CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

 

Transported to Hell

 

 

An execution is always an occasion, a break from routine, an opportunity for grand speeches and lavish tears. The best sermons are preached by the light of bonfires, raking over the coals in a spectator’s heart till he burns with gratitude at escaping such a fate. Death is brought close – close enough to smell it, to hear it rustle with the mice among the faggots, to see it moving about on the other side of the smoke. Executions bring out holiday clothes and holiday processions. An execution is a pageant and a play, with orange scenery and properties brought from the very treasure chest of the church – chalice and pyx, crucifix and relic – to be paraded through the streets. Even the faggots and the prisoner take on a kind of holy, processional significance.

So all to church for the address of a condemned ‘princess’ by the new Lord of Nerra-des-Etangs.

Executions bring forth good rhetoric as surely as they bring forth viscera and screaming, and a hot, righteous rejoicing in the belly of those watching.

It was traditional that the condemned should be incarcerated, for the duration of the harangue, in the base of the pulpit. So the shaven girl encrusted with her own and her accomplice’s blood, was thrust into the small dark cupboard, her legs tied together at the ankles and a bundle of firewood in her arms as a reminder of her imminent tryst with the bonfire. Then the Bishop Nerra mounted his rostrum to preach the Exhortation to Repentance and to move the strong to tears.

‘Men and women of Etangs-Nerra, I know you!’ he said, and the jostling for floor-space, the chivvying and chastening of children, the shared recollections of the Ordeal all came to a sudden stop. His voice impaled them, as did the light falling in punitive rods through the windows of God’s house on to His assembled People. ‘Do you think yourselves safer than this miscreant whore? Do you call yourselves redeemed? I look down from here and I can see the Devil jump from back to back, small as a flea, gorging himself on your blood, tasting of his cattle that he may know which he will feed on in Hell. Already he has tasted the sweetness of Lust and the sharp spice of Unchastity. There are fruits for him here already stuck with lies, each one like the black clove; there are joints for him here that will baste themselves as they turn on the spits of Hell. For they are made fat by gluttony and usury.’

Hands swatted at necks but killed only lice, not the crawling fear he cast over them. ‘Call yourselves sinners?’ he asked as they scratched at their matted hair. ‘My little children … there are sinners casting shadows in this world that make you shine in my eyes like a host of candles. I have been to the lands of wickedness and I have seen the children of the golden calf, and I am happy now beyond the power of telling to rest my eyes on the white fleeces of a gentler flock. Even here, in our own land, there are heretics calling themselves “pure” and “perfect” who deny the Saviour seven times a day. But not my flock.’

He tossed them between Heaven and Hell like flapjacks. Just when they felt the heat scorch their souls, they found their heads knocked against the floor of Heaven. It made them dizzy.

‘Take this woman. This creature penned at my feet. I feel her evil. I sense her there: a grub pupating in the bark of the tree, I the wood-pecker sent to devour her.’ The beading split from the crown of the pulpit, and he leaned over and banged it against the ugly carvings at the base. A shrill cry of alarm came from inside. Otherwise, the prisoner was silent. She did not shout denials of her guilt or drown out his preaching with howls of repentance. ‘This woman. This murderess of my uncle – oh, pour lime on the place where you bury the ashes of this fiend! For she was a princess and moved among copper and silver, in shoes too precious to tread on aught but carpets; a thing so unused to hardship that the very air she breathed must be perfumed with almonds and civet. Do you know, they oiled her body with the milk of she-goats and dressed it in damask and silks. She wore flowers in her hair.’ And when he said it, men who had never tasted luxury were translated to foreign harems. ‘Not for her the ignorance of the heathen! Her mother knew the mercy of redemption, and she was swaddled in the bands of Baptism. No! This one chose the ways of perdition, and her ear delighted in the Devil’s music as she tuned her song to his fiddle. I have watched this woman move among the shoals of men, silent as the lamprey, boring into righteous flesh, tempting them to crimes of luxury, to acts of venial wickedness. She haunted the dark places her complexion fits her for, as the lizard blends itself with its surroundings. There are men among you who have known passion and sinned for the sake of it. But I say to you that this woman’s passion is for sin itself, and her lover is Evil!

