The First Apostle

“Sorry?” Angela replied.

“A little stone house on the edge of a village in Brittany?” he asked with a grin. “In need of some light restoration?”

“Substitute the Dordogne for Brittany,” Angela said, matching his smile, “and you’ve pretty much nailed it. And it’s a town rather than a village. Cahors. Do you know it?”

The officer shook his head. “Heard of it, but I’ve never been there,” he said. “So what’s in the back?”

“Most of the master bathroom, or at least that’s the plan, as long as I can persuade the builders to install it. Would you like to look at it?”

“No, thanks.” He stepped back and waved her forward. “Off you go, then,” he said.

Her heart thundering in her chest, Angela gave him a carefree wave, put the Renault into gear and drove toward the exit door, which opened automatically. They were through.

III

Angela milled about with the other passengers, wandered through the shop and finally sat down in one of the lounges to wait for the ferry to dock in Calais. But despite her appearance of absolute calm, inside she was almost frantic with worry.

What would she do if the French police were waiting for her on the other side of the Channel? Did Chris have enough air? Would she open up the back of the vehicle somewhere in France only to find she’d been accompanied by a corpse? What would she do then?

It was almost a relief when she heard the Tannoy announcement asking drivers to make their way to the car decks. At least the waiting was over.

Two hours after driving the Espace onto the ferry, Angela steered the car down the ramp onto French soil and joined the line of English cars heading toward the autoroute. She saw no police or customs officers, and nobody appeared in any way interested in her or anyone else disgorged by the ferry. Most of the drivers seemed to be taking the A26 Paris autoroute, but Bronson had told her to stay off the toll roads and head for Boulogne on the D940 instead. She was to look for a secluded parking place where he could escape from his pink—their choice of bath had been governed by size, shape and price, not color—acrylic prison.

As afternoon shaded toward evening, Angela drove along the coastal road past Sangatte and on to Escalles. Just beyond the village she found a deserted car park overlooking the sea and Cap Blanc-Nez. She parked the Espace in the corner farthest away from the entrance and checked that she hadn’t been followed before opening the trunk and pulling away the boxes that covered the bath. Bronson gave a low moan as he crawled out.

“Are you OK?” Angela asked.

“I feel like I’ve gone over the Niagara Falls in a barrel,” Bronson said, groaning and stretching. “Every joint and muscle in my body is aching, and I’m as stiff as a board.

Have you got any aspirins or something?”

“Men!” Angela teased. “The slightest bit of discomfort and you turn into real moaners.” She opened her handbag and pulled out a cardboard packet of tablets.

“I’d take a couple if I were you. Do you want to drive?”

Bronson shook his head. “No way. I’m going to sit in the passenger seat and let you chauffeur me.”

Twenty minutes later, they were heading south on the A16.

While she drove, Angela filled Bronson in on what she had found out before the police showed up at the Internet cafe’.

“It looks to me as if the second inscription could be connected to the Cathars,” she said.

“The Cathars? That’s what Jeremy Goldman suggested, but I’m not sure that makes much sense. I don’t know too much about them, but I’m certain they had nothing at all to do with first-century Rome. They came along about a thousand years later.”

“I know,” Angela said with a nod, “and their homeland was southern France, not Italy. But the verses do seem to have a strong and distinct Cathar flavor. Some of the expressions like ‘the good,’ ‘pure spirits’ and ‘the word becomes the perfect’ are almost pure Cathar. The perfects or perfecti—the priests —referred to themselves as

‘good men,’ and they believed their religion was pure.

“One of the problems about the Cathars is that virtually everything ever written about them was authored by their enemies, like the Catholic Church, so it’s a bit like reading a history of the Second World War written entirely from the perspective of the Nazis. But what we do know is that the movement was linked to, or maybe even derived from, the Bogomil sect based in Eastern Europe. That was another dualist religion, one of several that flourished in the tenth and eleventh centuries.”

“What did they believe? Why was the Catholic Church so opposed to them?”

“The Cathars thought that the God being worshipped by the Church was an impostor, a deity who had usurped the true God, and who was, in fact, the devil. By that definition the Catholic Church was an evil abomination, the priests and bishops in the service of Lucifer. And they pointed to the rampant corruption within the Church as a partial proof of this.”

“I can see that must have pissed off Rome. But surely the Cathars weren’t powerful enough to have any real influence?”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘powerful.’ Their power base, if you like, was in southern France, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that the people of that region embraced Catharism as a very real alternative to the Catholic Church, which most people saw as wholly corrupt. The contrasts between the two religions were enormous. The high-ranking Catholic clergy lived in the kind of splendor you’d normally associate with royalty or nobility. But the Cathar priests had no worldly possessions at all, apart from a black robe and a length of cord to use as a belt, and existed solely on alms and charity. When they accepted the consolamentum, the vow they swore on becoming priests or perfecti, they surrendered all their worldly goods to the community. They were also strict vegetarians, not even eating animal products like eggs and milk, and were absolutely celibate.”

“That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.”

“It wasn’t, but that regime was only practiced by the perfecti. Followers of the religion—they were known as credentes—were allowed a lot more latitude, and most only accepted the consolamentum when they were actually on their deathbeds when celibacy, for example, wouldn’t have been much of a problem. I think the important point is that Catharism became popular in southern France precisely because the perfecti were so devout and humble. Significantly, the ranks of the Cathars were peopled by members of some of the wealthiest and most important local families.

However you look at it, the mere existence of the religion was a real threat to the Catholic Church.”

“So what happened?”

“At the end of the twelfth century, Pope Eugene III tried peaceful persuasion. He sent people like Bernard of Clairvaux, Cardinal Peter and Henry of Albano to France to try to reduce the influence of the Cathars, but none of them had any real success.

Decisions by various religious councils had no effect either, and when Innocent III ascended the papal throne in 1198 he decided to suppress the Cathars by any means possible.

“In January 1208 he sent a man called Pierre de Castelnau, a papal legate, to Count Raymond of Toulouse, who was the then leader of the Cathars. Their meeting was very confrontational, and the next day de Castelnau was attacked by unidentified assailants and murdered. That gave Innocent the excuse he needed, and he called for a crusade against the religion. The Albigensian Crusade—the Cathars were also known as Albigensians—lasted forty years, and was one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of the Church.”

“All very interesting,” Bronson pointed out, “but I still don’t see what any of that has to do with a couple of inscribed stones cemented into the wall of a house in Italy.”

“Nor do I,” Angela said. “That’s the problem. But I’ve got a few more books to look at, so I might have some answers by tomorrow.”

As the light began to fade, they started looking for somewhere to stay for the night.

“Our best bet is a small, family-run hotel somewhere. We don’t want anywhere that we’d have to use a credit card.”