The Lazarus Vault Part 7

'I don't think so. What is it?'

'Not important. When will you be back in London?'

The due diligence period was almost over. 'I'm flying home tomorrow night. I'll be in the office on Monday.'

'This is excellent work, Ellie. Again you have surpa.s.sed yourself. Our client will be impressed. Do you have plans this weekend?'

The street artist had started banging a steel drum. 'I'm sorry?'

'Michel Saint-Lazare our client has invited me to Scotland to hunt. I wondered if you would like to come with me. He would be very interested to meet you.'

For a moment, Ellie was captivated by a vision of lochs and forests, a turreted castle with a roaring log fire, snuggling into an eiderdown in a four-poster bed late at night. She bit her lip. 'I promised Doug I'd go to Oxford this weekend.'

'Then you must go, of course.' At once, Blanchard was brisk and businesslike. Was he offended? Disappointed?

He probably doesn't care one way or the other.

'I'll see you on Monday.'

Oxford Ellie took the train to Oxford, staring out the window as it chugged up the Thames valley. An autumn haze covered the fields; the sun shone from a vivid October sky and made the world golden. Up on the hills, the leaves were turning. There would be a frost that night.

On a Sat.u.r.day morning, the carriage was almost empty. Ellie scanned the faces she could see: a mother with two daughters, a man with a bag advertising antiquarian books; two students talking with self-conscious earnestness about Kant and Heidegger. She was invisible to them, which suited her well.

Doug had rugby training that morning; she'd told him not to meet her. She still felt an irrational stab of disappointment when she scanned the waiting faces at the station hall. Just being in Oxford made her apprehensive. She'd only lived there for nine months before Monsalvat approached: long enough for it to be familiar, but not to feel she'd ever belonged. The sense of unfinished business soured the taste, like an ex-lover.

It took her ten minutes to walk to Doug's place, a small mews house provided by the college near the Ashmolean. She still had her key; she let herself in. A pair of muddy rugby boots lay in the hall. From upstairs, she could hear the sound of running water. Books and papers filled the living room, stacked on shelves and sills. After three weeks in the gla.s.sy alt.i.tudes of high rises and hotels, it felt dim and dingy. Empty screwholes pocked the walls like machine-gun fire. The paint had peeled above the doorframe, and the carpet was threadbare. She'd never noticed it before.

She climbed the stairs and opened the bathroom door without knocking. Doug stood in the shower, his face flushed from the fresh air and hot water, his dark hair slick against his skin. Ellie was struck, as she had been their first night together, by his long, rangy body and muscular arms.

He opened his eyes and started. 'Practice finished late. I was going to come and meet you at the station.'

'I told you not to bother.'

'You know I never listen to you.' He grinned and held out the soap. 'Are you going to scrub my back?'

Afterwards, they walked hand in hand along the towpath towards Abingdon. Oars slapped the water as the new eights crews flashed by; the damp smells of mud and rotting leaves filled the air. For the first time since she'd started at Monsalvat, Ellie felt she could breathe again.

'How's your research coming along?' She'd held off asking until now. In the first six months of their relations.h.i.+p, work had been a shared pa.s.sion. Now it was a faultline.

'It's good.' Doug frowned. 'Really good. I had a letter last week, totally out of the blue. A guy up in Scotland, reclusive millionaire or something. Apparently he'd read one of my papers on early medieval romance and wanted to talk to me.'

Ellie glanced at him. 'In Scotland?'

'We met in London. At his club.' An ironic emphasis. 'Huge place off Pall Mall, lots of Victorian busts and deep leather chairs and not a woman to be seen, except the one taking your coat. Anyway, he was waiting for me. An old man in a wheelchair, strapped in to some sort of respirator. He never said a word. He laid out this leather folder on the table. He had a minder with him, a tall guy in a long black coat. He looked like an undertaker. The first thing he did was make me sign a confidentiality agreement which I'm breaching, telling you this, by the way. The minder said that the old man had found something in his attic recently and thought it might be interesting.'

'What was in the folder?'

'A sheet of A4 paper.' Doug smiled at the anticlimax. 'But there was a poem on it written in Old French. Twelfth or thirteenth century, you'd think from the style. The minder said it was a transcription of this piece of parchment they'd found in the attic. I read through it I'd never seen it before.'

He said it lightly, but Ellie knew what he meant. If Doug didn't recognise the poem, the chances were it had never been published.

'Obviously I wanted to see the original, but he said it had been put in a bank vault for safekeeping. I asked if anyone else had looked at it. He said not since it came out of the attic. He didn't know how long it had been there. They gave me the printout to study and asked me to let them know what I thought.'