‘And did she think to overleap the outcome? Did she think to maul and to murder and to mar, then leap up and snatch at the sun’s rays and climb them to Heaven? Oh! Would that I could deny her that chance, for the stench of her, as I stand here, shrivels the charity within me and clouds my sight with loathing! And yet…

‘And yet God’s love is open to all that repent. He is infinitely forgiving. And so I must exhort you – woman – dray – coiling viper who wrung life from the Lord Barral and tears from his people – do you repent of your gall, of your guile, of the day you were born and the tally of days you have added to the misery of this world? Will you take yourself out of it in humility and truth? Will you beg these people to pray for your soul, and welcome the purge of fire, so that your filthy soul may be burned clean and Satan turned out-of-doors? Speak, sinner, that you may be found human, after all, beneath that black hide! The Holy Spirit beats its wings against your cell, child!’

For a long moment, the only noise in the church was the crack of the wooden beading against the base of the pulpit, and the skittering of its fragments as they broke off, inch by inch. Then Foulque incited the chant to begin, starting in a low, rythmic mutter which only the front row could hear, and allowing it to wash back through the church, accumulate the stamp of feet, the occasional hysterical shriek. ‘Repent! Repent! Repent! Come out! Come out! Repent! Repent! Repent! He had raised them all to the station of summoners, and their unaccustomed power dazzled them.

So too did the phosphorous. Its searing flash pierced a black hole in every retina, and the pupils of every eye shut down against the light.

Then a stream of smoke – grey interwoven with red – belched out of the little door at the bottom of the pulpit, and stormed the congregation, submerging the first few rows in acrid smoke and reaching out into the side chapels and the great roofspace over the nave. Through the tears in their stinging eyes, it seemed to the worshippers that the angels supporting the hammer – beams writhed and fluttered and coughed into their trumpets.

A stampede to escape began. A chevron of compressed humanity drove the uninformed ahead of them: ‘Get out! Get out! A fire!’ And though it had occurred to many, it took the new bishop to confirm their worst fears. He waited until the church doors were both pushed wide, then shouted, ‘Satan is come for her!’

Satan inside the church? Impossible. Had demons lurked there, all through the sermon, prising loose the flagstones beneath their feet, forcing an entry to carry away their prize? It filled them with the terror of swimmers who see shark moving below. Afterwards, people described seeing demons with green legs and goats with bloody horns. At the time there was only the wish to get away, rapidly followed by the desire to see what had become of the woman in the pulpit.

They re-mustered in the porch. Men poked their heads round the door. Their wives pulled them back, then crept in under their arms and advanced over the flag floor, eyeing the beams overhead for jibbering demons swinging by prehensile tails. There was a smell of rotten eggs.

The base of the pulpit stood open. Like the Disciples on Easter morning they looked inside, their hands clamped over their mouths and noses. On the floor, where the murderess had squatted, lay two thigh bones and a twist of charred cloth.

‘Jesu. She’s carried off to Hell!’

The dawning realisation that their new bishop and souzerain had been standing perched above the conflagration made them cross themselves afresh, and one matron who had found him particularly attractive, ventured up the twist of wooden steps to the drum of the pulpit, thinking to find his remains still smoking. ‘Sir! Lord Bishop? Sir? Your reverence!’

But there was no trace of him. The same combustion which had propelled the murderess to Hell seemed to have tossed Foulque Nerra up to Heaven. The matron cast about for a sprinkling of ash to revere as a relic and preserve her family against bad luck.

‘She was unrepentant,’ said a voice from the echoing recesses beyond the rood screen, and Bishop Foulque moved out into the public gaze, his face and hands stained with soot, his shining head peppered with ash.

