kitchen and they ascended the stairs. At first sight, the attic appeared almost empty but, once they started looking, it was clear that among the inevitable detritus that accumulates in old houses, like the empty cardboard boxes, broken suitcases, old and discarded clothing and shoes, and impressive collections of cobwebs, there were a number of wooden objects, all of which they needed to look at. There were boxes, large and small, some with lids, some without, bits and pieces of broken furniture, and even a number of lengths of timber, presumably from some construction project that had never come to fruition.
After almost two hours, they had checked everything. They were both covered in dust, cobwebs decorating their hair, their hands filthy, and they’d found exactly nothing.
“Enough?” Bronson asked.
Angela cast a final glance around the attic before nodding her agreement. “Enough.
Let’s get washed and have a drink. In fact, I know it’s early, but let’s have some lunch. At least that’s the worst of the search over.”
Bronson shook his head. “Don’t forget this house has cellars too. And that means rats and mice, as well as spiders.”
“You really know how to show a girl a good time, don’t you? Think positive—maybe we’ll find the clue before we have to go down there.”
Searching the bedrooms didn’t take as long as Bronson had expected, because there wasn’t a huge amount to check. There were chests, wardrobes and beds which had been inherited with the property, many of them made of oak, but despite emptying every one there was no sign of anything that didn’t belong to the Hamptons. There was also no indication that any of them were made from two types of wood, apart from three of the freestanding wardrobes that had an inlaid marquetry decoration, but the wood used on those pieces was certainly not elm: it looked to Bronson more like cherry.
“This isn’t easy,” he remarked, replacing a pile of bedding in a large chest at the foot of the bed in one of the guest bedrooms.
“I didn’t expect it would be. This object was hidden more than six hundred years ago by people who’d been chased halfway across Europe by an army of crusaders who wanted nothing more than to burn them alive. When they hid the relic, they knew exactly what they were doing, and they would have made sure that no casual search was ever going to find it. Let’s face it: we might not find it ourselves.”
Bronson sighed, walked over to the corner of the room and pulled open the lid of another small chest made— like most of the others they’d looked at—of oak. As he bent forward to look inside it, a thought struck him.
“Just a minute,” he said. “I think we’re going about this the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think back to the Occitan inscription. What does the line actually say?”
“You know what it says:
“We’ve been assuming that the verse was telling us to find an object made of oak and elm, and that we’d find a chest or something with a lid made of the two woods, say, and when we opened it up there’d be a map or directions on the inside.”
Angela sat down beside him on the floor.
“But if that was what the Cathars did, if the clue was as obvious as that, then by now surely somebody would have found it.” Bronson continued. “This relic was of crucial importance to the Cathars, right? So if they just carved a map or something inside a chest or wardrobe, how could they guarantee that somebody wouldn’t sell it or break it up for firewood a few years, or a few centuries, down the line? If that happened, the secret would be lost forever.
“And, just in case the property was ever raided by the crusaders, they wouldn’t have wanted any visible or obvious clue. The inscribed stone was almost certainly covered with wood paneling, or maybe even plaster, and even if it was exposed, it could just be taken for a Cathar lament for the death of—oh—what’s his name?”
“Guillaume Belibaste,” Angela supplied automatically. “So what’re you suggesting?”
“It’s possible that the clue, or whatever it is, isn’t just on a comparatively fragile piece of furniture. I think we’ll find it’s built into the fabric of the house. We should be looking at the beams and the joists and the floorboards. We should be studying the actual materials—the wooden components—the Cathars used when they built this place.”
Angela nodded hesitantly. “You know,” she said slowly, “that just might be the most intelligent suggestion you’ve made since we started this. OK, forget the furniture. Let’s start with the ceiling.”
The construction of the house was typical for buildings of its age. Thick wooden planks rested on huge square-section beams, their ends inserted in sockets in the solid stone outer walls, that formed each floor, including that of the attic. The roof timbers were almost as massive as the beams, and covered with thick terra-cotta tiles: the property had clearly been built to last. The wood was blackened by age and smoke from the two wide inglenook fireplaces, and the floorboards had been polished by the passage of countless feet over the centuries and were now covered with loose rugs.
“Maybe the floorboards are made of both oak and elm,” Bronson suggested.
They worked through the house methodically, again checking the attic first. All the floorboards appeared to be made of the same dark-brown wood, painted and varnished, which didn’t look to Bronson as if it was either oak or elm. And they couldn’t see anything on the floor that looked as if it might be a marker of any kind.
They checked the first and then the second guest bedroom: nothing. In the master suite, a good deal of the floor was invisible because of the massive four-poster bed that had come with the house and dominated the room. They checked the floorboards that were visible, without result. Then Bronson looked thoughtfully at the bed.
It was a king-sized double with a carved wooden base. At each corner a tapering and fluted dark-brown wooden pillar terminated in a solid canopy close to the ceiling, draped with a heavy dark-red material that looked to him like a kind of brocade. The sheets had been stripped off, and two three-foot mattresses rested on the solid wooden base. It would take at least four or five strong men to move it.
“How the hell do we shift that?” Angela demanded.
“We don’t. I’ll wriggle under it and take a look. Pass me that flashlight, please.”
“Find anything?” Angela asked, after he’d been under the bed for a few minutes.
“Quite a lot of dust, and that’s all, so far. No, there’s nothing here . . .” His voice died away.
“What? What is it?”
“There’s what looks like a small circle on one of these floorboards. It could be a knot, but it’s the first thing I’ve seen on the floor that looks out of place. I’ll need to . . .”
“What? What do you want?” The excitement was rising in Angela’s voice.
“A knife, I think, but not a kitchen knife. I need something with a strong blade. Have a look in Mark’s toolbox—it’s under the sink in the kitchen—and see if you can find a penknife or something like that. If I can scrape off the paint and varnish, I’ll be able to tell if this is just a natural feature of the wood or something else.”
“Hang on.” Bronson heard her walk out of the room and down the stairs. A couple of minutes later she returned, carrying a heavy folding knife with a spike and a thick blade. She bent down and passed it under the bed to Bronson.
“Thanks, that’s perfect. Here,” he added, “could you hold the flashlight for me? Just aim it at my left hand.”
He opened the knife blade, eased back slightly and began to scrape away at the paint. After a few minutes Bronson had managed to shift some of the multiple layers that covered the wood, but because of the oblique angle of the flashlight, he couldn’t see clearly what he’d exposed.
“Let me have the flashlight, please,” he said.
Angela handed it to him. “Well?” she demanded impatiently.
“It’s not a knot in the wood,” Bronson said, excitement coloring his voice.
“Not a knot?”
“No. It’s some kind of an insert in the plank. It looks like two semicircles of different types of wood.” There was a long pause. “And one of them looks like oak.”
II
Bronson lay under the bed, looking at the small circle of wood he’d uncovered. The first thing he needed to do was pinpoint its location. He stuck the spike of the penknife into the center of the circle of wood and used it as a datum to measure its exact position with reference to the walls of the bedroom.
