The Secret of Provence House

by Aubrey Rhodes

  I was in no position to reprimand them. They had brought him back to me and done it in their manner. It was not a moment for moral quibbling. This fierceness was, after all, the reason I had hired them to begin with. I embraced Lucca and said to him I would be forever indebted to the both of them. The following morning both Romans approached me and offered their services for the duration of our journey. They were restless and had no desire to return just yet to Jerusalem. I told them I could not pay them their customary fee for such a lengthy period of time, but we came to an arrangement and I felt greatly relieved because of it. They were eager to see more of the Empire they said, and now they felt protective of Yeshua.

  For days Yeshua refused to speak and I did not insist. It was only when we had been at sea for two sunsets that he was able to address it. He seemed older, tougher, but less sure of himself and more suspicious of others. These were all good things. He spoke in low, quiet tones, staring at the sea. Lucca and Octavius were below deck casting dice for money with members of the crew.

  ‘Ahmed,’ he said, ‘the man I thought I had befriended, was the one who betrayed me. He sold me, like a rug, or a camel. The man who bought me, a soft fat man, had them strip me and paint me, as if I were a woman. The shame I feel has no limit.’ ‘There is no shame Yeshua,’ I said. ‘It has no meaning. The important thing is that you were rescued.’

  ‘My rescuers are wild beasts,’ he said. ‘They killed everything that lived. I shall never forget it.’

  ‘There is no need to forget,’ I said. ‘There is only the need to go on. Think of what your life would have become had they not found you. The world is a dangerous place and terrible things can befall us and now you know these are not just words from a fable but something you have witnessed and survived. It will make you stronger.’

  ‘I have seen animals slaughtered for food,’ he said, on the verge of tears. ‘But never have I seen human innards. Now I have seen too many. I do not know what I expected, but inside we are the same as sheep and goats. I do not know what to make of it.’

  I could think of no other thing to say to him that day. I put my hand on his shoulder and looked out on the sea with him. I too felt shame for having driven him away and into the hands of his captors. It was good to be under sail and heading west, and it was my most fervent wish that no further calamities would come our way. Alas it was not to be the case.

  Laura typed the last sentences onto her screen. Then she saved the file and turned off the computer. Her eyes were filled with tears, just as Joseph of Arimathea’s had been. How, she thought, had this extraordinary document come into her hands? Such a thing would never come her way again. Nothing else she would do in her professional life would ever come close to this. She vowed once again to do her very best by it. All of these precious hours she realized, working there at Provence House in Cornwall, would be fondly recalled someday as a blissful calm before a probable storm. Then Camilla appeared, knocking gently on the doorframe. Laura turned in her chair, drying her eyes.

  ‘Have you been crying dear?’

  ‘Tears of joy.’

  Camilla was tactful enough not to insist. ‘Feel like a bit of fresh air?’

  ‘Love some.’

  ‘Do you ride?’

  ‘A little.’

  Chapter 12

  Six Arabian mares were housed in stables Laura had not noticed before. They had first been built in the sixteenth century and then Camilla had renovated them considerably. An old Morris Mini Traveller that belonged to Finn and Bidelia was parked next to them, along with two motorbikes belonging to the women who cared for the horses. As they crossed the gravelled courtyard behind the kitchen, she realized the extent of the myopia that had taken hold of her since seeing the scroll and the codices. Up until then all of her walks had taken place in the garden off the breakfast alcove or along the bluffs, back in the direction she had first come from. It had never occurred to her to explore or even to think about anything behind the house and, lo and behold, just past the stables, were hundreds of acres of rolling hills, copses, and streams, all of it Camilla’s property.

  The paddocks were spacious and there was a fine tack room filled with English saddles, reins and bits, blankets and riding boots and knockabout coats hanging from pegs. There was a bathroom near an office that was decorated with an oil portrait of Camilla’s mother, at age twelve, mounted side-saddle on a towering steed. The walls and flooring were made from wood that was well oiled and varnished, and all of it was tended by a young lesbian couple who lived two villages away, Gin and Jen, both of them with short hair and smiling ruddy faces.

  ‘How much riding have you done?’ Camilla asked Laura after making introductions.

  ‘I took lessons as a young girl, mostly to please my stepfather. He was Master of the Millbrook Hunt in upstate New York for a time. This was when I was fifteen and I kept at it for, say, three years. But I had a bad fall that kept me off horses for a long time. Then in France, a few years ago, I went for a long ride in the Jura Mountains and I loved that.’

  ‘Let’s put her on Daisy, shall we girls?’

  ‘Daisy it is, ma’am,’ said Jen, and off they both went, even walking in unison, to saddle up Daisy and Camilla’s horse, Dorsey.

  ‘What size shoe are you?

  ‘A thirty-seven in Europe.’

  ‘Just like me,’ said Camilla, pleased. ‘Let’s get some good boots on you as well then.’

