The shrine was built on an east-west axis. In the middle of its south wall there was a door leading into a cloister, which must have been built at least partly into the hillside.’
‘To be of any use at all, that cloister must be at least five yards’ square,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘Did it have proper galleries?’
‘Neither the time nor the space available would have sufficed for the construction of these. It can’t have been much more than a walled yard, half roofed over, perhaps, to give the Despoina shelter when she walked there.’
‘Did she need shelter? I mean, to what extent could she feel damp or cold or heat? Obviously these…affected her corporal condition…but could she feel discomfort?’
‘A nice question. If, as we think possible, she was really alive when first confined, then plainly she could. But the assumption on which the place was built for her was that she was dead (though still mobile). In which case, does one assume that her nerves no longer operated? Probably not. And yet her senses would seem to have worked: in some fashion she saw and heard. But either way, sweetheart, I don’t think much attention would have been paid to her comfort. She was an embarrassment, not least to herself, whom all concerned, including herself, wanted safely out of the way as soon as possible. So up went the shrine, up went a crudely walled cloister adjacent – with the minimum thought of amenity.’
‘And up – or rather down – went a crypt,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘Where was this in relation to the rest?’
‘Underneath the cloister, apparently. But to get to it you had to go back from the cloister into the shrine, in which there were some steps that led down under the altar at the east end and into a little passage, along which you – or rather she – turned right and walked south to the crypt. This was entered at its east end, where there was another altar, and formed a rectangle longer than the cloister east-west but not so broad north-south. Apart from the altar the only other things in the crypt were a couch, a table and a chair for Xanthippe’s… domestic occasions.’
‘How was it lit?’
‘She was given a supply of candles. Apparently she liked to look at her Écrevisse candle-lit in the crypt far more than in the daylight of the shrine, which itself was lit by a circular east window over the altar, or al fresco in the cloister. However, as Hubert points out in the Appendix, the supply of candles would have run out after a time – and by then everyone who knew and cared about her predicament was on the road south.’
‘What about the Castellan? Couldn’t he have been asked to deliver a supply?’
‘The Castellan was a simple soldier, whom no one wished to burden with sophisticated problems. All he had been told, both before and after the one attempt to rifle the shrine, was that there was something abominable about it and that nobody must tamper with it. The place had now been resealed, so let it stay that way. If parcels of chandlery could get in, God knew what might not get out – despite Xanthippe’s promise to keep herself to herself, which she might find irksome as the years went on. Sooner or later she would have to accustom herself to doing without candles, however prettily they played on her shimmering and many-hued Écrevisse, and that must simply be that.’
‘Anyway, Ptoly, for how long, one now wonders, would she actually have been able to see the Écrevisse? I mean, if she really was a corpse, albeit with a soul attached…’
‘That whole area is very dubious. All we can say is that at the time she was consigned to her quarters – seven days after her supposed death – she was still seeing, hearing and talking with pretty fair efficiency…according to Hubert. And since then, of course, nobody at all has seen her.’
‘Ah,’ said Jo-Jo: ‘this brings us to the echte practical question: what happened to the shrine, and to Xanthippe (in whatever state she might have been) inside it? One would expect there to be ruins or traces. But from what I gather, there is now neither sight nor sign of anything.’
‘A very good point, my dear.’
Ptolemaeos helped himself to a pile of praires farcies and poured his niece and himself tall glasses of Montrachet.
