The Lady Agnes Mystery, Volume 1 (8 page)

‘But it was inevitable,’ Capella whined. ‘Two years before – in the month of August, I believe – some peasants and Muslim merchants were attacked by Hugues de Sully’s Italian crusaders in a marketplace. The merchants were forced to seek refuge in their inn, and …’

‘And who came to their aid?’ Leone interrupted in a voice that was now openly contemptuous. ‘The Knights Templar and Hospitaller!’

‘It was a war. Wars are …’

‘No. It was an ambush. An ambush that was admirably thought out and therefore worth its weight in gold. Was it not, moneylender? As for that skirmish at the marketplace, it was nothing but a poor excuse. Anyone starting a war must always provide some kind of justification. But that is neither here nor there. Had the Mamelukes not known the precise location of the New Tower and the sewers, the work of the sappers would have been useless, or at least slowed down. We could have waited for reinforcements or, at worst, negotiated the evacuation of most
of the people. How much did they pay, Giotto Capella, for the slaughter of fifteen thousand men and almost as many women and children?’

‘They … they beat me. They … they threatened to castrate me. They were going to … They were laughing …’ he stammered.

The usurer’s eyes swept the room, as if he were expecting some miraculous intervention. Leone stared at him. The sly rat was using his last defence: pity.

Early June 1291. The centre of the battle had moved. The Sidon Fort was now under siege and would not hold out much longer. A young boy of twelve struggled against the hand clutching his shoulder, that of his Uncle Henri, and, freeing himself from the iron grip, ran towards the ruins of Acre. He tripped and fell then leapt to his feet, his hands sticky with blood.

The broad white steps were bathed in sunlight. The broad white steps of the chapel defiled by streaks of dried blood and a morass of human flesh. The broad steps swarming with bloated, feasting flies.

Some of the women had attempted to seek refuge in the chapel, to hide their children there. Underneath one of them, whose head, almost severed from the neck, was facing the sky, the young boy recognised a mass of flaxen hair. Flaxen hair congealed with blood. His sister’s hair.

‘How much, Capella? How much for my mother and seven-year-old sister, defiled, their throats slit, left to rot in the sun, ravaged by dogs so that I could no longer recognise them? How much for your soul?’

The other man’s gaze settled at last on the Knight. The gaze
of a dead man, a gaze from the past. In a voice he no longer recognised as his own, and suspecting he might never recover from this confession, he said:

‘Five hundred gold pieces.’

‘You are lying. I can always detect your feeble lies. It was a smaller sum, wasn’t it?’

Faced with the other man’s silence, the Knight persisted:

‘Wasn’t it? What did you think? That doubling or tripling the amount in gold would absolve you? That by multiplying the price of your treachery and greed they would somehow be legitimised? That everything in this world has a price? How much do you imagine a thousand pounds, or a hundred thousand, or ten million is worth in the eyes of God? Why, the same as a single penny.’

‘Three hundred … And I only saw half of it. They broke their word. They spat in my face when I went to claim the balance.’

‘The rascals!’ said the Knight, mockingly.

He closed his eyes, tilted back his head, and, as though speaking to himself, repeated:

‘A hundred and fifty gold pieces for all those corpses, for those two women … A hundred and fifty gold pieces, which allowed you to become a usurer. A tidy sum for a … what were you when you still had a soul?’

‘A meat merchant.’

‘Oh yes … That would explain your perfect knowledge of the sewers at Acre and of the butchers’ pit.’ Leone sighed, before continuing in a hushed voice, ‘I know you and your kind so well that I sometimes feel I am enveloped by a rotten stench. It follows me everywhere, sticks to my skin, makes my stomach heave. I can sense you before I see you, before I hear you. I can smell
you. The stale odour of your dead decaying souls suffocates me. Do you know the stench of a rotting soul? It is worse than any stinking carcass.’

The other man leapt up, suddenly oblivious to the stabbing pain in his foot. His face drained of blood, he moved towards the Hospitaller’s armchair, and fell to his knees, wailing:

‘Mercy, I beg you, mercy!’