They were approaching the weir at Sandford lock. A red sign on pilings in the river warned DANGER AHEAD. Despite the sun and her snug coat, Ellie s.h.i.+vered.

Doug checked his watch. 'We should head home. I've invited Annabel and Mark for supper.'

Ellie tried not to look disappointed. She squeezed his hand. 'I thought we could be on our own tonight.'

'I invited them ages ago. It'll be fine.'

Annabel was a wispy woman who always seemed vaguely surprised to find herself in the twenty-first century. Mark was the sort of man who came to Oxford with certain stereotypes and did everything he could to live up to them. He was the only person Ellie had met who wore a cravat. He had also been her doctoral supervisor.

'Mark'll be a nightmare. He still hasn't forgiven me about the bank.'

'He's looking out for you. He wants the best for you.' Doug stared at a bird's nest couched among the willows. 'We all do.'

'I've got what's best for me.'

'I just thought the way they packed you off to Luxembourg like that, no word of warning. You didn't seem very happy there. I thought maybe ...'

His voice trailed off. He snapped a twig in two and threw the pieces in the water.

'Maybe I would come running back to Oxford?' A cold fury was building inside Ellie. 'I've just helped decide a deal worth seven hundred million euros. I'm earning more in a year than you and Mark and Annabel combined.'

'There're others ways to value what you do,' Doug said quietly. 'You're a great researcher. Don't waste it as a cog in some great money-making machine.'

'So I can waste it gathering dust in a library?' She remembered her first meeting with Blanchard. Academia is an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. 'I'm out in the real world, doing real things and earning real money.'

'Numbers on a computer. It's not real.'

She was trapped in a nightmare, reliving all the arguments they'd had that summer, the ones she thought she'd buried when she went to London.

'You can't change this,' she said flatly. 'It's who I am.'

'It's not '

The nightmare always ended the same way. Hot tears and rushed steps and Doug calling after her, too late. Leaves and twigs squelched underfoot. She didn't look back until she'd rounded a bend. She knew Doug wouldn't follow. He'd wait at the house, and eventually she'd go back. They'd skirt around each other like wary dogs, until eventually they'd pretend they'd forgotten. Until next time.

Except there was someone coming after her. A short man taking long, hurried strides, his face flushed from the effort. He wore green rubber boots and a green jerkin, whose numerous pouches and pockets bulged with all manner of reels and bright flashes of fabric bound onto hooks. He didn't carry a fis.h.i.+ng rod.

The path was narrow and overgrown; Ellie stood aside to let him pa.s.s. But he didn't. He stopped a few feet away and half-lifted a hand, almost as if he recognised her.

Ellie froze. She'd never seen the face before, but his pose was utterly familiar.

'Ellie Stanton?'

She couldn't run: the towpath was too muddy. Branches and brambles blocked the way. There was no one else in sight.

'Who are you?' She sounded faint and terrified, a little girl lost in the woods.

Metal flashed as he pulled something out of the pouch at his side. Ellie steeled herself to scream but it was only a hipflask. He unscrewed the cap and offered it to her.

'You look like you could use a drink.'

'No thanks.' She couldn't keep the trembling out of her voice.

He took a swig and refastened the cap. He didn't look dangerous. He was short and tending to fat; he had tousled sandy hair and bright blue eyes and ruddy cheeks that fitted his fis.h.i.+ng gear perfectly. He seemed to have genuinely enjoyed the drink.

'You're a hard woman to track down.'

A motor launch droned by. Ellie thought about calling for help, but the engines were so loud they'd never have heard. A little girl sat on the bow and waved at her.

Keep him talking. 'Was it you in Luxembourg?'

'Yes.'

'You took the lift to get up the hill in front of me.'

He glanced down at his stocky frame and short legs. 'I wasn't going to overtake you on foot.'

'Why didn't you call me at the hotel, if you wanted to speak to me?'

'Too difficult. They were watching it.'

His easy manner had let Ellie begin to relax; now she snapped back into reality. She looked at the barbed row of hooks looped onto his jerkin. Was he insane? Dangerous?

'I know I must sound mad.' Didn't all mad people say that? 'But you're in tremendous danger at Monsalvat.'

You aren't safe here. Ellie peered closer, wondering if he had been the man at the demonstration in London as well. She didn't know what to think any more.

'Why do you think they let you use your phone for personal calls? They're listening, Ellie. All the time. Watching as well, as often as they can.'

'Why ?'

'They're not what they seem. Underneath all that twenty-first century capitalist veneer, there's a medieval heart that's all darkness and malice. Look in their vaults sometime. They want something, and they're using you to get it.'

Ellie thought she'd be sick. 'Why are you telling me this?'

