The Lady Agnes Mystery, Volume 1 (7 page)

He leant towards her, planted a fraternal kiss on her anxious brow, and murmured:

‘Amen.’

C
lément felt confident. All was quiet. The nuns had retired to their cells after supper and compline.
⁺
Outside, a chorus of frogs croaked and the jays’ raucous complaints ricocheted from nest to nest. Further to his right, the tireless garden dormice tunnelled furiously between the stones with their claws. They were such cautious creatures that it was rare to catch a glimpse of their little black masked faces. The slightest unfamiliar presence would silence them. Clément delighted in the treasure trail nature left for those who knew how to watch and listen. He had uncovered most of its secrets, and its dangers too.

Cautiously, he stretched a numb leg out of his hiding place in the large hollowed stone the herbalist used for soaking the leaves, rhizomes, and berries she collected. The air was rank with the smell of rotten foliage. It would be dark within an hour. He had time to eat something and to reflect.

What was to become of them? The two of them that was, for Mathilde’s fate was of little concern to him. She was far too vain and foolish to worry about anything except her little breasts that were not budding as fast as she would like, her ribbons and hair combs. What would become of Agnès and him? A feeling of joy made his eyes brim with tears, for there were two of them, he was not alone. The Dame de Souarcy would never forsake him, even at risk to her own life. The certain knowledge that it was true wrenched his heart.

Crouching unseen behind the door to the main hall, he had witnessed the gruelling evening to which her half-brother had subjected her the day before. As usual she had outwitted him.
And yet the following day, just after the scoundrel had left, while they were doing their round of the outbuildings, he had sensed her uncertainty and understood her fears: how far was Eudes prepared to go? What would he stop at?

The answer to the second question was obvious and Agnès knew it as well as Clément. He would stop at fear, when he came face to face with a beast more ferocious than he.

They were so alone, so vulnerable. They had no beast to champion them, to come to their aid. For months now the child had struggled with his despair. He must find a way out, a solution. He cursed his youth and his physical frailty. He cursed the truth of his origins, which he was forced to conceal for both their sakes. Agnès had explained this to him as soon as she could, and he knew her fears were well founded.

Knowledge was a weapon, Agnès had explained, especially when confronted with an ignorant boor like Eudes. Knowledge. It was passed on, to some extent, by the schoolmistresses at Clairets. And so, two years earlier, his lady had allowed him to attend the few classes open to children of all ages from the rich burgher families and gentry from the surrounding countryside. These offered him scant intellectual nourishment since, thanks to Agnès, he had long ago learnt to read and write in French and Latin. He had vainly hoped he might learn about the sciences, about life in distant lands. In reality, most of the time was spent on the study of the Gospels and learning by rote the words of worthy Latin scholars such as Cicero, Suetonius and Seneca. Added to these limitations was the terror the schoolmistress,
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Emma de Pathus, inspired in them all. Her permanent sullenness and readiness to raise her hand was enough to strike fear into the hearts of her young charges.

In the end, it mattered little. The goodly Bernardines were
unstinting in their efforts, zealously caring for some, educating others, settling discords, calming hostilities, accompanying the dying. Unlike some of the other orders, they could not be accused of indifference towards the world outside the abbey, or of profiting from the misfortunes of humble folk. It mattered little because Clément had learnt so many things. Each seed of knowledge sprouted another. Each new key to understanding he forged unlocked a bigger door than the last. He had also learnt not to ask questions the sisters were unable to answer, for he realised that his curiosity, which initially rewarded their pains, ended by perplexing and then troubling them. In truth it mattered little because he had become convinced that the abbey contained an intriguing mystery.

Why had he slipped behind the pillar? He had been waiting for the Latin mistress. Was it instinct? Or was it the strange behaviour of the figure in white? The Abbess had looked around furtively before hurriedly locking the small postern door she had just emerged from, and then darted down the corridor, like a thief.

A quick, discreet enquiry left him none the wiser. No one seemed to know where that door led. What was in the room on the other side? Was it a secret cell for some important prisoner? Perhaps it was a torture chamber? The child’s fertile imagination ran away with him until he decided to solve the mystery himself. A roughly drawn map of the central part of the abbey helped him to determine that, if there were a secret chamber, it must be quite small, unless it contained a window – one of the ones that gave onto the interior garden that ran alongside the scriptorium and the dormitories. And if his modest topographical plan was at all accurate, it must be in the middle of the Abbess’s chambers and study.

