himself.
Trying to expunge doubts about his own faith, despite bouts of absolute certainty, the priest’s mind swirled with conflicting thoughts. He went back to wrestling with the central issue of the biography of Christine Carpenter: to understand precisely why she opted for permanent entombment in the wall of the church. Was it a depth of asceticism-fanaticism-peculiar to the late Middle Ages? No. Duval calculated that it had to be a peculiarly personal decision. Such utter devotion to Christ could not be dismissed as a helpless sacrifice to the spirit of the age.
He addressed his crucifix again: “Christine had to choose freely, because that is why God granted us free will. But why,” he asked himself, “did she choose as she did?”
The priest as writer needed to invent a tormentor, an agency which would provide the motive for Christine’s entombment. He felt impelled to create the embodiment of evil, because he had become convinced that Christine’s purity required an antithesis. If she came to love Christ in heaven, who better to hate than her earthly lord-to cast him as the central villain of the tale?
Duval had scrupulously investigated the nature of evil. History had taught him that great leaders could dispense with God, but never a satanic scapegoat; the mass movements of recent history-communism, fascism, and for that matter capitalism-could flourish without a belief in God, but not without a belief in a devil. And even for those who presumed to eschew all “isms,” nuclear destruction beckoned as a convenient symbol for all that was truly wicked. Evil was innate, the natural condition of man; what fascinated the priest was the really extraordinary facet of the human condition, the origin of goodness.
Duval fingered his typewriter slowly, lovingly, as if it were a venerated church organ. Then he started to type furiously.
Sir Richard FitzGeoffrey, despite his relatively humble estates, was an aggressive warrior, and renowned in his county as a crusader in the last doomed efforts to regain a foothold in the Holy Land. His demesne included all of Shere, Gomshall and Peaslake in the shire of Surrey. Sir Richard proudly traced his forebears directly to the Conqueror, and believed his French to be pure Norman, although his curses were base Anglo-Saxon. He saw himself as a warrior of Christ, just as long as the actual battles advanced his favour with his earthly king and increased his landed possessions. His two foreign forays had been careful: very bloody, but comparatively short for the long distances he had travelled. He had served his king in France and in the Levant, but slyly returned as soon as he could in order to secure his holdings at home. Jerusalem he regarded as a tool, not a vision.
Sir Richard’s men followed him in fear and awe. At home in his favourite tavern, Sir Richard’s squire, Phillip of Gomshall, would often hold court, regaling pilgrims and local villagers with tales of his master’s ingenious treatment of captured Saracens.
“It were near Antioch,” the squire would always start. He would scratch his mop of red hair, wait for perfect silence, and then continue: “We had been ridin’ since the break of day. Ten of us there were, two knights, two squires and six men but lightly armed. We sojourned briefly at a well. Bare slaked our thirst when we were surprised by the enemy-at least a score there were.
“Sir Richard and his son Edward flew at the intruders. Sir Richard, still mounted, killed two with his long- sword. Edward-on foot-sundered one unbeliever’s head with his axe. Most of the enemy then took flight, run they did like frightened hares, but we seized four, with the grace of Almighty God. Sir Richard said we should feast there and honour our Saviour with a toast.
“Then my master ordered us to render naked the Mussulmen, to shame them before their false god. We bound them fast to trees and whipped them, for an hour, and so, in submission, they did our biddin’. We told them to dig-the earth was sandy-a hole six feet deep and near four feet wide. They did it speedily, too, with their hands and metalled scabbards, despite the heat and bloodied backs, though they knew it to be their grave. When it was done, Sir Richard bade the Saracens descend into the hole. Pricked by our swords, in fear, they did so.
“Sir Richard then told us: ‘Bury these men, but leave their heads above. We are Christian knights so we shall leave these men to pray to the true God. Place their heads a foot apart, facing east, west, south and north, so they can see that our one true God is everywhere.’
“And so it was. Their heads were like the round hide-balls we throw on feast-days, but resting there in the sand.”