‘The frustrating thing,’ he continued, ‘is that there are no accurate records or explanations. There may have been once, but the library in which they would have been housed, in the premises of the Department of Monuments and Antiquities in Eu, was destroyed during the Invasion of Normandy. After the war the loss of the records was simply shrugged off (en fin, qu est-ce qu’ on peut faire?) and no one in the Department took much interest in the Castle of Arques for many years. Indeed, no one would be taking much interest now, or so my friend des Veules-les-Roses tells me, were it not for a romantic attachment which a young official called Jean-Marie Guiscard has conceived for the place. His imagination was fired by Henri Martel de Longueil’s ballad and by the Chronicle of Hubert of Avallon, both works of fairly wide circulation in scholarly circles. Of the Appendix, of course, he knows nothing, and his recent and exhaustive search of the archives at Eu only confirmed what was already well known, that all specialized records of Arques, its construction, its alteration, its military and architectural development, were blown to atoms by a two-inch mortar bomb during street fighting in the city in the autumn of 1944. So, the fate of the shrine, and of its occupant, would be completely unknown to us, were it not for one rather remarkable circumstance…or chain of circumstances.
‘For the first link we have to go right back to the Mani, to Ilyssos. In a church in Ilyssos there is an inscription, probably composed or commanded by Xanthippe’s father, the Kyrios Phaedron. Ivan has read and checked it quite often. Carved on a plain tablet of marble, it begins with a lamentation for the death of the Despoina Xanthippe and continues with a prayer – a very odd prayer – for her soul: PRAY FOR HER SOUL THAT IT MAY RETURN IN PEACE TO THIS HER OWN LAND…’
‘What’s so odd about that?’ said Jo-Jo. ‘You yourself told me that the Ilyssans believe that the soul, being at last brought to life by the death of the body, often tours the places where the body has spent its life “to see what it has been missing”. It knows instinctively where the body has been, you said, and goes off on a check-up round.’
‘But the belief also holds, my darling, that the soul needn’t do this…that it does not always do it, and it certainly needn’t, and that the important thing is, from the point of view of itself and its well wishers, that as soon as possible after leaving the scene of demise it should brave the Wilderness and commence its journey to the Throne. Pottering about the former haunts of its now defunct body is quite irrelevant. Whoever composed that prayer, which was Phaedron almost for certain, should have wished Xanthippe’s soul all speed into the presence of its Maker, not expressed a hope that it should come to Ilyssos. As it is, what the prayer asks is that the soul of Xanthippe should “return in peace” to Ilyssos, thus implying not just a casual visit, which might not matter much, but a definite and even prolonged sojourn. We conclude that Phaedron desiderated an event that he should have deprecated. Why?’
‘He may have loved her very much…and perhaps he hoped to make some kind of contact, which would have been more likely if she hung around for some time, nice and calmly, than if she flitted straight off on the long trek to Heaven.’
‘Right. He hoped to make contact. Perhaps he loved her, as you say; and perhaps he also wanted something from her. Information: just what did you do with that very beautiful and valuable Écrevisse which went with you to Normandy?’
‘Ptoly…how too squalid.’
‘Of me – or Phaedron?’
‘Both of you.’
‘Nothing squalid about a brilliant work of art worth six million quid. And to Phaedron the disappearance of that Écrevisse would surely have been a misery and a mystery. All the other items of Xanthippe’s dowry (all those of any importance) had come back to Ilyssos with Henri and the girls. But no sign of the Écrevisse – not a single jewel off its back. Where on earth was the fucking thing? Now,
neither Lalage nor any of the other girls was going to tell him, because they knew how important it was to Xanthippe that the creature should stay where it was, undisturbed. So they didn’t want Phaedron to get it back, and they may well have been scared about what might happen to him if he tried. Anyone who knew anything about that shrine also knew that it was not to be interfered with; and mum was the word about any aspect of that affair, for everyone’s sake, including the Lord Phaedron’s.’
‘Could Henri have told him anything?’
‘No. As you remember, Henri withdrew from Arques before the fun and games began, and returned only after Xanthippe… had been disposed of.
‘Dunque. No one tells Phaedron where the Écrevisse has gone to. They simply do not know, the girls tell him. Oh yes, they all knew it was there in the chest as part of the dowry when they set out from Ilyssos with their mistress; and oh yes, they all saw it from time to time on the journey or at Arques: but no, they have no idea what became of it. Pressed to state a definite time after which they saw it no more, they improvise: it disappeared, they depose, round about the time that Hero died.
