The Sixth Key (31 page)

‘How long have you been with me now,
Chavigny?’ his master said.

‘Ten years or thereabouts,’ Chavigny answered.

‘How many hurdles did Dorat place in your way,
when you said you wanted to be my pupil?’

‘It took me near a year to convince him and
then he gave me no letters of introduction.’

‘That’s right, and you made the two-month
journey south to my home and arrived empty-handed at my door. And what did I
tell you then?’

‘That if I intended to become a student of the
mystic arts, I would have to be prepared to do those tasks you set me.’

Nostradamus nodded.

‘But in all this time you have set me no tasks
and there has been no instruction!’

‘Really?’ Nostradamus raised one bushy brow.
‘No tasks and no instructions? Well, you have not been very attentive, then.
Bring me that box.’

Nostradamus opened it and took out the velvet
pouch; what lay inside it looked ancient. ‘When I was given this I was sworn to
never divulge what I saw except to an acolyte who would one day replace me.
Circumstances have now precipitated what should not have come so soon. And so,
my dear Chavigny, I must ask you before all else, to take an oath.’

Chavigny, who had been listening without
taking a breath, gasped. This was the moment he had been waiting for! But he
told himself not to be hasty. The wrong answer could cost him his privilege.

‘Perhaps I’m not ready. Perhaps I am, as you
have said, too vain and unwise . . .’

Nostradamus raised a brow and looked at him
serenely. ‘Come now, Jean, will you have me believe that after ten years you
are not ready for what I am offering to share with you? Will you not swear the
oath to be my loyal student?’

Chavigny felt a momentary confusion, unsure if
he was swearing an oath of silence or one of loyalty, and there was a very fine
but important distinction. ‘What exactly am I swearing I will do?’

‘Listen to me, I don’t have time now to go
into all of it with you except to say that you will learn everything as we go
along. Right now I need you to swear to me that you will not read it. I have
not shown it to any man since I myself received it.’

A realisation struck Chavigny and he looked
down a moment. Of course, he understood now. Nostradamus did indeed live in a
forest of isolation, unsure of whom he could trust, looking around every
corner. Chavigny would now be the only other living soul to know some of his
innermost secrets. His heart swelled and he was about to say what this moment
meant to him when the impulse was forestalled by his master’s next words, which
were short and sharp.

‘Will you have me waiting all night?’ His grey
eyes were full of anxious glints as he prompted, ‘Well?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Chavigny blurted out, ‘I
swear on my life not to read it.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now listen carefully. This
book I hold in my hands once belonged to the secret library of a great man, a
doctor and alchemist named Scaliger. Did you know that your old teacher Dorat
and I studied together under Scaliger? I lived with Scaliger at Agen and we
worked side by side to vanquish the plague. He taught me all he knew and
initiated me into the secrets of the Rose Cross and after that allowed me to
enter into his secret library, which was hidden by panelled walls. Those were
happy days, sitting in the dark with a lighted candle and the world’s thoughts
in my hands. When he considered that I was ready he showed me this. Not long
after that, his niece, who was also my first wife, died of the plague, as did
all our children.’ He sighed. ‘The people rose up against me because I was not
able to save my own family, you see? They accused me of sorcery and without
their protection the Inquisition came knocking at Scaliger’s door. That is why
we pretended to quarrel publicly, so that he and his family would not suffer
through our friendship. One stormy night he packed a wagon full of his books
for me, handed me this treasure and wished me well. I left Agen and later
settled in Salon, but the Inquisition has long arms and soon caught up with me.
I was forced to burn most of the books one terrible night to save my new family
from the Dominican priests.’

‘And this?’

‘This—’ he caressed it, ‘—belonged
to the Cathars. They had safeguarded it from the Church for many years in the
caves of Lombrives. Before that it belonged to Mary Magdalene, Saint John’s
sister and the guardian of his Apocalypse. Days before the pope’s men and the
king’s imperial guard blocked up every exit from the caves – condemning
countless men, women and children to a slow and agonising death – an
unknown man slipped out carrying this. I don’t know how the book fell into the
hands of the Rosicrucians who were the followers of Saint John, but through
them it came into the possession of Scaliger. It has passed through many hands
and must do so again. You see, if Cosimo Ruggieri has a copy of the book of
Pope Honorius, there is no telling what he will do if this book falls into his
hands.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It is dangerous, Chavigny. That is why I have
carried it with me all these years. Why I cannot trust to leave it in any
place.’ Tears welled in his eyes. ‘I did not know whom I could trust . . . this
is a heavy burden I have carried, Chavigny. But now, I can do nothing else. I
must trust you. And you will take it from here.’

‘I?’