‘Or was she proud and left repentance too late? Let us learn by it, my excellent good people, and live mindful of the demons at our elbow waiting to wrest us away to eternal torment.’

Just for a short time, while the veil was torn that divides the Living from the Dead, a religious devotion gripped the castle community of Nerra-des-Etangs. It carried the people dancing through the streets, speaking in tongues.

It would settle. Gold-dust cannot be kept in permanent suspension. It sinks down again to the riverbed. But for a time they were God’s Chosen People, the ones visited by pillars of fire and smoke. They racketed about the town shrill with self-congratulation: it was their church which had been chosen by God for His Great Example.

Meanwhile, in the church itself, silence recuperated. Starlings twitched the bell ropes, and the smell of phosphorous and sulphur settled in the cobwebs to be eaten away by spiders. Foulque Nerra went to the pulpit and, lending bulk to brute strength, he shifted the thing two feet back to its original position. He was then able to lift the small stone access to the crypt. ‘You can come out now.’

She did not. She could not. The ladder would not stay still, but bumped and rattled against the stone curbing like two skeletal brown arms reaching out of the grave. And her legs had no substance to them.

Foulque stood astride the opening, reached down a hand to Ouallada and pulled her up. As he set her down on the church floor, she subsided on to her haunches, hugging her knees, and jibbered with unwarranted cold.

The soft flap of his woollen skirts moved around her as he tidied the church scrupulously of all trace of his sermon. He gathered up the pieces of broken wooden beading bit by bit, counting them every so often in his open palm.

‘That was very clever,’ she said. ‘I never knew you dealt in alchemy as well as verse.’

‘Who, me? Of course. I’m of the Scientific brotherhood, don’t you recall? That’s why the Council of Tours … disagreed with me so. The ban on the sciences. No opportunity for me to entertain my public with magic tricks. And see how they love it, too? Of course, charismatics are the fashion of the age. I think they’re all side-show charlatans, myself’.

They lapsed into a silence so dense it seemed to stifle Ouallada.

‘I didn’t kill your uncle,’ she said at last.

‘I know that. I saw your hands. The wire would’ve bitten in as you pulled it tight. I regret you were put to… all this.’ He dismissed, with a gauche wave of the hand, his manmade miracle. ‘The blood lust was up, though. They’d’ve burned you in any case, and maybe gone on to deduce us confederates, you and I. Mere self-preservation, you, see.’

It was meant to ease the crushing onus of gratitude on her for saving her life, but she still could not look at him. She crouched there, tracing an inscription raised in bronze beneath her feet. Inh toml qi cb …

‘I’m just sorry I didn’t prevent the Ordeal. You should have let me fight your fa … the killer.’

‘I told you. I knew he was guilty and I was innocent. And he tried to put the blame on me. I had cause to fight him. Anyway. Now you can go back to Haut-Beziers and-’

‘I could have judged the matter better if I knew why your father should want to kill Barral Nerra.’

‘My father?’

He was angry with himself for letting the mutual deceit drop, but then deceits pestered him, like wasps, and the temptation was to swat them. ‘Yes. The Sheik Obeid ben Zefir. He’s clearly fallen on hard times, the sheik, since you were a child of his tents. I’d heard opium wasted a man, but to drain him so of his colour?’

Her back stiffened. She came close to resenting the imputation. It was such fabric as her childhood was woven from. ‘My father knew Barral, seemingly. In his youth.’

‘Ah yes. I forgot. My uncle was a much-travelled man.’

‘I think they must have loved the same woman.’

‘Ah. Love. The all-purpose devil. And you, when you saw that your father’s life stood in jeopardy, were prepared to keep silent and let the axe fall on you.’

‘Oh, but I thought you – ‘ She broke off, and he looked at her squarely for the first time, his eyebrows raised. She did not finish the sentence. How could she say, ‘I thought you’d done the murder; it’s only you I’d die for’?

