The Lady Agnes Mystery, Volume 1 (21 page)

É
leusie de Beaufort listened calmly to the young Dominican who had been announced earlier. The Extern Sister, Jeanne d’Amblin, her usually beaming face wearing an ominous expression of solemnity, had brought him to her study.

In common with her, Jeanne d’Amblin, Yolande de Fleury, Annelette Beaupré, the apothecary nun, and, in particular, Hedwige du Thilay, the treasurer nun,
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whose uncle by marriage had perished in the slaughter at Carcassonne, were sufficiently intelligent women to be able to articulate, on occasion and in veiled terms, their disapproval of Rome’s chosen methods for defending the purity of the faith. Doubtless others shared their reservations – Adélaïde or even Blanche de Blinot during her moments of lucidity – but they were more reticent. Éleusie found herself regretting, however, that the majority of her girls did not.

Indeed, despite her unquestioning faith and her obedience, the alarming evolution of the Inquisition upset the Abbess. Saving the souls of those who have strayed so that they might rejoin God’s flock was of the utmost importance, and yet it remained inconceivable to her that friars should resort to torture and death in the name of Christ’s love and tolerance. Naturally, they had no blood on their hands since those condemned were surrendered to the secular authorities for them to carry out the death sentence; but this expedient hypocrisy did not reassure her, especially now that a certain number of Grand Inquisitors presided over the torture sessions.

She recalled the courageous, nearly century-old warning Hilaire de Poitiers had given upon meeting Auxence de Milan:

Even so, these Dominicans and Franciscans had full powers and could exercise them over everybody, and that included her.

How handsome and radiant he was, this Brother Nicolas Florin. The ease with which he had requested that the convent extend him its hospitality for a month pointed to an order beneath the polite formalities. Strangely, no sooner had he entered her study than the Abbess had been seized by an almost uncontrollable feeling of revulsion. This had surprised her – she who was always so distrustful of instinctive responses. And yet there was something about this young man, although she could not put her finger on what it was, which alarmed her.

‘You are compiling information for an inquiry, you say?’

‘That is correct, Abbess. I would normally be accompanied by two brothers, but the urgency …’

‘I do not believe I can recall a single case of heresy in Perche, my son.’

‘And what of sorcery and demonic possession, for I assume you must have had your share of succubi and incubi?’

‘Who has not?’

He gave her an angelic smile, agreeing in a soft pained voice:

‘A sad but true admission. Doubtless you understand that I cannot reveal to you the identity of the person I am investigating. You also know that our methods are wholly compassionate and
just. I will duly inform the person concerned of their month’s grace. If within this time they do not denounce themselves, their interrogation will commence. If, on the other hand, they confess to their sins, they will almost certainly be pardoned and their identity kept a secret in order to spare them the condemnation of their … neighbours.’

He clasped his beautiful long hands together and prayed that Agnès would maintain her innocence. If what he had heard about her was true, there was every chance that she would. And, if not, then he was prepared. He would simply claim that she had retracted her confession, relapsed heretics being considered the worst kind. None escaped the flames. Agnès de Souarcy’s word counted for nothing against that of a Grand Inquisitor. The feudal Baron who merely wished to terrorise and disgrace his half-sister was in for a nasty surprise. Nicolas felt drunk on his own duplicity. He was powerful enough now to challenge and overrule the orders of a baron.

‘It requires at least two witnesses to bring an accusation,’ Éleusie de Beaufort insisted.

‘Oh, I would not even be here if I did not have more than that. There again, as you know, our aim is above all to protect. And so our witnesses and their depositions remain a secret. We wish to spare them any possible reprisals.’

A dark-haired angel, his face tilted slightly towards his shoulder, his brow illuminated by an almost unearthly glow that reminded Éleusie of the light that shone through the mullioned windows in the abbey’s Notre-Dame church. The long eyelashes curling towards the brow veiled with a bluish transparency the bottomless gaze, the gaze of death.

