The Last Secret of the Ark Read online

  In his hotel room that afternoon, he used a portable scanner to copy each of the papers, or at least those that were clearly of interest; most of the documents were old land deeds, property transfers, mortgages and the like, and of no consequence to anyone except the participants involved. But just in case he’d missed something, he would send the entire copied archive by courier to Rome before he left Paris.

  He then attached the scans to several emails because of the amount of data involved and sent them to a temporary email address used by his contact at the CDF.

  He followed those with another message to deliver the inevitable bad news.

  The orders he had been given were to find and recover – or at least to copy – the documents, which he had done. He had also been ordered to destroy them if their recovery was not an option, but the security precautions at the Bibliothèque Serpente meant that that would have been impossible. At least it would have been impossible if he wanted to walk out of the building without a police escort and wearing handcuffs, and spending a few years in a French jail charged with vandalism or arson wasn’t something Rossi was prepared to contemplate. The CDF employed him on a contract basis, but they certainly didn’t own him.

  What he had managed to do was remove two of the loose pages from the Hautpoul papers when he’d been inspecting the documents. Both were hand-written, one clearly encrypted and the other written in what looked like Occitan, though what had attracted Rossi’s attention was the date at the top of the page. These he had secreted inside his jacket when he was sure nobody else in the reading room was paying him any attention.

  Even if it could have been achieved, there was a reason why destroying the documents would have been pointless. In fact, there were two reasons.

  First, while every book received by the Bibliothèque Serpente was simply listed in the library’s computer database, documents of the sort that comprised the Hautpoul archive were scanned and stored in a named folder on the computer and on numerous backup locations to create multiple permanent records. So destroying the papers would achieve nothing, as the data was securely stored on several different hard drives that Rossi couldn’t even identify, far less access. In fact, it would make the situation worse, because people would then start studying the scans of the papers to work out why somebody had wanted the originals destroyed.

  The second reason was that it was already too late. One of the researchers Rossi had talked to in the building was an Englishman named George Anderson, on secondment there from the British Museum in London. He’d looked at the papers as soon as they had been scanned and had been quite happy to talk to the visiting Italian professor about them.

  ‘Not a lot in them,’ he’d said over coffee when Rossi had successfully steered the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go, ‘unless you have a burning desire to study the histories of a handful of obscure French noble families, mainly the Aniort, Blanchefort, Hautpoul and Voisin dynasties. They were all interconnected to a certain extent, mainly because they all lived in the same area for centuries, had dealings with each other and were linked through a few dynastic marriages, but I can think of much more fertile and rewarding ground to study.

  ‘There was one point of interest, though,’ Anderson had added. ‘Some of the later documents in the bundle were typewritten, but most of the early stuff was done by hand, and one of the papers was not only hand-written but also encrypted, so that would offer a bit of a challenge.’

  ‘I think I noticed that one,’ Rossi said, without a trace of nervousness despite the knowledge that that particular page was even then hidden in his inside jacket pocket. ‘Is anyone here – anyone at the Sorbonne, I mean – investigating it?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. We’ve all got more pressing stuff to get through than something like that. And just because somebody went to the bother of devising a code to conceal something doesn’t mean it was anything important. It could be something as mundane as a traditional family recipe they didn’t want anybody else to have, or perhaps an explanation of something potentially embarrassing, like why one child in a family had blonde hair and blue eyes but all the other kids had black hair and brown eyes. All families have secrets, you know.’

  ‘So that’ll be a secret that stays secret?’ Rossi suggested.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. As I said, we’ve all got scheduled work to do here, but I have a colleague back in London who’s always been fascinated by this kind of thing, so I’ve sent scans of the relevant documents over to the British Museum.’

  ‘Who’s your colleague?’ Rossi asked. ‘Just in case something interesting crops up.’

  The English academic wrote down a name and the department at the British Museum where his colleague worked, and gave it to Rossi.

  The name meant nothing to him, but he included it and details of the relevant department as part of his follow-up email to the CDF, with the obvious conclusion that there might now be multiple copies of the papers in existence if the researcher in London had decided to duplicate them while they were being worked on.

  Rossi was unfamiliar with the English idiom, but this was definitely a case where it was far too late to close the stable door. That particular horse had already bolted.

  Chapter 6

  Languedoc, France

  Present day

  ‘Do you feel anything?’

  Chris Bronson glanced at his former wife.

  ‘I can feel lots of things,’ he replied, waving his arm in an expansive manner to encompass the hills and valleys and fields that surrounded them, ‘but mainly right now I can feel the wind in my face and a growing need for food and drink. I thought this was supposed to be a holiday, but all we’ve done today is clamber over rocks and climb hills.’

  ‘It is a holiday,’ Angela Lewis replied, ‘but it’s also kind of work, I suppose.’

  ‘I knew it. So what are we looking for this time?’

  ‘Nobody knows.’

  ‘That should give us a head start, then. Why did you ask what I was feeling?’

  Angela almost replicated his gesture to indicate the terrain on which they were standing.

