Lion Heart

by Justin Cartwright

  I walked round the castle tower and entered the keep, where Pierre Basile, the man with the frying pan, could have been positioned with his crossbow. It was not possible to climb up to the top of the remaining battlements. But it was clear that the scale of the siege was unworthy of the attention of the most famous king in Europe, unless he had something else on his mind.

  Later that night when we were lying in bed, Cathérine told me that her brother had said she would like me.

  ‘And was he right?’

  ‘Absolutely, although maybe he was not expecting us to jump into bed.’

  ‘No, probably not. Men are protective of their sisters.’

  ‘Do you have sisters?’

  ‘Just one half-sister.’

  ‘Are you close to her?’

  ‘She lives in Toronto. I didn’t even know about her until a few months ago.’

  ‘Do you have une petite amie?’ Cathérine asked.

  ‘No, not at the moment. Do you miss your husband very much?’

  ‘I miss Harry, and every day I think of him, and every day when I wake up I have to remember that he has gone. It is terrible.’

  I couldn’t tell her about Noor while lying under the old Limousin oak beams on her big, lavender-scented bed, a foaming cataract of embroidered sheets and pillows. I couldn’t tell her that I had fallen in love unwittingly with my half-sister and that in Egypt she had been gang-raped. My relationship with Cathérine, so far, was more like a bitter-sweet French romance of a young widow and an English stranger meeting fortuitously and consoling each other, although down the road there was undoubtedly going to be a phase of existential angst and introspection. My true story was far too implausible, with dark undertones that would not survive the examined life.

  ‘Why did you come to live in this place?’

  ‘La France profonde. Just because it is deepest France, that is why I come. We had a small apartment in Paris, just by St-Sulpice, but I have for a long time an idea of a bookshop in la France profonde, and we bought this place. Harry was working in Paris and I spent more and more time here. I became fascinated by Occitan – we have our own Limousin dialect even now – and I was looking more and more deep in the history of our language, which is endangered. Anyway, I become over the last eight years known and now our bookshop – and our tea and coffee – are well known.’

  Her body has a fine, aromatic sheen. A new lover has intriguing little aromas and textures. I feel blessed to be lying next to her.

  ‘Are you happy? You don’t think it is a mistake?’ she asks, looking genuinely concerned.

  ‘I am ecstatic. I have been through some bad times.’

  We kiss. Her lips have calmed down now and are gently solicitous, tenderly exploratory. This kissing business surprises me even now, because it is so intimate. I remember my first proper kiss in Aqaba, with Judy McAllister, and the shock of her wet and falafel-flavoured tongue exploring the inside of my mouth.

  ‘Cathérine, did you intend to seduce me?’

  ‘No, no. In French we say it was un coup de foudre. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘I had not planned anything at all. In fact you are the first man I have fucked with since my husband died.’

  I am taken aback for a moment by the word ‘fuck’, but I guess that she thinks it is nothing more than argot, like ‘merde’.

  ‘I am honoured.’

  ‘We only meet this morning. Is that a matter of concern for you? Do you think I am a salope?’

  ‘A cause of concern? No, it is beautiful. A miracle. I haven’t been so happy for many, many months.’

  ‘In our local Occitan we say “gorrina” for “salope”.’

  ‘You are the most wonderful gorrina I have ever met.’

  ‘Have you met many?’

  ‘Quite a few.’

  In the morning she is not quite so serene. We have slept a little uneasily.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I ask, as she brings in some tea.

  ‘I am fine, but I found it strange. This was our bed, and two or three times I woke up and thought that it was Harry next to me. I had dreamed about that so often.’

  I put my forearm under her thigh, and pull it gently onto my stomach, and we press against each other, taking counter measures against doubt. I feel a little anxious, aware that I am in the unseam’d bed. I could even things up by telling her all about Noor, but it is not possible at the moment – or ever. In truth Cathérine is lovely in the morning, hardly rumpled, and radiating a gentle warmth. We go out to a café for breakfast and I am pleased because I think that this means she is happy to be seen with me. She has given me one of her husband’s shirts to wear: perhaps unconsciously, she has chosen nothing particularly distinctive. It fits me well; Harry appears to have been about the same size as me.

