Alys Clare - The Joys of My Life

‘Sorry, Sir Josse. What am I to think about?’

Josse smiled, and Gus’s tense expression eased. ‘De Quercy told me that de Loup has gone to Chartres because they’re building the new cathedral and de Loup wants to make some special contribution,’ he explained. ‘Now what, young Gussie, are we to make of that?’

Gus rested an elbow on his saddle-bow and leaned on it. ‘Well,’ he said after a moment, ‘he could just have meant that, like most rich folk, de Loup is going to pay for a bit of glass, or a statue, or something.’

‘De Loup?’ Josse said disbelievingly. ‘The man who owns that evil tower and puts it to unimaginably terrible use?’

‘Maybe making a show of giving money for the new cathedral is intended to cover up how evil he is,’ Gus said shrewdly.

‘Perhaps.’ Josse sighed. ‘But it doesn’t seem right…’

‘On the other hand,’ Gus went on slowly, ‘maybe he’s planning mischief. Maybe “special contribution” means he’s going to do something destructive.’

‘The cathedral has suffered more than its fair share of mysterious fires,’ Josse murmured. ‘Is it- Could it be that a man of Philippe de Loup’s nature cannot bear to see something good and holy rising from the ashes, and so has gone to Chartres to make sure it doesn’t?’

‘They had a fire five years back.’ Gus spoke eagerly now, his words tumbling out. ‘One of the pilgrims back at Hawkenlye told me. Lightning struck the old cathedral and started the blaze and everyone feared that their precious relic had gone up in flames. At Chartres, they’ve got the Blessed Virgin’s nightgown, you know, Sir Josse, the one she wore when she gave birth to Our Lord.’

Josse smiled. ‘So I’ve heard, Gussie. I believe it’s called the Sancta Camisia.’

‘Anyway, it turned out that some of the old priests had managed to grab the nightie and they’d hidden in the crypt or something with it, and it was quite undamaged.’ His face awestruck, he whispered, ‘It was a miracle, wasn’t it, Sir Josse?’

‘Perhaps it was, Gussie, or-’

But Gus wasn’t listening. ‘What if someone like de Loup or one of his old knights started that fire and it wasn’t the lightning at all?’ he said. ‘And, now that they’re getting on with building the new cathedral, he’s gone to Chartres to burn that one down too?’

‘Why would he do that, Gussie?’ Josse asked, although, remembering the palpable malevolence in the room in the tower, he thought he already knew.

‘Because he’s bad,’ Gus said simply.

Josse had heard enough. He gathered his reins, nudged Horace’s sides with his knees and moved off. ‘Come on,’ he said. Gus, understanding, clicked to his horse and took up his place beside Josse.

By Josse’s best calculations, the abbess and her party could hardly have reached Chartres before today, but he and Gus were still two hundred miles away. They had been riding hard since they left Oleron; both they and their horses needed a few lazy days, not another long journey.

But that was just too bad.

In a well-concealed encampment close to the city of Chartres, Joanna sat on the fringe of a circle of her people thinking back over the past two years. This was her third visit to the city and the tension in the air was far more noticeable than ever before. Her people’s habitual expression was one of serenity that changed readily and frequently to joy; now they moved through their daily round looking preoccupied and worried. What was more, as Joanna well knew, matters could only get worse.

The grave problem facing Joanna and all her kind was that the cathedral of Chartres had been built on one of their most sacred places. Beneath the hill where successive cathedrals had been sited there was an ancient sanctuary cave; within the cave, the Well of the Strong poured out its vital earth energy. To Joanna’s people, this precious, holy spot was the dwelling place of the Mother Goddess and for countless generations they had honoured her there, setting up her image in the form of a beautiful dark-wood statue of the fecund, heavily pregnant goddess.

The original church, they had told Joanna, had been erected over the sanctuary centuries ago, when the new religion started to spread. Successive constructions had followed, each larger and more ornate than its predecessor, each steadily nudging out the ancient spirituality of the site and putting in its place the version that the new priests believed to be the only one. Ironically, Joanna’s teacher said, the Virgin Mary, whom the new men worshipped, was not in fact very different in character and nature from the Mother Goddess. It was only the black-robed priests who insisted that it was heresy to say so.

For the people who still followed the old ways, this was the problem. To them, it did not matter in which guise the Great Mother was revered and they would have been perfectly happy to share their sacred place with the newcomers. To them, as the old teacher put it, all gods were one god and behind them was the truth. It was evident, as in the beginning they tried to explain to the new priests, that the power coming from the figure who now had to be called the Virgin Mary was the same dynamism that the people of the old religion had sensed so forcefully emanating from the Mother Goddess. As the decades and the centuries slowly passed, however, it became clear that the priests did not feel the same tolerance towards them.

The beginning of the end had come, the old teacher sadly told Joanna, when three hundred years ago Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne, presented the cathedral with its most precious relic. Legend had it that this relic had been given to Charlemagne by the patriarch of Jerusalem while the great emperor was on a pilgrimage to the Holy City. It was, or so they said, the tunic worn by the Virgin Mary when she gave birth to her holy son.

‘And is it?’ Joanna had demanded.

The old man had sighed. ‘Child, it makes no difference whether it is or it isn’t. The pilgrims who come to the cathedral believe that it is and so to them that has become a truth. The garment itself has responded to the faith of the worshippers and, even were it not sacred to begin with, it has acquired sanctity now.’

Joanna had puzzled over this. ‘But if it isn’t the Virgin’s tunic — ’ and she could not find it in her to believe that it was, thinking it far more likely that a clever Jerusalem merchant had got hold of some old cloth and made several such garments to sell at great cost to gullible Crusaders — ‘how can it acquire sanctity?’

The old man took her hand and held it in a hard grip. ‘Because worship imbues a place, or indeed an object, with special powers,’ he said. His grip tightened. ‘That is why we are here, child! That is why we cannot give up our most sacred place without a struggle! It was holy from the start of time, which is why our forebears were first attracted to it. Over the centuries, our people have gone there to praise the Great Mother and take offerings to her, and they have poured out their love, their prayers, their hopes, joys, aspirations and sorrows into her receptive ears. She is there, she always was, and she always will be. But also we are there; she holds our past as a people.’ He paused, then added softly, ‘She holds our heart.’

Joanna understood as well as she believed she was going to. She understood quite enough, anyway, to pour her whole being into her people’s final battle to protect what was theirs. They had taught her well, those revered men and women, and in the course of her earlier visits she had absorbed everything that they had tried to explain to her. It had been tough; the elders were not known for being gentle or patient teachers. The first time, Joanna had been at the secret encampment outside the city for the entire summer and she had been made to study for long periods every single day. Her second visit, the previous autumn, had been shorter and its purpose had been to assemble as many of the people as possible to attend the great Samhain celebration at the end of October. That night was burned into Joanna’s heart, soul and mind; she knew she would never forget the moment when the elders had called to the people to add their power to the circle and the vast cone of power had risen up like a vortex from the depths of the ancient sanctuary to blast its light into the night sky. The good folk of Chartres had cowered in their beds and nervously reassured each other in the morning that it must have been a peculiar sort of lightning.