The Secret of Provence House

by Aubrey Rhodes

  ‘It is,’ said Laura, and because she could not be certain of the author’s true identity yet, she did not feel she was lying. ‘But I’ll get there. You mentioned last night that you’d been told ‘a story’ of how they came to be here. Could you tell me what you know? The whole issue of provenance will end up being important.’

  ‘Like I’ve said, they’ve been in our family for a very long time.’

  ‘Fiona told me, in passing, that you were related to royalty in some way.’

  ‘On my mother’s side, we’re descended from Plantagenets, Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine and all of that, Richard the Lionheart, King John and the Magna Carta.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘The official language at court in those days, as you probably know, was French. Do you know anything about Edward I?’

  ‘Nothing springs to mind at the moment.’

  ‘He was the eldest son of Henry III – very tall, severe, all in all considered to be a good king for England. His mother was French, Eleanor of Provence, which is how this house got its name. Edward brought Wales into the realm, mostly by force of arms, did much legal reform and reinforced the legitimacy of Parliament. He also spilled much blood and coin waging a brutal war with Scotland. But before all that, when he was still a young prince – and I am simplifying things considerably – in order to resolve a problem that arose between Henry III and the King of Spain, he married the King of Spain’s daughter, Eleanor of Castile. She was thirteen and Edward was fifteen.’

  ‘It’s extraordinary how common that was back then,’ Laura said.

  ‘As you know, such marriages were about property and propagation and not at all about affection,’ said Camilla, continuing. ‘The English royal family, even then, was a randy bunch, and keeping a bevy of mistresses about was comme il faut. But the marriage between these two blossomed, and it quickly turned into a real love match. It apparently remained that way until Eleanor, who was known for her love of culture and literature, and who kept many scribes employed, died when she was forty-nine years old. Edward was beside himself with grief, and though he remarried, again for political reasons, he never got over her.’

  ‘And she was Spanish.’

  ‘Her father was the Spanish king, her mother, like Edward’s was French, Joan, Countess of Ponthieu. When my mother told me where the documents were hidden – for up to that point I had just considered it all to be a family legend – she also said that it was Eleanor of Castile who had acquired them, and who left them to her descendants, along with many other things. Luckily for us, this particular part of her personal fortune stayed together, and was passed down generation after generation, while most of the rest of it was squandered.’

  Though she would check the history being thrown her way, on the face of it the story seemed to hold together. Even so, Laura held on to some healthy scepticism.

  ‘Is there any particular reason you’ve waited until now to look into it?’

  ‘My mother’s father told her that if she were ever to find herself in financial straits, selling these things might solve the problem. She said it had almost come to that for her on more than a few occasions but she was lazy and unorganized – characteristics that run in the family – and she never got around to it. But I would like to have some extra funds now.’

  Camilla finished her shrimp and rang for Finn to return.

  ‘If you’re in that kind of difficulty,’ said Laura, ‘perhaps you are paying me too much.’

  ‘Not at all. I have done a budget and that is what I have allotted for your position. I am going to need your absolute attention and your absolute discretion, so I mean to make it worth your while.’

  ‘All right.’ Laura said, relieved. ‘It’s astonishing to me that something so rare and unusual could be kept out of view all this time.’

  ‘It’s probably not that unusual.’

  Finn entered the room keeping his hands behind his back.

  ‘If you knew more about my family,’ Camilla went on with a slight smile, ‘it would be easier for you to grasp – their tradition of proud and aggressive absent-mindedness, their uber-British, self-destructive snobbery. Anyway. That is neither here nor there. The important thing now is that the documents will, I hope, speak for themselves.’

  Chapter 7

  The following morning Laura translated the next segment:

  What I valued most in those years was independence, the freedom from having to explain my movements, my whims, or the company I kept. The idea of having any person along on my travels was irksome, having a youth with me for whom I would be responsible was worse still, but that the youth in question be difficult and judgmental, felt especially odious and put me into a sour temper.