‘Aha, thinks Phaedron, perhaps there is some connection or explanation there. What happend to Hero? he enquires. She… had a nasty accident (the usual formula, at that period, for accounting for anything awkward)…and her remains were not recoverable. (In fact the bare bones of Hero, all that Xanthippe had left of her, had been put in a weighted sack and thrown by the girls into the moat.) Could the Écrevisse be with these remains, asks Phaedron, desperate for a lead, wherever they might be? But the girls just shrug and pout and shake their heads and mutter and titter and give nothing. Phaedron starts to fume with impatience. For some time he has hoped (and prayed) that the soul of Xanthippe might come along and give him a clue, but it hasn’t and he now reckons (quite rightly) that it won’t, and he makes a snap decision. He will go to Arques and look for himself. Whatever has happened to the Écrevisse, it can’t have gone far without somebody’s having noticed it, even if he can’t get anything out of these dumb (or dishonest) hand-maidens. So he will go to Arques, on the respectable pretext of making a pilgrimage to his daughter’s tomb, and investigate the matter in person.
‘He further decides that Henri, who has found no gainful occupation in the Peloponnese, can accompany him as guide and courier. Henri’s social standing in Normandy will be a useful asset. As it happens, Henri has now married Lalage (a cross-bow wedding, if you take me) and there must be some question of whether or not she should come too. But to everyone’s relief, she pleads her advancing pregnancy as an excuse for staying behind. In fact she is as strong as a horse and quite fit to travel, in a litter at least, but she is not going to get mixed up in the kind of grand guignol with knobs on which she reckons may be in store for anyone who goes into that shrine by the tilt yard. Henri, who is only too happy to off-load her and be free for fumbles and tumbles on the trip north, accepts her plea and leaves her with her parents in Ilyssos. Either he will return when Phaedron does or he will send for her after the child has been born. So here are loving kisses, one, two and three, and off prances Henri with Phaedron and a train of young Maniot knights and nobles, some time around Michaelmas of 1256.’
‘How on earth do you know all this, Ptoly?’
‘As it happens, I am just about to tell you. The story, as you will see, provides its own authentification.’
‘All right. But tell me first: does Lalage give Henri any hint, before he goes, of what he may be getting into?’
‘No. She leaves him to find out for himself. She wants Henri to go, and she don’t propose to put him off by telling him a scary story.’
‘Why does she want him to go?’
‘Because Phaedron will pay good money, because she thinks Henri should check up on his (their) estates in Normandy, and because she has some zestful entertainments planned for the time of his absence.’
‘While she’s pregnant?’
‘The best time, provided no one gets faddy. There can never be, you see, any tangible evidence of misdemeanour.’
‘Surely, in those days Henri would have left her padlocked?’
‘Padlocking a Greek is like putting a paperweight on a shadow. Anyway, her parents would have objected (family honour), and don’t forget that Henri was a liberal progressive.’
‘So. Hey boys for Normandy. What happened next?’
‘One of the things that happened was that Henri started writing a kind of diary in verse of the events of the journey. Not a day-to-day record, but a series of poems, of varying lengths, which described and celebrated the salient occurrences. For centuries after Henri’s death these poems were lost. But as my friend, the Marquis des Veules-les-Roses, also Sire de Longueil and Henri’s descendant, was well aware, there had always been a legend in the family that there was, somewhere, a lost collection of manuscript poems by Henri Martel which had to do with his later adventures, after escorting the hand-maidens back to the Mani; and indeed they were eventually discovered, along with a copy of the ‘Ballad of the Lady Xanthippe’, in the library of a monastery near Areopolis. Ivan Barraclough found them while engaged on his historical research in the region.
