Darling Sweetheart (15 page)

She looked in the front reception room then tried the kitchen, but Darling Sweetheart wasn’t there. Then, she noticed a yellow glimmer from the far end of the darkest corridor. She sneaked along it; the light came from the chapel door. It was a little bit open. She took a deep breath, hugged Froggy and went inside. The door creaked and a candle flickered, which made the statues look like they were moving, getting ready to pounce. The glass faces in the windows all stared down at her and she nearly ran away. But then she heard Darling Sweetheart say, ‘Piss off, Gabriela.’ His voice came from inside a wooden box that Mr Crombie said was where the priest used to listen to your sins.

She whimpered, ‘Darling Sweetheart?’

There was a silence then, ‘Annalise, is that you?’

‘Are you talking to God?’

‘No. Go back to bed.’

‘Please come out – it’s cold and there’s faces and Mummy is crying because she doesn’t know where you are.’

‘No one knows where I am. Now go to bed.’

‘I know where you are.’

‘That’s not what I mean. No one knows where I am in my life; no one understands me. And now I’m discussing my problems with a five-year-old child; that just says it all. Thank you, God.’

‘I knew you were talking to God!’

‘I am
not
talking to God! I don’t believe in God and even if I did, it wouldn’t be the same God they built this place for. Now go away; I want to be alone. A shit-heel deserves to be alone.’

‘What’s a shit-heel?’

‘If I have to come out of this box, I’m going to be very cross with you.’

‘I want you to come out of your box.’

‘Oh… just go away.’

She sat on the stone floor. It was freezing on her bum. She put Froggy on her lap; she didn’t want his bum to freeze too. She waited; she said nothing and Darling Sweetheart said nothing. After a long time, she couldn’t feel her bum any more. Then, she had an idea; she made Froggy talk. She made him say, ‘Annalise, why won’t Darling Sweetheart come out of his box?’

She answered, ‘Because he is sad, Froggy.’

‘Poor Darling Sweetheart. We don’t like it when he is sad in a box.’

She heard a click, and the door of the priest-box opened. Darling Sweetheart sat on the floor, his chin on his knees. He was in his pyjamas but had his glasses on, so she knew he could see her. He said, ‘You’re doing it all wrong.’ He crawled out and knelt in front of her. ‘Give him to me.’ He took Froggy from her. ‘You see, Froggy’s voice,’ he held him up, ‘has to come up through your nose. And he speaks quickly, like this, “Hey, bug-face. You gotta make me sound like a shit-heel.” Now copy me.’

She said, ‘Hey, bug-face. I am a shit-heel.’

‘Not bad, not bad. But you need to practise over and over, until you get it absolutely right. That’s called rehearshing.’

‘R
ehears
ing.’

‘Another thing… do you want to know the
real
secret of making Froggy talk?’

‘What?’

‘When you’re pretending to be somebody else, you don’t just copy how they speak. You have to copy what they’re like, before it really works. Like, Mrs Crombie always says nice things, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s because she’s a nice person. So if you were pretending
to be Mrs Crombie, you would try to think nice things. But if you were pretending to be me, you would think bad things, because I’m a bad person.’

‘No you’re not!’

‘Don’t argue! You have to imagine what it’s like inside someone’s head, or else it doesn’t work properly!’

‘So inside Mummy’s head would be crying?’

‘Exactly! Very good! So when you make Froggy talk, you have to make him like me, cheeky and nasty – okay?’

‘But you’re not nasty, you’re my Darling Sweetheart!’

‘Pay attention!’ he barked. ‘You know, there are people who would pay an awful lot of money for acting lessons from me!’

‘Sorry.’

‘Now listen closely: Froggy is always cheeky because he says the things that you really think, but you’re too polite to say. Like if someone was fat, Froggy would call them a lard-arse…’

‘Lar darse.’

‘… and if someone was stupid, he’d call them as thick as bottled pig-shit.’

‘But you shouldn’t call people stupid – you might hurt their feelings!’

‘Schnopple-kopf, no one tells you this when you’re little, but most of the people who live on this planet are profoundly stupid. Isn’t that right, Froggy?’

And Froggy said, ‘Hey, you’re the one hiding in a creep-hole of a chapel in the middle of the freaking night!’

Annalise slapped Froggy. ‘Bad frog! Don’t you say bad things to my daddy!’

