Richard’s death was a joy to some and an unbearable sorrow to others. He was dead after twenty-five years of relentless warfare. It was said of him that he sought victory rather than conquest. He was addicted to war and danger. There are soldiers and foreign correspondents who become adrenalin junkies. Maybe Richard was one of these people who are easily depressed and bored when they are thrown back into domestic life. But Richard was widely admired for his contempt for danger and his generosity of spirit. These two qualities came to be seen as English virtues, despite the fact that Richard spent so little of his life in England itself, where, he said, it was cold and it rained all the time.
Rumours immediately sprang up to explain his death, and what he was doing in Châlus besieging this insignificant castle. There was talk of a Gallo-Roman treasure. Around Europe the news of his death changed at a stroke the balance of power. John was soon to lose almost everything Richard had held. The contrast with his brother caused some to wonder why God had cut short his life:
Oh death, if heaven allow it,
I chide even God.
God why did you fail?
If you recall he defended your Jaffa
Against many thousands;
Acre too he restored to you . . .
Legends sprang up. One German legend – ‘
Richard Lowenherz
’ – has him locked in a room with a lion while in captivity. Richard kills the lion by sticking his hand down its throat and ripping out its heart. It was believed that a lion would not kill a true king. This legend had wide currency, and nearly two hundred years later, Shakespeare knew it well enough to use it in
King John:
Lady Falconbridge to her son, Philip Falconbridge:
King Richard Coeur-de-Lion was thy father
By long and vehement suit was I seduced
To make room for him in my husband’s bed.
Heaven lay not my transgression to my charge!
Thou art the issue of my dear offence,
Which was so strongly urg’d, past my defence.
Philip Falconbridge:
Now, by this light, were I to get again,
Madam, I would not wish a better father.
I think of the Globe and
Richard III
and Emily with her earnest nose, and her sexual fervour. I try to think clearly of Noor too, but she is becoming faint in my mind, as if she only existed as a preliminary sketch, like the master drawings Emily and I once went so earnestly to see at the Royal Academy.
When I try to understand Richard the Lionheart, a man who died relatively young, I am struck by the fact that I am myself more than a third of the way towards the end of my own life, and that I am alive only by chance at this moment in all the millennia that have passed and will pass. I am not warming up these feelings for literary purposes: I have learned with frightening clarity how insubstantial and arbitrary a life is. Noor described Kerak Castle as a necropolis. Who would disagree? We are, after all, resting on the bones of the dead.
From the balcony I see the Household Cavalry trotting pointlessly along. Some of the horses are steaming.
37
Academics may be
out of touch with the world, poorly barbered and prone to wearing sandals with socks, but their job is to represent the idea – at the very least – that there is rationality in the world, and that it must be explored. And that puts me in a difficult position, as my quest is not entirely rational. As I walk around one of those airy squares in Bloomsbury looking for Dr Philpott’s office, I wonder what he will make of it. There is a huge bronze bell knob. He comes to the door.
‘Keith Philpott, how do you do?’
‘Fine, thanks, and very grateful that you have given me the time.’
He is dressed in a denim shirt and shiny blue trousers. His hair is curly and tousled and he has that perennially boyish manner which male academics often retain, as though their hair is fixed for ever in a certain time. I would guess he is about forty-five.
‘No, it is my pleasure. It sounds interesting. And we have just the kit you need to look at your document closely. Cup of coffee before we begin? I do a rather fancy coffee. I took a course.’
I think his accent is from Somerset, a sort of reminder of the rustic world that has passed.
‘Coffee, that would be great.’
He has a huge old coffee machine. It rests on a table under a vast photograph of Jerusalem, the classic view across the Old City towards Al-Aqsa and its golden dome.
‘I did some weeks at the École Biblique.’
‘Yes, so Prosper told me. Lovely man. He says he knew your father.’
‘Yes. Back in the ’60s.’
‘Latte?’
The coffee machine is obscured by clouds of steam. The place looks like the station café in
Brief Encounter
. Philpott takes some time to pour the milk into two glasses, producing, by some magic, the design of a Prussian eagle on each of them.
‘That’s amazing.’
‘I find it strangely enjoyable. Yes, Prosper is a remarkable man. I have been out there often, looking at manuscripts, parchment and vellum, even papyrus, trying to date them and so on. I don’t really read them, so much as analyse them and conduct DNA tests. Prosper gave you a very warm recommendation. So let us march boldly on. Can you show me on the manuscript all the words you have identified first? Shall I get it out of the box and set it up?’
There seems to be something about me that attracts charity. I persuaded Lord Huntingdon to let me have the document X-rayed. He was reluctant, but I told him that his vellum might have a clue to where King Richard’s treasure was buried. He was animated by the mention of Richard; anything that brought him closer to Richard was a bonus. Every day for the past month I have passed under the gaze of the Lionheart, his sword aloft and a rapt look on his face, which recalls his one and only sight of Jerusalem.
My job is to write speeches for Huntingdon and research arcane facts about the European Union. At the moment we are looking closely at the residences of the important people in the EU’s foreign office. Huntingdon calls the functionaries who are allotted them
les grands fromages
. His next speech should make clever play, he says, on the scandalous protection these people are accorded against auditing of their expenses; and he will make a connection with the way that France’s two hundred and forty-six cheeses receive special status. (His ire is directed primarily at the French.)
Les grands fromages
should fear for the onslaught that he, armed with my choice phrases, is about to unleash on them. I am enjoying it, crazy though it is.