A mask. Raw red beneath the pale skin eaten away by vermin. Festering flesh, strips of greenish skin, viscous foul-smelling fluids. Liquefied cheeks, hollowed eye-sockets, rotting gums. Reddish carapaces, a mass of legs, hungry mouths and tenacious claws burrowing into flesh. The stench of rotting carcasses. A piercing shriek lifted the empty thorax and the ribcage gnawed by unforgiving teeth. A rat scuttled out, its snout red with blood. The beast was upon them.

Éleusie de Beaufort gripped the edge of her great desk with both hands, suppressing the scream she felt rising in her throat. A voice spoke to her from far away:

‘Is anything the matter, Abbess?’

‘A dizzy spell, nothing more,’ she managed to reply before adding, ‘You are welcome, my son. Pray excuse me for a few moments. It must be the heat …’

He took his leave at once, and Éleusie remained standing alone in the middle of the vast study whose edges were beginning to recede.

They had come back. The infernal visions. There was nowhere she could seek protection from them now.

H
e was so young and handsome, so radiant, that Agnès foolishly thought he must be benevolent. When Adeline had come to announce in a stammering voice the arrival of a lord monk from Alençon who was waiting for her in the great hall, dressed in a beige cloak and a black robe, she had known immediately. She had paused briefly: it was too late to turn back now.

He was standing waiting, his hands clasped around his big wooden crucifix.

‘Monsieur?’

‘Brother Nicolas … I am attached to the headquarters of the Inquisition at Alençon.’

She raised her eyebrows, feigning surprise, struggling to calm her pounding heart. He smiled at her and it occurred to her that he had the most moving smile she had ever seen. Something resembling sadness seemed to well up in the Dominican’s eyes, and he murmured in a pained voice:

‘It has reached our ears, Madame my sister in Christ, that you once sheltered a heretic rather than surrender her to our justice. It has reached our ears that you brought up her posthumous son under circumstances that suggest the work of a demon.’

‘You must be referring to a lady’s maid by the name of Sybille who served me briefly before dying of weakness during childbirth. It was a deadly cold winter that year and claimed many lives.’

‘Indeed, Madame. Everything points to her having been an escaped heretic.’

‘Nonsense. They are the rumours of a jealous woman and I can even provide you with the name of your informant. I am a pious Christian …’

He interrupted her with an elegant gesture of his hand.

‘As your chaplain, Brother Bernard, would confirm?’

‘The Abbess of Clairets as well as the Extern Sister, Jeanne d’Amblin, who is a frequent visitor here, would swear it before God.’

After a few days and some clever questioning at the abbey, Nicolas had arrived at the same conclusion. He had also resolved to put aside the charge of carnal relations with a man of God. He would use it only as a last resort. He moved on:

‘We have not yet arrived at the trial stage, still less at the verdict. This is the time of grace, my sister.’ He closed his eyes and his angelic face stiffened with pain. ‘Confess. Confess and repent, Madame, for the Church is good and just and watches over you. The Church will pardon you. Nobody will know I have been here and you will have washed your soul of all its impurities.’

The Church would pardon her, but she would be handed over to the secular authorities who would confiscate her dower, her daughter and Clément. She hesitated, doubting her ability to withstand an inquisitorial interrogation, and decided to try to gain a little time.

‘My brother … I know nothing about the atrocious crimes of which I stand accused. However, your robes and your office inspire me with trust. Have I let myself be deceived? Am I guilty of having been too trusting? I must search my soul for the answer. Be that as it may, Clément was brought up to respect and love the Holy Church and has no knowledge of the deplorable error of his mother’s ways … if such they were.’

Replacing his crucifix in the inside pocket of his surcoat, he
walked towards her, arms outstretched, a satisfied smile on his lips.

The image was so real it made Agnès gasp. Where did they come from, these excruciating visions of death and suffering? The beast was before her. She stepped back.