‘That is beyond me, and I regret it. For my own sake.’

Some minutes passed, punctuated by the kneeling man’s sobs. A violent sadness shook Leone. How could a simple act of forgiveness cause his infinite love for Him to waver? What had he lost, what had he destroyed of his faith? He pulled himself up with the thought that he had not yet become the Light, that he was still drawing near, with such difficulty, so much effort, like a desperate ant, deranged and sickened by darkness.

One day. One day he would reach out and touch it at last, the Light he had only been able to glimpse in the nave at Santa Costanza. One day he would embrace it, he would breathe it in, be immersed in it and all his sins would be cleansed. He was drawing near, he could feel it. For so long the tireless ant he had become had crossed oceans, climbed mountains, braved every obstacle, nearly died a hundred deaths, seared by the desert sun, wasted by fever, swept away by storms. And yet each time he had picked himself up and continued towards the Light. He longed one day to die inside the Light, to dissolve and at last to be at peace.

The Ineffable Trace, the Unutterable Secret was within his reach, all that was necessary to attain it was to shed blood, his own blood.

Leone stood up, gently pushing aside the broken man.

‘I await this meeting with Guillaume de Nogaret. You are,
after all, an official moneylender to the kingdom of France, and I am sure you will find an excellent reason to explain my presence here. And remember: at the slightest sign of treachery Philip the Fair will learn who was responsible for the slaughter at Acre. I shall remain in your house for the duration of this enterprise. Do not speak to me, usurer, about any other matter. I shall take my meals alone in the room you will provide for me in your residence. I want it ready within the hour. I am going outside to breathe the putrid smell of the streets. It must be more tolerable than the one you mask with incense in your chambers.’

He paused in the doorway without turning and addressed the shell of a man:

‘Never lie to me. I know so much about you, Capella, so much that you do not know. Should you be tempted to betray me for a fat sum or simply out of fear, I swear before God that I shall punish your days and nights with torments such as you have only touched upon in your wildest imaginings.’

E
very night for weeks Clément had been coming back, drawn almost in spite of himself by the treasures in the secret library that were hidden from the eyes of the world. After a few uneasy forays he had gradually gained in confidence. He would enter at nightfall and occasionally felt bold enough to stay for the whole of the following day. He lived on the provisions he pilfered from the kitchens at Souarcy – for he was becoming more and more distrustful of Mabile. Indeed, his initial, rather dormant mistrust had grown keener since Eudes de Larnay’s last visit. Up until then, he had been content to spy upon the spy in order to protect Agnès, but now he was on the lookout for any suspicious activity. He had soon seen through the folly of his first plan: catching Mabile red-handed in order to give the Dame de Souarcy a legitimate excuse to turn her out was too obvious – too obvious but, above all, of little or no use. Why not instead catch the spy out at her own game? Why not plant a few harmless secrets for her to find? Then if Eudes tried to use them against his half-sister, it would be easy to discredit him in spite of his lineage and wealth, which gave him nevertheless a significant advantage. All Clément needed to do now was convince his mistress to agree to this subterfuge. He knew that his lady was beginning to glimpse an unpleasant truth.

Noble victories or dignified defeats are only possible when confronting a noble enemy. The weak can fight a powerful villain only with cunning and deceit. He was certain Agnès had understood this even though she had still not accepted it completely. Still, in one sense Eudes’s villainy had done the
Dame de Souarcy a good turn; it had silenced her remaining scruples and remorse. Eudes was an evil beast and in order to defeat him any line of attack was permissible.

