Authors: Manda Scott
—How fares the Maid, my dear chancellor? Is her colour not better?
—I think it is, my good archbishop. The king’s care suits her. She must remain under his watch another month at least, I think.
—But then the fighting season will be over.
—No loss. How can she fight, who has no army?
She sleeps while they are here, or appears to, and wakes when they have gone, to spit curses into a mug of watered wine and gall, that she might not taint the air.
Her friends come more frequently, and with gifts. Always, Tomas hears Yolande before he sees her, a sigh of silk and satin. He smells her too: a light, flowering scent of citrus, lavender and rosewater and a top note of something sharp-light-sweet that he cannot name.
Today, she is caught in dry October sunlight, taller than the tallest man, stretched to it by a confection of veils and wire, so that she approaches God with her height, can petition Him for favours.
She comes prepared for battle, girded in midnight blue damask, bright jewels and gold. Her eyes are dark pits, reflecting a thousand points of coloured light. He cannot truly see her face for the dazzle.
By contrast, de Belleville remains the very epitome of self-effacement. When the rest of the court is gaudy, he is clad in doublet and hose of near-black English wool (in some things, England cannot be bettered) with a cambric shirt and a jacket of tawny silk, stiffened at collar and cuffs by Belgian lace and Italian pearls. His boots are calf hide, neatly fitted, with pointed toes.
Marguerite, of the alabaster skin and black hair, is midway between these two. Her veils are not overly high, her brocades are good but not exceptional – Italian, he thinks – in muted gold and blackened blue, with lilies here and there but neither the restraint of her husband nor the bludgeoning magnificence of Yolande.
Once, Tomas thought she had eyes for Huguet, but now he has a chance to see more deeply, and to understand, for in the Maid’s waking moments, Marguerite sits always beside the bed, unless the Maid is on her feet, when she finds a place that does not block her walking and follows her with her eyes. Whatever the company, it is to the Maid that she turns, the Maid’s embrace that she seeks. Nobody else matters.
They are like
this
. So said Claudine, her fingers scissored together. Claudine who resented their closeness. Claudine who …
Stop. Look to the Maid. She, likewise, does not see the rest of the room when Marguerite is here. They laugh together now, over some small murmured intimacy.
Tomas catches de Belleville’s eye. They share a shrug. What can be done when the die was cast so young? Nothing. We live with it, as do they. Tomas takes his jealousy and scatters it into the darker corners, to spin its webs and die for lack of food. It is his penance. He has much to repent. He will not feed it.
‘What can we do?’ Marguerite asks the Maid. ‘You will lose your mind if you are confined thus for another month.’
‘Another month? I will be barking with the moon if I cannot ride within the week!’
She smiles as she speaks, mellowing herself for the sake of the present company, but he has wondered this past week about the balance of her mind. He offers the idea he has been incubating since the wagon ride from Paris.
‘The king will not let you fight against the enemies of France, but he might let you assault the enemies of his friends. At the very least, those friends may add their voices to his persuasion.’
‘Which friends? Which enemies?’ Yolande, her fingers steepled, head slightly bent, catching the late light. She is like Bedford, possessed of a vast, sharp mind to be wooed with intelligence and swift thought. She is their best hope in the turning of the king from spineless puppet into monarch worthy of the name.
And so, to Yolande, he says, ‘Perrinet Gressart.’ The name drops as lead into an ocean, straight down. Nothing happens.
They stare at him, except the Maid. Her look is his reward. She ceases to pace, sits on a stool. Not for here the thick, black ugliness of the inn at la Chapelle. The king’s furniture has elegant, cup-shaped legs that cross over, and bear the sitter as on a small throne.
The Maid says, ‘Perrinet Gressart leads his own company. Burgundy funds him.’
Tomas corrects her. ‘Until recently, my lord of Burgundy funded him; now he is his own man, fights his own battles, takes the towns that please him. Specifically, he has taken those lands to which Georges de la Trémoïlle lays claim. The king’s chancellor, I hear, is most discomfited by the loss of his tax revenues. He has complained bitterly to the king, who has, as yet, done nothing.’
