Falconer and the Death of Kings

EIGHTEEN

Falconer stopped, and people began to push past him on the bridge, complaining at the obstruction he was causing. He thought the person he had seen had been moving towards one of the buildings to his right, but he had lost sight of her. Could it have been Saphira? Or had his eyes been deceiving him due to him thinking about Oxford and all he had left behind? There was only one way of finding out.

He forced his way across the street towards the place where the red-haired woman had disappeared. The narrow stone building had a small sign over the door in Hebrew, with a name carved below it. It read ‘Manser of Calais’. Falconer hesitated for a moment, recalling the terms on which he and Saphira had parted, then pushed open the door and stepped into the darkened room beyond. Two faces, a little startled by his abrupt appearance, looked up at him from where they sat either side of a small table. One was an old man with a hatchet face half hidden by a beard and with deep brown eyes. The other face was that of Saphira Le Veske. Her look of alarm was abruptly replaced by a broad smile on recognizing who it was had entered.

‘William! You have saved me a long and tedious hunt. How did you find me so soon?’

She held out her hand, and Falconer’s fears about his reception fell away. He clasped her hand in both of his, squeezing a little more powerfully than he needed to.

‘Luck, I suppose. I was walking across the bridge thinking of you, and there you were. You are not an apparition, are you?’

‘You can feel that I am flesh and blood from the way you are grasping my hand. A mite too tightly, I may say.’

He responded to her teasing and released her fingers.

‘I had to be sure. Too many strange things have been happening to me recently. But tell me: how did you know I was in Paris?’

She looked down at her feet, not wishing yet to admit the need she had felt to communicate with William.

‘I… er… sent a message to Rabbi Jacob that I would be longer than I anticipated in Honfleur, and asked him to pay the rent on my house. When I got his reply a few weeks later, he happened to mention he had heard you had left for France too.’

What she did not say was that she had specifically asked the rabbi for some information about Falconer. And that she had been told he was actually in Paris. Oblivious to her hiding these facts, he took a step back and surveyed her. Her shapely figure, clad in one of her familiar green dresses, had not changed. It looked even more enticing, in fact. He pointed to her headgear.

‘I see your hair is as unruly as ever.’

Saphira instinctively reached up and tucked an errant curl back under her starched white snood. Then she turned to the money-changer, who still sat at his table, visibly amused by the bantering exchange.

‘It seems I do not need your services, Manser. This is the man I came to Paris to seek out. He has fallen right into my lap.’

Manser smiled broadly, nodding his head.

‘It is just as well he did. I fear it might have taken me weeks to find one scholar among all those that throng Paris. Even if we could have narrowed it down to Englishmen.’ He looked Falconer up and down. ‘There are far too many Englishmen in France.’

Saphira laughed and, taking Falconer by the arm, led him from Manser’s gloomy counting house. They sauntered along the Right Bank of the Seine towards the hiring square Falconer had seen before. Business there was brisk, and the couple watched in silence for a while, both thinking their own thoughts. When they did speak, it was together.

‘I was going to come to Honfleur…’

‘My business was finished in Honfleur…’

They both stopped and laughed. Saphira bowed her head in mock deference.

‘Please, master, you must speak first.’

William gave her a serious look that he could not sustain, and they laughed again. Her tinkling laughter wove itself around his low guffaw, and he held his hands up in defeat.

‘Saphira, I…’

She put a finger to his lips.

‘You need say nothing, dear William. Let us call a truce in our battle.’

He nodded his head sagely.

‘A truce sounds better for my sense of pride than a complete capitulation. A truce it shall be.’

She took his arm in both hands and clutched it tightly.

‘Now, tell me what you have been doing while I have been subjugating the wilfulness of an errant sea captain and setting my wine-shipping business to rights again.’

Thomas’s day proved a frustrating one. Despite Falconer’s warning of the dangers, he had hoped to question Peter de la Casteigne or Jack Hellequin about his idea that at least some of the students of Adam Morrish had been misusing drugs. But both of them were absent from the lectures. Which was no real surprise, as those students who had come were sorely distracted by the second death in their midst. Most of the clerks could not concentrate on what their master was teaching. And Master Adam himself seemed out of sorts, his lecture on Galen being listless and full of errors. Thomas listened with only half an ear, thinking he might ask Morrish if he kept any preparations on the premises. He knew that hemlock and opium were used as an anaesthetic, and a useful ointment could be made up from opium and lard. Had the students broken in to his supplies themselves? He waited until the end of Adam’s lectures in order to be able to question him. But as soon as Adam had finished, the master claimed a headache was plaguing him. He asked Thomas to lock the building after he had finished his meeting with Friar Bacon, and he hurried off before Thomas could speak to him properly. The students dispersed without expressing their usual pleasure at being released for the day.

