Heretic

‘He said they made the tower into a prison,’ she said.

‘A furnace,’ he insisted, ‘to find the philosopher’s stone.’

The priest’s guess was closer than he knew, and soon the whole neighbourhood was convinced that a great philosopher was locked in the tower where he struggled to make gold. If he was successful, men said, then no one would need to work again for all would be rich. Peasants would eat from gold plate and ride horses caparisoned in silver, but some people noted that it was a strange kind of alchemy for two of the soldiers came to the village one morning and took away three old ox-horns and a pail of cow dung. ‘We’re bound to be rich now,’ the housekeeper said sarcastically, ‘rich in shit,’ but the priest was snoring.

Then, in the autumn which followed the fall of Calais, the Cardinal arrived from Paris. He lodged in Soissons, at the Abbey of St-Jean-de-Vignes which, though wealthier than most monastic houses, could still not cope with all the Cardinal’s entourage and so a dozen of his men took rooms in a tavern where they airily commanded the landlord to send the bill to Paris. ‘The Cardinal will pay,’ they promised, and then they laughed for they knew that Louis Bessières, Cardinal Archbishop of Livorno and Papal Legate to the Court of France, would ignore any trivial demands for money.

Though of late His Eminence had been spending it lavishly. It had been the Cardinal who restored the tower, built the new wall and hired the guards, and on the morning after he arrived at Soissons he rode to the tower with an escort of sixty armed men and fourteen priests. Halfway to the tower they were met by Monsieur Charles who was dressed all in black and had a long, narrow-bladed knife at his side. He did not greet the Cardinal respectfully as other men would, but nodded a curt acknowledgement and then turned his horse to ride beside the prelate. The priests and men-at-arms, at a signal from the Cardinal, kept their distance so they could not overhear the conversation.

‘You look well, Charles,’ the Cardinal said in a mocking voice.

‘I’m bored.’ The ugly Charles had a voice like iron dragging through gravel.

‘God’s service can be hard,’ the Cardinal said.

Charles ignored the sarcasm. The scar went from his lip to his cheekbone, his eyes were pouchy, his nose broken. His black clothes hung from him like a scarecrow’s rags and his gaze constantly flicked from side to side of the road as though he feared an ambush. Any travellers, meeting the procession, had they dared raise their eyes to see the Cardinal and his ragged companion, would have taken Charles to be a soldier, for the scar and the sword suggested he had served in the wars, but Charles Bessières had never followed a war banner. He had cut throats and purses instead, he had robbed and murdered, and he had been spared the gallows because he was the Cardinal’s eldest brother.

Charles and Louis Bessières had been born in the Limousin, the eldest sons of a tallow merchant who had given the younger son an education while the elder ran wild. Louis had risen in the Church as Charles had roamed dark alleys, but different though they were, there was a trust between them. A secret was safe between the tallow merchant’s only surviving sons and that was why the priests and the men-at-arms had been ordered to keep their distance.

‘How is our prisoner?’ the Cardinal asked.

‘He grumbles. Whines like a woman.’

‘But he works?’

‘Oh, he works,’ Charles said grimly. ‘Too scared to be idle.’

‘He eats? He is in good health?’

‘He eats, he sleeps and he nails his woman,’ Charles said.

‘He has a woman?’ The Cardinal sounded shocked.

‘He wanted one. Said he couldn’t work properly without one so I fetched him one.’

‘What kind?’

‘One from the stews of Paris.’

‘An old companion of yours, perhaps?’ the Cardinal asked, amused. ‘But not one, I trust, of whom you are too fond?’

‘When it’s all done,’ Charles said, ‘she’ll have her throat cut just like him. Simply tell me when.’

‘When he has worked his miracle, of course,’ the Cardinal said.

They followed a narrow track up the ridge and, once at the tower, the priests and the armed men stayed in the yard while the brothers dismounted and went down a brief winding stair that led to a heavy door barred with three thick bolts. The Cardinal watched his brother draw the bolts back. ‘The guards do not come down here?’ he asked.

‘Only the two who bring food and take away the buckets,’ Charles said, ‘the rest know they’ll get their throats cut if they poke their noses where they’re not wanted.’

‘Do they believe that?’

Charles Bessières looked sourly at his brother. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ he asked, then drew his knife before he shot the last bolt. He stepped back as he opened the door, evidently wary in case someone beyond the door attacked him, but the man inside showed no hostility, instead he looked pathetically pleased to see the Cardinal and dropped to his knees in reverence.

The tower’s cellar was large, its ceiling supported by great brick arches from which a score of lanterns hung. Their smoky light was augmented by daylight that came through three high, small, thickly barred windows. The prisoner who lived in the cellar was a young man with long fair hair, a quick face and clever eyes. His cheeks and high forehead were smeared with dirt, which also marked his long, agile fingers. He stayed on his knees as the Cardinal approached.