He had been burning with curiosity and impatience ever since. He had given a great deal of thought to the problem of how to remain within the abbey enclosure in order to pursue his secret inquiry and test his theories. In the end one solution imposed itself: the herbarium adjacent to the medicinal garden would give him shelter for a few hours while he waited for nightfall.

The full moon that night was Clément’s unwitting accomplice. He left the herbarium, moving as silently as a ghost and blending in to the outer wall of the dormitory. He passed beneath the scriptorium windows, taller and broader than the rest in order to allow the copyists as much light as possible. He continued alongside the smaller windows of the steam room, the only part of the abbey that was heated in winter, and the place where the sick were tended and the ink stored overnight so it wouldn’t freeze. Only a couple more yards to go. The young boy was breathless with anxiety, wondering what explanation he might give for being there in the middle of the night if he were discovered, hardly daring to imagine the ensuing punishment. He slipped below the two small windows in the Abbess’s study and below the two air vents cut into the stone wall of the circular room in her chamber containing the garderobe. The mystery chamber should be located somewhere between these two rooms. Clément retraced his steps and measured the distance in paces between Éleusie de Beaufort’s chamber and her study. He estimated about twelve yards. Abbess or not, a nun’s cell could not be that wide or spacious. The secret chamber, then, though much bigger than he had first calculated, must be windowless. The thought sent a shiver of fear and excitement down his spine. What if the room was an inquisitorial chamber? What if he discovered signs of torture there? No. There was no such thing as a female Inquisitor. He went back over the same patch, this
time on his hands and knees, his nose to the ground. A cellar window, measuring approximately two yards long and a foot high, opened onto the ornamental flowerbeds at the base of the wall. Thick bars protected the window against intruders. Full-grown intruders, he supposed correctly, for they were widely enough spaced to allow a slim child to pass through. Relief gave way to panic. What should he do now? Curiosity prevailed over the many excellent reasons he could think of for turning back and leaving the abbey enclosure as quickly and, above all, as quietly as possible.

How far was the cellar window from the floor? A piece of gravel from the pathway bordering the flowerbeds served as a sounding device. Clément calculated from the clear and almost instantaneous impact it made on the ground that five feet at the very most lay between him and his objective. He was wrong.

Stretched out on his side, he struggled through the bars that dug into his flesh, holding his stomach in and exhaling as deeply as he could to make himself as thin as possible. Finally his chest squeezed through and he let himself fall to the floor. The length of time he was suspended in the void startled him. He landed like a dead weight and a searing pain almost made him cry out. His suffering soon gave way to panic. What if he had broken something? How would he find his way out of there? He gripped his rapidly swelling ankle, rotating it this way and that and forcing back the tears that pricked his eyes. It was a sprain, only a bad sprain. It would hurt but he would be able to walk.

He was encircled by thick blackness. A humid darkness in which wafts of dank air combined with a lingering sweet smell reminiscent of animal glue. The cool gloom of a cellar. He began to tremble with rage at himself. How could he have been so stupid, he who was so proud of his quick wits? How was he
going to get out of there? He hadn’t given it a thought. What a fool!

He waited a few moments for his eyes to become accustomed to that indoor gloom, denser than the darkness that had camouflaged him in the garden. A long table, like a work bench, covered in uneven heaps was the first thing he was able to make out. He limped towards it, his arms outstretched. Books. Piles of books on a table. Then, out of the gloom, the shape of a ladder. No. More like a small stepladder leaning against some shelves containing more books. A library. He was in a library. Over in the corner stretching up to the ceiling, a large indistinct shape loomed. He walked over to it, wincing from the pain in his ankle. It was a spiral staircase leading to another room, and below the steps were pinned pieces of fine leather, no doubt intended to repair the book bindings. He carefully climbed the stairs. The darkness seemed to grow less opaque the further up he went. Emerging on all fours into the room at the top, he slowly rose to his feet. He froze with astonishment. It was a vast library with a soaring ceiling and books covering every wall. Moonlight filtered through the horizontal arrow slits, ingeniously positioned more than four yards above ground level, which was why he had failed to notice them earlier. Their function was to allow both light and air to filter discreetly into the room. As though in a trance, he walked over to one of the bookcases and with reverential awe pulled out a few of the weighty volumes. The good condition they were in was proof of the care they received. Choked with emotion, Clément managed to read some of the titles. He sensed the world was opening up just for him. Everything he had always longed to discover, to learn, to know was here, within his grasp. Overcome, he murmured:

‘My God! Could it be that the entire works of Claudius
Galen* are here?
De sanitate tuenda
… And
De anatomicis administrationibus
… And even
De usu partium corporis
…’

The child’s breathless voice trailed off.

