He was a big man in his forties, with battered features and sharp brown eyes below his bald head. His robe was even dirtier than the last time I had met him, and the stench of it as he sat beside me made my eyes water. But, though he may not have been fond of changing his clothing or washing his body, as Matthew had said, there was nothing wrong with his mind.
He engaged the boys almost immediately in a conversation about the true nature of the Bible that dazzled me with its wit and elegance. Master Fulk maintained that the Bible was only part of the scriptures, the most important part for sure, and the part that contained the keys to Salvation, but merely a part of the teachings of God and His only son Jesus Christ. He cited the Gospel of Nicodemus, a book that I had never heard of, though the students all seemed to be conversant with it, and suggested that it should be included in the Bible as it offered an alternative version of the Crucifixion story that was a valuable addition to the lore of the Church. Matthew, typically, took up the opposite position, and claimed that if the Bible already contained the true and full instructions on how to attain Heaven, there was no need for any Gospels other than the four already contained within it. I lost track of the argument on several occasions — and found it again, and lost it once more, and as a result I said nothing, listening quietly in awe as Fulk demonstrated the depth of his learning, and the keenness of his mind. Matthew was drinking too heavily to be a true match in argument for Master Fulk — and after a while the student conceded his position with a laugh, and much jeering from his fellows.
It was at Luke’s suggestion that I put the mystery of the ‘man you cannot refuse’ before Master Fulk, and, with only a little reluctance, I was persuaded to do so — for the wine had warmed me, too, and made me loquacious.
When I had finished my tale, to which Master Fulk had attended with complete concentration and in silence, the teacher gave me a strange, almost shamefaced look: ‘I thought that you seemed familiar,’ he said. ‘I must tell you now that I knew your father twenty years ago, and I remember well his expulsion from Notre-Dame. Have people told you that you resemble him?’
I nodded and I remembered where I had heard his name before: at Verneuil, Father Jean had told me that Fulk was the name of the bully whom my father had thrashed.
‘I was not a very good student in my youth,’ said Master Fulk, ‘I drank too much, I was loud and loutish — you should all learn a lesson from my youthful sins — ’ The teacher pointed a powerful finger at the flushed, unlined faces gathered around the table. ‘Your father taught me a lesson, Sir Alan. We fought with our fists and he bested me; but more importantly he taught me to mend my ways. I was headed down the path of sin to certain destruction, and your father showed me the error of my ways.’ The teacher smiled at me a little shyly and I saw the honest truth of his statement in his eyes. ‘I honour your father’s memory,’ said Master Fulk, his voice gruff with deep feeling, and he lifted the henap, the big wine cup we were all sharing. ‘To Henri d’Alle!’ he said, and drank. I felt the choke of emotion in my own throat as he passed the cup to me and I took a long swallow from the vessel.
‘Perhaps you should give these sinful rascals a good beating one day,’ Master Fulk said, waving a hairy paw at the students gathered round the table. ‘It might teach them to mend their contumelious, dissolute ways!’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I do have need of a new purse!’
The table erupted in laughter, and once the joke had been explained to the teacher, he laughed the loudest of all.
Towards the end of the evening, when one or two of the students had slipped away to bed, Fulk leaned in towards me and said: ‘I do remember something concerning Bishop Heribert’s visit that may be of interest to you. It was mere rumour, of course, but we young monks whispered about it a good deal at the time. Heribert was supposed to possess a great and holy relic, a magical device that could defeat death itself. It was supposed to have the power to cure any hurt or illness and grant youth and everlasting life to the man who possessed it. I think the Bishop may have been heard boasting about his fantastical possession to de Sully by one of the novices who served at their table. Heribert may even have shown it to his host.’
I was intrigued — it put me in mind of the ‘wondrous’ object that Heribert had mentioned to me before his death. Surely this was the relic that my father had been blamed for stealing.
‘Do you know anything else about it?’ I asked him.
‘No, and it was merely a rumour; perhaps completely unfounded. None of my friends had ever laid eyes on this relic. It may not even have existed outside of Heribert’s mind, for he was not always entirely compos mentis. But if it did exist, it would have been fairly small; there was some talk of it being contained in a box about so big.’ Fulk made a gesture with his hands, holding them a foot apart. ‘But, as I say, it may have been pure invention — a fantasy concocted by a half-mad old man.’
I was less than completely sober when I stumbled the short distance to the Widow Barbette’s house from the sign of the Cock; and it may have been the wine or the darkness — or just my own fevered imagination, but when Hanno stopped to urinate in an alleyway, and I idly gazed around the neighbourhood, I thought I saw a hooded figure, no more than a tall, man-shaped shadow, a hundred yards further up the street leaning casually against the side of a house. I rubbed my eyes, looked again, but it was gone.
Chapter Fifteen
Early on the morning before I was due to dine with Sir Aymeric de St Maur at the Paris Temple, a maidservant called at Widow Barbette’s house. She was a very pretty, delicate girl with incongruously large breasts for her slight frame, which she evidently found most embarrassing. And while the students, who were helping Luke and Henry to pack up their beds in the salle, eyed her without attempting to hide their lust, she conveyed her message to me with a very becoming blush mantling her cheeks.
‘Sir Alan,’ she began, ‘I come directly from my mistress the Lady d’Alle, who beseeches you to meet her this morning after Prime in the choir of the great cathedral of Our Lady, on the northern side. She wishes to speak to you urgently about a family matter and hopes that you will agree to the rendezvous and tell no one of this affair.’
She glanced around at the staring students. ‘I hope these young gentlemen can be trusted to be discreet?’
I said that they could, but in truth I had my doubts: they would probably be gloating to their friends about the visit of this petite angel before noon. But it could not be helped. I dispatched Luke, the least lascivious of the students, to escort the maid back home to the Rue St-Denis, and prepared myself to meet the lovely Lady of Alle.
It might seem from my descriptions of her that I had fallen in love with Adele — and, if I had not sworn to tell the truth in all matters in these pages, I might have made a pretty romance of the ‘affair’ as the maid described it — a young lusty knight who was not yet twenty and the beautiful wife of an older lord. I have written many a canso on this popular theme myself. But I swore to tell the truth, and the truth is that my heart belonged to Goody, my betrothed, as it always has — and always will do. My own lovely girl might have been far away in England, and we might have done no more than kiss each other, but I loved her. And as soon as I had solved this mystery concerning my father, my heart’s desire was to be wed to her and to hold her in my arms for ever. To be sure, I was almost as prone to bouts of lustful thoughts as my student friends, but I swear, as Almighty God is my witness, I did not lie with any other women during my long absence from Goody.
Having said that, Adele’s beauty squeezed my chest when I saw her in the cathedral of Notre-Dame two hours later, sitting on a corner of one of the square pediments that support the mighty pillars. She wore a silk gown the colour of young leaves, and even through her white mesh veil I could see it perfectly matched her eyes.
‘Oh, Sir Alan, do not stare at me so,’ she said when I stood before her seat under the pillar on the north side of the choir. ‘Sit here, quickly now and do not look at me, we must pretend that we are strangers. I do not want to heap yet more humiliation on my husband with vile rumours.’
I perched on the adjacent corner of the pediment, the carved stone already worn smooth by countless pairs of weary buttocks before mine. Adele’s slight maid — she of the bountiful breasts — waited just out of earshot and spent the time with her back to us, praying at a small shrine to St Botolph. The arrangement of the seating on the pediment meant that I was facing north-west, and Adele was facing south-west; we were not in each other’s line of sight, so it would appear as if we were not known to each other and had no connection either — and yet a quiet
