he looked like skin and bones, but because he looked so young. ‘Abelard too!’ he hissed.
Barthomieu was standing in the corner with his arms tightly folded around his chest. He nodded.
Abelard managed to smile. In order to speak without inducing a paroxysm he had learned to whisper, using his throat more than his diaphragm. ‘Have you come to drop a heavy weight upon my head and finish me off?’ he joked.
‘I have come to pay my respects.’
‘I was not aware you respected me.’
‘As a person, you have my utmost respect.’
‘What about my views?’
‘That is another matter. But we are finished with those arguments.’
Abelard nodded. ‘Have you met Heloise?’
‘Just now.’
‘She is a good abbess.’
‘I am sure she is.’
‘She is a good woman.’
Bernard said nothing.
‘I love her. I have always loved her.’
The abbot shifted uncomfortably.
Abelard asked that Bernard and he be left alone and when Heloise and Barthomieu withdrew, he beckoned Bernard closer. ‘Can I tell you something, as one friend might say to another?’
Bernard nodded.
‘You are a great man, Bernard. You perform all the difficult religious duties. You fast, you watch, you suffer. But you do not endure the easy ones – you do not love.’
The old man slumped into a bedside chair and tears filled his eyes. ‘Love.’ He said the word as if it were foreign to his tongue. ‘Perhaps, old friend, you are right.’
Abelard gave him a sly wink. ‘I forgive you.’
‘Thank you,’ Bernard answered with a touch of amusement. ‘Would you like to confess to me?’
‘I am not sure I have the time left to confess all my sins. We have not seen each other since that night in Ruac when we drank some tea together.’
‘Yes, the tea.’
Abelard had a coughing fit and stained his mouth cloth red. When his breathing was under control he said, ‘Let me tell you about the tea.’
Two days later, Abelard was dead.
Heloise took his body back to Paraclete and buried him in a grave on a small knoll near the chapel.
She lived to be an old woman and in 1163, according to her wishes, she herself was buried next to him, certain in the knowledge the two of them would rest side by side for eternity.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Thursday, Midday
The taxi ride to the Palais-Royal was a brief one and didn’t give Luc much time to reflect on what he had just heard.
Was it possible there was a connection between the Ruac manuscript and the chaos and carnage of the present? How could a twelfth-century monk’s fanciful tale of infusions and monastic intrigue ripple through the centuries to affect his life?
When Isaak had finished translating the Latin he became excited, saying, ‘You know, Luc, I don’t know about this concoction, this brew, Barthomieu keeps writing about, but the independent first-person account of the affair and the coda to the romance between Abelard and Heloise is priceless. I have to put on my commercial hat. If the manuscript is recovered I’d love to broker the sale to a museum or the State.’
‘I hope it is. But anyway that would be up to the abbey to decide. It’s their property.’
Isaak nodded and promised Luc he’d contact him as soon as the next email arrived from the decoder. But they’d see each other again over dinner. They would eat and drink to Hugo that night. Both of them wanted that closure.
He tried Sara by phone one more time in what had become an obsessive and futile routine. The midday traffic was fairly light. The Place de Concorde was wide open and magnificent as always. He glanced absently at his knuckles. They were less red; the new pills were definitely working. He’d almost felt guilty taking them. People were dead. Sara was missing and he was attending to a mundane hand infection. He got angry with himself and in the flick of a physiological switch, the anger turned to melancholy. He put his hands to his face and literally shook his head, trying to shake out the demons. But he couldn’t permit himself to wallow. He had work to do.
Maurice Barbier had agreed to see him on short notice. Here was a man who had grown into his affectations. While Einstein hair and a cravat had marked him throughout middle age as somewhat of a dandy, it suited him as an older man. His office too, in the ministry, was an exercise in unselfconscious ornateness, an overstuffed assortment of archaic artefacts and pre-classical art on loan from the storage cabinets of the Louvre, an extravagant spectacle that seemed less ridiculous the older he became.
Barbier was sedate and serious. He guided Luc by the shoulder over to his gilded drinks cabinet.
Luc relaxed when he saw they were going to be alone.
‘You thought I’d ask Marc Abenheim to sit in?’ Barbier asked.
‘I thought you might.’
‘I have too much respect for you to play the tricks of a politician. He doesn’t even know you’re here.’
‘I need your help,’ Luc said.
‘Anything I can do, I will do.’
‘Give me my cave back.’
Barbier took a delicate sip of sherry and looked at an oversized Etruscan urn in the corner as if seeking strength from its spear-clad warriors. ‘That, unfortunately, I cannot do.’
Then and there, Luc knew he’d lost. Though saddened, Barbier seemed resolute. But he couldn’t just give up, finish his drink and walk away. He had to fight. ‘Surely, Maurice, you don’t buy into the nonsense that the things which have happened during the excavation represented a dereliction of duty or a failure of leadership!’
‘I want you to know that I don’t believe that.’
‘Then why?’
‘Because we have here the problem of perception versus reality. The image of Ruac has been sullied before we can even define it. There won’t be a magazine or newspaper article written about it which will not mention the deaths. There will be idiotic Internet postings about the Curse of Ruac. The mishaps are over-shadowing the importance of the archaeology and this is hard for me to bear. The Minister herself has ordered a health and safety assessment of the conditions of the dig and by the way, you will be questioned by more lawyers and functionaries than you can imagine. What I’m saying is that perception has become reality. You’re in an untenable position.’
‘I’m sure Abenheim shaped the discussion within these halls,’ Luc said with disgust.
‘Of course he did. I won’t lie to you about that, and I tell you, whether or not you trust my word, that I fought for you – until the pendulum of opinion had swung too far. So yes, I voted, in the end, for your removal. I’m worried about future funding. The cave is more important than one man, even its discoverer.’
‘Let’s not confound one tragedy with another. My heart’s already been broken. Losing Ruac will tear it out.’
More sherry, then the glass came down hard on the table. ‘I’m sorry.’
Luc rose and picked up his case. ‘Is there nothing I can do to change your mind?’
‘It would take a miracle.’
Luc was back in his hotel room with more time to kill before dinner than he would have liked. He sprawled on the bed and pulled out the notes he’d jotted down during Isaak’s translation.
The mentions of the red tea.