He found a translation from the Latin by a certain Farag ben Salem of a book by Abu-Bakr-Mohammed-ibn-Zakariya al-Razi,* a name he had never heard of before. The work,
Al-Hawi
, or, in Latin,
Continens
, appeared to be on pharmacology but the feeble light of the moon hampered his ability to read.

Other books remained inaccessible to Clément, their strange-looking titles in foreign tongues guarding their secrets.

Was it Arabic, Greek or Hebrew? He did not know. So the room he had gone through to reach there was only a storeroom, or possibly a workshop. That would explain the smell of glue and the pieces of leather. Exhilarated, he studied the books for hours, losing all notion of time. The night sky filtering through the arrow slits became tinged with milky blue, finally alerting him that day was approaching.

With the help of the stepladder, Clément managed with great difficulty to climb back out through the cellar window. He could feel his ankle pounding – an immense throbbing pulse.

T
he oppressive afternoon heat did not bother Francesco de Leone any more than the stench emanating from the mounds of refuse at the corner of every alleyway. On the other hand, the ceaseless activity of the human anthill made his head spin.

The city numbered over sixty thousand hearths, meaning a population of close on two hundred thousand souls. This buzzing populace was distributed on both sides of the river Seine, spanned by only two wooden bridges: the Grand Pont and the Petit Pont, which were recklessly over-constructed – the larger of the two accommodating a hundred and forty dwellings and a hundred shops, as well as the added weight of watermills. As a result, it was not unknown for flood waters to wash the bridges away as if they were clumps of straw.

The Knight slowly climbed Rue de Bucy, benignly refusing the advances of a famished-looking young woman with dark shadows under her eyes. He thought she must have come out of one of the steam rooms. It was common knowledge that the mixed public baths were also used for assignations of an amorous nature, whether of the clandestine or the remunerated variety. Sex was for sale all over Paris and there was no lack of customers. Carnal love was considered a minor sin so long as it had a price on it. It allowed men whose poverty inhibited them from marrying to satisfy their urgent needs, their desires. It also allowed starving girls, cast into the street because of an untimely pregnancy or by penniless parents, to survive, while at the same time saving married women from the lechery of the powerful.
At least these were a few of the glib arguments that acted as a balm for the consciences of some and the guilt of others. They did not persuade Francesco de Leone, and he was filled with a strange sadness. The oldest profession in the world, practised by women who were increasingly excluded from any others, was spreading in the city. At this rate they would soon be able to count their options on one hand: born to wealth, married, nuns or prostitutes. In the latter case they would end up eaten away by tuberculosis or intestinal diseases, or even slashed to ribbons by some casual client. Who cared what became of these spectres? Not the powers that be, not the Church, certainly not their families.

The girl kept her eyes fixed on him. She was intimidated by his appearance yet driven by hunger and fear of destitution. He paused to study her.

He was chasing that woman, always the same one, in the ambulatory of that church, always the same place. Did he want to kill her or was he trying to save her from some unseen enemy? He had prayed for the second theory to be the true one. And yet he remained unable to convince himself that it was.

The eternal misery of women, their astonishing frailty. His mother and infant sister, their throats slit like lambs, left to rot in the blazing sun, their wounds crawling with flies. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, the girl was smiling at him, the pathetic smile of a poor unwanted creature looking for money for her supper and a bed for the night. There was nothing seductive or alluring about those sickly-looking lips. And yet, though powerless to seduce, she still attempted to persuade him.

He took five silver pennies from his purse, a fortune for a pauper, and walked over to her:

‘Eat and rest a while, sister.’

She stared at the coins he had placed in the palm of her hand and shook her head.

When she looked up at him, her pale cheeks were streaked.

‘I … Come, I’m sweet and gentle, and I’m not sick, I promise … I …’

‘Hush, rest.’

‘But … How may I …’

‘Pray for me.’

He turned on his heel and walked away quickly, leaving her weeping, overcome with relief and despair. For her and for his mother and sister, for all women who had no man to protect them, for Christ and his immense love for women, a love that had so long been scorned by miserable buffoons. Sinners, sinners disguised as practitioners of the faith.