‘Young Gaspard,’ the Cardinal said genially and held out his hand so the prisoner could kiss the heavy ring that contained a thorn from Christ’s crown of death. ‘I trust you are well, young Gaspard? You eat heartily, do you? Sleep like a babe? Work like a good Christian? Rut like a hog?’ The Cardinal glanced at the girl as he said the last words, then he took his hand away from Gaspard and walked further into the room towards three tables, on which were barrels of clay, blocks of beeswax, piles of ingots, and arrays of chisels, files, augurs and hammers.

The girl, sullen, red-haired and dressed in a dirty shift that hung loose from one shoulder, sat on a low trestle bed in a corner of the cellar. ‘I don’t like it here,’ she complained to the Cardinal.

The Cardinal stared at her in silence for a good long time, then he turned to his brother, ‘If she speaks to me again, Charles, without my permission,’ he said, ‘whip her.’

‘She means no harm, your eminence,’ Gaspard said, still on his knees.

‘But I do,’ the Cardinal said, then smiled at the prisoner. ‘Get up, dear boy, get up.’

‘I need Yvette,’ Gaspard said, ‘she helps me.’

‘I’m sure she does,’ the Cardinal said, then stooped to a clay bowl in which a brownish paste had been mixed. He recoiled from its stench, then turned as Gaspard came to him, dropped to his knees again, and held up a gift.

‘For you, your eminence,’ Gaspard said eagerly, ‘I made it for you.’

The Cardinal took the gift. It was crucifix of gold, not a hand’s breadth high, yet every detail of the suffering Christ was delicately modelled. There were strands of hair showing beneath the crown of thorns, the thorns themselves could prick, the rent in his side was jagged edged and the spill of golden blood ran past his loincloth to his long thigh. The nail heads stood proud and the Cardinal counted them. Four. He had seen three true nails in his life. ‘It’s beautiful, Gaspard,’ the Cardinal said.

‘I would work better,’ Gaspard said, ‘if there was more light.’

‘We would all work better if there were more light,’ the Cardinal said, ‘the light of truth, the light of God, the light of the Holy Spirit.’ He walked beside the tables, touching the tools of Gaspard’s trade. ‘Yet the devil sends darkness to befuddle us and we must do our best to endure it.’

‘Upstairs?’ Gaspard said. ‘There must be rooms with more light upstairs?’

‘There are,’ the Cardinal said, ‘there are, but how do I know you will not escape, Gaspard? You are an ingenious man. Give you a large window and I might give you the world. No, dear boy, if you can produce work like this’ – he held up the crucifix – ‘then you need no more light.’ He smiled. ‘You are so very clever.’

Gaspard was indeed clever. He had been a goldsmith’s apprentice in one of the small shops on the Quai des Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité in Paris where the Cardinal had his mansion. The Cardinal had always appreciated the goldsmiths: he haunted their shops, patronized them and purchased their best pieces, and many of those pieces had been made by this thin, nervous apprentice who had then knifed a fellow apprentice to death in a sordid tavern brawl and been condemned to the gallows. The Cardinal had rescued him, brought him to the tower and promised him life.

But first Gaspard must work the miracle. Only then could he be released. That was the promise, though the Cardinal was quite sure that Gaspard would never leave this cellar unless it was to use the big furnace in the yard. Gaspard, though he did not know it, was already at the gates of hell. The Cardinal made the sign of the cross, then put the crucifix on a table. ‘So show me,’ he ordered Gaspard.

Gaspard went to his big work table where an object was shrouded in a cloth of bleached linen. ‘It is only wax now, your eminence,’ he explained, lifting the linen away, ‘and I don’t know if it’s even possible to turn it into gold.’

‘It can be touched?’ the Cardinal asked.

‘Carefully,’ Gaspard warned. ‘It’s purified beeswax and quite delicate.’

The Cardinal lifted the grey-white wax, which felt oily to his touch, and he carried it to one of the three small windows that let in the shadowed daylight and there he stood in awe.

Gaspard had made a cup of wax. It had taken him weeks of work. The cup itself was just big enough to hold an apple, while the stem was only six inches long. That stem was modelled as the trunk of a tree and the cup’s foot was made from the tree’s three roots that spread from the bole. The tree’s branches divided into filigree work that formed the lacy bowl of the cup, and the filigree was astonishingly detailed with tiny leaves and small apples and, at the rim, three delicate nails. ‘It is beautiful,’ the Cardinal said.

‘The three roots, your eminence, are the Trinity,’ Gaspard explained.

‘I had surmised as much.’