‘Yes, you! One day you
will understand why this was your destiny. I have seen the future in the
mirror. I have seen that we will be together again. In those far-off days you
will still be as stubborn as you are now, you will still think yourself a poet
and a writer and you will yet need my guidance.’

‘You have seen my future?’

‘Not now, Chavigny, you must leave. The Queen
Mother will arrange it. I cannot go. I’m too old. Who knows what this night
will bring? The mirror showed me nothing of it. You saw the township of Blois
on the way here – Protestant reformers gathering with weapons. The guards
had to beat them off with staves to let us pass. The Duke of Guise has arrested
the Protestant Conde and his supporters are not merry about it. That Catholic
Cosimo Ruggieri has turned against the Queen Mother because of her leanings for
the Protestants. He has sided with the Cardinal of Lorraine, a necromancer who
uses the Church for his own ends. Should they win out, I will be jailed for my
loyalty to her and they will find the book. My dear Chavigny, I fear we are
headed for a bloodbath!’

‘What will happen if they find the book?’

‘Pope Honorius had the keys or formulas which
allowed him to summon all the demons one by one, for whatever purpose. But
there was one key missing in his grimoire. If that key, which is contained in
this book that once belonged to the Cathars, is united with the knowledge in
the book of Pope Honorius, Ruggieri and the Catholic Cardinal of Lorraine will
be able to bring about the end of the world – they will cause the
Apocalypse that Saint John foretold, ahead of time.’

At that moment a bolt of lightning sent a
silver vein across the night sky and lit the room with incandescence. Chavigny
braced himself for what would come, since it seemed to him that Heaven itself
had underscored his master’s words.

‘I am afraid,’ Chavigny told him, truthfully.
‘Where will I take it?’

‘Go to the descendants of Raymond de Parella.
Centuries ago this family owned Montsegur, the fortress of the Cathars, now
they have become the lords of Perillos, in Roussillon. They are the only ones
who can be trusted. They will hide it and I will secret the knowledge of it in
one of my quatrains – it will say that the treasure can be found with the
twin infants from the illustrious and ancient line of a warrior monk.’

‘Twin infants?’

‘The townships of
Perillos and Opoul.’

‘And the ancient line of
a warrior monk?’

‘Templars! Hurry –
to Perillos!’

‘We need you to be honest with us, Madame Dénarnaud. The life of
a friend might just depend on it – and we’re running out of time!’

She raised her brows but said nothing. She
seemed to find his words amusing.

‘Saunière found it, didn’t he?’ Rahn pressed.
‘That’s what those antiquarian booksellers from London were looking for when
they came here to search his library after he died. But you made certain that
it wasn’t there!’

‘Found what?’

‘You tell us.’

‘Me? You give me too much importance,
monsieur, I was just a housekeeper.’

Eva cut in: ‘But you were more than a
housekeeper, madame! You inherited everything . . . perhaps it is more accurate
to call you an accomplice?’

The old face changed, almost imperceptibly
– it became hard, cunning. ‘Accomplice to what?’

‘Rituals,’ Rahn said.

‘What rituals?’

‘Rituals of black magic, right here beneath
the church, in the crypt of Marie de Blanchefort.’

She laughed then, a guttural laugh. ‘You have
been reading too many mystery novels!’

‘You warned me about ravens and then we find
one hanging in the church this morning. Did you do it?’ Rahn said.

‘Did I hang the raven from the crucifix? Of
course not!’

‘But you were in the church last night –
the abbé saw you,’ Eva remarked.

‘Are you asking me who tried to kill you? Why
don’t you go look for him – you will find that he’s long gone, with
whatever you told him tucked away in his heart!’

‘What?’ Rahn said.

‘Monsieur Rahn, for a lover of mysteries
you’ve not done well in figuring out this plot, have you? You’ve played right
into that priest’s hands. I suppose his blushing did it. He looks like such an
innocent – those fair eyes! But he is an innocent with the heart of a
devil.’

‘What do you mean?’ Rahn said.

The old woman looked at him with a smug
expression that annoyed him. ‘Well, who do you think locked the hatch leading
to the crypt last night? I suppose he told you I did it, didn’t he? The truth
is, if I hadn’t unlocked the door to the sacristy you wouldn’t be here now. He
did not know about that door, you see. And so, what did you tell him? Did you
show him something you had found perhaps? Was it that list of names you
mentioned?’

Rahn blinked.

Madame Dénarnaud gestured to a seat and said
with a sudden affectation of motherly concern, ‘Sit down, my dear, you look
pale. I think it’s time I told you some things, and you are free to do whatever
you want with them.’ She composed herself and began: ‘It all started, in many
ways, with Marie de Nègre d’Ables, Dame d’Hautpoul, Marquise de Blanchefort.
She was the last in her line and the last to live in the castle of the
Hautpouls, the one that is deserted now and fallen to ruin on the hill in this
village. On the eve of her death, she called for her confessor. Quite
naturally, he was the priest of Rennes-le-Château, the Abbé Antoine Bigou. I
believe he is on your list?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Never mind, just listen,’ she said to him,
ignoring Eva.