And so the amazement disappeared out of his face as he found another way of interpreting her silence. ‘You thought I would extricate you. Whereas no one would extricate your… esteemed father.’

She nodded. The Truth seemed so very much more complicated than this simple account of events. She would have needed more words at her beck.

‘Then he proved to be unworthy of such a daughterly gesture, and you turned harpy and tore him in shreds. I swear, I never saw such savagery. Still, I’d’ve killed him for you if there’d been a need.’ His voice was unshocked, slightly mocking, as if the antics of his fellow human beings were consistent only in their foolishness. She did not know whether she was talking to a man or a monk.

‘Your kindness has already outrun my means to thank you, sir. I’d best not stay any longer to endanger your repute as a miracle worker.’

‘No. No, you’re right.’ He seemed suddenly nervous. He crouched down a few yards from her and tried to lay the pieces of beading out in the right order so that the splintered ends would fit together. ‘No, you’d best get back to Haut-Beziers and deliver the news.’ She looked at him blankly. ‘Well? She sent you, didn’t she? My lady domna? To see the job done? What will you tell her? Have I snatched you out of the claws of Satan to have you spill my guilty secret in my lady’s lap? Will you tell her it wasn’t I who killed Barral?’ He was afraid of her. She was capable of telling Aude that he was not the murderer. Ouallada had the power to declare the assais failed.

‘Go back to Haut-Beziers? Like this? How could I?’ She meant more than the labourer’s leggings, the shorn head, the smell of crypt and blood that clung to her. But he only waved his hand briefly in front of his face and said that cap and gown could be found; it was surely not impossible to find cap and gown and to pretend …

‘I’d be immensely obliged to you, sir,’ she said. ‘And of course I’ll simply tell the Lady Aude that Barral is murdered and you are made Lord of Nerra-des-Etangs.’ She looked for his face to crumple into a smile, but it remained as stony as ever. He simply nodded to acknowledge his indebtedness.

‘We’d best go now, then,’ he said. ‘While the town’s in frenzy.’

‘We? You’re coming too? But you’re established here! You can’t leave! Send for her.’

‘Send for her?’

‘Your hand’s on the great “salt-cellar of the Camargue”, isn’t it? Send for her to come here and marry you. She’s bound to come. She’s given you her promise …

It’s really very fortunate the way things have come about, don’t you think? The thing done and no blood to blot your good fortune? All very propitious.’

‘Send for her?’ The notion was plainly unimaginable. Graceless past all gaucheté. It caught him unawares and made him laugh. ‘Send for her? I don’t really think so! Besides, there is a small – ah – impediment to my staying here. Or even coming back. Until I’ve seen my Prior and set things to rights.’ His large, doleful eyes flickered in her direction, full of guilty admission. ‘You’re aware, I know, that I’m somewhat … lapsed as a man of the Church. Otherwise we’d hardly be having this conversation. What you may less immediately call to mind…’ He pulled at his nose sheepishly. ‘For some years now it has been, in fact, a crime to impersonate a priest. Punishable by death – at the discretion of the court ecclesiastic, I daresay. But you see, not only would it – how can I say? – embarrass me a touch, in the person of ‘Bishop Foulque”, to bring my wife here – yes? – I’d also run the slight but considerable risk of being hanged. So you see a short adjournment to the pastures of Haut-Beziers seems not only pleasant but advisable.’

 

As Ouallada and Foulque travelled back into the central Languedoc, it was as if she reclaimed her disguise from the branches of each tree they passed. Never once did he refer to the man whose head stood on a pole beside the gate of Etangs-Nerra. He gave her money to buy a dress. She managed to find a woollen helmet that fitted close to her head so that she looked no worse than a victim of some sickness that had caused her hair to fall.

