dashboard GPS unit was informing the driver he had arrived at his destination. ‘Thank you, I know,’ the driver sniffed at the female voice.
Hugo Pineau got out and blinked from behind his designer sunglasses into the noon sun which hovered over the church tower like the dot on an i. He took his briefcase from the back seat and winced with each step on gravel, irritated because his new leather soles were getting a premature scuffing.
He dreaded these obligatory visits to the countryside. Ordinarily he might have been able to pawn off the job to Isaak, his business development manager, but the wretch was already on his August vacation. The referral to H. Pineau Restorations had come directly from the Archbishop of Bordeaux, an important client, so there was no question of snapping to and providing first-class service.
The abbey was large and fairly impressive. Set in a verdant enclave of woodlands and pastures, well away from the D-road, it had clean architectural lines. Though the church tower dated to the tenth century or earlier, the abbey, as it existed today was primarily built in the twelfth century by a strict Cistercian order and up to the seventeenth century periodically it had been expanded in stages. Of course, there were twentieth-century accoutrements in the realm of wiring and plumbing but the complex was remarkably little changed over hundreds of years. The Abbey of Ruac was a fine example of Romanesque architecture fashioned of white and yellow limestone quarried from the nearby outcroppings prevalent above the Vezere plain.
The cathedral was well proportioned, constructed in a typical cruciform plan. It was connected, via a series of passageways and courtyards, to all the other abbey buildings – the dormitories, the chapter house, the abbot’s house, the manicured cloister, the ancient caldarium, the old brewery, dovecote and forge. And the library.
Hugo was escorted by one of the monks directly to the library, but he could have found it blindfolded; he’d sniffed enough days-old fires in his career. His mild attempt at small talk about the fineness of the summer day and the tragedy of the blaze was politely deflected by the young monk who delivered him to Dom Menaud and bowed goodbye. The abbot was waiting amidst the piles of sodden, smoky books.
Hugo clucked knowingly at the sight of devastation and presented his card. Hugo was a small, compact man in his forties with no excess body fat. His nose was broad but otherwise his features were chiselled and quite handsome. He looked elegant, perfectly coiffed and urbane in a closely fitted and buttoned brown sports jacket, tan slacks and an open-necked white shirt made of the finest Egyptian cotton which shimmered against his skin. He had the musky scent of good cologne. The abbot, on the other hand, wore traditional loose robe and sandals and gave off the odours of a sausage lunch and sweaty skin. It seemed like a time warp had brought the two men together.
‘Thank you for coming all the way from Paris,’ Dom Menaud offered.
‘Not at all. This is what I do. And when the archbishop calls, I run.’
‘He is a good friend to our order,’ the abbot replied. ‘We are grateful for his help and yours. Very little was burned,’ he added, gesturing around the room. ‘It’s all water damage, and smoke.’
‘Well, there isn’t much we can ever do about flames but water and smoke: these can be rectified – if one has the correct knowledge and tools.’
‘And money.’
Hugo laughed nervously. ‘Well, yes, money is an important factor too. If I may say, Dom Menaud, I am pleased I can converse with you so normally. I haven’t worked with Trappists before. I thought there might be, well, a vow of silence that was followed here. I imagined having to pass notes back and forth.’
‘A misconception, Monsieur Pineau. We endeavour to maintain a certain discipline, to speak when needed, to avoid frivolous and unnecessary discussion. We find that idle chat tends to distract us from our spiritual focus and monastic pursuits.’
‘This concept suits me fine, Dom Menaud. I’m eager to get to work. Let me explain how we do business at H. Pineau Restorations. Then we can survey the task and set ourselves an action plan. Yes?’
They sat at the reading table while Hugo launched into a tutorial on the salvage of water-damaged library materials. The older the book, he explained, the greater its water absorbency. Material of the antiquity of the abbey’s might absorb up to two hundred per cent of its weight in water. If a decision was taken to address, say five thousand water-laden volumes, then some eight tonnes of water must be removed!
The best method for restoring soaked books was to freeze them followed by a process of vacuum freeze drying under carefully controlled conditions. The outcome for parchment and paper might be excellent but, depending on the specific materials and the amount of swelling, bindings may have to be redone. Fungicidal treatments were essential to combat the spread of mould growth but his firm had perfected successful approaches to killing the microbes by introducing ethylene oxide gas into the drying cycles of their industrial-sized freeze-drying tanks.
Hugo answered the abbot’s well-reasoned questions then broached the delicate subject of cost. He prefaced the discussion with his standard speech that it was invariably more cost-effective to replace volumes that were still in print and apply restoration techniques only to older irreplaceable ones. Then he gave a rough estimate of the typical price tag per thousand books and studied the abbot’s face for a reaction. Usually at this stage of his sales pitch, the curator or librarian would start swearing but the abbot was impassive and certainly did not spew oaths.
‘We’ll have to prioritise, of course. We can’t do everything but we must salvage the sacred history of the abbey. We will find a way to pay. We have a roofing fund we can tap. We have some small paintings we can sell. There’s one book, an early French translation of St Benedict we’d be loathe to part with but…’ He sighed pathetically. ‘And you can help too, Monsieur, by offering us a price that reflects our ecclesiastical status.’
Hugo grinned. ‘Of course, Dom Menaud, of course. Let’s have a look around, shall we?’
They spent the afternoon poking through the piles of wet books, making a rough inventory, and setting up a ranking system based on the abbot’s assessment of historical value. Finally, the young monk brought them a tray of tea and biscuits and the abbot took the opportunity to point out one small book wrapped in a hand cloth. It was set apart from the others at the far end of the reading table.
‘I’d like your opinion about this one, Monsieur Pineau.’
Hugo thirstily slurped at his tea before putting on another pair of latex gloves. He unwrapped the towel and inspected the elegant red-leather bindings. ‘Well, this is something special! What is it?’
‘In truth, I don’t know. I didn’t even know we had it. One of the firemen found it inside that wall. The cover was stuck. I didn’t force it.’
‘A good decision. It’s a cardinal rule unless you really know what you’re doing. It’s very saturated, isn’t it? Look at the green smudge on the edges of the pages here and here. And here’s a spot of red. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are coloured illustrations. Vegetable-based pigments can run.’
He applied light pressure to the front cover and remarked, ‘These pages aren’t going to come apart without a good freeze-drying but I might be able to lift up the cover to see the flyleaf. Are you game?’
‘If you can do it safely.’
Hugo retrieved a leather clutch from his briefcase and unbuttoned it. It contained an assortment of precision tools with points, wedges and hooks, not unlike a small dissection or dental kit. He chose a tiny spatula with an ultra-fine blade and started working it under the front cover, advancing it millimetre by millimetre with the steady hand of a safe cracker or a bomb defuser.
He spent a good five minutes freeing the entire perimeter of the cover, inserting that spatula a centimetre or so all around, and then with gentle traction, the cover peeled away from the frontispiece and hinged open.
The abbot leaned over Hugo’s shoulder and gasped audibly as together they read the boldly written inscription on the flyleaf, rendered in a flowing and confident Latin script: Ruac, 1307 I, Barthomieu, friar of Abbey Ruac, am two hundred and twenty years old and this is my story.
TWO
Midway between Bordeaux and Paris, from his first-class compartment of the TGV, Luc Simard was waging a pitched battle between the twin interests that perpetually consumed him: work and women.
He was seated on the right-hand side of the carriage in the row of singles, working on revisions to one of his papers under peer review at Nature. The flat green countryside whizzed past his tinted windows but the scenery
