Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

There was no opening in the woods on either side. Once Sasha thought she saw the head of a deer flashing between two tree trunks, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. And then there was nothing until the track turned to the right and she came out suddenly into the light. The ruined house was in front of her, and beyond it Marjean Church occupied a low ridge with the lake as a backdrop. Sasha parked at the bottom of the path leading up to the church, but she didn’t get out for a moment. The dead seemed to be all around her: the abbots and their monks who had worshipped God in this place for centuries, proud of their library and their church with the jewelled cross of St. Peter that hung sparkling above the high altar. Sasha closed her eyes and heard the night bells, summoning the tonsured monks from their dormitories to come shuffling through the candlelit darkness to the church for vespers, compline, prime, and lauds. There was nothing left of the monastery now except the remains of a few low walls in a clearing beyond the chateau. And nothing left of the monks’ library except the codex that lay wrapped up in her clothes back at the inn. And the cross-that was why she was here. To see if she could bring it back from the past, out of the hands of dead men.

With a renewed sense of purpose, Sasha climbed the hill to the church. There was an old rusty padlock securing the door, but she had come prepared for that. She broke it easily with a pair of bolt cutters that she had bought in Le Havre the day before and went inside, crossing quickly to the vestry area at the back. And then down a winding, narrow staircase to the crypt. She had brought candles, but she didn’t need them. A power cable had been run down the stairs since her last visit, and with a flick of a switch the grey stone tombs of the abbots of Marjean were suddenly bathed in the cold electric light of the twentieth century.

“Crux Petri in manibus Petri est.” Sasha took Cade’s list of numbers out of her pocket, looking for her father’s words at the bottom of the page. “Abbots of Marjean,” he had written in his own distinctive shaky Parkinson’s-affected script. “Marcus 1278–1300. Stephanus Pisano 1300-05. Bartholomeus 1306-21. Simeon 1321-27.” They were probably the last words he had ever written, before the stroke knocked him to the ground.

Slowly, Sasha walked the length of the crypt, concentrating her attention on the tombs on the left-hand side. The inscriptions on the wall showed that these were the most recent. Seven from the end, she came to the name “Marcus” with the date 1278 written underneath: the same year that he had become abbot of Marjean. Like so many of his predecessors, he had been immortalised in stone. Except that the details of his face had been worn away with time, so that the expression was now unreadable. Sasha remembered that Marcus had also been Bishop of Rouen for a time. He had ruled the city with an iron hand, burning heretics in the cathedral square on an almost daily basis until the townsmen had had enough and petitioned the archbishop in Paris to have him removed. This abbot certainly had no right to rest in peace, but it was not him with whom Sasha was concerned.

Beyond Marcus, the remaining tombs were sarcophagi without sculpture or adornment. These held the last abbots before the monastery was wiped out by the Black Death in 1352, little more than half a century after the death of Marcus in 1300.

The names on the wall above the tombs corresponded exactly to Andrew Blayne’s list, and Sasha read them out loud as she passed each one. Stephanus Pisano, 1300; Bartholomeus, 1306; Simeon, 1321 1327. Her voice echoed off the thick walls of the crypt, and she could hear it trembling just like her hands as she came to a halt in front of the tomb of Abbot Simon. It was strange that there were two dates for him, whereas all the others only had one, but still, the dates were the same as those that her father had written down and underlined twice. She needed to open the tomb and see what was inside. It was not that she really expected to find the jewelled cross lying in the dead abbot’s hands. Cade had been here before, after all, and come away empty-handed. It was rather that she hoped for some sign that would take her forward. Something that Cade had missed.

But try as she might, she couldn’t move the stone lid of the sarcophagus. She pushed as hard as she could, but it was useless. She needed help. A man with a crowbar could do it if she had one too. Sasha swallowed her frustration. Getting help meant taking someone into her confidence, and Sasha trusted no one. But this time she knew that she had no choice. She quickly turned over her options as she drove back down the track to the main road. People in Mar-jean used this church. They had kept it open since the end of the war, even though the chateau was a ruin and the church was a mile’s walk from the village. They were hardly likely to want to help a foreigner open up tombs in its crypt, however much money she offered them, and they probably wouldn’t just refuse. They’d go to the cure or, worse still, the police, and that would be the end of any chance she had of finding the cross. No, she needed to go farther afield to find someone without any local loyalties.

Half an hour later she thought she had found the man she was looking for. She had driven through Moirtier-sur-Bagne and stopped at a cafe on the outskirts of Rouen. There was a builder’s truck parked outside, and she took it as a sign. The owner was at the bar, slightly the worse for drink. His wife had left him and his business was failing, and the cafe proprietor looked like he had had enough of listening to the man’s complaints. He cursed everybody and everything and seemed to hold Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary equally responsible for his troubles. Sasha shook out her long brown hair and took a seat beside the man at the bar. His name was Jean Marie, and he was like clay in her fingers. She puckered her lips and showed him some of her French francs, and twenty minutes later she was sitting beside him in his truck, giving him directions in her slow, grammatically correct French. Behind her on the backseat there were two crowbars under a blanket, and Sasha felt a warm glow of anticipation as they turned down the track leading to Marjean Church.

But the man’s enthusiasm quickly waned once he’d got out of his truck. A stray dog was barking somewhere inside the ruined chateau and a light rain had begun to fall out of the grey, leaden sky. Down in the crypt under the cold electric light, Sasha could hardly get him to stay. Cursing Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary in a roadside cafe didn’t make Jean Marie an unbeliever, and he seemed to have no doubt that digging up the abbots of Marjean was a blasphemous act, for which he would suffer on both sides of the grave. Sasha had to double and then triple the money that she had already given him in the cafe before he was prepared to fit his crowbar under the lid of Abbot Simon’s tomb and join her in levering it up and around to the point where there was enough space for her to shine her torch down into the interior. The tomb was not empty. The pale white skull and bones of the once-holy abbot were there, but that was all. There was no cross, no jewels. Just the empty eye sockets of the dead man, staring up at Sasha in silent mockery.

It was what Sasha had expected, but not what she had hoped for. There was something she was missing, but she did not know what it was. She needed time to think without this half-drunk Frenchman whining in the corner of the crypt. It was all she could do to get him to help her replace the stone cover of the tomb. Outside the church, he ran down the hill to his truck, and she had to call to him to stop, worried that he would leave her behind, even though she had only paid him half his money. Then, just as she got level with the chateau, she became aware of someone slightly below her, to her left. She turned to see who it was and stopped dead in her tracks. It was Inspector Trave, the policeman from Stephen’s trial, the one who’d come to visit her at Moreton to try to get her to change her evidence. He seemed as shocked as she was. Behind her, Jean Marie was already in the truck, and she knew he wouldn’t wait. Pulling herself together, she launched herself across the few remaining yards, pulled open the passenger door and told him the word that he most dreaded to hear. “Police,” she shouted. “Drive now. Quickly. Quickly. Go.”