‘Hands off the fur! The truth hurts, y’know?’

‘Now Froggy,’ her father said, ‘you have to be nice to Annalise because she is a tired little girl who needs to go back to her beddy-byes.’

‘No!’ Annalise cried. ‘I’m not leaving you alone in the creepo chapel!’

It’s all right, poppet.’ He lifted her up. It was her favourite feeling in the world, when her father carried her. ‘I’m finished here. We’re all going to bed now. Here,’ he gave her Froggy, ‘take this bad article with you.’

She yawned. ‘But who will look after Mummy?’

He kissed her nose. ‘Don’t you worry, Schnopple-kopf – you leave Mummy to me.’

Froggy snickered. ‘If the lady still wants some when you’re done, gimme a shout.’

‘Silence, you filthy frog, or you’ll find yourself sleeping in the duck pond.’

Annalise hugged Froggy and snuggled her face into her father’s neck. He smelled of his spicy aftershave. As he carried her up the big stone stairs he sang, ‘Call me darling… call me sweetheart… call me dear…’

Roselaine de Trenceval huddled in a corner of the tumbrel as it bounced along the riverside track. Her hands were bound in front of her, one end of the rope lashed to the side of the crude cart, although, in truth, she could not have run very far with some fifty mounted men riding before her and another dozen or so behind. She’d been captured near Toulouse the previous evening, visiting a sick relative in a small, peaceful village that had been overrun by the crusaders as quickly and as casually as the tumbrel wheel crushed any unwary toads into the muck. She had been forced to watch as fifty-two villagers were burned alive. In fact, only six had been
credentes
– believers – the rest were ordinary Christians, consigned to the most painful death imaginable for the minor crime of tolerating Cathars in their midst. As the Dominican friar who supervised the burnings had said, ‘Kill them all; God will know his own.’

She had been spared because her clothing, speech and pale skin marked her as an aristocrat’s daughter, therefore maybe worth a ransom. She had lied about her parentage, telling the inquisitorial monk that she belonged to a minor liege family that resided twenty leagues east of her father’s castle. She knew that if she revealed she was Raymond de Trenceval’s daughter, she would be used as a bargaining chip to force him to surrender without a fight. Or to torment him, if he resisted. Quite possibly, she had about another day to live.

The Dominican, a certain Friar Bernard, had expressly ordered that she should not be beaten or violated, either suspecting she was more noble than she claimed or perhaps reserving her for his own purposes. Her father, in fact, was the most prominent Cathar convert in all of Languedoc: his patronage had permitted the religion to flourish in the region for many decades. The beauty of Catharism was that it required no churches, no
priests, no rituals or riches; indeed, it regarded such things as evil distractions, the work of the devil. Instead, all a convert had to do was to receive the
consolamentum
, the only sacrament the faith required or recognised. After that, if life was lived chastely and modestly, a person attained the status of Perfect – and if you died Perfect, you could escape the hell that was this earth and rejoin the spirit of God.

But a single slip – an act of self-indulgence or lust – and one returned to the lesser status of
credente
and had to receive the
consolamentum
all over again. That could be problematic, as only another Perfect could pass on the sacrament, and as the crusade progressed south, the Perfect were either being killed or forced into hiding. Roselaine had been Perfect since the age of eleven – her greatest fear was that she might not die in this state and therefore suffer reincarnation. Next time around, there was no guarantee that she would be born noble – or even female, for that matter – and for a less privileged mortal, attaining and keeping the status of Perfect could prove very difficult, especially if the cursed crusaders continued to murder her co-religionists with such vigour. The
consolamentum
had been passed from Perfect to Perfect for twelve hundred years, since the time of Christ, and if that immaculate link was broken, it could never be repaired.

‘I wouldn’t mind a taste of you, my pretty.’

A mounted soldier leered into the tumbrel. He was filthy, unshaven and missing most of his teeth. Roselaine averted her face in disgust, but he drew his sword and slapped the side of the cart where she crouched, causing her to jump. She tried to wriggle away but, just then, the cart stopped. Up ahead, a handsome knight raised his sword in the air. Even through her terror, she had noticed this knight looking at her earlier.

‘We must ford the river here!’ he called back to his men. ‘It is deep, but in both directions it is deeper still!’

Reluctantly, the leading soldiers began to coax their horses
into the water, the knight having drawn back to let them pass. The ugly thug beside Annalise took advantage of the distraction to renew his mocking advances.