  There is something wonderfully conspiratorial about breakfast after a first night of passion, of intense longing, of secret appraisal.

  At the yglise – ‘egleisa’ in Occitan, she tells me – Cathérine leads me around the outlines of the building. It was a Romanesque church, she says. It once had a crypt, now full of rubble and what looks like bistort and yarrow, although I can’t be sure; heathers are more my bag. St Martial himself was buried in the Cemetery of Martyrs in Limoges. There was once a chapel above his tomb, which became a pilgrim shrine. The abbey in Limoges, which bore his name, was founded in ad 848 by Benedictines, and destroyed during the French Revolution. When the abbey was torn down, St Martial’s tomb was lost, but it was found and excavated in 1960.

  ‘What are you looking for here?’ Cathérine asks.

  ‘As I said, my research suggests that an important reliquary of fine Byzantine and Crusader work, which was supposed to go to Rouen, was buried here in St Martial’s Church in 1193 to wait until Richard was free again.’

  ‘OK. Well I don’t think it will be here. Most likely it was removed when the church was destroyed and taken to Limoges and placed in St Martial’s tomb in the abbaye, the one that was discovered in 1960. But that was excavated. So there is a possibility that whatever was found was taken to storage. Now the relics, not the archaeological objects, are controlled by the people who organise the Ostensions. I will explain that you are an academic from Oxford – we all love Oxford – and that you wish to look for reliquaries that may have come from Outremer. What are you going to do with these objects if you find them?’

  ‘I just want to photograph them and decribe them for my dissertation. I have a picture of a reliquary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Barletta, Puglia. It may be that it would be similar.’

  I also tell her about Queen Melisende of Jerusalem’s psalter and I say that until recently few people had realised the extent of the influence of Outremer on art back home. The Latin Kingdom was not just some flyblown outpost. As I say it, I wonder how much of this my father understood. His expectations of Richard were of the spiritually significant variety.

  Cathérine has to go to a dinner party with friends. She feels she can’t bring me along because everyone would be wondering if we were lovers and her husband only died eleven months ago. I understand. She drops me off at the hotel. The receptionist looks at us with disapproval; I have obviously been up to no good, a dirty stop-out, and missed more meals so generously included in the formule.

  The world of priests and canons and abbots and bishops and monks and cardinals seems to be remote from life as the rest of us know it. For a start these people believe in the incredible. We meet Father Fabien Pelous at the cathedral of St Étienne in Limoges. I can’t make up my mind if Father Pelous, a strongly built, peasanty man, believes that parading the relics and asking for God’s intercession with the saints – it seems a rather roundabout procedure for attracting God’s attention – works in some way, or whether it is merely a cultural custom of long standing that has the benefit of attracting people into churches. Fortunately he appears to have absolutely no aesthetic or historical interest in the art of the La
tin Kingdom, but he does see my arrival as a good opportunity for a story in the local press, under his byline. Cathérine is doing a terrific job of overstating my academic credentials.

  ‘This English gentleman, Monsieur Cathar, is an expert from Oxford University on the art and artefacts of the Latin Kingdom. He wishes to see if he can identify any of these as coming from the Holy Land in the twelfth century.’

  Catherine translates his answer, although I already have the gist of it.

  ‘Yes, we may have some things which are of interest to Monsieur Cathar. Allons-y.’

  The relics are in another building. We cross a courtyard and enter a Romanesque chapter house, on the south side of the cathedral. The floor is of huge flags. Our feet echo across it as we walk; the sound is moving ahead of us in rivulets. As Father Pelous grapples with some huge keys on a leather belt, Cathérine squeezes my bottom conspiratorially. I try not to laugh.