De Belleville: ‘De la Trémoïlle might ask of the king that we retake his lands?’
The Maid is one step in front. ‘Better that the suggestion comes from Regnault de Chartres, who must believe it comes from Bedford.’
Guerite asks, ‘How will such a thing be done?’
Tomas’s heart takes wings. This is what he was born for. He sweeps an extravagant bow. ‘Leave it to me.’
‘
ARE WE READY?
’ Picaut asks Patrice as he drives into Cléry-Saint-André.
‘As we’ll ever be.’ Garonne, answering, is in Rollo’s car outside the basilica awaiting only Picaut’s order.
Patrice drives on past, turns right and parks a hundred metres further down the road.
Picaut: ‘Do you still have the directional microphone from last night?’
‘Already out.’
‘Any sign of Monique Susong?’
‘Her car’s the yellow Clio three in front of mine. She just walked inside. There’s no sign of the priest, but he might be inside already.’
There is a moment while Rollo turns the car and drives back to park out of sight around the corner. She keeps the line open. Garonne murmurs, ‘Gotcha,’ and there’s a scrape of plastic on plastic as he balances his mobile by the output speaker of the directional mike.
A murmur of conversation hisses down the line, too distant, too fuzzy-thick to be coherent. Patrice says, ‘Wait,’ and pulls a mini USB lead from his satchel, connects her phone to his laptop and tweaks the software.
A hiss of white noise and Monique Susong’s voice emerges from the fog. She sounds muffled, as if she’s speaking through a gas mask, but it’s good enough to pick out the meaning and Patrice is recording every word.
‘… that he didn’t die for nothing. I don’t expect you to understand the science or the need to set history right, but I do expect you to understand that a man
died
for this. Isn’t that what your religion is all about? A man who died for a cause?’
‘Our Lord died for our sins. Yours as well as mine.’ The priest speaks with the dry, husked whisper of a man who is losing his voice, or regaining it.
He could be on the tail end of a cold, but Picaut has heard that particular rasp before, and the pathology behind it was far more malign than a virus.
She wants to know the man behind the sound. At her request, Patrice pulls up an image from the Internet and mounts it on the right half of the screen.
In his online identity, Father Cinq-Mars is lean, wiry, surprisingly youthful. His hair is dark and thin and falls straight to below his ears. His profile is angular and angry.
Today, he sounds like a man with little time to spare. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to see whatever Iain Holloway saw that made him fear for his life.’
‘That won’t be possible.’
‘You would rather I went to the police?’
‘It’s not a question of preference, it’s a question of possibility. What Dr Holloway saw no longer exists. It has been incinerated.’
‘You destroyed human remains because someone with a modicum of qualification wanted to take a proper look? You
burned
them?’
The enormity of this stabs through the walls, blows the sensors on Patrice’s microphone off the red end of the scale. In their separate cars, Garonne and Picaut sway back, put their hands to their ears.
In the basilica, Father Cinq-Mars says nothing, and nothing, until, eventually, ‘Some things are better left undisturbed.’
‘You mean the Church wants them left that way?’
‘Not just the Church; the whole of France. We will not let one man’s obsession – or one woman’s – destroy our heritage.’
‘That’s … vandalism …’ Monique Susong sounds defeated. Inside the basilica, there is a rustle of clothing as if a woman of extravagant means has lifted her handbag and slid it over her shoulder.
‘What will you do?’ the priest asks.
‘What I was going to do in any case: find out why Iain died.’
‘The police are already doing that.’
‘No. The police are searching for whoever is lighting the fires in Orléans and they are failing to find them. They don’t care about one man, a foreigner, and his death.’
‘Whereas you care about his death, but not the fires.’
‘I am trying to convince myself that a priest of the Church has not lit half a dozen fires in Orléans merely in order to kill one man.’
‘Then you must succeed in your endeavour, because I give you my word, in the name of God, that we neither lit the fires nor killed your friend. I don’t know who did.’
‘I believe you about the first, if only because they started long before Iain Holloway set foot in France. If I thought otherwise, I’d have gone to the police long ago.’
‘I am grateful for your insight …’
A brief pause. Perhaps a handshake?