Eva watched them from her seat opposite with
an aloof detachment, apparently unperturbed by the other woman’s rudeness.

‘On her deathbed,’ the woman continued,
‘Madame Blanchefort gave Abbé Bigou something that had been in her husband’s
family for many years. Something that came into her husband’s possession
through the lords of Perillos – at least that’s what Saunière managed to
find out.’

‘The lords of Perillos?’

‘No one knows how the
house of Perillos came to have the treasure, but the house of Perillos and the
house of Blanchefort have had close ties since the Crusade against the Cathars.

The Blancheforts were a Cathar family with
Templar affiliations, and the lords of Perillos were connected to the Cathars
through Raymond de Parella, the master of Montsegur. They were united, if not
by blood, by loyalty. So it was natural that when the Perillos family became
diminished the treasure passed into the hands of the Blancheforts for
safekeeping. Knowledge of it and information about its whereabouts eventually
reached François d’Hautpoul when he took for himself the lands and the titles
of the lords of Blanchefort. François then married a nineteen-year-old orphan,
Marie de Nègre. On his deathbed he bequeathed knowledge of the whereabouts of
the hidden treasure to Marie, and on her deathbed, having no male heirs and
fearing instability in the land, she in turn passed the information to the only
man she could trust – her priest.’

‘You say there were no heirs?’ Eva said
coldly.

The woman glanced sharply at Eva. ‘I said no
male heirs.’

‘So there were female heirs?’

That glance was full of contempt. ‘Yes, but
perhaps she did not consider them suitable. Women were just chattels, to be
disposed of at will, they held no power in society and were quite defenceless.
This information was a perilous thing, after all,’ she said, and smiled at her
little pun. ‘Marie then died. Do you know the date?’

Rahn nodded. ‘The seventeenth of January
1781.’

She smiled and raised one brow. ‘As it
happens, her confessor, Abbé Bigou, was himself affiliated with a circle, a
brotherhood that had inherited the knowledge of a secret. To be precise, they
were called the Compagnie du Saint Sacrament. The order was formed in Toulouse
sometime around 1630 but was based at Saint Sulpice whose feast day is—’

‘The seventeenth of January,’ Rahn said.

She sat forward. ‘Saint Vincent de Paul was a
member of this order, as was Richelieu, who was not only a cardinal of the
Church but also King Louis XIII’s prime minister. Now, after Marie de Nègre
died in 1781, we find that the old Abbé Bigou, a member of the Compagnie, which
now calls itself Association Angelica, is in possession of the information that
relates to the whereabouts of the inheritance of the Hautpoul-Blancheforts
– not the treasure itself, but the information pertaining to where it had
been hidden by the family Perillos. Of course he had a sense for its
significance in relation to the secret, but he couldn’t take it to anyone more
senior, since the order by now consisted of a network of provincial branches
that were forbidden contact with one another. Moreover, France was erupting in
a revolution inspired by the Freemasons and everything was falling into chaos;
he did not know whom he could trust.

‘It was a difficult time for the Catholic
Church. Many priests were killed and their churches ransacked or put to the
torch. This meant that Association Angelica was in disarray and those clergy
who did survive chose to leave the country rather than swear an oath of
fidelity to the revolutionaries. Abbé Bigou and a certain Abbé Caunielle, of
Rennes-les-Bains, decided to head for exile in Spain together. But before Bigou
left for Spain he hid the information somewhere in the church here at
Rennes-le-Château, as he’d been told to do by Marie Blanchefort before she
died. Fearing for his own health and to ensure that it would not be forgotten,
he confided that he had hidden it, but not its whereabouts, to the younger Abbé
Caunielle of Rennes-les-Bains. He encouraged him to tell his successors what he
had done if ever the young abbé returned to France. When Abbé Caunielle finally
made his way back to Rennes-les-Bains some years later, he mentioned it to his
successor and the information came, finally, to the attention of Abbé Boudet
– who became a friend of Abbé Saunière’s.’

‘This Boudet is on the list,’ Rahn said, under
his breath.

‘Of course! Abbé Boudet was a very
knowledgeable man, a historian of the Celtic past of this area. It was Boudet
who encouraged Saunière to begin his modest renovations. He even supplied him
with the funds he needed from donations made by the Countess of Chambord and
others. These renovations bore fruit with the discovery of that parchment that
Marie de Blanchefort had given to Bigou before she died. Bigou had hidden it
inside the baluster that supported the pulpit.’