Of course, as far as he was concerned, her return to a dress invested in her no more femininity than before. He had merely rescued a colleague, a fellow troubadour, and though the kindness might seem so huge that Ouallada’s love redoubled within her each time she thought of it, it was no more than he would have done for Gaston Mauriac or Auxerre d’Impt.

The closer they came to Haut-Beziers, the more anxious and absorbed he became at the prospect of what lay ahead. When his horse actually strayed off the track, she was loath to call out and tell him: he had so often scorned ‘the per cuda ramblings of absent-minded fools’. The horse decided matters by coming to a halt. Foulque was obliged to get off and lead the animal back to the road. He coughed and scowled as he remounted, but about a mile farther on, he caught her eye and, with a sheepish sort of a smile observed, ‘There’s a good deal to be said for the joys of anticipation.’

‘The journey as opposed to the arriving, you mean?’ and he nodded. ‘The hoping as opposed to the having?’

‘Ah. Aha, well. Perhaps that’s to press a theory too far.’

If she had really been a man, as he treated her, she could have asked in the crudest terms, the question that raged in her head: ‘Are you truly still a virgin? At your age?’ Half the priests in France could not have said so much, and they still toddling in the skirts of Mother Church. But coming from a woman (as she persisted in thinking herself) the question would have been outrageously immodest.

Just as it would be to remind him his bride was not a virgin.

But he knew it, didn’t he? Did he not care, so long as Aude have not given her love to Mauriac? The questions tumbled through her, all unanswerable. What did it matter, she concluded, and followed on, in tow behind him, resolving to break away as soon as she was new rigged and seaworthy. Before the wedding, if that were possible. Until then, she would keep a quiet tongue in her head and quash her private thoughts.

‘Doesn’t it worry you that she lay with Gaston Mauriac before you?’

She blurted it out, so loud and inarticulate that he stared at her wide-eyed and ran a hand several times over his head. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but when nothing came out he kicked his horse to a gallop and raced off ahead. He rode directly at a grassy hill so steep that the beast could only buck and scrabble so far up the slope before coming to a halt and sliding back down on its hocks. By this time Ouallada had caught him up.

‘A tapeworm can gnaw on a man without killing him, can’t it?’ he shouted at her. ‘I can stomach it. Don’t I merit one small detraction from my earthly blisses? You think I haven’t deserved…’ He swerved his eyes to survey the familiar, lovely landscape of the Orb valley and the sky warping it with corrugating heat. ‘Don’t you think I’ve detracted from God’s joy in creating me? Given Him grounds to regret breathing the breath of life into me? Hasn’t He good grounds to set a curb on my happiness?’

‘No,’ she said involuntarily, and then, ‘No! Since you ask me. No. In my case, as you said to the pleasant people back there: God is infinitely forgiving.’

He dug his spurs into his horse again but he was also unknowingly hauling on the reins so that the beast only crouched down in abject confusion. ‘I was play-acting back there. Don’t you recognise satire when you see it?’

‘You’ll never starve for want of work as an actor, then. Your theology sounded plausible enough from where I was sitting.’ He finally managed to break away from the spot and put on speed, but at first she kept level with his horse’s tail, shouting into his slipstream. ‘Don’t you believe it, then? Nerra? That God forgives?’

He let the words fly back to her over his shoulder, angry that she should have soured his day of triumph. ‘If there’s one thing my ancestors taught me, it’s not to use God like a royal warrant: a free pass to ride roughshod over my neighbours and my conscience! The third Count? You recall my royal ancestry? He burned down cities then put it right with a penance. Barral Nerra? He nailed men to their doors then went on pilgrimage. If there’s one thing I learned from my antecedents, it’s not to pretend sins can be shed like that – like a crab’s back – the better to grow bigger ones below. Me, I carry my sins with me where I can keep close reckoning.’