  The earth was damp and the temperature mild. Throughout the morning the sun had burned off what had been thick cloud cover. A thin mist remained that was rising as they rode over rolling pastures that had the sort of luminous look that often follows a storm. Camilla did not like to ride alone, and she found the conversation of the stable girls tedious. Her son, who did enjoy it, rarely visited. She was pleased to see Laura looking more comfortable and assured than she had expected. Laura too was enjoying herself, the suddenness of it, the recovered familiarity of it, the rush of fresh air and the beautiful scenery that she had unknowingly cloistered herself away from; the contrast it provided to the work she had been immersed in all morning, the Country Life Britishness of it all, and the odd physical connection it provided with the ride of Lucca and Octavius that she had translated less than an hour ago. They dismounted at a stream bank, allowing the horses to drink.

  ‘James arrives this evening in time for dinner, along with his wife and two little girls.’

  ‘Really? My goodness. Well, how nice.’

  ‘I’m sorry for the disruption. I shall endeavour to keep them out of your hair.’

  ‘I can go to a hotel. No problem.’

  ‘What on earth for? He far prefers the cottage anyway. It reminds him of when he was a boy and that sort of thing. That’s where we’re going now.’

  ‘Are you sure? I didn’t know there was a cottage. Isn’t it too far from you?’

  ‘It’s only far on horseback and I am taking us on the scenic route. By car you’re there in five minutes. I love my grandchildren, but they are best enjoyed in small doses. So the cottage solution works out splendidly. I’ve you to thank for the visit.’

  ‘You mean what I said to you about provenance?’

  ‘Yes. They’ve had a trip planned to London for a while now and I was to go up there and join them. But James says he wants to make sure the papers I mentioned are where he remembers putting them – I confess I’ve not been able to find them. So, they are coming down here for two nights instead before returning to Barcelona. The only nuisance is getting the place ready for them. I’m meeting the woman I usually use now.’

  ‘If I can be of any help, just say so. I’m quite good with a mop and pail.’

  When they first stopped at the stream Laura had thought to use the pause to tell Camilla what she had translated that morning. But she decided to wait.

  ‘Have you told him what’s in the scroll?’

  ‘No. Not in any detail. I trust him with my life, but he might say something to Carmensina, his wife, a girl
brought up with a Catalan silver spoon in her mouth who loves to gossip.’

  Laura did not say so but the idea of having a woman around closer to her age sounded good to her. She could use some gossip and idle chatter, if only as a counterweight to the momentousness of everything else going on.

  The ‘cottage’ was a proper house standing at the edge of a small forest, all white on the outside with many latticed windowpanes and a roof thick with layers of wooden shingles. There was a matching garage behind it. Inside, the dark wooden walls were covered with still-life paintings, mounted antlers, and framed dry flies. All of the furniture was large and wide and comfortable. There were no dainty antiques. The bedrooms upstairs were airy and simple. It was a storybook house, a hunting lodge for Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy, smaller and much less formal than Camilla’s mansion, but more conducive to merrymaking. It was easy for her to imagine a son of Camilla’s, mostly brought up in a dark apartment along the Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona, jumping for joy at such a place where one could picture Robert Louis Stevenson penning a pirate yarn before the massive hearth.

  The maid was there waiting for them with another woman she had brought along to help. Absolved of any responsibility, Laura allowed herself to ramble about the property. She went through the bedrooms and then came downstairs and admired a proper snooker table in a games room where framed Punch magazine covers from the 1850s were on walls painted a scarlet red. In a small study she browsed through old books that described the minutia of hunting and fishing in the area down through the ages. Some of the pages had rose petals and sprigs of honeysuckle pressed into them. Then she studied a slew of family photographs in silver frames, all of them in need of polish, that were gathered upon a vast table pushed up against the back of the living room’s largest sofa. A baby grand piano sat closed in the corner.

  She went outside and fed the horses sugar cubes she’d found in the kitchen and then walked into a small forest filled with ferns where a path had been cleared. At the end of the path the forest gave way to a soft meadow that sloped gently down to a lake, and next to the lake by a wooden bench were the remains of some sort of dolmen. She walked down and examined it and saw it was authentic. Seating herself on the bench and placing a hand on one of the old stones she contemplated the lake until a call came in from Fiona. They had exchanged news via email over the past few days but had not spoken since the day she’d had lunch at the gastro-pub in the village.

  ‘It was during my sport-shagging spree.’

  Laura had listened to Fiona make reference to this period in her life many times and had even witnessed some of it in person when the two of them were in their late twenties, but this was the first she’d heard about the James Figueras episode. After pleasing her mother by marrying Jeremy Wynter, Earl of Somerset, it had taken Fiona two years to divorce him. Wynter’s penchant for threesomes with other men and his increasing need, when it was just the two of them, for her to cane him before he could achieve tumescence, had got tiresome quickly. ‘My life was a third-rate parody of upper-class English depravity,’ she said. But she had got a lovely house out of it and was possessed for a time afterwards with a yearning to prove to herself that she was attractive to ‘normal men, whatever that means.’

  ‘What’s he like?’ Laura asked.

