‘Do you like fish? I have some beautiful sea bass from Padstow, straight off the boats.’
‘I love fish. I used to be a ghillie.’
This is not one hundred per cent true: I hate salmon after having gutted and cleaned them and looked into their glassy, vacant eyes.
‘Larry is a wonderful cook,’ says Stephen. ‘He spoils me.’
We sit down with a glass of wine: for the first time in weeks I am completely relaxed. Stephen tells me he only goes up to the college about four or five times a year nowadays, for meetings or various dinners. Outside it is very dark, the deep rural dark. In the cottage I feel as though Peggotty is caring for me.
Stephen’s eyebrows are vigorous, probably nourished by the rich intellectual matter within. He seems wonderfully pleased to see me and, eager as I am for human warmth, I am grateful. He is a very old man, but he is still relaying something sacred, which I first heard from him, the belief in the transformative power of literature. I see that Larry has made him happy. Larry reads to him and cooks for him. In return, Larry receives the help and advice in his own writing from a great man, who is generous and unselfish.
Later, Larry shows me to my bedroom under the roof. A small fire burns in the grate. The bed is covered with a patchwork quilt, and a blue bottle of Cornish Natural Spring Water stands by the bed.
‘He often talks about you.’
‘I don’t deserve it, but I need his approval just at the moment.’
‘He told me he wanted you to sit for the prize fellowship.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t think I was up to it. How is he, by the way?’
‘It comes and goes. At the moment he seems very happy and well.’
‘I can see you are good for him.’
‘I hope I am. Anything you need? No? Well, sleep tight.’
I have a bath and jump gratefully into bed. In my bedroom at Ed’s house, now on the market, everything is damp and soiled. Here, all is crisp and clean. I have six pillows with embroidered pillowslips and there is a bowl of tulips by the mineral water. I sleep untroubled for the first time in weeks. My aunt would have said it was the fresh air, or the ozone.
After a late breakfast, Stephen suggests we go for another walk. We head up a lane, and emerge on the golf course, and cross a fairway, heading towards the stumpy, isolated church.
‘Stephen, I didn’t tell you the whole story.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘I have to tell you that Noor, who was kidnapped, is my half-sister.’
‘How exciting.’
‘Well, when I met her I didn’t know and she didn’t know either. But after she was taken, her mother, who lives in Jerusalem, told me. My father and her mother had a relationship a year or so after I was born. Haneen – her mother – felt she had to tell me when she realised we were proposing to get married.’
‘Quite common amongst the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns, of course. What are you going to do?’
‘We’re not going to get married, obviously. She’s in Toronto having counselling and psychiatric treatment, as well as internal operations.’
‘Dear boy, what an extraordinary and awful thing.’
‘I really wasn’t meaning to involve you, but I thought it was dishonest not to tell you.’
A man in plum-coloured trousers and red fleece comes down the hill, led by his Labrador, which is pulling hard on the leash.
‘Hello. Stephen, hello.’
‘I see the dog is taking you on a walk, Mark.’
‘I would have died years ago without him. It’s a consensual arrangement.’
‘A retired High Court judge,’ says Sephen when he has gone by. ‘Richard, can I ask you, as your old tutor and great admirer, to listen to what I have to say?’
‘Of course.’
‘Your quest, as you quaintly called it last night, is troubling you, because it has no obvious outcome. Is that more or less what you were saying?’
‘That is exactly what I was thinking.’
‘Perhaps it is a diversion. You should write about your experiences in Jerusalem and your quest to find the Holy Cross in any way you like. Use your imagination. From what you have told me, it’s about belief. The power of fiction at its best is to make the reader believe, to enter into, what you, the writer, are writing. That’s all it is. By reading, and giving his consent to be beguiled, the reader becomes complicit with the writer, to some extent creating his own fiction. You have a wonderful opportunity. Even if it turns out not to be the True Cross, and even if there is no neat outcome, you can write about that. You must free yourself. Dear Richard, nothing could give me greater pleasure and satisfaction than to be able, before I die, to read the book I know you are capable of.’
We are standing near the ninth tee of Trebetherick Golf Club, the wind blowing in from the estuary; Betjeman is at rest two hundred yards away. I feel treacherous tears welling again. Even now I wonder if my treatment in hospital has altered me for ever at the cellular level, somewhere the emotions arise. Stephen’s hand on my arm is shaking. His thick grey hair is flying wildly. His cheekbones and the surrounds of his mouth are raw from the wind so that he has a cadaverous look, as if prefiguring his death.
‘Thank you, Stephen. Thank you.’
‘Shall we go home?’
I take his arm under the elbow, in the way we were taught at Boy Scouts to escort a blind person across a busy street. I did not have the opportunity to put it into practice as I never saw a blind person and, anyway, the streets were rarely busy.
19
Marseilles was a
busy port. From Pisa and Genoa, Venice, Milan, Corfu, Rhodes, Acre, Alexandria, Constantinople and Brindisi, ships from the modest to the magnificent docked. The Crusades had led to an increase of commerce and traffic and there was a constant bustle around the quays, and the markets on the quaysides; the huge warehouses, which looked like rural barns, were full of goods for onward transit. A new world of trade and commerce was emerging in the counting houses, factors’ offices and merchants’ storerooms. All the languages of the Mediterranean were spoken here, including Arabic. The merchants and factors were highly organised. In order to cope with the many nationalities and the complex agreements, Latin had become the language of trade.
The sailing season was officially closed for the winter; the sea could be violent and the winds could rip sails; galleys powered by slaves could be swamped. But this did not deter the few brave, or desperate, captains who set sail for home when they saw a break in the weather. Ox- and horse-drawn carts departed at all hours on the first stage of the long journey inland, as far as Paris and Antwerp and Rouen and La Rochelle, Dieppe and Amsterdam. Glassware, silks, spices, Flanders cloth, skins, wheat, wine carried in tuns, and much more, were loaded and unloaded.