  On the morning of our departure he embraced his parents and three younger siblings. His father wept, but neither he nor his mother did. The little ones looked at us as if for the last time. Given the perils that often occur on these lengthy journeys, they may well have been right.

  We travelled on tall, well-shod mules, with a line of smaller but stronger pack mules behind us bearing casks filled with coins, provisions, extra clothing, and the oils I traded for tin. Two guards accompanied us, men I had done business with for many years. They were Roman soldiers on leave, one an aristocrat and former Dux, the other a fierce legionnaire, two men who had formed an unusual friendship given their respective ranks, both of them enamoured of the region and fearsome with their swords. They rode before us on handsome Arabian steeds.

  A plague had taken hold in Acre, so we set out for the port of Tyre. When the Roman road ended and a rockier, unpaved route began, we had to leave the mules and the horses and arrange to travel by camel in caravan. The caravan merchant I normally paid was not to be found. I was forced to haggle with a group of other caravan leaders. All of them were related and the level of argument and rivalry flowing between them, speaking a tongue unknown to me, was exasperating. My Roman guards smirked and waited, indifferent under the shade of a date palm. My nephew, who up until that day had been silent and uncooperative, suddenly spoke to me in a whisper. ‘They are trying to cheat you,’ he said. ‘What you call cheating, they call business,’ I replied. ‘The one on the left, the one who is missing an eye, he is ashamed of the others and is telling them to be more reasonable,’ he said. ‘Do you pretend to understand them?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is a local dialect my father’s woodcutter uses. How much do you usually pay them?’ I told him the price and he said to me. ‘The lowest number I have heard thus far is twice that. How was the man called? The one you are used to dealing with?’ And I told him that as well, and he went over to the man with one eye and began to speak quietly to him. The others at first grew more furious until Yeshua turned to them and yelled back at them in their own tongue. Some of them looked to be chastened, some of them angrier still, but their furore diminished. He then resumed his dialog with the more reasonable one until they each put their hand upon their breast and lowered their heads. Then he came back to me. ‘He will take us for the usual price.’

  I am certain he did not speak with the camel drivers that day in order to help me. He spoke, I believe, to show me his intelligence and guile, in a manner many youths his age would, youths who strut about like cockerels preening before a clutch of hens. Nevertheless, after that day, things began to improve between us.

  Chapter 8

  Laura spent most of the next day working and reworking the first two instalments, trying to achieve a prose style that was not too literal, but not too contemporary either. In bed in the dark that night, over-excited and anxious for sleep to relieve her, she made a note to herself to work on them yet again, to get it right, to avoid the evangelist tones popular since St Jerome’s thirteenth-century versio vulgata, or the lush, Jacobean, Tyndale-influenced prose style of the 1611 King James edition of the Bible. Once again, a whirlpool of fantasies spun within her brain, immediately followed by heart-stabbing worries tinged with paranoia. If the scroll and the codices were
authentic, she would undoubtedly become famous. The story was being told by Josephus of Ha’Ramath, meaning Josephus ‘of a high place or plateau’, the Hebrew version of Arimathea. Joseph of Arimathea was the uncle of Iēsous, the Greek form of the Hebrew name Yeshua, more commonly known as Jesus Christ.

  She thought it curious that, at the time this was written, which must have been around 60 CE, Joseph of Arimathea would have felt the need to set the record straight as he saw it. The Christian religion hardly existed then. Although there were some people taking Jesus’ story forward, it was still pretty much unknown, and the parts that were known were varied and conflicting. The more controversial Christian beliefs didn’t come about for another fifty to 200 years, which is what led to the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. But here it was in front of her. The carbon dating procedure done at Oxford was surely accurate. Once revealed, news of it would capture headlines around the world. What would that be like? And what if it turned out to be false? Which was more than likely the more she thought about it.

