PART ONE
1
Le Domaine De Seyeme,
Cap Camarat, France
Present Day
Ex-Captain Joris Calque, grateful recipient of the Police Nationale Francaise’s early-retirement plan for officers injured in the line of duty, had long ago accepted that he was built for comfort and not for speed.
It was for this reason that he had bribed a notorious local poacher to build him a camouflaged hideout on a hill overlooking the present-day Dowager Countess of Hyeres’s private estate on the St Tropez peninsula, almost exactly 765 years after the events at the St Denis Basilica.
The hideout came complete with battery-operated fan, blow-up armchair, and high-density, polyurethane insulated, safari-style picnic box. From his eyrie on the opposing hillside, the newly retired Calque intended to monitor the comings and goings of the group of individuals he now knew as the Corpus Maleficus, and, in his own time, to secure proof of their involvement in the death of his lieutenant earlier that same year.
Calque had done his homework well. He had spent the first fortnight of his retirement trawling through the records of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and the French National Archives at Fontainebleau, researching everything he could about the history of the de Bale family. And he had come to a number of inescapable conclusions.
Firstly, that the de Bales had managed to thrust their fingers into just about every slice of religious, political, civic, administrative, governmental, socio-religious and socio-political pie that France had contrived for itself – or had contrived on itself – since the early Middle Ages. And secondly that, almost without exception, the de Bales had abused whatever power they had thus managed to grasp.
Across a span of nearly eight hundred years, the de Bales could count three marshals, one seneschal, and two constables of France amongst their number. They had bought archbishoprics, infiltrated the college and orders of the Cardinalate, and even manipulated popes, without ever having quite achieved the papal tiara themselves. They had started wars and engendered riots. They had conducted massacres, espoused revolutions, and incited assassination attempts. They had weakened kings and queens, suborned dauphins and minor princelings, seduced foreign princesses and even, on one occasion, a Mademoiselle de France. They had fomented bastards, and undermined the principles of fair play at every opportunity. Far from protecting France from the Devil, the de Bales appeared, at every opportunity, to have eagerly encouraged her towards his fold.
The history of the de Bale family, via even the partial records available to Calque through the exclusively public sector access open to him, showed a family so intent on the pursuit and enjoyment of power, that it had ultimately ended up so diluting itself and dispersing its seed that, by the time of the Great War, it had lost virtually all influence. Lord Acton, thought Calque, had hit the nail squarely on the head with his ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.’
This had led to a situation where the last remaining direct holder of the de Bale name had found himself – via the misfortunes of war – incapable of procreating and of continuing his direct line, whilst at the same time being titular head of a fast diminishing cabal that was unravelling itself at the speed dirty water flushes down a drain.
Nearly thirty years later, in the age-old way of such things, and in one final, desperate grasp at life, this elderly man had then procured himself a much younger woman, of lesser lineage, perhaps, than his own, but who was possessed of that inestimable compensation – a greater fortune. The family of Genevieve Odilonne de Moristot had been more than happy to trade her youth, her beauty, and the astonishing fortune she had inherited thanks to being the only daughter of a minor nobleman with a phalanx of elderly female relatives widowed in the Great War (and now gradually dying off in their coddled eighties and nineties), for a countship, a marquisate, and one of the oldest names in France.
The fact that the de Bale line could not be continued in the direct fashion that might have been expected had proved no hindrance to the new Countess. Using the example of Italy, in which the per se continuation of great names often takes precedence over strict genetic purity, and of France’s very own ‘ Maman toujours, Papa peutetre ’ – ‘Mummy always, Daddy only perhaps’ – dictum, she had persuaded her elderly husband to allow her to adopt thirteen children from her family-funded nunnery orphanage.
When Calque had first confirmed that this number was true, he had reared back from the microfiche newspaper he had been reading just as if a poisonous spider had landed in front of him and flashed him her claws.
But upon further consideration, he had begun to see the logic behind the Countess’s actions. What better way to rebuild the Corpus’s influence? She had had both the money and the leisure – thanks to her extreme youth in relation to that of her husband – to use it. If one accepted that the nature/nurture debate was something of a moveable feast, what better way to gain power over your adopted children than by the use of titles, influence, and, last but by no means least, virtually unlimited funds? The old Count had chosen his partner well.
So was Achor Bale simply the exception that proved the rule? As far as Calque could tell, he had been the only one of the thirteen children adopted by the Countess old enough for his character to have been significantly formed before the fact. Was he the simple one-off freak that he seemed, and that Calque’s Commandant insisted he was? Or had all the Countess’s children been similarly groomed? Freed from the pressures of bureaucratic interference by his premature retirement, Calque now intended to find out.
The jobbing farmer on whose land Calque had planted his semi-permanent encampment had been easy enough to persuade. Before vacating his desk at the 2 eme Arrondissement, Calque had contrived to mislay his Captain’s badge and shield amongst the maelstrom of his boxed-up belongings. He had been a police officer for thirty years. Calque reckoned that the desk sergeant, embarrassed at having to say farewell to a man he had taken orders from since he was a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, wasn’t going to quiz him any too closely about the loss.
In the event all Calque had needed to do was to promise to drop the badge and shield off the next time he visited his old friends at the precinct. It was with exquisite satisfaction that Calque had noted the desk sergeant solemnly ticking off the box marked ‘Identification Returned’ on his retirement checklist. He had plans for that badge, the first of which was to use it to silence the farmer.
Calque hadn’t been that badly injured, of course, in the car accident the Countess de Bale’s adopted son, Achor Bale, aka the ‘eye-man’, had contrived on him and his assistant, Paul Macron, earlier that summer. But Macron’s brutal death at the hands of Bale a few days later had damaged more than merely its victim – it had undermined Joris Calque’s rock-solid sense of his own vocation.
It wasn’t that he mourned Macron unduly, or even felt guilty about his death – the man had been a bigot, for God’s sake, and as thick as a navvy’s bicep. It was more that he had lost the urge to explain himself anymore to superior officers who were both younger than himself, stupider than himself, and seemingly incapable of seeing or imagining anything beyond the confines of their own little time capsules.
This new breed of men and women infesting the upper echelons of the police department had no earthly sense of history – no earthly sense of what was seemly or appropriate in terms of their behaviour. When Calque had told the Commandant of his initial suspicions about the Countess and her baker’s dozen of adopted children – Calque had briefly been tempted to call them by the more accurate medieval term of a ‘Devil’s dozen’ but had thought better of it – the man had as good as laughed in his face.
‘Achor Bale was a freak. A one-off. What do you think? That someone as respectable as the Countess of Hyeres – who must be seventy if she’s a day – has been grooming a family full of killer orphans to fulfil her late husband’s 800-year-old sworn duty of protecting the French Crown from the Devil? Captain Calque, this may come as a surprise to you, but there is no Devil. And there is no French Crown any more, either. The last King of France was Louis-Philippe. And he was got rid of in…’ The Commandant had hesitated, a vague sense of betrayal suffusing his face.
‘They got rid of Louis-Philippe in 1848. But he wasn’t the last King of France. He was the last King of the French. The last reigning King of France was Charles X. You’ve heard of him, surely?’
‘You’re skating on very thin ice here, Captain.’
