A Murderous Procession (21 page)

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Authors: Ariana Franklin

Tags: #Adult, #Mystery, #Thriller, #Historical, #(¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), #Suspense, #Crime

BOOK: A Murderous Procession
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“Too difficult?” asked Sister Ermengarde.

If this woman had seen her and Rowley saying good-bye to each other under the fig tree, she wouldn’t ask. “I’m afraid I love a man.”

“More than God?”

“Yes.”

Ermengarde sighed in pity “Once Aelith was born, my husband and I found that our love had turned to the spiritual. He, too, is a
parfait
now.” She became brisk again. “Well, you must just make sure you starve yourself of the sins of the flesh on your deathbed. We call it the
endura.
Without it you will be condemned to be born again in another human body, or even as an animal, until your soul is pure enough to enter Heaven. That is why we abstain from meat in our meals—you never know who you’ll be eating.”

Adelia laughed. “I’m going to miss you, Ermengarde.”

“And I you … Doctor.”

“Oh, dear. Has it been that obvious?”

“It is in everything you do.
‘Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel.’
So the Sermon on the Mount instructs us. Jesus used the word men in the sense of all humanity, of course, for men and women are equal in the sight of God.” Sister Ermengarde harrumphed. “Catch the Pope in Rome agreeing to
that.”

Ward growled. He’d stood up, his fur raised in a ridge along his back. His snout was pointing down the hill to where the flames of the fire outside the cowshed seemed to have multiplied and were streaming back and forth, occasionally disappearing and appearing, as if from a rush of activity. A lot of shouting started up down there.

“What is it?”

Adelia got to her feet and squinted down the hill. Against the light of the fires, she could just make out the shapes of men wearing helmets.
Oh, God, Richard’s war has spread to here.

Whoever the men were, they were coming up the hill. Now she could hear what they were shouting: “Heretics,” they yelled. And, “Burn.”

For a second, Ermengarde was still. “They’ve come for us.” Then she whipped around, shouting. “Aelith. Out the back. Run, I’ll hold them off.”

She gave Adelia a push before grabbing at Boggart’s hand in an effort to raise her up. “Run, both of you.
Run.”

Unwieldy from pregnancy, Boggart was struggling to rise. As Adelia went to help her, the men closed in; she was enveloped in a smell of sweat and iron. Even in her terror, she knew it was the Cathars they’d come for, not her, and that Aelith, at least, must get away.

Ermengarde had slammed the cottage door shut and was shrieking and struggling to keep it closed. Adelia joined her where she clung onto the latch. “Leave her alone, leave her
alone.”

She felt her collarbone break as one of the men tried to wrench her away, but she still held on.

The two women gave Aelith just enough time to clamber out of the back window and escape into the woods. But they couldn’t save themselves—or Boggart.

Nine

BOTH
COWSHED
AND
COTTAGE
were put to the flame. “Like you fucking Cathars when we get where we’re going,” the leader of their captors assured them.

“We are not Cathars,” Adelia told him, struggling for calm, aware that she and Boggart had their hair bound up like any Cathar women and were wearing the black robes Aelith had lent them.

If she was distancing herself from Ermengarde, she was sorry, but so be it; she was only telling the truth, and there were the others to think of.

She said: “We are the servants of King Henry Plantagenet, and he’ll be mightily displeased if we’re harmed.”

“You’re fucking Cathars, that’s what you are,” he’d said, and spat. “And where we’re going ain’t Plantagenet land.”

At that point there’d been no sign of Mansur nor Ulf nor Rankin, and she was in terror in case they’d been killed. Then some more men came up the hill, and from their midst she heard the multilingual oaths of Mansur’s Arabic, Rankin’s Gaelic, and the good fenland English of Ulf—the latter cursing his captors and demanding in God’s name that his wooden cross be returned to him.

The captives’ hands were bound with ropes, each of which was tied to a saddle of a captor’s mule.

It was difficult to tell how many soldiers there had been during the assault because their leader immediately sent some of them off to pursue Aelith. Of the seven who were left when the others rode away, the torchlight showed rough, country faces and tunics bearing what looked like an ecclesiastical blazon. They addressed their leader, who, like them, spoke with a strong Occitan accent as Arnaud.