Dr Philpott extracts the manuscript carefully.
‘From what I can make of the ink and the few visible words, it is twelfth century. Let’s get it on the rostrum and have a good look. I am sure you know that these sheets of vellum were often used a few times. We may find words that have been written over, or we may find details which will allow us to identify both the place and a date. Presumably that would be important for you?’
‘It would be wonderful.’
He turns off the lights and fires up the machine. He tells me it is a Synchrotron, which throws an intense beam at the object. On the screen a ghostly, almost submarine, image is appearing.
‘Yes, I think you are right, it is a simple map, just what you would expect from someone in the field,’ Dr Philpott says. ‘There, under the remains of the note, look. Do you see just under that line? Just there is a church, and over there is the outline of what is a town. Are you interested in the church? OK, let’s go in closer.’
Philpott says that this kind of medieval map or diagram uses a number of familiar symbols for river, castle, church, abbey, city wall, and forest. He points to what he says is a pictogram of a cross beside the church and also to the words
‘grotte profonde’
; as he zooms in he says he can read ‘
sanc . . . croitz
’.
‘Are you looking for a cross?’ he asks.
‘Yes. We are looking for the True Cross, lost to Saladin. I don’t want to offend you, but will you keep this entirely secret?’
‘Of course I will. Father Prosper told me that you were on to something very important.’
‘Look, I think that this may be the cross that Richard brought back from Jerusalem. We think it was hidden on the way to Rouen. When I looked at the chart again I could see ‘
Chasluç
’ which is Occitan for ‘
Châlus
’, and that was where Richard was killed. We think Richard was there to look for his treasure, which many of the chroniclers mention. It was a piddling little place, and there can have been no other reason for the most important king in Europe to have been there, in person, to subdue thirty-eight people.’
‘OK, sounds reasonable. Now you need to know if what you have is enough to identify the place? Am I right? The church may still exist, and that would be a great help; if you think the treasure was hidden in the crypt or somewhere in the church.’
‘ “
Grotte profonde
” seems to suggest that it was left in a crypt or cave, I would say. “
Amagada
” means “hidden”.’
‘Yes, and the church, which we can just see outlined, seems to be to the south of a town, beside a castle. This little shape of a tower here, this could be your “Chasluç”. Now I have a fancy trick to show you. I can overlay this on a Google map of the area and we can see what we get. We will start with the presumption that this is Châlus. Is it Châlus-Chabrol? Right, this will take a little time. What we want is to find the few clues that your man left behind and then we can see if we can pinpoint the spot. Let me just use the computer to mark up the places of interest on the screen because they won’t read when we overlay. OK, done. This is exciting – a quest. Another coffee while the computer sorts itself out?’
I am light-headed, but I say yes. Keith Philpott is rushing about, perhaps crazed by caffeine himself, now making his exquisite latte, now checking the progress of the map overlays. I knock back my latte, this one decorated with a fern.
‘Why did you take a barista course, Keith?’
‘My wife left me, and I wanted something to do that wasn’t work. So that’s when I took the course. Being a boffin, I have naturally looked into all the mumbo-jumbo and the science of coffee and how to make it. Now I blog. I am known on the web as Prof Mike Macchiato.’
‘Do you mind me asking, why did your wife leave you?’
He looks at me briefly before answering.
‘She really hated me. That was it. She hated me for not being someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘Anybody. It’s a very unpleasant feeling, to be hated. Particularly if, in your own mind, you believe you have been quite reasonable. My wife said I had Asperger’s, very common amongst academics, she claimed. The strange thing is that now that she has gone I have never been happier. I feel guilty for being happy, but the upside is that, if I feel guilt, I can’t have Asperger’s. OK, let’s see where we have got to. Right, this is a river, the Tardoire, and, look, it corresponds, roughly anyway, to the river running beside Châlus. I do this all the time, by the way, for projects on British medieval villages and early Norse settlements. Your church would be about here, if it still stands. I’ll go in. And lo and behold, here is the outline of a church. Your “
yglise
”. Up to the north-east is a town and here we see, in exactly the right place, the city of Limoges.’
‘The castle belonged to the Viscount of Limoges. He had been a thorn in Richard’s side for many years.’
The day passes happily. It is amazing what Keith Philpott can find and interpret. He overlays medieval maps on our map. He looks at deeper levels of the vellum; he produces ink analysis.
There is a ring on the doorbell, and the door opens; a young woman with a pale, ethereal, seamless face appears. She has a little snow on her woolly hat. Keith introduces her. Her name is Ann. She is his colleague from Gothenburg on a project about early Norse villages in the pre-Christian era. She shakes my hand and I feel a little insistent pressure like the grip of a chameleon. Of course I am wondering if this pale woman has contributed to his new happiness.
‘Right,’ he says, ‘our time has flown. Ann and I have to do a little work. I will draw up a usable map for you, containing all the information I can get from your manuscript, overlaid with existing rivers and ancient buildings. Can I ask you, what are you expecting to find? A complete cross, a piece of wood, or something more elaborate?’
‘I think the cross will be in a reliquary, probably of gold and silver bands around a wooden casket. Although it may not have travelled in that alone.’
‘You have done a fantastic piece of detective work. Wonderful. I hope you can come round tomorrow and I will take you through the detail. And don’t worry, the chart will be locked away for the night. Goodbye, Richard. This has been one of my best days.’
‘Me too. Thank you.’