  Father Pelous opens an iron grille, which grinds and squeals. He leads us down a long, vaulted corridor. At the end of the passage is another door, rounded in the Romanesque style. We are entering a crypt, he tells Cathérine, who tells me. Father Pelous unlocks the door. As he pulls it open it starts up its own ancient protest of creaking and arthritic oak.

  The interior is a surprise; it looks a bit like a mortuary, with neon lighting falling evenly on stacks of drawers in pale grey; the effect is of bluish moonlight. In each drawer is a relic, Father Pelous says. He consults the labels and opens about twenty drawers for me. I am pleased to see he has very little clue of what’s inside each drawer. I take photographs indiscriminately, so as not to draw particular attention to any of the reliquaries. I even photograph Thomas’s finger bone. I have taken close-up pictures of about half the reliquaries, but I am very interested in Tiroir Numero 37, which contains something I have glimpsed, a cruciform box, labelled indistinctly: Provenance inconnue. Cathérine goes out to make some calls. For half an hour I carry on looking in the drawers. Father Pelous says he will be gone for a while: I may photograph for my records, but I must not touch anything.

  I return to Tiroir 37. The interior of the drawer is dark and the contents are visible only by the flash of my camera, which confirms that it is a wooden, cross-shaped box, about four feet long. The gold and silver bands that would have bound the box have been removed. Gently I prise open the box, hoping that Father Pelous is not going to reappear suddenly. The wood is dry and crumbling. Lying in the box, I see a board, deeply incised with words that once read, in Hebrew, Greek and Latin: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. The original white pigment, that would have been in the incisions, is still just visible. It is the remaining portion of the titulus of the True Cross, attached to a single crossbeam of wood, about two feet long. I photograph it from all angles and in many sizes, particularly close on the script, which I know will match exactly the other section of the titulus.

  My legs are shaking and my heart is out of rhythm as if I had run up two hundred steps: the titulus was sawn in two on Helena’s orders, and the other half is in Rome, in the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme; it was taken there by Helena, Constantine’s mother, in ad 328. This is the cross Saladin took from the Templars in 1187 on the Horns of Hattin, and this is the cross for which Richard the Lionheart was prepared to give up so much. And it is the cross that Richard’s knights brought across the Mediterranean and on to Chasluç and which they hid, probably in the lost church of St Martial.

  I can’t tell Cathérine the full story when she comes back inside. It’s too soon.

  40

  Letter from my Aunt Phoebe

  Dear Richard,

  I am sorry to have to tell you that I am dying. I have no one else close enough to me to convey the news to you. I am in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, and I have been told that I will not live for more than three weeks. To be honest, I am not afraid of dying, in fact I welcome it. As Dr Johnson said, ‘It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.’ Dying, I think he said, is a short interlude in comparison with a life.

  If you can come and see me in the next few days I would be very happy. The years you lived with me were a great blessing for me. I hope that I didn’t drag you down with my problems and my sense of inadequacy. You were always a bright and delightful boy and – as you proved – a very intelligent boy. I may not be able to email you again unless I can get one of the nurses to do it, as I am going to be all wired up, but I live in the hope of seeing you before I go.

  I have also sent to your London address a letter, which your father wished me to give to you when he died. He said he had given it to me because he was not able to bring himself to see you again. He told me that he had behaved very badly towards you, and that he wanted to explain himself. But I didn’t want to send the letter on to you immediately, because I was worried that, whatever the letter said, it might disturb you. It was selfish of me but your father was always erratic, for all his charm, and anything could have happened. Anyway, the letter has never been opened and now I will be spared having to read his vain and mawkish ramblings.

  God bless you, if there is a God,

  From

  Your aunt, Phoebe, who loved you.

  I had a picture of her in the infirmary, alone and helpless, and I rushed to King’s Cross to get a train to Aberdeen. On the journey up I was keenly aware that I had neglected her and I was also aware of how much she had done for me in her dour way. As we crossed into Scotland, I called the hospital to tell them that I was on my way, but they said that she had died in the morning. They wanted instructions about where the body was to go; at the moment it was in the mortuary. The hospital had a list of local undertakers. My aunt had given me as her next of kin, but she had refused to give them contact details. I could only guess her reasons.