  ‘Some people claim that if you go to certain places where a huge loss of life has occurred, there can be a sensation in the surroundings that tells you something dreadful happened. Places like Culloden or Auschwitz or Treblinka. I just wondered if you felt anything like that in this place.’

  Bronson looked around. Under a clear blue sky dotted with intermittent small white clouds, the land rose and fell in an irregular but pleasing manner, broken up here and there by steeper slopes that rose to craggy heights extending above the treeline. Behind them, one of these high points dominated the landscape. A mountainous peak, technically a volcanic pog, climbed above the trees and was itself topped with a ruined castle. They were surrounded by grass and trees, serenaded by birdsong and warmed by the sun. To him, the scene looked like the kind of raw material a landscape artist would revel in discovering and then translating into an image on canvas. But what he didn’t get was any indication of some past tragedy.

  ‘I don’t feel anything like that,’ he said. ‘So what happened here?’

  ‘Of course,’ Angela said after a few seconds, ‘we might not be in exactly the right place. That’s something else nobody knows.’ She pointed at the volcanic pog and the ruin that capped it. ‘But you do know something about that, even if you don’t recognise it. That’s the castle of Montségur, or rather it isn’t the castle of Montségur if you’re talking about the Cathars.’

  That apparently confused sentence made perfect sense to Bronson. He did know something – in fact he knew quite a lot – about the Cathars and Montségur, and he and Angela had discussed it before. And then he knew what had prompted her earlier question.

  ‘That’s Montségur?’ he replied. ‘I’ve never seen it in the flesh before. It looks different in photographs because they’re usually taken closer to the ruins, or from the air. So you think we might be standing wher
e they built the stockade or whatever the correct term is for a mass execution pyre?’

  ‘This place is called the Prat dels Cremats in Occitan, or the Champ des Brûlés in French, which both mean “field of the burned”. This might be the right place because it’s fairly flat. But that’s not where the Cathar monument is.’ She pointed up the slope. ‘That’s further up the hill.’

  They continued along the path until they reached a rough stone platform built on two levels, on which had been erected a solid stone stele, the sides tapering inwards from the base and ending in a circular shape at the top. There were symbols carved in the stone circle at the top and an inscription on the body of the monument. Bronson leaned forward for a closer look.

  ‘It reads: “Als catars als martirs del pur amor crestian 16 mars 1244.” That looks to me like Catalan,’ he said.

  ‘You’re nearly right,’ Angela replied. ‘It’s actually lenga d’òc, or Occitan, which was spoken in this area in the Middle Ages. But Occitan and Catalan are quite similar. It translates as “To the Cathars, the martyrs of pure Christian love”, which is a pretty accurate summary of what happened here.’

  ‘If it’s as old as it looks, it’s lasted well.’

  ‘Not as well as you might think,’ Angela told him. ‘It might appear almost medieval because of the carvings and the language used, but this stone was only erected in 1960. But I don’t believe this is where the executions would have taken place. I think they chose this spot for the memorial because it’s right by the path that leads to Montségur and reminds people on their way to visit the castle about what happened here eight hundred-odd years ago.’

  ‘I see what you mean. There’s quite a slope where we’re standing, and they would have needed level ground to burn the heretics. Do we know exactly how the executions were carried out?’

  They continued striding along the path that led towards the ruined castle, frequently losing sight of their objective as they entered the woods.

  ‘There are a few near-contemporary accounts,’ Angela replied, ‘but they’re all a bit short on detail. Bearing in mind the number of Cathars executed, certainly more than two hundred and five and maybe as many as two hundred and forty, it would have been too time-consuming to prepare an individual stake for each victim, and until the Cathars came down from the castle, the Crusaders wouldn’t have known how many heretics they were going to have to kill. What the accounts say is that they constructed a kind of wooden stockade and filled it with branches and kindling and maybe oil or some other accelerant, then closed the gates with the Cathars inside and fired it. Nobody knows for sure. But there is one point upon which all the accounts are in agreement.’

  ‘That all the Cathars went willingly to their deaths?’ Bronson suggested.

  ‘Exactly. Death by being burnt alive must be one of the most painful ways to go, and we know from accounts of other executions that most victims had to be dragged to the stake and then chained to it, because rope would burn away too quickly. This method of execution was enshrined in the law of most countries in Europe as a punishment for heretics, and in the eyes of the Catholic Church the Cathars were perhaps the ultimate heretics. There were refinements that could increase their suffering or relieve it. In Britain it was common for the victim to be strangled at the stake before the fire was lit, but to compound the agony he could be doused in oil or made to wear a garment infused with sulphur. Even the type of wood used had an effect. Dry wood literally roasted the victims, while if the fire was made from damp wood the smoke would asphyxiate them. According to one account it had rained and snowed at Montségur the day before the executions, so it was probably the smoke that killed the Cathars.

  ‘According to the accounts, they weren’t forced into the stockade but walked there as a group singing hymns, as if they were entering a church rather than heading to an execution pyre. And why they did that is one of the great unanswered questions about the Cathars.’

  ‘We do know they placed their faith in their souls and were unconcerned about what happened to their bodies.’