Nicolas paused a few paces from Agnès, attempting to penetrate the mystery of the pretty face that suddenly looked so distraught. He had the fleeting impression that he had experienced this scene before, though he was unable to recall the precise circumstances. A feeling he had believed himself rid of forever made his throat go dry: fear. He stifled it and leapt at the chance to turn Agnès de Souarcy’s strange reaction to his advantage.

‘Have you strayed so far down the road to perdition that you fear the embrace of a man of God?’

‘No,’ she breathed in an almost inaudible voice.

This man was a personification of Evil. He loved Evil. She was certain of it, though she did not know how. And yet for the last few moments, since that horrific vision, she was no longer alone. A powerful shade was fighting beside her. More than one. She was filled with a strength she thought she had lost. She let herself be guided, replying boldly:

‘No … I am taken aback by your assertion. Did Sybille deceive me? Did she take advantage of my kindness, my naivety? What a terrible thought. I am afraid that, if Clément were to learn
the awful truth about his mother, it would destroy him,’ she dissimulated with an ease imparted to her by the good shades.

They, too, compelled her with open arms towards this diabolical angel and made her clasp the shoulders of this man who repelled her in a gesture of love and trust.

He had not come here for her confession – he wanted her life, whispered the shades to Agnès, whose mind was now humming with voices that were not her own. Was one of them Clémence? Agnès could not tell.

As she relaxed her embrace the eyes staring back at her had become veiled with a kind of anger. The struggle threatened to be more prolonged than he had envisaged. If she confessed before the inquisitorial court that the lady’s maid had been a heretic but insisted that her error had been made in good faith, the judges would be predisposed to leniency. She would be let off with a mere pilgrimage or, at worst, a few novenas. He could bid farewell to the Baron’s hundred pounds – which he had had no intention of returning following the death of his half-sister, as well as the three hundred pledged to him by the mysterious messenger. He could say goodbye to his pleasure.

Then the anguish Nicolas had contrived to suppress returned, striking him with full force; his life was in danger should he fail. The cloaked figure had the power to show no mercy. Whereas before he had merely despised his future victim – his toy – now he was beginning to detest her.

No sooner had he left than Agnès slumped to her knees. She begged the voices to come back, for they had grown silent since the Inquisitor’s departure.

Was she losing her mind? She prayed for what seemed like
hours. She was in the grip of a sort of delirium. At that very moment, she would have given anything for the voices to live in her again, to soothe her.

‘My angel,’ she sobbed quietly.

A sigh, like a caress, inside her head.

Clément found Agnès huddled on the stone floor in the main hall. A moment of sheer panic. He rushed to her side as it struck him she might be dead. She was sleeping. The child stroked the thick plaits coiled round his mistress’s head and beseeched her:

‘Madame! Pray wake up, Madame. What is the matter? Why …’

‘Hush! He was here, and it was Evil who embraced me. You must leave here immediately, Clément.’ Sensing a mounting protest, she added in a firm voice, ‘It is an order and I will not accept any argument.’ Softening all of a sudden, she continued, still seated on the floor, ‘You must do as I say out of love for me. The inquisitorial procedure has begun.’

Clément’s eyes grew wide with fright and he trembled:

‘My God …’

‘Hush and listen to me. Something extraordinary has occurred. Something so extraordinary that I hesitate to share it with you for I myself am so bewildered that I can barely gather my thoughts.’

‘What was it, Madame?’

‘A presence, or rather several presences … It is very difficult to describe. The realisation that I was being helped by some kind of benevolent force.’

‘By God?’

‘No. But whatever they might be they inspired me with a feeling of confidence, a strength that tells me I am able to defeat this evil being, this Inquisitor named Nicolas Florin. He is … a
personification of the worst, Clément. How can I explain it to you? Eudes is wicked but this man is evil. You must disappear, for while you have been my strength all these years, now you are my biggest weakness. You know as well as I. If that man manages to persuade the superstitious fools he will appoint as judges that you are an incubus, your youth will be no protection, on the contrary. And if he finds out that we have concealed your true sex, the outcome will be even worse. His judgement will be implacable in their eyes for you are the child of a heretic. And then they will believe anything that monster tells them. You must leave, Clément. For my sake.’