  She heard a train whistle in the distance and imagined a line of freight cars moving along the outskirts of some mill town miles away. She pictured the engineer unshaven and awake, peering ahead, a lit cigarette in the hand that rested on the throttle. And she saw the iron wheels turning on rusty rails flanked by sentinel weeds and broken brush. It was a sound that, coming as it did through sea-moistened air, reminded her of her youth, in bed at night, cosy in her room at her stepfather’s summer house on Great Plains Road in Southampton, where she had sometimes awakened to hear the milk train from Penn Station carrying the morning papers to East Hampton and Montauk.

  She drew a sensorial connection between Camilla’s baronial home in Cornwall and her stepfather’s house within the Cuddihy compound on Long Island; the rich scents of wood resin in the hallway, the civilized dampness, the appealing contrast of the good linens and furniture kept within, the semi-agricultural seascapes without, and how the main bedrooms faced the ocean. She imagined the Southampton house across the Atlantic at that very moment, five hours earlier along the Earth’s curve, uninhabited, closed up for the season, with some of her mother’s clothing still folded in dark drawers, musty raingear and tennis racquets in the entranceway closet; the old TV set in the maid’s living room where she had watched cheesy American sitcoms with Pat and Clara, the couple her mother had found on Martha’s Vineyard. The bedroom that had been hers was upstairs facing the ocean, like this one, where as a girl and then as a teenager she had slept all those summer nights protected, a Chinese red bureau against the far wall, the dainty mirrored wall sconces at either side of her bed.

  She thought about her mother, who after her conversion to Islam and her embracement of the Palestinian cause, had – once she fell in with Gerald Cuddihy II – converted just as fiercely to the Protestant faith, and sworn solidarity with the State of Israel as well. Such had been her determination to distinguish herself from her Spanish parents who had kept a photo of Francisco Franco in their living room. She remembered those grandparents, the gloomy trips she and her mother made once a year to visit them in Granada for Christmas. Despite their rigid morals, ugly politics, and the tension in the air between them and her mother, they had been kind to her and loving.

  By dawn she had the library bookshelf open, the security system disarmed, and she was back at work. As Camilla had said, the scroll was in a lamentable and more than understandable state of decay. Placing a towel upon the side table, she unfurled the scroll just enough to see a further section of script. She wanted to verify one more time that the two texts were the same. She did this a few times, scanning from place to place.

  She had never handled anything so old or fragile and at one point she removed one of the latex gloves and touched the papyrus with her bare finger. It was not the same as touching old rocks or peering into a prehistoric cave. This was an artefact of distinct and miraculous human ingenuity. Living hands had harvested the plant and prepared it for writing. Human hands had made the ink and honed the reed pens. Human hands had written down the symbols while listening to another man speak, recording his thoughts, observations, and emotions.

  She saw enough to satisfy her that it was indeed the same text that had been later translated into Ancient Greek. It had the same voice, the same tone. It was shockingly distinctive, not the sort of verse found in the Old Testament, nor the poetic cadences found in the Psalms, nor the disembodied meter authored by the evangelists hundreds of years after the fact. It was freer than that, conversational and personal, more akin to the tone found in the letters of Paul. She decided to share her thoughts with Camilla. To sit on them any longer would not be ethical.

  ‘Something to do with Christ you say?’

  ‘Quite a lot to do with Christ. It’s hard to believe.’

  ‘So it might be very valuable.’

  ‘Very. Not to mention sensational. Which probably explains why the codex in old French was altered. Whoever did it censored it some, or was told to. But it is still difficult to figure out why these texts never saw the light of day, as far as I know.’

  ‘You are asking the wrong person,’ Camilla said. ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe because not many people knew how to read back then? Perhaps by the time reading and scholarship were more common, these artefacts were already put away somewhere, out of circulation.’

  ‘I’d like to see the carbon dating study done at Oxford.’

  ‘I’ll show it to you this afternoon.’