She could not sustain the pace, and he pulled away from her, reaching the top of the rise first and so catching first glimpse of Haut-Beziers. At the sight of it, he punched a clenched fist hard into the air over his head with surfeit of feeling. He might have tricked the people of Nerra-des-Etangs into seeing miracles, but he had tricked himself into believing a much greater one: that all earthly happiness lay in the I possession of La Belle Aude and was within reach now, just beyond that outcrop yonder of marriage vows.

As the door of the great-hall opened and Foulque Nerra humped his saddlebags and rolled tarpaulin over the threshold, the room fell silent. He felt the stares keenly, and his colour rose. He stopped in the doorway, half-blocking it, half-holding it open for Ouallada. ‘You tell her,’ he said in a low voice. ‘She sent you to keep a watch on me. You tell her it’s done.’

Ouallada squeezed past him and, knowing he would never notice it, let her fingers trail across the sheepskin of his waistcoat. After that nothing remained but to approach Aude, where she sat at the topmost table, and to say, ‘The assais is done’, and offer congratulations on a fortunate marriage.

As she came closer, she could see that Aude’s face was powdered with ground silver and glittered with every turn of her head and with the suppressed laughter of her twitching cheeks. ‘Princess! Where have you been? So long gone from us!’ She stood up and pushed her face forward for Ouallada to kiss and then, seeing that the woollen cap concealed no hair, thought better of kissing a possible source of disease. ‘My dear, dear Princess. You’ve not been well!’

‘I—’

Ouallada turned round and walked back down the room, every step an ordeal under the public gaze. ‘You say it,’ she whispered bad temperedly to Foulque. ‘It’s not for me to say. You say it.’

So Foulque lumbered himself and his baggage farther into the room and dropped it all down behind the door. A lady in a samite dress burst into uncontrollable sniggers and was shushed by her companion. Foulque scowled and straightened his back. His stacked saddlebags slithered one over the other and spilled their contents. The woman in the samite could not be restrained from snorting into her cup.

Foulque started down the room and, to force a path through the sheer density of silence, began his formulaic address as he walked. ‘As you know, mistress, when I left my former life, I commended myself to fortune, gave the rein to my steed and let it carry me where it would. It bore me here, to discover a love more precious to me than Heaven, and I courted that love, as Love itself commended me to do, in verses and song. My lady took pity and inclined her ear. She set me assais to try and temper my love – for God knows it was a love always conducted in temper.’ His walk brought him to the opposite side of the table from her, and he leaned his palms down among the dishes. ‘And now I present myself, Foulque, Lord of Nerra-des-Etangs, and crave …

‘There was no formula for the proposal of marriage: it was not a troubadoric principle. ‘…and crave the reward of your companionship during all the remaining days of my life.’

Why must she do it to him? thought Ouallada: make him speak in formulae, who despised cliché; make him speak at all, who preferred silence? But she persuaded herself that it was natural for Aude to enjoy her last moments of actual power: the scope of a married woman is, after all, a circle drawn on the ground for her by her husband. At least Gaston Mauriac was not there. And ultimately the triumph was Foulque’s who had fulfilled his assais.

Aude cupped a pair of hands over her grinning mouth in a show of horror. ‘Christ, you did it, then! What a monstrous man you are, to be sure!’ She said it in shocked delight, and with a dramatic shiver. ‘Everyone said you’d baulk at it. But you did it! Well! What a wealth of money and land you have now! We must all treat you with great respect, mustn’t we? I’m very happy for you, dear Foulque. What a difference from before!’

‘I have nothing but what you can call yours, lady. That most worth having, I had before, unless you prize a man according to his purse. What I most wanted, I left behind me here, in the safe-keeping of your heart: that’s to say, your promise.’

‘Such a pity you were gone so long,’ she said as if he had not spoken.

‘A two-weeks, madam? It seemed a long time to me, but …’ He scented a danger. Even from the doorway Ouallada could see it. On the road back he had always known when there were wolves running. Now his head leaned slightly back, his nostrils stiff and wide.