Giotto Capella. Long ago in a land where the sun scorched the earth, the Knight would have given his life to slay this man. Arnaud de Viancourt knew nearly all there was to know of Francesco de Leone’s childhood and had hesitated before pronouncing the name of their ‘unwitting intermediary’. When he had finally uttered it and awaited his brother’s response, he had evoked the threat that was hanging over them in order to justify imposing on him such a difficult task.

The handsome white stone house, completed only months before, dominated Rue de Bucy. It belonged to Giotto Capella, a native of Crema, a small Lombard village to the south-east of Milan. His third-floor windows gave onto the Seine and the Louvre. It was the reason he had chosen the location: to be close to the heart of power and thus to the biggest borrowers, but also to Paris’s natural frontier. For the disposition of the powerful
towards moneylenders was a fickle one. A fact that the Lombards – the name given to Italian and Jewish moneylenders alike regardless of whether they were natives of that province – had had the recent misfortune to discover. In reality, the inconsistencies of the new century with regard to usury should have amused Giotto, who was not an uncultivated man but one for whom money was a means and, above all, an end and a passion. How could they as merchants be expected to lend money to strangers without making a profit? Nonsense! There was a good reason why usury had been outlawed. It allowed kings and noblemen to borrow money and then banish the usurers, confiscating their assets and brandishing religion as a justification. How many times had they had to listen to that convenient verse from the Gospel encouraging the lender to expect nothing in return? Thus the debtors rid themselves of creditors, interest and debt. What fools they were. For someone who knew how to negotiate, a debt was always repayable, whether against cash or against less obvious forms of payment.

Giotto Capella set down his glass of mulled wine, a rare treat he permitted himself regardless of the gout that seared his foot and was progressively immobilising him. The Knight Hospitaller had been waiting outside in his anteroom for some minutes. What did he want? The moneylender had felt uneasy the moment he agreed to the meeting. The Leones were one of the most eminent Italian families and had been in the service of the papacy for centuries. They were exceedingly wealthy, notwithstanding the vows of poverty taken by a number of their male offspring, which included Francesco. The Templars and Hospitallers were the type of complex and powerful entity it was preferable not to associate with. No prince, king or bishop could make them yield, so what
chance had a moneylender! Even less so, as Leone was not there to ask for money. On this Giotto Capella would have staked his life. A pity, since money was so simple: it retained, restrained, and subjugated. What did he want, then? A favour, a mediator, the means with which to blackmail somebody? If Giotto Capella had had the courage, he would have turned the Knight of Christ away. But that was a luxury he could ill afford. Conflict with a military order would hamper his long-held ambition: to hold the post of Captain General of the Lombards of France by adroitly forcing out the current holder, Giorgio Zuccari – if necessary into his grave. For years he had been unable to abide Zuccari. A man given to preaching and impossible to catch at his own game, such was the loathsome integrity he showed towards his peers and, worse still, towards his debtors. Thus he applied to the letter Saint Louis’s recommendation that interest should not exceed 33 per cent. Why, if there were people crazy or desperate enough to pay 45 per cent? After all, Capella did not force potential borrowers onto his premises!

This line of reasoning repeated a hundred times worked like a charm. It had the power to lift his spirits. His light-heartedness, however, was short-lived. What the devil did Leone want from him? Why hadn’t he gone directly to Zuccari? His name and the fact that he was a Hospitaller permitted it, and the old moneylender would have welcomed him with open arms. A pox on inscrutable people!

His unease combined with a feeling of displeasure the moment Francesco de Leone walked into his study – a veritable Ali Baba’s cave jam-packed with paintings, carved wooden boxes, furs and valuable pieces of porcelain from his latest seizures. God, the man was handsome, while he resembled an ugly toad, wizened and yellow-looking from the constant privations decreed by his
physic in a clipped voice. Even his wife closed her eyes in disgust now, the rare times he stroked her thighs.

He stood up, holding out his hands, forcing himself to be gracious.

‘Knight, you honour my humble dwelling.’

Leone immediately sensed Capella’s hostility. He moved forward a few paces, responding to the perfunctory greeting only with a slight raising of his eyebrows. It occurred to Giotto that the man belonged to that select few before whom others knelt without them even noticing. His resentment mounted. He checked it, however, by enquiring:

‘Would you accept a goblet of my best wine?’