‘Hey, pretty pretty,’ he drooled, ‘do you know what it is to have a real man inside you?’ Again she tried to pull away, but the binding rope would not let her. The buffoon laughed and prodded at her. ‘Hey, lads!’ He summoned his fellow troops, several of whom gathered around, peering down at Roselaine with a mixture of lust and crude amusement. ‘What wager you that m’lady has never had a man between her legs?’

‘How could she,’ rasped another, ‘when there are no men in Languedoc?’

A third soldier spat on her, his hot phlegm spattering her naked arm. ‘A taste of Frankish beef! That’s what this filthy Cathar needs!’ The fear and mortification of her predicament burned across Roselaine’s face. The first soldier tried to lift her dress with his sword.

‘Give me five minutes, I’d soon convert her!’

She kicked his sword away, summonsing every shred of contempt in her soul. The soldier cackled and ran his tongue around his hole of a mouth. Suddenly, his expression changed from one of twisted desire to surprised pain, as he took a blow from the flat of someone else’s weapon. He swung around to retaliate, but the knight already held a blade against his hairy chin.

‘Get your carcass into that river – it could do with a wash.’

The other rogues watched closely as, for an instant, it seemed as if their ringleader might risk a fight, but the knight smiled, daring him to try. The toothless soldier lowered his weapon, yanked his horse’s reins and cantered off. His fellow tormentors followed. The knight moved his mount, a large black stallion, against the side of the tumbrel.

‘Bernard de Vaux,’ he grinned at her. ‘You have about ten seconds to escape, so do exactly as I say.’ He glanced at the foot-soldier holding the reins of the cart-horses. He was permitting
the mounted troops to pass – most of these were now in the river, trying not to fall in. The knight smiled at her again. ‘I deliberately picked a deep spot.’ She looked at him in puzzlement. ‘When I cut your rope,’ his expression turned serious, ‘you need to jump on my horse – can you do that?’

She shook her head. ‘Why are you–’

‘There’s no time to explain. I won’t get another chance like this. Either you come with me now, or you’re dead.’ She held up her wrists and averted her face. He sliced the rope. ‘Now! Move!’ She leapt up, stepped onto the edge of the tumbrel and sat behind him, side-saddle. They galloped off, away from the soldiers in the river, but three of Roselaine’s tormentors saw what happened and wheeled around to follow. One fell in the water with a splash. The other two set off in pursuit.

‘Cut! Cut!’ Peter Tress stood upright. Both he and Sergio Palmiro had been crouched on a metal camera platform attached to the rear of the cart. ‘That was amazing!’ He clapped his hands, grinning. He took a walkie-talkie from his belt. ‘David! Maria! Please tell me you are as happy as I am!’ David Lamb stepped from the trees with a steadicam operator beside him.

‘We’re good,’ he nodded.

Across the river, Maria Kepecs gave the thumbs-up from her position atop a scaffold tower. The two mounted soldiers who had pursued Bernard and Roselaine re-emerged from the forest, followed moments later by their quarry. Annalise slid off Emerson’s horse. She shook her arms and what looked like a tightly bound knot slipped easily away.

‘Hey! What about this lady?’ Emerson announced. ‘She even does her own stunts!’ The star led a smattering of applause and Annalise gave a quick mock-curtsey.

‘Perfecto,’ Palmiro nodded. ‘It was perfecto.’

‘Sergio is right,’ Tress beamed. ‘So much emotion for the camera, yet you hardly said a word! I tell you, you have no problems with this part!’

I wasn’t acting.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘I feel pestered and humiliated in real life at the moment, so I just let it show.’ Tress’s smile turned glassy. She patted Emerson’s horse on the nose.

‘You’re comfortable around these fellas,’ he noted.

‘Like I told you, my father once bought me a Palomino…’

‘Sure.’

‘…but my mother had it shot.’

‘Huh?’

‘Peter, what’s next?’

‘Oh, uh, maybe you could both take a break – I want to do close-ups of the soldiers.’

She patted the horse again then sauntered off. Emerson turned his animal around.

‘Hey! Where ya goin’?’

‘To get a drink from the catering truck.’

‘Jump up,’ he reached out an arm, ‘and I’ll give ya a ride.’ She held his arm, put a toe in his stirrup and swung herself up behind him, this time straddling the horse. He cantered on.