‘There was also an Epistle, written or dictated by Phaedron’s son and heir, the Lord Meno, which explained what had happened. Henri’s poems contained a great many blunt remarks about Phaedron’s motives and conduct, and a pretty comprehensive exposé of the eccentricities which went on after they had all arrived at Arques. For although Henri had been allowed to set off north in total ignorance of what might be cooking for him, he began to wise up as time went on (since Phaedron’s conversation was not always very discreet), and when they finally got to Arques he saw – well, what he saw – and set it down in his verse. According to the Kyrios Meno, his father discovered what Henri was up to and realized that the manuscripts of those poems were dynamite. But since there was as yet only one copy of them, preventive measures were clear and easy. Phaedron seized the poems, had his attendants murder Henri, in case he should rewrite the poems or otherwise broadcast their substance, and then, his business in Arques being concluded, rode back to the Mani. Once there, he locked away Henri’s injurious verses, along with his presentation copy of the Ballad of Xanthippe, which Henri had given him when he first turned up at Ilyssos. This latter item was quite harmless in itself, and in any case other copies of it had already been widely distributed; but I suppose Phaedron felt that all souvenirs of Henri might as well be kept together in one place…where they were duly secreted and in due course forgotten.
‘Meanwhile, Henri’s wife, Lalage, had dropped a fine bold baby son, and the Villehardouin Prince of the Morea (or Lamorie) had claimed the pair of them as kin. After a time a male guardian or warden was appointed for the child, who, with his mother, was sent back to Henri’s Manor in Normandy and continued, when grown, to propagate the line of the Martels, Sires of Longueil, later Viscounts of Barville and Counts of Offranville and Cany-Barville, finally Marquises des Veules-les-Roses – a line of which my friend at Barville is, I think, the last. However, before Lalage and the boy were moved on to France, Lal had of course enquired pretty fiercely of Phaedron what had become of Henri in the course of their expedition. She was told, inevitably, that Henri had “had a nasty accident” and with that she had to be content – probably didn’t care all that much so long as her position and her son’s were properly recognized. But one lead she did get: a strong hint from a handsome friend in Phaedron’s guard that things hadn’t been quite as simple as she’d been told and that if ever she could get hold of Henri’s poems these would a tale unfold… No doubt she was curious, but then she and the boy were sent for by the Prince, there was a new world now for her to bustle in, and off she went without ever seeing her husband’s oeuvre –’
‘But she did know of the poems, and very roughly what they were about, so the rumour that they existed was started by her and passed down in the family for centuries?’
‘Right. And then ca
nny old Ivan happened on them about eighteen months back, when he was looking for something quite else, a manuscript history of some convent in Gythaion where the nuns had practised white magic. That manuscript he did not find, but Henri’s poems he came across one April morning, written in Henri’s own bold hand and old French, stacked in an unlocked casket which was sitting on a shelf in the linen cupboard of a tiny monastery on a cliff over the sea just south of Areopolis. There they were, fortunately in an excellent state of preservation, and with them was Meno’s Epistle of provenance and explanation. He had come on the poems after his father’s death, had enquired and discovered (from a surviving member of the expedition to Arques) how and why they had come to be where they were, had thought of destroying them, had enjoyed them far too much to do so, and had finally given them into the discreet care of the learned monks of the little monastery on the cliff. Learned they might have been in the Kyrios Meno’s day, but seven centuries later, when Ivan made his find, they were illiterate and drunken boobies, who neither knew nor cared what the manuscript was, whence it came or whither it went – which was by the hand of a trusted guest of Ivan to the place in which it properly belonged, des Veules-les-Roses’ Château at Cany.’
‘And of course the poems narrated all that you’ve just been telling me –’
‘– Narrated or suggested all that I’ve just been telling you –’
‘– About why and how Phaedron set off for Arques, and all the rest of it…which Henri had gradually come to learn, and to record in his verses, as the journey went on.’
‘Right. Now, when Ivan discovered the MS, the Arques project had been long decided upon and was already far advanced. But as you may imagine, those poems were a real bonus. They told us what happened when Phaedron arrived at September Castle and asked to be taken to his daughter’s tomb…and what happened when he was.’