‘I will be back.’
‘I could say that I look forward to that with pleasure, but what I can do with honesty is wish you well in your quest.’
They part.
Into the microphone, Garonne says, ‘Do we take her?’
‘Not yet. Follow her. If she goes to Orléans, bring her in. Otherwise, I want to know where she goes, and— Fuck …’
Patrice has been trawling through the net and has pulled up one of the most striking images of Monique Susong, sub-editor of the fashion pages of
Vogue Paris
. Seen in full screen, she is tall, black, astoundingly dressed – and not the woman who is now walking out of the west-facing door of the basilica. Her facial structure is similar enough to confuse them in a thumbnail; they may be cousins or sisters, but they are not the same woman.
‘Rollo, Garonne, she isn’t who she says she is. Follow her and pick her up at her hotel. Patrice, keep the tap on her phone. I want to know who she calls and what she says.’
The woman calling herself Monique Susong is dressed in scarlet and black. On the grey winter streets of Cléry-Saint-André she stands out like
Vogue
amongst the broadsheets. Picaut watches in the side mirror as she returns to the Clio, sits for a while in thought, then pulls away and heads back towards Orléans. Garonne reports soon after that he and Rollo have her in sight.
Picaut steps out of the car. To Patrice, she says, ‘Stay here. I’ll call if I need you.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To talk to the priest.’
He is at the far, eastern end, beyond the altar, when she reaches him. She doesn’t need to show her police ID to prove who she is, the television coverage has seen to that. He nods a greeting, as if they had a longstanding appointment to meet.
‘Monique Susong,’ she says. ‘Who is she really?’
He has the intelligence not to look surprised. If anything, he seems tired.
‘Iain Holloway’s lover?’
‘That would be one part of it, I imagine.’ His voice is still husked, but she was right, this is not simply a viral infection. The rest of him bears only a ghost of a resemblance to the man in the online images. With a precision that is not purely professional, Picaut notes that his fingernails are yellowed, with ridges and troughs ploughed along their lengths, his face is lined, his hair far thinner than the photograph and damaged by radiation or drugs; he has been mortally sick and may never be well again.
He sees her looking. ‘Laryngeal carcinoma.’ He gives a thin smile. ‘Your father and I share afflictions. I suspect we also shared an enthusiasm for the same cigarettes in our youths.’
‘Do you have pulmonary secondaries?’
His eyes skid away from hers. ‘I will not meet my maker just yet.’
Her father went through exactly this; the remissions and re-admissions and false hopes that turn out to have been better than no hope at all, and were, in fact, the best he’d get, and looked back on later as oases of sanity in the final crumbling.
She says, ‘What did Iain Holloway see that you have since destroyed? No, really—’ She holds up a hand. ‘I heard what you said to Monique Susong. She might accept it, but I don’t. If I have to, I’ll present a file to Prosecutor Ducat this afternoon and we’ll hold a press conference on the steps of his office this evening. All we have to do is breathe a suggestion that you’re linked to the fires, and I promise you, the press will wreak havoc with what’s left of your life.’
He stares at her. The scleras of his eyes are yellow with jaundice. Still, there is some fire there, some spirit. He chews on his lip. When at length she reaches for her phone, he says, ‘He saw a collection of bones, old bones, bones that were purported to be, amongst others, the monarch Louis XI and his wife.’
Louis XI: son of Charles VII, the king made by the Maid. A pattern nudges at the edges of her mind; not one she wants. ‘Purported?’
The priest spreads his hands. ‘Our nation, you might remember, has suffered more than her fair share of revolution and strife. English, Spanish, Huguenots, revolutionaries, Nazis; times without number, men armed with fire and axe have swept through this church. Each time, the priests have saved that which mattered most, which is to say the mortal remains of the men and women who were interred here. The stone and brick and marble they have left to those whose pleasure is destruction. In the process, human remains are not always labelled as accurately as we might like. Those in our care were said to have come from the king’s tomb,’ he gestures back towards the marble monstrosity that sits inside the northern door, ‘but one can never be sure.’
‘Why did you burn them?’