It was a moment before Thomas realized that the building now stood empty and silent. And that he was alone with the key to the front door in his hand. It was the best chance he would have to search the house. That at least could not place him in any danger. Familiar with the layout on the lower level, he decided to start at the top, and climbed the creaky stairs leading to the upper room, the only one he had never seen inside. He opened the door cautiously, despite the fact that he knew the master had left, feeling he was doing something wrong. The solar was untidy in a way that was unlike Falconer’s room in Oxford. His friend’s quarters were cluttered with the detritus of his enquiring mind. Esoteric texts were buried under rocks with strange marks on them, and under skulls of animals, and birds’ wings were stretched to see how they might support a body in flight. Morrish’s room was merely uncared for. He leaned over the table in one corner of the room to find a battered copy of the Isagogue of Johannitius open and turned on its front, straining the cords that held it together. Another medical text — Haly ibn Ridwan’s treatise on Galen — lay discarded on the floor. Thomas was appalled. Did Morrish not know the value of these works? Letters written on parchment were scattered around as though of no further use. Thomas knew each one of them could be scraped clean and reused. Morrish appeared not to need to care about being penny wise. Searching further, he found nothing that resembled a pharmacy of drugs, or even a formulary listing medicines and their uses. Until he looked under the table and found a small chest. He pulled it out and tried to open the lid. But it was locked, the hasp deeply scratched and battered. As he could not open it without the key, he was not able to verify if it contained opium or any other sorts of herbs and preparations. Idly, he poked the door key he still held in his hand in the lock and jiggled it. And almost jumped out of his skin when a voice called out from down below.

‘Thomas Symon, are you here?’

He had thought guiltily that it was Morrish and that he would be caught in the act of prying into the master’s affairs. But it was Doctor Mirabilis come to record more of the information from his compendious mind. Thomas pushed the chest back under the table and hurried downstairs, his face red with embarrassment. When he had sat down in their damp, dark room, quill poised, Bacon had carried on from where he had left off the previous day.

‘Experimental science is at the heart of everything we do, testing by personal experience all the conclusions of all other sciences.’

It was as if he had never broken off from yesterday’s train of thought at all.

Sitting in the Grand Master’s house in the Paris Temple, the present incumbent was thinking deeply about his interview with the English king. Guillaume de Beaujeu was a thoughtful man as well as a warrior. He was as used to biding his time and thinking through a problem as he was to making instantaneous decisions on the battlefield. He had once been captured by the infidel and had waited months in prison to be ransomed. During that time he had developed the ability to look at issues from all sides before coming to a conclusion. He knew too that Edward was a canny strategist not easily given to revealing his motives concerning a matter. So it had been no surprise to him that the English king had spent a while reminiscing about their mutual past in Outremer. The reminder of their abortive skirmish against Krak des Moabites castle had only been a preliminary sortie into that history. He had warmed to his task with more wine.

‘Do you remember taking Nazareth?’

Guillaume grimaced to himself. Indeed he did. Edward had slaughtered all the inhabitants in an orgy of blood.

‘Yes, Your Majesty, I do.’

Edward smiled at the recollection of his bloody deed.

‘If the Mongols had come down on our side, I believe we would have taken Jerusalem. Or if Hugh of Cyprus had stirred his lazy arse and helped.’ He looked de Beaujeu in the eye and quaffed more wine. ‘I believe you, like me, supported Charles of Anjou’s claim to the throne of Jerusalem.’

Guillaume, only sipping at his goblet, nodded. Edward knew very well the Templar stood with Charles and against King Hugh’s claim to Jerusalem. And that both men were close friends of Tedaldo Visconti, the man who was now Pope Gregory X. He waited patiently for the next words that he felt sure would get to the crux of Edward’s ramblings. The king laid his goblet down and leaned forward in his chair.

‘So it was a shock to me when I heard rumblings of a plot from within your order against me and mine.’

Ah, so this was all about Odo de Reppes. How curious that William Falconer should raise the matter in Edward’s name only the day before. Guillaume put on his solemn face, the one he used to use when gaming with dice which he knew was inscrutable. He nodded his head and stroked his beard with his strong yet elegant fingers.

‘A single renegade who has been dealt with already.’

‘He is… dead, then?’

Guillaume did some quick thinking and reckoned that Edward already knew that de Reppes was not dead. He was being tested.

‘No. But he is suffering in a way worse than a quick death. He is imprisoned here in Paris.’

‘In the donjon tower.’

It was a flat statement carrying all the horror associated with the great turreted building that loomed over the northern marshes. The Templar donjon was not a pleasant place to be. Guillaume affirmed the statement.

‘He will never emerge alive. Nor will I give him up to any other authority.’

Edward understood the implicit warning. The Templars dealt with their own, and no one else — even a monarch — was allowed to interfere. He raised a hand to ward off the Grand Master’s threat.

‘I am not seeking to play any part in his punishment. Merely that you allow someone to see him, and to talk to him.’

Guillaume smiled to himself, knowing he had information not even the king was aware of.

‘Master Falconer, you mean?’

The king looked startled for a moment, but he recovered well, hiding his confusion in his wine goblet. After he had drunk another mouthful, he continued.

‘Then Falconer has already spoken to you. I must compliment him on his tenacity and speed of investigation when I see him next. Yes, it is Falconer I would like to be allowed to speak to de Reppes. He can tell Falconer who was behind the murder of my cousin Henry by the de Montfort brothers. And that may lead the master to uncover something about other matters I have asked him to look into.’ He grimaced. ‘The de Montforts are like the Hydra, sprouting more heads as each one is cut off.’

Guillaume knew that, of the two brothers implicated with de Reppes in Henry of Almain’s murder, Simon had died while holed up somewhere. But Guy was still at large. There was a youngest brother too, called Amaury. But he lived in pious obscurity God knows where, and was reputed not to be involved in the trail of revenge following in his older brothers’ wake. Edward’s weakness over the de Montfort family was useful information for a Grand Master in any possible future power struggle between the order and the various monarchs of the West envious of its power. He reassured Edward of his cooperation.

‘Master Falconer is an old friend of mine, and he is returning to see me tomorrow. I will allow him access to de Reppes on your behalf.’

Edward grinned broadly and lifted his goblet by way of a toast to their mutual enterprise.