  ‘We should get a second opinion too.’

  ‘James was most thorough about it, and it did cost a small fortune to have it done properly.’

  ‘I’m sure. It’s just that the level of scrutiny this will receive once word gets out is going to be intense.’

  ‘All right,’ Camilla said.

  ‘Remember what happened to your Robert Graves with his translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1967 – based on a manuscript the Shah brothers claimed had been in their family for 800 years and that later turned out to have been a forgery.’

  ‘Good lord. This is the first I’ve heard about that.’

  ‘It was a terrible blow to his reputation for a while. It probably wasn’t talked about much around the dinner table.’

  ‘I’ll show you the report James had done, and you can see if you think we need a second opinion. But I don’t want you to worry about that now Laura. Just work on the translation, doing the best job you can. Let’s see what we really have, no?’

  ‘I will. You’re right.’

  The technical report was lengthy, detailed, and reassuring. It calmed Laura’s nerves, giving her the necessary peace of mind to continue translating. She employed a stop and go rhythm that seemed to produce the best results. She set herself up in a corner of the library near the breakfast alcove where there was more natural light and sat at a Louis XV Tric-Trac game table that had a chessboard inlaid into the surface. It seemed appropriate for the task. She put the photos into a desk file on her laptop that she labelled ‘Fall Project’, and then began to translate the next segment.

  Chapter 9

  We travelled through a desert-like terrain. Its effect upon Yeshua was powerful. Its austerity, its cleanliness, the sensation it imparts to one of insignificance, most especially at night when the sun that has been relentlessly searing disappears, giving way to a cold and empty darkness and when the stars and their constellations seem perilously close.

  His state of rapturous wonder and continuous pronouncements about God irritated me. I felt closer to my sardonic Romans who only referred to their gods when cursing, or when marvelling about the pleasures of flesh or food. For them that terrain was an infernal nuisance that made them wary of scorpions, a geographical aberration to be traversed as quickly as possible. Whenever my nephew would remark ‘Heavenly Father, what feat hast Thou wrought to lower the stars so close to we your minions?’ I would say to him, ‘What brand of arrogance is it to think your heavenly father is paying us any mind at all?’

 
And when he would remark, ‘Look upon the mountains and the craters of the moon, uncle, seen so clearly on this night, where surely souls shall gather to rest, as if at an oasis, upon their way home to our Heavenly Lord.’

  I, who had more in common then with the Sadducees who do not believe in an afterlife, would say to him, ‘It seems to me, dear nephew, that the moon is cold and empty. One has only to regard the expression of melancholy on its face. Woe be the soul inclined to rest there.’

  But he travelled well, and he did not complain, and it seemed he confined his urge for teaching mostly to me. No doubt he had learned from his mother the fame I had in the Sanhedrin as a doubter, a man more concerned with profits and earthly welfare, someone who chafed at the religious rules that pushed too far into a man’s life.

  Apart from the one-eyed Bedouin whose company he enjoyed, he took to speaking with my Roman guards as well, and when I made light of it, he said to me, ‘Love thine enemy.’ ‘This is a new opinion,’ I said to him, ‘but an easy one for someone who has yet to face a sword. What do the men in your temple answer to such a proclamation?’

  ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for tooth is what they say,’ he answered. The mixture of youthful gentleness and brashness was not without its appeal.

  When I was younger than he and already trading with my father, we were set upon by thieves one night. They slit his throat before I was able to do anything. My cries roused our servants and made the thieves flee, and seeing my father dead I pursued them and captured one who was broader and slower, and I dug my knife into his back until he too was dead, and I am glad to have done it. Since that time, I have never been able to slaughter a beast without recalling the noise my father made as his life slipped away from him. I told my nephew this story that night under the heavens as we rested our heads upon our packs far from the foul-smelling camels, our fire all but extinguished. Every campfire I have known since that terrible night brings the memory back to me.