His nightly forays into the secret library at Clairets Abbey were part of this. To begin with, Clément had comforted himself with the idea that if the Abbess had a sudden wish to go in there, he could simply hide under the spiral staircase, behind the pieces of leather that formed an improvised curtain. His fears soon proved groundless. The Abbess rarely entered the library, to which she alone possessed the keys, and of whose existence only she was aware. The fact that it held so little appeal for Éleusie de Beaufort, who was renowned for her learning, had at first surprised the child. But he had gradually begun to understand why. A number of these works contained such revelations, such shocking secrets – some so upsetting they had reduced Clément to tears. To begin with he had doubted the veracity of the words that expressed them. But the evidence was so overwhelming it had finally convinced him. Thus the earth was not surrounded by a void, but by some intangible fluid within which coexisted elements and organisms so microscopic as to be invisible to the human eye. Thus the stone in toads’ brains that protected against poison was a mere fable, as were unicorns. Thus comas, convulsions, trembling and headaches were not symptoms of demonic possession but of a malfunction in the brain – if one were to believe Abu Marwan Abd Al-Malik Ibn Zuhr, called Avenzoar in the West, one of the twelfth century’s most eminent Arab doctors of Jewish origin. Thus it was not enough to spit three times in a toad’s mouth in order not to conceive for a year. Thus, thus, thus …

Was Éleusie de Beaufort trying to hold back this tidal wave? Had she grown pale at the thought of the threat this science posed
to all the stale dogmas and, more importantly, the power it gave to those who wielded it?

A single slim volume had absorbed him for almost a whole month. It was a Greek primer for Latinists. He had even been bold enough to borrow it for a few days in order to further his learning of that strange language, which seemed to him more and more essential to an understanding of the world.

He had then scoured the library’s interminable shelves for a similar work that would allow him to penetrate the mysteries of Hebrew and Aramaic; for during his feverish research a sort of logic had soon become apparent, an indefinable conducting thread that led him from one work to another.

He was stunned upon carefully opening a small collection of aphorisms bound in a kind of coarse red silk. That same name. That same name written in ink at the top of the first page in the last three books he had deciphered. He had discovered the connecting thread. Eustache de Rioux, Knight Hospitaller. Was the man dead? Had he bequeathed his books directly to Clairets Abbey or through a legatee? What was it that had drawn Clément to the works in his collection those past few days?

A sudden impulse made him go back to the shelf where he had found the book. One by one he pulled out the adjacent volumes, glancing inside them before replacing them. At last he found what he had been looking for. The large book was bound in roughly tanned leather of an unpleasant dark-purple hue that still gave off the sour smell of suint. There was no sign of any title, even on the title page, only the name of its former owner, like a code: Eustache de Rioux. From the diagrams that filled the first few pages Clément supposed it was a textbook on astronomy or astrology. The subsequent pages astonished him:
in them appeared the signs of the zodiac, some accompanied by a profusion of arrows pointing to complicated calculations and annotations penned by two distinct hands. One set of writing was even and graceful, though rushed, the other more squat. It was not so much a book as a personal notebook. Did it belong to the Knight de Rioux, and to another whose name did not appear in its pages? A sentence written in italics caught his attention:

Another arrow pointed from this proclamation to the following page. What he discovered there left him utterly bewildered.

An ecliptic circle featuring only three of the zodiac signs – Capricorn, Aries and Virgo – was covered in the jottings and crossings-out of someone searching for answers. Comments ending in question marks bore out the impression of uncertainty. Others seemed only to be reminders for the author, or authors.

These comments had been penned by the more graceful hand – visibly at ease with a quill pen. But to whom did they refer? This
Filii hominis
, the Son of Man, Christ? If so, then the first sentence made no sense at all, and the third even less so. More time to do what? And who was meant by ‘we’? The two authors? As for the astrological reference, it was too abstruse. What was the ‘consanguinity’ of a sign? Who were the women referred to?

Clément raised his head towards the arrow slits. Outside, the sun was setting. He had not shown his face at the manor since the previous day, and Agnès would be worried. It was almost vespers. He could slip away while they were holding the service and go back.

He paused. He had a strong urge to take the notebook he had found back to Souarcy and study it at his leisure. But his good sense quickly dissuaded him, all the more so as the volume was unwieldy. So be it, he would return to the library after matins
⁺
and pick up where he had left off.

He stood up and snuffed out his little oil lamp, the benefits of which were that it smoked less than a torch and there were enough of them at the manor for one missing to go unnoticed, unlike the tallow lamps or candles, which were costly and therefore included in the kitchen inventory. He walked down to the storeroom.