‘With pleasure. I do not doubt that it is excellent.’

The moneylender considered for a moment whether the seemingly anodyne remark contained a hidden reproach. What he really wanted was for the Knight to show that he was as greedy as his fellow man, but shielded by his name, his order, his piety. Then he could despise him freely, dismiss him with feigned indignation. He could already hear himself saying:

‘What! And you a Knight Hospitaller, Monsieur! What a disgrace!’

All those nobles and prelates, those so-called dignitaries who had filed before him and whom he had flattered, reassured and encouraged in their vices, which were the source of his livelihood – the never-ending source. Most had abandoned themselves to the deadly sins of cupidity and covetousness, which had corrupted their souls, their hearts, even their speech. But the man before him possessed the calm confidence of the pure, and they were the worst – especially when they were intelligent and no longer knew fear.

The two men sat in deceptively companionable silence while
a maidservant fetched the wine. Leone took the measure of the man opposite him. A few seconds were sufficient for him to know that Capella remained what he had always been: an avaricious swindler who only refrained sometimes from committing the vilest acts out of cowardice. An image flashed through his mind of a repulsive, carnivorous beast lying in wait uneasily, ready to pounce on his enemy’s throat at the slightest sign of weakness. The possibility of redemption was not distributed equally among men, for there were those who did not wish it.

Francesco took a sip of wine and set down the goblet, made ugly by an excess of chasing and inlaid precious stones. He reached beneath his heavy linen surcoat
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for the Grand-Master’s letter and handed it to Capella. After the Lombard had broken the seal and read the first few lines, everything around him started spinning. He murmured:

‘My God …’

He shot a glance at Leone, who signalled to him to continue reading.

It had never occurred to Capella that this blood-soaked memory from nearly fifteen years ago might one day come back to haunt him. He had paid dearly enough for it in every sense of the word.

A warm tear fell on his hand, followed by another. He let the sheet of vellum fall to the marble floor he had had brought over from his native Carrara at great expense.

Was he aware that he was crying? Leone could not be sure. Francesco de Leone waited. He knew the contents of the letter, of the blackmail note more precisely: any weapon, the prior had specified, himself having recourse to this strategy of extremes.

What did he care about the usurer’s tears, or his memories? So many people had died because of him.

The other man whispered breathlessly:

‘This is monstrous.’

‘Why? Because it is the truth?’

Giotto Capella gave the Knight the look of a drowning man and spluttered:

‘Why? Because it was so long ago … Because I have suffered the torment of guilt, and of the worst kind: that which we inflict on ourselves. And because I have tried so hard to be worthy of forgiveness …’

‘You mean, to be forgotten. We have never forgotten and we have not forgiven. And as for the torments of guilt, why, I would laugh if I were a mere soldier. Who let the Mamelukes invade Acre more than a month into the siege? Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil was champing at the bit outside the city walls with his seventy thousand men on horseback and his hundred and fifty foot soldiers from Egypt and Syria. The defence of the citadel of Saint-Jean was heroic: there were only fifteen thousand Christian soldiers inside the city walls. They fought like lions, outnumbered by fifteen to one. The Sultan’s men identified the weak points in the enclosure and in groups of a thousand tunnelled into the sewers and the butchers’ pit with remarkable precision.’

Leone paused to study the breathless man, who was gripping the edges of his writing table with both hands.

Capella made an attempt to justify himself in a barely audible voice:

‘The negotiations had been successful. Al-Ashraf had agreed to the citadel being evacuated if the defenders left behind all their possessions.’

‘Come now. King Henri would never have accepted such a complete, such a dishonourable surrender. What is more, the defenders of the citadel were soon able to judge for themselves
how far they could trust the Sultan’s word,’ retorted Leone in a calm voice, fixing the usurer with his deep-blue eyes. ‘On 15 May, the New Tower, donated by the Comtesse de Blois, collapsed, having been undermined by sappers. Al-Ashraf then promised to allow the conquered to evacuate, above all their women and children. But the Mamelukes were already in the central square desecrating the chapel and raping the women. What followed was a bloodbath. The Dominicans, Franciscans, Clarisses were massacred and the women and children were taken away to be sold as slaves. That was only the beginning of the destruction. Almost everyone was slain: my brother Hospitallers, the Knights Templar of Saint-Lazare and Saint-Thomas. Only a handful of cripples were left alive.’