Adelia asked again and again where they were to be taken and why, but received no more reply than did Ulf’s threats that Henry II would spill their captors’ guts when they got there—the men didn’t understand them anyway

Arnaud gave a signal, the ropes around the prisoners’ hands tightened as the mules moved forward, and the march began.

The mountains were too rough even for mules to go at anything except walking pace, but every pull on the rope sent pain through Adelia’s broken collarbone. Also, she’d lost a shoe in the struggle and her right foot was being pierced by thorns.

An occasional reassuring whiff told her that Ward was sticking, unnoticed, to her heels. Yet who was there to follow the scent? Rowley had gone to Carcassonne.

“Are we going to Carcassonne?” she asked.

Nobody answered her; Arnaud had ordered silence.

Betrayed.
Somebody had told the authorities where Ermengarde and Aelith were staying. It could have been anybody, a peasant looking for reward, a Cathar hater. And he or she had entangled the rest of them in the betrayal.

Whoever the mercenaries were, they knew these mountains well; they followed wide tracks mostly, but now and then diverged from them so that the prisoners’ legs were torn by prickly brush that sent up the smell of thyme and fennel as they went.

The sound of hoofbeats announced the arrival of the men who’d gone hunting the escapee. “Lost her,” Arnaud was told. Ermengarde uttered a shout of triumph and was hit across the mouth for it.

Progress became harder when the mercenaries threw away their spent torches and proceeded by moonlight.

Through it all, and despite more punches because she wouldn’t keep quiet, Ermengarde sent up long and confident Cathar prayers.

Adelia’s eyes were on Boggart, tied to the mule beside hers. When the going became too rough and the girl fell, Adelia shouted at its rider: “Damn you, mind that lady, she’s expecting a baby” To her surprise, the man dismounted and heaved Boggart onto the mule in his stead. Arnaud, who was in the lead, didn’t notice.

It was impossible to calculate in which direction they were going or even to keep track of time; everything reduced to the necessity not to stumble, to stay on one’s feet, not to surrender to thirst and fear.

When would it be day? When would this stop?

Suddenly Arnaud shouted that he was going ahead “to tell ‘em we’re coming” and kicked his mule into a trot to disappear down a wide track into the darkness. After he’d gone, the man who’d shown care for Boggart proved his humanity once more by ordering a halt so that the captives could be given a drink. The water was warm and stale and the leather on the flasks it came in smelled foul but, oh, it was beautiful.

The march began again.

At last the mountains ahead became jagged shapes against a dim reflection of a dawn still down over the horizon. They funneled down on three sides of what was, so much as could be seen of it, a sizable town.

Figeres? No. Rowley had said that Figeres was little more than a village.

A hope reared that it was Carcassonne, one of Languedoc’s major cities, where Rowley was going. And yet she’d had the idea that Carcassonne was built on a plain.

She heard Ermengarde say, “Aveyron,” as if something had been extinguished in her, and one of the men laughed.

It was just waking up as they reached its outskirts. A woman emerging from one of the houses to empty a chamber pot shouted at her family to come and see. Shutters were flung back; questions, dogs, and children accompanied the prisoners up a winding, cobbled track toward a square formed by buildings of considerable size. Adelia glimpsed a tall tower and cupolas like graceful saucepan lids outlined against the rising sun.

Up and up into a square, where Boggart was lifted from her mule and the ropes binding the prisoners’ hands were replaced by manacles. They were ushered into a magnificent, arcaded hall, a where a line of liveried servants carrying food dishes into a room on the right paused to stare at the prisoners and were commanded to be about their business by a tap from the staff of a heavily robed steward. A line of people in a gallery above their heads goggled down at them.

In the middle of the hall, a man in the cassock of a priest sat at a table, a scribe beside him. There was an oath and a scuffle and, looking back, Adelia saw that one of the riders had taken Ward by the scruff of his neck and thrown him outside the doors that were then closed against him.

Ermengarde had recovered her courage. Pushed in front of the table, she addressed the priest politely in Latin: “
Ave,
Gerhardt,” and then, louder, in Occitan:
“Ara roda l’abelha.”
(“That bee is buzzing round again.”)

