Michael Jecks - The Templar, the Queen and Her Lover

But Agnes and Raymond had been deemed guilty. They had been questioned, tortured, and had their crimes recorded by the zealous Bishop Fournier. And finally, they were passed over to the secular arm for their destruction.

It wasn’t only Jean who spat on the idea that they had died sinful. Others were of a like mind. When he stood and drank his wine at the inn in Pamiers, it was not merely the bitterness in his soul which made him denounce the bishop. He wasn’t foolish or brave enough to try that. No, it was the general feeling in the room.

‘Who thinks them evil now?’ asked the innkeeper.

‘Who could?’ one customer asked, and belched.

That was the strange thing, Jean thought. He’d felt it even under the elm tree at Ornolac earlier, when the village worthies gathered to discuss the executions. The man Raymond had sobbed, but never begged forgiveness for his crimes. Instead, when the ropes were burned away, he held his hands aloft, clenched together in prayer, and entrusted his soul to God.

It was that which made Jean bear witness. ‘Any man who could do that, who could suffer the flames and still call on God to take his soul, that man was no heretic. He must be a Christian. Any man dying in such pain and calling on God must surely have had his soul accepted. God would treasure a soul freed in such suffering in His service.’

It was the other customer there who’d shaken his head at Jean then. ‘Jacques Fournier is a good man, though. He’s a good bishop. Do you know, he wept when he heard that Raymond wouldn’t recant? It was Raymond’s fault — all he had to do was apologise, beg forgiveness, and return to the Holy Mother Church’s arms. There he would have been welcomed. He had fallen prey to heretical beliefs — perhaps from his own stupidity; maybe he was just gullible, and others took advantage of him with their lies — and he should have seen that he should give them up. It was ridiculous of him to hold fast to that which could not be true!’

‘A good man? A good bishop? He is a murderer! I would wager that Fournier would be less keen to hold to his faith than Raymond, were he to be put to the flames! Ha, there were two good Christians there, but he had them both burned.’ In his heart, he had added that it would have been better for all had Fournier been burned, and Raymond and Agnes saved, but saying something of that sort would only have served to ensure his own arrest.

Not that he need have worried. Within the hour, he was held by the bishop’s men. He was accused, denounced, and gaoled, and there he would yet be, were it not for the good offices of my Lord Enguerrand de Foix.

The Comte’s men had negotiated his release in little time, and provided that Jean left the gaol with a yellow cross stitched to the breast of his tunic to show that he was a reformed heretic of whom others should be wary, he was permitted to go with the Comte’s men. One was le Vieux, although the old man-at-arms would not talk to him for many a long month.

He had been taken up to Château Gaillard, and there he learned that he was himself to turn gaoler rather than prisoner. Others would suffer, but he was assured by le Vieux that the people in those cells deserved their punishment. Especially the poor woman who would have been queen. And even when he realised Arnaud was to remain there too, he swallowed the revulsion he felt. The alternative was to return to the bishop’s gaols himself. He couldn’t do that.

In the bishop’s cells, and then guarding those at the château, he had come to appreciate the fact that often the gaolers were little happier than those in the cells. All those in the guard rooms were rather like him. All had spent time in suffering. Some, like him, had been in trouble with the Church, others, like Berengar, had been guilty of some other crime. Berengar had married a maid in the Comte de Foix’s household without permission, and the Comte had sought to punish him by separating him from his wife. But all debts would be discharged as soon as the last prisoner had been taken away.

The good thing about his time in gaol, and then spent guarding Lady Blanche, was that when he was forced to hide in the undercroft there was little that could alarm him. Not rats nor dark could concern him after the dank misery of Bishop Fournier’s cells at Pamiers. Apart from anything else, the room was very well stocked with food and drink, and no one need ever realise he had stolen from it.

It was two days before he dared leave the castle, and by then the Queen was long gone, but at least her movements were not kept secret. Jean was able to hear that she had travelled with her entourage to Paris itself. Surely, he reasoned, Arnaud must have also gone there. It seemed that Arnaud and le Vieux had been with the Queen’s party thus far, so it was unlikely he would have left now.

But all the way as he walked from the castle through the town and out on to the road, his pack over his shoulder, he saw in his mind’s eye how le Vieux had glared at him as he tried to brain him. It was almost as if le Vieux hated him — had always hated him. That wasn’t how it had been, though. Le Vieux had been friendly towards him — towards all of them — from the moment he’d first rescued Jean from his prison cell. There was only kindness in him, or so Jean had thought. Of all the guards, le Vieux was the only one he would have trusted. The others had all spent time in gaols, for one thing. They were hardly responsible, respectable fellows. Le Vieux had always been different. And he’d seemed to have more respect for Jean, because he’d heard that Jean had been in the battle at Courtrai. A fellow man-at-arms was someone to honour.

The more he thought about it, the more he tended to the view that someone must have poisoned le Vieux’s mind against him. And the only man who could have done so, surely, was Arnaud. Arnaud must have told le Vieux that he had gone mad, killed the men in the guard rooms, and then run away. He had no idea what Arnaud could have wanted to achieve by such lies, but there was no other explanation of le Vieux’s behaviour. There had been such loathing and disgust on his face as he tried to brain him with that cudgel. It wasn’t like the old man he’d come to know over the months at Château Gaillard.

But Arnaud was capable of anything. He enjoyed seeing people suffer. He had set the rope about Agnes’s neck, but when she started to scream in anguish and he could have strangled her to save her further torment, he hadn’t done so. He had allowed the rope to dangle in the flames so that it burned away before he could use it. And left her to shriek in the intolerable horror of death by fire.

Yes. Apart from the murder of the guards at the château; apart from the lies told about him to le Vieux; apart from all these and the rape inflicted on Lady Blanche, Jean wanted to meet Arnaud again, and make him feel the anguish of a slow death for what he had done to poor Agnes.

He finished his pottage, wiped his bowl with a little of the remaining bread, and left the inn.

Arnaud was dead. No matter what, Jean would hunt him down and kill him.

When the others were all back in their rooms, Paul went out once more.

At times like this, a man must be cautious and look to his safety. In truth, there was no city in Christendom which was fully safe. The curfews protected many, but when a man walked abroad after nightfall, his life was in his hands. Anyone might defend himself against a dark shape in the shadows, and with good reason. It was better to attack first than wait until someone drew blade against him. Each morning there was a fresh crop of bodies waiting to be found and collected — and here many were lost for ever, simply dropped quietly into the Seine. Like London’s Thames, the river could clean up a multitude of untidy murders.