  I called Ed in Australia – it was mid-morning in Perth – and congratulated him on his engagement to Lettie, which I had seen in the Telegraph. I told him about my aunt. I had to speak to someone. As always, he was warm and generous and keen to know how I had got on. I told him that I had found the True Cross that Saladin captured in 1187.

  ‘Struth, that’s bloody brilliant, mate.’

  ‘You’re taking the piss, Ed, but I forgive you. I miss you. Is Lettie with you?’

  ‘She’s on her way. She’s got a job in the embassy in Canberra.’

  ‘Spook-type job?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘I’m going to the Greek islands with Noor.’

  ‘How is Noor?’

  ‘I don’t know, to be honest. I’m nervous.’

  ‘Have you got a Plan B yet?’

  ‘No. But I’ve got to go now. A big male nurse is heading my way, with intent. It was great to speak to you.’

  ‘No worries, mate.’

  ‘Ed, serious question: have you had too much sun?’

  ‘Got to blend in with my cobbers, Richie. By the way, Lettie wanted you to know that you are no longer on a watch list, whatever that means.’

  ‘It means she’s a spook. Bye bye, Ed.’

  ‘Bye, Rich, I am very sorry about your aunt.’

  ‘Thanks. She was a good person.’

  I have no Plan B; I have fallen deeply in love with Cathérine. As a matter of fact, I don’t even have a Plan A.

  41

  Letter from my Father

  My dear Richard,

  I have asked my sister Phoebe to pass this letter on to you when I die. It’s not the usual load of clichés and meaningless sentiment and it contains no advice. But I feel that I should try to explain myself.

  You asked me in the early days about your mother. I just couldn’t speak about her to you. She was a lovely girl. I met her in Chelsea and it was love at first sight. She was already a heroin addict, although she hid the full extent of her habit. She believed that the occasional pipe was good for you. I never took H myself, but I was doing quite a lot of the other stuff, mainly acid. When your mother became pregnant we thought that we wanted to have a natural birth in the Rockies. I had pe
rsuaded her to get off the heroin, and that was one of the reasons we moved to the Rockies, so that I could be sure she wasn’t taking heroin while pregnant. She suffered very badly for weeks, but stayed clean. When she died giving birth to you, somehow in my paranoid-delusional state I blamed you. I could not look at you without thinking of her. It took me years to realise that I had been living in a state of denial, because actually I was to blame for insisting on having the birth on the side of a mountain, miles from the nearest doctor. When we had that altercation and you left for Scotland, that was the catalyst for starting on my long journey back to sanity. I was stoned when we had that awful moment. It took me years of therapy and treatment to live a more or less stable life. My friend David Huntingdon helped me, both with money and with accommodation. Many other friends were kind, too, despite the dreadful things I had done to them, and their wives.

  The worst of these, my boy, was to send you away to boarding school. It was a time when you needed a proper father, and I was no use at all, still believing I had some magical future.

  When you were awarded your degree, I was so proud of you and I wanted desperately to come and see you and to beg forgiveness. You had achieved something wonderful, in contrast to my miserable Oxford fiasco. I waited outside the Sheldonian and tried to hear the acclamation. Afterwards you walked right by me, almost in touching distance, and I turned away. I was so proud of you, but I didn’t want to spoil your moment.

  I have asked my sister to give you this letter only after I have died, which event won’t be long now. Not an event in life, as Wittgenstein remarked. You may choose to reject my letter completely and imagine that these are the ravings of a sad, deluded old man, and you may be angry, thinking that I am trying to excuse the inexcusable. Most of all I think that you will have contempt for the way I have lived my life. But please, dear Richard, know that I loved you and, far too late, understood what a mess I had made of my life and how tragic it was that we were never close. I have desperately wanted to see you again. Goodbye, my boy, goodbye.