There was a laugh, quickly suppressed, that caused an echo making it impossible to tell where it had come from.


Father
Gerhardt to you, bitch,” the priest said in Latin.

“My father is in heaven. Are we to dispute again? Splendid.”

Father Gerhardt addressed his scribe. “Ermengarde of Montauban, a self-confessed Cathar. Write it down.” He raised his head. “Or have you repented, woman?”

“I repent of nothing.”

“You are charged with preaching heresy throughout this region in defiance of the edicts issued by His Holiness Pope Alexander the Third. The punishment is death by burning.”

“I do not recognize such edicts, nor your Satanic Pope. I have preached only true Christianity”

“We have the statements of witnesses.” Father Gerhardt pointed at a roll on his table.”

“Splendid.”

Stop it, stop it,
Adelia wanted to shout at her. The statement of an ignorant man as he’d set fire to Ermengarde’s cottage—
Like you fuching Cathars
—she’d taken to be the threat of a bully; now it was being translated into something else. Here, they were enclosed in the efficiency of a powerful machine, in front of them was a man about serious business, a stone-faced man whose eyes—the only mobile thing about him—had flames in them.

They can’t,
she thought.
Not us. Henry’s anger would be terrible

don’t they know that? They must know.

But around her were the indifferent mountains of a landscape where the Plantagenet writ did not run. She’d wandered into somebody else’s story, not hers. It was a mistake, she was going to die by mistake. She willed Ermengarde to cower, plead, whisper repentance, instead of shouting for her own execution—and theirs.

One by one they were made to stand before their inquisitor and told to give their names, place of birth, and occupation.

Their explanations were cut short: “You are Cathars, you were found consorting with Cathars.”

For all that she was shaking, Adelia tried for indignation when her turn came. “It is disgraceful that we are treated like this. Who are you? Where is this place?”

“You are in the palace of the Bishop of Aveyron.” The priest had the thin, protuberant features of a dog and an expression that suggested he would be better for going muzzled.

“Then inform your bishop that we are under the protection of the Bishop of Winchester, who is with Princess Joanna at Figeres, and the Bishop of Saint Albans of England, whom you can find at Carcassonne. We are servants of Henry Plantagenet, and we have been traveling with his daughter until …”

“You are Cathars, you were found consorting with Cathars.” It was a mantra.

Mansur’s questioning was briefest of all: who he was or what he was doing in Languedoc was of no interest—his color and robes were those of a self-confessed, if different, heretic; he could burn with the rest.

WHEN
HE’D
FINISHED
his interrogation, Father Gerhardt took up his papers, left the hall for the palace’s dining room, and passed through it to the breakfast room, where a table winked with crystal glass and gold plate.

Above, a flat ceiling glowed with Bible scenes painted by a master; below, the morning robe of the man at the table was no less inspired with autumn color and the skill of embroideresses.

The Bishop of Aveyron, a plump man with clever eyes, took one more honeyed fig, wiped his fingers on the linen napkin tucked into his neck, and looked up. “So the information was exact?”

“In every detail, my lord. I doubt we’d have found her hideout without it. Unfortunately, she managed to delay the men’s entry long enough for the daughter to escape. I’ve ordered a hunt for her.”

His bishop waved a hand in dismissal. “Do we care about the daughter? Ermengarde is the one we wanted.”

“And now we have her.”

For a moment these two very different men shared the same, searing memory—a black-clad woman standing in the town square making fools of them both:
“Leave me alone, old men. Abandon either your luxury or your preaching.”

The townspeople had laughed at them.
Them.

“Also,” said Father Gerhardt, “we have written proof against her. Our men searched the hovel before setting fire to it. There was a gospel written in the langue d’oc.”

The bishop shook his head sadly: “Gerhardt, Gerhardt, is there no end to Cathar evil? Where
should
we poor Latinate clergy be if the common herd were able to listen to the holy word in their own language?” He stretched out his hand to take one of the soft, white rolls nestling in a basket that his steward had just put in front of him. “You and I would have to go begging our bread.”

Gerhardt was put out; he never knew when his bishop was joking.

“A joke,” the bishop explained, seeing him puzzled. That was the trouble with priests who brought their zeal straight from the Vatican, no humor.

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