us some wine, and perhaps a little bread and cheese.’ Then to me: ‘Be seated, young man, here, sit beside me, and tell me how I might be of service to you.’
The Bishop put the bowl of thyme down on the warm yellow slabs at his feet, and I took a seat beside him on the stone bench. Hanno stood behind me, his back leaning comfortably against the sun-warmed bricks of the garden wall, alert and yet relaxed at the same time.
‘I have an ailment of the stomach,’ the Bishop said. ‘It discomforts me a good deal and my new doctor — a Jewish fellow, but very well regarded among the brotherhood of physicians — advises that I drink an infusion of honey and thyme every night. I pick the herb myself each morning, and tell my servants that it is part of the cure but, in truth, I come here mostly so that I may be alone with my thoughts for a while. So you have chosen a good time to speak to me, my son — we will not be disturbed. You said that this matter concerned your father, yes?’
‘Do you remember him, Your Grace? Henri d’Alle; a singer in the cathedral twenty years ago, a tall, blond man who I’m told has a good deal of resemblance to me?’
De Sully looked closely at me, his pale eyes crawling over my face, and then let out a long heavy breath. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘oh yes, I remember Henri d’Alle. And I see him in you. I remember well the manner of his leaving us, too — I may be old and not in the best of health, but my recall is still reliable.’
‘Would you be so kind as to tell me the circumstances leading up to his departure from the cathedral…’
The Bishop picked up his bowl of thyme and began plucking the leaves from the stalks again as he spoke, his white fingers and thumbs moving with speed and delicacy to strip off the tiny green rounds from the woody stalks.
‘Henri was not comfortable being a monk,’ he began. ‘I don’t think it was his true calling; I think God did not mean him for that, although He had endowed him with an exceptionally fine voice. Your father was, I recall, unruly and disobedient — and I think lecherous, too. I know that the Dean was forced to discipline him on a number of occasions for minor transgressions. Having said that, I believe he was a good man and a true Christian.’
The Bishop paused for a moment, and put down the bowl of thyme again. He laid an almost translucent, blue-veined hand, blotched here and there with the brown spots of old age, along his cheek, remembering. ‘The visit of Bishop Heribert, God rest his soul, was a grand affair — it must have been in the thirty-sixth year of the reign of King Louis, oh, twenty-one years ago — it smacked of rather too much pomp and ceremony for my liking, but Heribert came from a powerful family in the south, and his wealth allowed him to make an occasion of his visit — and he was an important man, after all, a bishop, one mustn’t forget that. His money also allowed him to indulge his two great passions in life: Heavenly music and holy relics.
‘He came to Paris to hear the monks of Notre-Dame sing — your father being one of the leading choristers at the time — and I believe he found the experience rewarding. He spent many hours in the old cathedral listening to the holy offices being sung — and in my grand new cathedral, too, though in those days only the choir had been built and it was hellishly cold in wintertime. But while he was in Paris he also purchased a sacred relic — I think it was supposed to be a toe bone of John the Baptist — from a trader in such items and he had it mounted in a beautiful golden reliquary with a crystal top and sides, so that the bone could be viewed — and venerated. He had a collection of such pieces — a hair from Christ’s beard, the dried arm of St Gregory of Tours, and as many as four fragments of the True Cross — and he took them with him wherever he travelled, which I thought foolish. Indeed, so it proved to be.
‘I am afraid that I am somewhat wary of relics — perhaps it is a foible of my upbringing, or perhaps I merely lack the proper amount of faith — you young people all seem to be very keen on them and rush to pray before them whenever they are revealed, but I have always felt that, while there are undoubtedly some genuine relics, which do indeed have tremendous spiritual power, there are also a goodly number of charlatans offering items for sale that are no more than midden-fodder in a golden box. I have twice personally been shown a scrap of dried leather that was claimed — each time in earnest by a most pious and respected high churchman — to be the foreskin of Christ. And yet there is nothing in the Holy scriptures about Our Lord being so unusually endowed as to require two circumcisions!’ The Bishop gave a dry chuckle — but Hanno shifted uneasily behind me and when I turned to glance at him I swear that tough old Bavarian warrior looked deeply shocked by the Bishop’s crude words.