'Because'

'Ellie!'

While he'd been speaking, Ellie's world had shrunk into a tiny sphere bounded by mud, water and wood. A place out of time. Now the barriers receded as Doug came running around the bend in the path, his long coat flapping around his legs.

'I'm so sorry. You're right I shouldn't have said any of that. I've rung Mark and Annabel to cancel tonight. Let's just go home, open a bottle of wine and curl up on the couch.'

He looked at her again, misreading the anguish and confusion written all over her face. Drops of blood beaded on his hand like a string of pearls where brambles had torn the skin.

'I'm so sorry, Ellie.'

She kissed him, but only to stop him talking. Her eyes sidled over his shoulder down the path. The fisherman had vanished.

Doug had followed her gaze. He pulled back a little. 'Who was that man you were with? He wasn't giving you any trouble was he?'

'He just wanted directions.'

He accepted the lie. Ellie let him take her arm and escort her back towards Oxford, pretending that the fight was all that had upset her. Delicate ridges of pink clouds furrowed the blue sky; an owl hooted from somewhere in the thicket.

She'd never felt so lost.

XIV.

Normandy, 1135 Gornemant can tell I'm on edge. He says I show too much anger on the practice field. When we spar, I fight wildly and lose often, which only makes me angrier. Gornemant thinks it's impatience. He's seen it happen to all squires left kicking their heels too long, waiting for their spurs. He thinks I need a war to lift me. But G.o.d smiles on his people that year: all Christendom is at peace. I could take the Cross and go to fight for Jesus in the Holy Land, but I don't have enough money for the journey.

And the truth is, I want to stay in Hautfort. All the hours of drudgery are worth it for my glimpses of Ada. To leave her would be desolation. At dinner, I can stand behind my lord Guy's table for hours, just to be close to her. If she speaks to me, I carry her words with me like a treasure boxed in my heart. If she ignores me, I despair. I recall everything I have ever said or done to her, wondering what might have offended her. I tear my mind out wondering if she'll ever forgive me. And the next morning she gives me a smile, or her hand brushes mine as I help her mount her palfrey, and I'm insane with hope again.

I know I'm deluding myself. Ada has no idea: she'd be horrified if she knew what I'm thinking. Neither of us would ever betray Guy: my lord, her master. But I'm trapped in a dream, an enchantment, and for the moment I have no will to break it.

An August day, a cloudless sky. The whole world is limp with the heat. Gornemant had us in the lists all morning in full armour, charging and skirmis.h.i.+ng until we were ready to drop. My hair's as wet as a dog's; my hands are sticky with the pine resin I rubbed on so my damp hands wouldn't drop my sword. I stink of sweat, horse, leather and oil. If I don't cool off soon, I think I might boil away.

I strip off my clothes and dive into the stream by the apple orchard. The first fruits are beginning to ripen on the trees, but there's no one here to pick them. The labourers are all in the fields bringing in the harvest. Guy's gone to inspect the new mill he got with Ada's dowry. Apart from the birds, I might be the only person alive.

When I've washed, I haul myself out and lie naked on the gra.s.s. The sun dries me quickly; bees and hummingbirds flit about over my head. Black spots dance in front of my eyes.

I'm hungry. I pull on a clean tunic and walk along the stream, looking for an early apple, or perhaps some mushrooms. I haven't gone twenty paces when I see her, sitting alone at the edge of the water in a plain green dress. I didn't notice her arrive; I wonder how long she's been there. Did she see ...?

To hide my embarra.s.sment, I study the undergrowth on the far side of the stream. I see a hazel and a honeysuckle, their stems and branches twined and knotted together, and I say, 'Do you know the story about those?'

She shakes her head.

'They grew on the graves of Tristan and Yseult. King Mark burned them down three times, but the hazel and the honeysuckle always grew back.'

She rolls over on her stomach and peers at her reflection in the water. 'That sounds like the end of the story. Tell me from the beginning.'

I might as well not have bothered with the swim. I'm sweating into my clean tunic more than I ever sweated under my armour. I should go, plead some ch.o.r.e that Gornemant has for me. I can't trust myself.

I sit down on the bank, what I hope is a respectful distance away.

'Long ago, when Arthur was king ...'

The words are a key, unlocking my anxiety. They relax me; I find I can go on. My mother never told me the tale, but I have heard it many times in Guy's hall. I'm surprised Ada doesn't know it.

None of the troubadors I've heard entirely agreed with each other, and mine is changed again.

'Tristan was a knight from Lyonesse, who served his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall.

In my mind, uncle Mark is a fat oaf in a vair-fur cloak that leaves powder on the table.