The squire would pause for a deep draught of his ale, and savour the wide-eyed look of expectancy in his audience. He would time his drinking actions to tally with his words: “We drank a little of the wine we had, and Sir Richard bade us share some water with the living heads afore us. The first head, desperate was he for the drops we gave, but the second Saracen-even though his eyes were wide with fear-took the drops and then spat at his provider-that were Thomas, my cousin from Netley. You all know him.”
The audience would murmur a rapid assent, eager for him to proceed with his tale. The squire would hesitate just a second or so longer than he ought, to tease his captivated listeners. “Ah, yes,” he continued, as though he had lost his way for a moment, “Sir Richard saw this impudence, but said naught. He fell to joking with his son about domestic matters. When the sun was dyin’ in the sky, Sir Richard instructed us to light a fire, and we collected some of the wood that lay scattered around. One of our soldiers made to start a fire in the lee of some rocks, but my master said he wanted the Saracens to feel the fires of Hell.
“‘Light the fire between their heads,’ he commanded.
“I could see that the soldier was not willin’, though he did what he had been bidden. The man-Gilbert from London town-lit a small fire that did but heat the Mussulmen a little.
“Sir Richard strode over to the fire and shouted, ‘By the Holy Cross I wear, we will teach these Saracens the price of scornin’ our Holy Father the Pope.’ Those were truly his words.”
At this Sir Richard’s squire would drink deep of his ale until his leather jug was empty. He would upturn the empty vessel and stay silent until a member of the rapt audience bought him more. Adopting a patrician smile as they rushed to satisfy his thirst, and with a softer-almost conspiratorial-voice, he would return to his tale: “Thereupon, my lord threw stout faggots on to the stuttering fire. As the flames rose, the Mussulmen’s hair caught fire and they screamed to Allah. Their eyes bulged and popped out like corks from a jug of shaken ale. I must confess I could not bear the sight nor smell of burnin’ human flesh. Just like the smell of roasted pig after Lent, exceptin’ that the stench of burning beard and hair was stronger than the pork…but Sir Richard was not discountenanced at all.
“He used the black gargoyles with gaping mouths that before were heads as hearth-stones for the roasting of our meat. I felt I could not eat, but we had ridden long and hard, and hunger was on us, despite our battle and the smell of flesh. We feasted on the fireplace of the Saracens.”
The squire was always content with the utter silence that would fall on the tavern, no matter that it was the twentieth telling of his tale.
***
Michael Duval was also content with the power of his sadistic invention, or “selective reinterpretation” as he would term it. He would now work this episode into his story of Christine.
The historical evidence for Christine’s story was meagre: essentially three letters, written in Church Latin between 1329 and 1332. Duval had researched related histories of the lives of anchorites and anchoresses as well as local records. But nothing had told him why the most well-formed girl in the valley-the priest was fusing spiritual and earthly splendour-had chosen a life of total enclosure in a cell in the wall of St. James’s church in the hamlet of Shere. Nevertheless, her story had seized his imagination and fired his intellectual curiosity, finally consuming him as though it were a literary transubstantiation: he could feel Christine’s flesh and blood coming alive through him. If evil was caused by the flesh, he asked himself, how could the Devil be explained, the fallen angel who had no flesh? Better to explain evil as integral to man’s nature, but goodness, yes, that could be generated by flesh, especially flesh as perfect as mortality would allow. A young girl’s flesh. The life of Christine was not so much a history as his own creation, a rebirth of his faith, perhaps even the Eucharist of his soul; he had become a consecrated writer. When he picked up his pen to make notes before he typed, he imagined the blood flowing down through his hands into the pen and on to the pure white paper.
Edward II had taken up the Cross fourteen years before, and for a century to come the kings of England were to be absorbed in squabbles abroad, for God in the Holy Land and for Mammon in France. When Christine was born in Shere in the year of our Lord 1311, her village had been racked by famine. Harvests failed and murrain infected the oxen and sheep. Plague, taxes and revolt were to lay waste an England often deserted by her lords, her kings