‘And so, when Heribert showed me his newly acquired holy toe at dinner one day, I was not as awestruck as perhaps I might have been. The good Bishop sensed this and my indifference to it seemed to make him desperate to impress me with the sacred grandeur of his collection. He mentioned this item and that, and extolled the special powers of this object and the rarity of another — I am afraid he did not command my full attention. And while, God knows, I tried to show the proper enthusiasm for his collection of old rags and bones, I was not successful. And eventually Heribert became quiet and sulky, and spent the rest of the meal indulging his prodigious appetite.
‘I regretted it the next day, of course, for that same night someone broke into the storeroom where the Bishop’s possessions were kept, and the thief made away with several of his much-vaunted relics — and it was the ones that were closest to his heart that were taken.’
‘Do you remember which particular relics were stolen?’ I asked, interrupting the old man for the first time.
‘Yes I do,’ he said, looking at me with his colourless eyes. ‘He was reluctant to tell me at first, but I pressed him and it all came flooding out eventually.’
‘And what were they?’ I asked. I could feel my pulse beating faster; a bead of sweat ran down my spine.
‘They were the most preposterous cluster of costly rubbish imaginable: a silver carving plate, a pair of golden candlesticks, an old lance head, and something he called a “ graal ”, a sort of serving bowl. I never fathomed the significance of the carving plate and the candlesticks, though Heribert claimed they had vague miraculous qualities — but the lance head, he told me, came from the weapon that a Roman soldier used to pierce the side of Our Lord Jesus Christ while he suffered on the Cross — and this graal, well, that was the vessel that Christ used at the Last Supper and also, rather conveniently, I must say, it was the vessel used by Joseph of Arimathea to collect the blood of Christ after he had been cut down from the tree at Calvary.’
Despite the Bishop’s dismissive, almost blasphemous, tone, I felt a jolt of lightning run down my spine at his words. This graal, this Grail — if it were indeed the true artefact — was claimed to be the very bowl that Christ had used and drunk from and blessed with the touch of his hands; and as if that weren’t enough, it had held his sacred blood! If it were real, I could scarcely imagine an object more worthy of deep veneration. This Grail had held the sacred blood of Our Lord, it had cradled the life fluid of God himself! To those who believed, it was indeed a wondrous object — that would be well worth killing for. Indeed, for some, it would be worth dying for. It was without a doubt the holiest thing that I had ever heard of.
I pulled myself together and dampened my excitement — though I noticed that Hanno had stepped a little closer, to listen, and that his face seemed to be all eyes. Then I asked the question that had been nagging at the back of my mind. ‘Who else was at this dinner when Bishop Heribert spoke so eloquently of his collection of holy relics?’
‘No one — it was just Heribert and me. And the duty monks who served the meal, of course.’
‘And my father, Henri d’Alle, was he one of the monks who served at the dinner table that day?’
‘He was — him and some of his young friends had been chosen to serve. I don’t recall exactly. It was one dull meal, with a dull, greedy, credulous fool, twenty-one years ago.’
‘Do you believe that my father was the man who stole this graal?’ My question came out flat and heavy, like a sheet of lead being dropped on wet turf. At first I thought that Bishop de Sully would not answer me, so lengthy was the pause between my question and his response.
‘A bishop must be a man of God, a devout follower of Christ’s teachings,’ said de Sully, ‘and as such, I shall answer you truthfully: no, I do not now believe that Henri d’Alle stole any of Heribert’s ludicrous collection of relics. But a bishop is also a lord of men, and a power in the land, and sometimes it is necessary to do things that a good Christian would not normally countenance. I shall answer to God for my actions, of course, but at that time I deemed that it was necessary for your father to shoulder the blame for that crime. I was not certain of his innocence, I may even have convinced myself of his guilt at the time; but I knew that I needed Heribert’s goodwill. And Heribert demanded a scapegoat for his loss. You must understand that the Bishop of Roda was a very wealthy man, absurdly wealthy, and he had agreed to make a vast contribution to the building of the cathedral, to Notre- Dame, to my life’s work. I decided that the building of a sacred monument to God’s greatness, a sublime edifice that would proclaim the glory of Our Lord, which would stand as a testament to the Christian faith for a thousand