  ‘He’s smashing. Wonderful looking. Very proper on the outside but fun once you get to know him.’

  ‘Sort of like his mother.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So how did it all go?’

  ‘Badly. I tried every trick in the book to get him into bed and though he once came close, he ran off at the last moment. Set me back considerably.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I always sort of fancied him since I was a teenager, but the opportunity really didn’t present itself until I was divorced, by which time he was married.’

  ‘What’s the wife like?’

  ‘That was the problem. She eats him for breakfast. Has him right under her sexual thumb. He kept on saying he felt too guilty to cheat on her, but it felt more to me like he was just scared to death of her.’

  ‘Is she pretty?’

  ‘Yes. In that Mediterranean way, like you. Good figure, massive amounts of healthy hair, almond-shaped eyes. I don’t know about now but back then she drank and smoked heavily. I’m amazed their girls weren’t born with three eyes.’

  ‘So, you’d think he’d fall head over heels for a raven-haired beauty like you.’

  ‘Well exactly. And he did, just not enough. I mean, in the end I really threw myself at him. It was so humiliating. Anyway, that was years ago, thank god. Maybe he and his wife are both obese by now. That would be nice.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He works for his father-in-law who owns half the newspapers, publishing companies and magazines in Spain – another reason he sticks by her so faithfully, I guess.’

  Fiona was seeing another married man now, one who had had the good sense to give into her. After what had been a year of drama filled with explosive ultimatums and furious bouts of make-up sex – all of which Laura had had to hear about while incurring the petulant disapproval of Nathan – Fiona and her fellow, Giles, who Laura had never met, had settled into an amicable and stable arrangement that suited them both – and that probably suited Mrs Giles as well.

  The conversation, like so many others with Fiona, left her feeling out of sorts. The prospect of having some new people in the house, people who lived in a world more like her own, had given her a buzz that was now diminished.

  When she got back to the cottage, she found Camilla coming out of the front door pulling on her riding gloves.

  ‘I walked through the woods down to the lake. It’s so pretty,’ Laura said.

  ‘My mother put the bench there next to the dolmen,’ Camilla replied.

  ‘I didn’t know there were any dolmens in Cornwall.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Camilla said, ‘there are nine or ten that have been documented. I’m starving. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ said Laura.

  ‘Well back we go then. I was a fool not to pack us some sandwiches.’

  ‘How is it going in there?’

  ‘Wonderful. Hard-working women from Romania. The older one’s lived here almost five years now.’

  They freed the horses, mounted and headed back, breaking into a brisk trot both horses tried their best to push into a canter. Laura, close to Camilla and trailing her by just a few yards, admired the older woman’s poise, her still shapely figure and straight back and the dyed hair swept into a French twist that day. English-Irish Camilla, she thought, stereotypical perhaps, but real, with one foot firmly planted in the early years of the last century while the other was holding its own in this one.

  Laura took a nap in her room after lunch and when she awakened, she decided to work some more before the arrival of Camilla’s family. Running a search connecting ‘Amiens’ with ‘Eleanor of Castile’ proved fruitless until, fine-tuning her terms, she discovered that one Gerard of Amiens had written a roman, called ‘Escanor’, that had something to do with the Arthurian cycle, and that Eleanor had received a copy of during a later visit to France. Then she found an article about Eleanor that revealed that after she succeeded her mother as Countess of Ponthieu in 1279, a romance was written for her about the life of a supposed ninth-century Count of Ponthieu.

  Situated in northern France, Ponthieu’s most notable town was Abbeville. According to a book she also found online, Studies in the Italian Renaissance by Berthold Louis Ullman, Gerard of Amiens lived in Abbeville and even started a college there where he was a collector of rare books, including a complete collection of ‘pagan’ Latin poetry. If Gerard of Amiens was the author of the book written for Eleanor in 1280, it made sense that Eleanor might have shown him the Greek codex containing Joseph of Arimathea’s text, and that he would have pleaded with her for permission to translate it. And even though Gerard was also known for his opposition to the Dom
inican and Benedictine orders, Laura reasoned that he still would have thought twice about faithfully translating such an explosive text for fear of persecution – thus the censored version. She put all this in a food-for-thought category, making a few notes, and went back to the work at hand.

  Chapter 13

  It was midmorning in spring with a gentle sun. The floor of the sea was clearly visible as we approached Rhodes. Lucca stood by the railing with Yeshua and pointed out the remains of the Colossus that once dominated the harbour entrance. Yeshua asked what the Colossus had represented.

  ‘Helios, the god of the sun,’ Lucca replied. ‘A handsome god who drives his flaming chariot across the sky each day, giving us light. He is brother to the moon and to Eos, the dawn.’

  ‘And yet it was a mere earthquake that brought it down?’ Yeshua asked.

  ‘It was a statue,’ said Octavius coming up to them, ‘made from stone, not the god himself.’

  ‘Have you ever been in an earthquake?’ Lucca asked the young man. ‘You would speak of them with greater respect if you had.’