Madame Dénarnaud took out a small, weathered
parchment from inside the pages of the bible and gave it to Rahn.

He looked at it:

Jevousle gue cetindice
dutres or qui apparti entaux seign eursderen nes etce stlam ort. Lefeur evele

EWOWSZZKQGKAQBEWZHCSOZVX

XOTDQTKWZIGSDGZPQUCAESJ

MQTGYDCAFZVYMFUAQBUWPNDGZRLEURZ

MQTGYDCAXSXSDRZWZRLVQAFFPSDAPW

POEKXSXDUGVVQXLKFSVLXSSWLI

PSIJUSIWXSMGUZVVQZRVQSJKQQYWDQYWL

‘It’s a cipher!’ Rahn
said.

‘It was a simple cipher,
at least the first part of the parchment. Still, it took Saunière some months
to work it out, but once he found one word, seigneur, the rest began to form a
recognisable pattern, and each word he picked out revealed other words in French,
until he had deciphered the entire first part. It read: I bequeath to my
successor this clue to the treasure that belongs to the lords of Rennes. It is
death. Fire reveals it.

‘Saunière was an ambitious man, and the
thought of treasure was enticing, but he could not understand the jumble of
letters in the rest of the cipher. It vexed him terribly and he became obsessed
with decoding it, without luck. Finally, he resolved to ignore the cipher
entirely, convinced that the treasure had to be hidden somewhere else in the
church. He took note of the words “It is death” and searched in the niche
created at the foot of the altar wherein he suspected were buried relics as was
customary in churches. When the niche was opened, he was emboldened by the fact
that on the underside of the stone cap there was a depiction of the knightly
lords of Rennes, however he found nothing except a few scraps hardly worth his
trouble. He then took to the altar itself because altars are traditionally
places of sacrifice. He looked in the pillars that held it up and again he
found nothing, so he began to tear the church apart, under the guise of
renovation.

‘Despite months of searching he failed to find
anything, and yet he continued, for he had come too far. He then turned his attention
to the ancient crypt, which he knew held the sepulchre of the lords of Rennes.
Telling his parishioners that he wanted to shore up the foundations of the
church, he began looking for a way down. He was convinced that the treasure was
hidden in the crypt below the church and that there must be a hidden way to it.
He did find the crypt eventually, but it had been ransacked, and was empty of
anything valuable. Even this did not dissuade him. He continued his search and
discovered a tunnel and at the end of it a wall. This, he was certain, led to
the crypt of the dames of Rennes. The night he began to dismantle the wall,
there was a downpour and the crypt flooded with water, as it no doubt did last
night. He only just managed to escape with his life. After that, one could say,
Saunière became slightly mad. Rather than wait for the floodwater to recede, he
began looking in the cemetery late in the night for another entry into the
crypt.’

‘Did he find it?’ Eva asked.

‘Yes, there was an entry near the church
concealed by a gravestone inscribed with the words Et in Arcadia Ego.’

‘So he did use the crypt for magic rituals?’
Eva asked.

The woman gave her a whisk of a glance. ‘That
is not important. What is important is that he never found what he wanted in
that crypt and it ate away at him until finally, at his wits’ end, he decided
to tell his friend about the parchment.’

‘Abbé Boudet?’ Rahn said.

‘Yes, of course.’ She smiled as if he were an
orphan and she had just adopted him. ‘Boudet suggested that Saunière go to the
Bishop of Carcassonne, a certain Billard. The Bishop was very interested in
what Saunière had to say and he even gave him money to travel to Paris, to see
if someone could solve the cipher.’

‘To whom did he take it?’ Rahn asked.

‘Why, to Association Angelica, of course, who
are based at Saint Sulpice.’ She sat back, with narrowed eyes. ‘You see, Bishop
Billard also belonged to the same order that Boudet belonged to – and
Bigou before him. Billard understood clearly the significance of the parchment
and he told Saunière to go to Saint Sulpice, to see Abbé Hoffat who was a
senior member of that same order, and whose knowledge of all things occult was
unsurpassed. The man realised instantly that the note was related to the secret
their order had been safeguarding for many years and he set about trying to
decipher it. He worked out that in the second part of the note he was dealing
with le chiffre indéchiffrable – a Vigenère cipher. Do you know what that
is?’

Rahn nodded, thinking that he wasn’t going to
tell her how many reports on ciphers he had written for Himmler.

‘Then you will know, Monsieur Rahn, why the
Vigenère cipher is called indecipherable. Without the master word, it was
impossible to unscramble the message and therefore find the treasure. And they
did not have the master word. They tried every word in the first part of the
cipher and a number of combinations of words but even with his vast knowledge,
Hoffat failed to find the solution! After that, Saunière contacted those with
whom he had a special connection from his early days in Narbonne, thinking they
might be able to help him.’