‘What about Mathilde?’

‘I shall ask the Abbess of Clairets to take her in for a while.’

‘But I can …’ he tried to argue.

‘I beg you, Clément! You can help me by leaving. Go quickly.’

‘Would it really be helping you, Madame? Are you not just trying to protect me?’

‘I am trying to protect us all.’

‘But where will I go, Madame?’

Her immediate response was a despairing smile:

‘Of course nobody will rush to our aid. The only person I could think of approaching for protection is Artus d’Authon and I do not know whether he will grant it to me on your behalf. If he refuses for fear of the consequences, flee, it does not matter where. Swear to me on your soul. Swear!’

He paused then yielded before her insistence:

‘I swear.’

She clasped the child to her, and he buried his face in her rosemary-scented, silky hair. A terrible grief made him want to burst into tears, to cling on to his lady. He felt as if all his strength were being sucked out of him. Without her he was lost,
without her he knew not which way to turn. For her he could do anything, of that he was certain. But the huge void that grew even as she spoke paralysed his body and crushed his spirit.

‘Thank you, my sweet child. I shall write a letter for you to give the Comte. If he should refuse to hide you … I have saved some gold coins, not many but enough for you to reach a port and sail to England – the only country that has not yielded to the temptation of the Inquisition. Go and saddle a horse and fetch some supplies and join me in my chamber.’

When she released him from her embrace, he felt he was dying there at her feet.

Did she sense it? She whispered in his ear:

‘I am not afraid any more, Clément. I will prevail – for your sake and mine, for everyone’s sake, and for the sake of the good shades. Never forget that you are always with me even though we are apart. Never forget that I am guided by love and when love fights it overcomes all. Never forget.’

‘I will not forget, Madame. I love you so.’

‘Prove it to me by not coming back until I have defeated this creature of darkness.’

In a few short years Clément would have grown into a young woman. The deception that had allowed Agnès to keep her by her side would be too difficult to maintain. What would be Clément’s, Clémence’s, reaction when she discovered the whole truth about her birth? The weighty secret shared by three women, two of whom were now dead.

In a few short years … if God allowed them both to live.

As she watched the child leave, Agnès was surprised by how much he had grown in a few months. His breeches reached halfway up his legs and his heels were sticking out over the backs of his clogs. She felt absurdly cross with herself for not having
noticed it before. Suddenly it seemed vital to her to remedy the situation before his departure – as though such a simple gesture were a clear link to the future, as though it were proof they would soon be reunited.

And what if she was deluding herself? What if she was unable to survive an interrogation, to defeat that beautiful infernal creature? What if she never saw Clément again? What if she perished? What if Comte Artus was merely a pleasant façade concealing a coward? What if he sent Clément away or, worse still, delivered him into the hands of the Inquisition?

Stop! Stop this instant!

A month would pass, a month of grace. She had time to reflect, to prepare her defence, to think of other solutions. Clément had already helped her to do so one evening when he came back from one of his mysterious night-time forays.

A courage she had not expected to feel since the shades grew silent returned. She was no longer alone, even though she had chosen to send Clément away. She had not been lying to him. He was at this moment her greatest weakness. She felt capable of resisting anything except a threat to his young life. Now he was gone, out of harm’s way, she could confront them. A strange thought occurred to her, a thought which up until a few days before she would never have had. She would show no mercy. Eudes had woven the web that was closing in on her. If she survived this ordeal, she would make him pay, ruthlessly. The time for forgiveness, for moderation was over.

She went to the kitchens and calmly ordered Adeline to find some clothes that would fit Clément and to pack a bundle of food for him, without satisfying the girl’s silent curiosity.