‘Ah, but so much has happened since you left! Such interesting visitors! Such wonderful debating! Let me introduce you to Deacon Gislebert, who is perfect.’

Foulque’s eyebrows soared as he turned to address the shabby individual dressed in gunny and frieze and seated on a stool at the table’s end. ‘Perfect? Oh, happy man that anyone should impute it, let alone it be true!’

The deacon, a pallid man with a straight, lipless mouth like a sword scar, smiled without parting his gums.

‘I mean he’s a perfect – a saint! – a minister of the new religion. Oh, the windows he’s thrown open for us! The light he’s let in!’ (She seemed less than enraptured now, though could have been describing a genuine emotion that had come and gone. As Gaston Mauriac had come and gone.)

Foulque no longer spoke or moved. His stillness made the rest of the room seem wriggling, fidgety, wormy.

‘Auxerre and I were totally and completely moved to ecstasy! Not just us – oh, everybody! I mean moved to the bottom of our souls! Truly! Deacon Gislebert blew into our mouths, you know. To impart the Holy Spirit. He can do that, you know! He’s in direct communication with – Well, the problem is, Foulque, you’re just such a very …

Christian man. I mean, as Deacon Gislebert says, all carnal love is a sin, but if it must be, then best between two like-thinking people, don’t you agree? And unmarried, too. Or there’s all that tiresome forswearing to be done … And you gone so long. Deacon Gislebert says that marriage is defunct – a scab over material filth. “No marrying in Heaven” and so forth.’ Gislebert scratched his head, as if he had been slightly misquoted, but did not contradict her. ‘So I’ve acknowledged Auxerre d’Impt as my drut. – Of course, we shan’t marry either, so you mustn’t feel cast down – disparaged – nothing of that sort. You see, of course, that I couldn’t tie myself now, in any case, to a papist. Leave alone a murderer.’

An orange hit Foulque in the back, and the whole room burst out laughing, a deafening, crescendoing Babel of collapsed sobriety. He was the butt of a joke. The Lady Aude had never intended to marry him. And what a topical joke she had made of it! The lady was to be congratulated with laughter and applause.

It did not seem possible that Foulque should know who had thrown the orange. And yet when he drew his sword and flung out the full reach of his arm as he turned, the flat blade caught the very man across the face, leaving a white pennant edged with blood on his cheek. The room protested at Foulque’s lack of humour. It also delighted in seeing the Railing Monk restored to character. The guests laughed and screamed alternately as he broke up the food and tableware all along the top table. Only when he lifted the board clean off its trestle and overturned it into the faces of Aude and Auxerre did they worry that some real harm might be done. The board was heavy and Aude lay pinned beneath it, her face as round and silver as the plates alongside it, her arms raised defensively.

‘Come away, Foulque!’ said Ouallada from the other end of the hall. ‘Come away and be glad. Save your injury for your verses, man. You always meant to sing her through the land, didn’t you? We can sing songs that’ll make La Belle Aude famous through the Languedoc. The famousest whore ever to jilt an honest man. The silliest trollop ever to spit on salvation.’

They left to the shrill protests of Aude, her dress spattered with food and her hair pulled about by her own hands. ‘You won’t do that! He won’t do that! He doesn’t hate me, do you, Foulque? You’ve sworn to love me always, haven’t you? Anyway … one word about me and I’ll tell how you murdered Barral for his land!’

Foulque turned and pointed at her with a gloved leather hand that silenced her with its sheer menace. ‘Ah, but I didn’t, you see. I am become a liar in your service, ma’am, but not, thank God, a murderer.’

Even after the door shut behind him, Aude continued her tirade – half-taunting, half-afraid – while the silver shimmered down from her face like moondust from the perfidious moon. ‘Not one song, you hear? By all the Codes of Love, I forbid it! One slur and I’ll know you never really loved me at all, deceitful man! Not one word, you hear? Either of you! Not a word from either of you. Well! Now we all know where the Princess’s hopes are laid!’