  ‘That’s a good way of putting it,’ Angela agreed, ‘and you’re right. But walking into a fire is a somewhat extreme way of releasing your soul. And it’s worth remembering that not a single Cathar actually had to die on 16 March 1244. On the first day of that month, when it was clear that the nine-month siege was effectively over and that Montségur would fall, a truce was negotiated with the besieging Catholic troops. All of them – the mercenary soldiers of the castle garrison, the non-Cathar servants and, most surprisingly, the Cathars themselves – would be allowed to walk out with their weapons and possessions at the end of the fifteen-day truce. The only stipulation was that the Cathars were to renounce their heretical beliefs in front of the Inquisitors waiting for them. Bearing in mind the utter brutality of the Church’s two Albigensian Crusades, which had resulted in the deaths of perhaps one million Cathars in the Languedoc region of France over the previous thirty-five years, it was an astonishingly lenient offer. And the most bizarre aspect was that the Cathars rejected it.’

  The climb was getting steadily steeper, some sections of it formed from rough steps supported by wooden planks. They stopped beside a small wooden structure on the right-hand side of the track to pay their admission fee to a bored-looking man sitting inside it, then continued onwards, moving more slowly as the slope increased.

  ‘I’ve never understood that,’ Bronson admitted.

  ‘You’re not the only one. And even more bizarre is what happened on 13 March, the spring equinox, which we know was important in Cathar beliefs. On that day, twenty-six soldiers and other non-Cathars in Montségur asked to be given the consolamentum perfecti, the sacrament Cathars took when they became perfecti or perfects. Doing that guaranteed they would die in the flames.’

  Angela paused to catch her breath as the grey stone walls of the castle loomed above them, the structure looking almost as if it had grown out of the rock beneath it rather than having been constructed by man.

  ‘And that,’ Bronson said, also stopping for a brief respite, ‘brings us to the last two or three or four mysteries of the Cathars of Montségur.’

  ‘How many?’ Angela asked.

  ‘It all depends on how you count them. There’s the reason why the truce was agreed so easily, why it was long enough to include the spring equinox and why the terms were so lenient. That’s three separate but related questions right there. Then there’s the story about the handful of Cathar perfecti who allegedly slipped out of the castle using ropes, probably down the steep northern flank of the mountain, carrying the treasure of the Cathar movement. Most accounts state that these men made their escape after the spring equinox celebrations had taken place and after the truce had been negotiated, which again doesn’t make sense. The Crusaders had already agreed to let all the inhabitants of Montségur leave with their possessions, so why didn’t they just wait until the siege ended and walk away with whatever they had? And then, finally, there’s what happened when the Crusaders gained possession of the castle. Why did they then tear it to pieces? Obviously they were looking for something, but as far as I know, nobody has any idea what it was. Or if they found it.’

  ‘I’m surprised you know all that,’ she said as they stepped into the open ground bounded by the castle walls.

  ‘I like mysteries,’ Bronson said. ‘Not least because it’s part of my day job, being a copper.’

  ‘And you’re right. There are a lot of unanswered questions associated with this place. Some of the points you raised might be linked, like the lenient terms of the surrender, the escape of the small group of Cathars and the dismantling of the castle. If the leaders of the Crusaders believed the Cathars possessed something of huge value, they may have agreed to let them walk free on the assumption that when the siege ended they could simply seize it from them or recover it from the castle. That would explain why they tore the place to pieces when they couldn’t find it because the Cathars who’d escaped had taken i
t with them.’

  Bronson nodded. ‘I know. I think most researchers have concluded that the treasure was either books or manuscripts sacred to the Cathars, or material wealth like gold and silver. One of the suggestions is that because the spring equinox was important to the movement, there would have been ceremonies performed on that day that might have used a particular relic or manuscript. That might also explain why the twenty-six non-Cathars decided to become perfecti. Perhaps the Cathars owned some religious relic that was so powerful they were prepared to embrace that religion in the certain knowledge that it was right and the massed Catholic forces outside the walls were wrong, even though they knew that to do so was also to embrace a certain and excruciatingly painful death. Realistically, only something like that could have persuaded so many of them to walk down the mountain and into the flames of the execution pyre.

  ‘And I’ve read something about the wealth of the order as well. Although the Cathars took a vow of poverty and lived simple lives – many of them worked as itinerant manual labourers – the order as a whole was notably wealthy by the end of the twelfth century. Many of the perfecti were rich men who had donated property to the movement, and the ordinary members of the church, the credentes, frequently left what they owned to the order on their deaths. These assets were used by the Cathar movement to help people in need in the Languedoc. The Cathars of Montségur were almost the last of the line, so it would be reasonable to assume that most of their remaining wealth was in the castle with them. But the big problem, as I see it, is that however many perfecti managed to escape from the fortress, they couldn’t have carried everything of value.’

  ‘That’s the crux of the question,’ Angela agreed. ‘Abseiling down from the top of this mountain means they could only have been carrying something reasonably small, or at least fairly light in weight. An object or objects of huge importance to them, rather than heavy boxes full of gold and silver.’