On the 15th of January, a large sailing ship docked. It was rumoured that it carried knights who had come from Acre and Corfu. This mysterious ship had a high prow, which made it capable of crossing the Channel to England, but at this time of year there was no question of leaving the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Bay of Biscay: the prevailing winds made that impossible.
An armed guard from the Templar
commanderie
waited for the five knights who were escorting the precious cargo to disembark. These men were among Richard the Lionheart’s most loyal knights. They had taken the cross and they had all fought at Richard’s side in Messina, in Cyprus, in Jaffa, in Acre, in Arsuf and in Ascalon. They had about them a sort of dignified sanctity: a third of their fellows had died of disease, drowning or wounds over the past two years, and they had seen death and blood and massacre. All of them bore scars. But they had received Almighty God’s grace by entering the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, so fulfilling their vows.
Word had got out that the Templars were receiving these important knights, who were on the business of a king. Rumours were circulating furiously around the quays. Henry of Huntingdon understood that rumours were dangerous. In truth, only the Master of the Templars knew their business. But here in Marseilles, not even the brotherhood of the one hundred leaders of the crafts and businesses of Marseilles, which had its own courts and regulations, would dare to offend the Templars by asking questions. The Templars were very powerful and in Marseilles, which was in practice an autonomous state, they were particularly potent.
As they disembarked, the knights were wearing their light mail without cuirass. The mail was covered by a plain white surcoat on which was stitched a simple cloth
crotz;
none of them wore the arms of their captive King because there were many enemies of their overlord here in Provence.
Messengers from Hubert Walter had prepared the Templars for the arrival of their guests. Henry of Huntingdon, William de l’Étang, Gerard de Furnival, Raoul de Mauléon, Bartholomew de Mortemer, Roger de Saci and Master Robert walked beside a wooden box, draped with a brown Flanders cloth. Huntingdon was the only one of the knights heading for England. The others were going to Anjou and Normandy. An outer ring of Templars led them solemnly from the great ship towards a waiting galley. The merchants and factors stopped their work briefly to watch; they had seen many strange sights. It may have looked to them like a religious ceremony, as, in a way, it was. To reach the Templar
commanderie
, an island fortress, the knights, their escort and the treasure had to travel by boat. The galley moved swiftly, leaving behind the bustle and rumours and spies of the port. The Master himself came out of the castle to greet the travellers, and led the procession through the main gate. As soon as they had shed their mail the knights were seated at a long refectory table, where the Master gave thanks for their safe arrival from the Holy Land, through dangerous waters, and blessed them for their successes against the infidel. Huge fires at either end of the refectory warmed them. Flagons of Provençal wines were brought in by the squires, followed by platters of mutton, and lampreys and beef from the marshlands of the Camargue, known in Occitan as Camarga.
Weary and sick though they were, Huntingdon and his brothers in arms made their way to the chapel of St Bernard de Clairvaux, the patron saint of the Knights Templars. The chapel was devoted to the cult of the Virgin Mary, and Richard’s knights gave thanks on their knees for their safe passage and prayed that the Virgin would continue to protect them on their sacred mission. For two weeks they waited for a message as they rested in the Knights Templars’ care.
Henry of Huntingdon was particularly anxious to set out for home. He hadn’t seen his wife for three years. But, unlike Marseilles, Arles and Toulon were under the suzerainty of the Counts of Provence and the journey to Arles and onward would be dangerous. If it were known that Huntingdon was leading a small group of knights who were escorting precious treasure for Richard, there would be a free-for-all, and the knights would be seen as candidates for ransom, like their sire. The whole world knew that Richard was held in captivity. There was a cloud over England and the Angevin empire.
When the message came and the terms were agreed, and the silver was handed over, the Master of the Templars prepared to provide an escort of twenty knights to ride as far as Arles; Huntingdon’s men were given Templar cloaks and robes and armour for the journey. Their shields, on a black-and-white background, were inscribed with the words:
In hoc signo vinces – In this sign you will conquer
, the motto of Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor, who saw a vision of the cross, the chi-rho, in the sky before the decisive Battle of the Milvian Bridge. The new world that was emerging still had roots in the classical world. The bridge, where Constantine received his revelation, still spans the Tiber, almost one thousand seven hundred years after Constantine’s apocalyptic vision.
For Henry of Huntingdon himself, no challenge was too difficult, no danger too great, but he was apprehensive: to lose the Holy Cross now was unthinkable. The contingent, apparently of Templars, set off well before dawn in a galley; the horses were restless, tied head to tail in a flat barge, before they were led onto the quay and the knights mounted, to ride out beyond Marseilles, away from the marshes and islands and the teeming port. The treasure was in a covered wagon pulled by four horses. Two more draft horses were tethered to the back of the wagon in case they were needed. Only the master of the
commanderie
knew what was being carried in the large wooden box, secured with metal bands and wrapped in Flanders cloth. Initially the knights followed the route of the Roman Road, skirting the mouth of the Rhône. Roger de Saci rode with his favourite falcon from the Holy Land on the pommel of his saddle. It was in jesses and bells and an Arab hood covered its head.
‘That bird won’t last long in this weather,’ said Huntingdon.
The bird was crouched, its feathers plumped up.
‘She is strong. If she dies, that will be a very bad omen for all of us.’
From within its hood, the falcon squeaked.
‘You are a mysterious man, Roger.’
‘I trust fate. I love the bird. I want her here, close to me. If she dies it is God’s will.’
Henry had seen many men who clutched at straws after the horrors they had witnessed.