sustainable.’
‘I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?’
‘Other than join me in the restoration business? No, just venting. We’ll have to sell it to settle his estate. I’m talking to bankers. This is my problem. You have your own. I’m sorry to equate mine with yours.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ Luc said. ‘We’d both be better off if Hugo were still here. Look, it’s good of you to make some time. What do you have for me?’
‘Like I said in my voice message. More of your manuscript. Hugo’s Belgian contact decoded another chunk.’
‘Did he say what the key word was?’
Isaak’s desk was in chaos, files and papers everywhere. He searched and cursed for a good minute before laying hands on the folder. ‘H ELOISE.’
‘Not a shock,’ Luc said. ‘It’s in Latin, no?’
‘It’s not a problem. I read Latin, Greek, even a bit of Hebrew and Aramaic. Hugo picked me for my background. He didn’t want a guy who only knew spreadsheets.’
‘Do you have time to translate it now?’
‘For a friend of Hugo’s, of course!’ He scratched his beard. ‘Also, I’m curious, and it’s more fun than sorting through accounts payable.’
Luc’s phone rang and he excused himself when he recognised the number.
‘Luc, it’s Father Menaud calling.’ There was a tremor in his voice.
‘Hello, Dom Menaud. Are you all right?’
‘It’s a silly thing to be upset about, what with the horrible tragedy of the murders but…’ His voice trailed off.
‘But what, Father?’
‘I’ve just found out the manuscript is gone! It was in the box on my desk. You recall it?’
‘Of course.’
‘I opened the box this morning to look at it and it wasn’t there! You don’t know anything about it, do you?’
‘No, nothing. When was the last time you saw it?’
‘Perhaps a week ago. Before the tragedy.’
‘Could someone have gone into your rooms and stolen it Sunday night?’
‘Yes. Nothing is locked here. I and the Brothers were at prayer when your people were attacked.’
‘I’m sorry, Father. I don’t know what to say. We have a very faithful colour copy of the manuscript, of course, but that’s no substitute. You should call Colonel Toucas and let him know. And listen – a little good news, I suppose. Another section has been decoded. I’ll send you the information when I have it.’
Luc re-pocketed his phone and saw that Isaak was staring at him.
‘On top of everything, Isaak, the Ruac Manuscript was stolen, perhaps the night of the murders. I’m not buying the randomness of all the shit that’s happened. Not for a minute. It’s more important than ever for us to know what the manuscript says. It has to be the key, so please, let’s go.’
Isaak had the lengthy email from Belgium printed out. He put on his reading glasses, and began translating the Latin, on the fly, apologising for his stumbles and wistfully interjecting that Hugo was the superior Latin scholar. It is a mystery to me how like-minded men, united in exaltation of Christ, could come to opposite conclusions about a shared experience. Whereas myself, Jean and Abelard were firmly of the belief the red infusion we prepared was a path to spiritual enlightenment and physical vigoir, Bernard was strongly opposed. Whereas we took to calling the liquid, Enlightenment Tea, Bernard declared it a Devil’s brew. Bernard’s rebuke was a great blow to us all, but none more so than Abelard who had come to love and respect my brother as deeply as if they were of the same flesh and blood. Bernard took his leave of Ruac and returned to Clairvaux when we three declared we would not forego the pleasures of the infusion. We would not, and indeed, felt we could not.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Priory of St Marcel, 1142
For a priory as modest as the one in St Marcel, it was an extraordinary gathering. Well set back from the River Saone and nestled in a dense thicket, the priory was ill equipped to deal with the influx of pilgrims. They arrived from all the compass-points of France, and how such a diverse population had efficiently learned about one man’s imminent death, no one could say for sure.
Abelard, the great teacher, philosopher and theologian lay dying.
There were students, disciples and admirers from all the way-stations of his life – Paris, Nogent-sur-Seine, Ruac, the Abbeys of Saint-Denis and St Gildas de Rhuys, the Paraclete in Ferreux-Quincey, and finally, this friendly final sanctuary near Cluny. He had spent his life teaching and wandering, thinking and writing and were it not for the dreaded white plague, the consumption that was eating away at his lungs, he would have continued to attract many more followers. Such was his charisma.
The infirmary was little more than a thatched hut and in the trodden-down clearing between the hut and the chapel, perhaps forty men had pitched camp to pray, to talk and to visit at his bedside in ones and twos.
The path from Ruac to St Marcel had been a twenty-four year exploration of life and love. Abelard had left Ruac, his health and outlook restored and had travelled to The Abbey of St Denis, where he had assumed the habit of a Benedictine monk, and had begun an explosively rich period of meditation and writing. Not only did he produce his controversial treatise on the Holy Trinity, much to the discomfort of the Church orthodoxy, but he also continued to write letter after letter, ever more passionate, to his beloved Heloise, still ensconced at the nunnery of Argenteuil.
He was nothing, if not feisty. His inquisitive temperament, rapier intelligence and boundless energy led him to argue and probe and shake established thought from its foundations. And whenever his spirits flagged or his pace slowed, he would set off with his wicker basket into the fields and meadows to collect plants and berries, much to the amusement of his fellow monks who knew not what he did with them.
He had his own personal trinity of sorts that occupied all his waking thoughts: theology, philosophy and Heloise. Of the first two, few men had the sufficiency of mind to spar with him or share his intellectual proclivities. Of the last, all men could understand his longings.
Heloise, sweet Heloise, remained the love of his life, the fiery beacon on a faraway hill that beckoned him home. But she had taken the veil and he had taken the cloth and Christ was their proper object of devotion. All they could do was exchange letters that singed each other with their passion.
Neither he nor Bernard of Clairvaux, would have ever imagined that Bernard’s new-found enmity of Abelard would have formed the bridge that would unite the star-crossed lovers.
When Bernard left Ruac, and returned to Citeaux healed in body but troubled in spirit, he bitterly rued the decision his brother Barthomieu had taken not to forsake the devil brew. On reflection, he blamed no one more than Abelard for the turn of events because among the players in this affair, none was more ample of mind and persuasive than that eunuch. His poor brother was a mere pawn. The true evil-doer was Abelard.
For that reason, he used his ever-widening sphere of ecclesiastical influence to keep tabs on that renegade monk and when Abelard’s treatise on the Trinity made it into his hands, he seized on its heresies, as he saw them, to have him summoned before a papal council at Soissons in 1121 to answer for himself.
Was he not proclaiming a Tritheistic view that Father, Son and Holy Ghost were separable, each with their own existence, Bernard fumed? Was the One God merely an abstraction to him? Had the devil brew made him lose his mind?
With no little satisfaction, Bernard learned that Abelard had been forced by the Pope to burn his own book and retreat to St Denis in disgrace. But bitter seeds had been sown. The monks at the abbey saw fit to rid themselves of Abelard and his heresy and he withdrew to the solitude of a deserted place in the vicinity of Troyes, in a hamlet known as Ferreux-Quincey. There, he and a small band of followers established a new monastery they called the Oratory of the Paraclete. Paraclete – the Holy Ghost. A stick-in-the-eye to his accusers.
The place suited Abelard. It was remote, it had a good spring nearby, fertile soil and an ample source of
