The Mistletoe Bride(13)

Only then did Claire see she was not, in fact, the only visitor.

Someone was standing on the very top of the outer wall of the citadel, looking out over the valley. It was hard to be certain, but it looked like a woman. She narrowed her eyes. A woman with black hair in a long red coat that reached almost to the ground.

Claire took a step closer, wondering how she’d failed to notice her before and how she had managed to get up to that section of the wall. There were so many broken steps. The lower flight presented no problems, but then it simply stopped. It was as if two different workmen, one starting at the top, one at the bottom, had failed to meet. She wanted to call out, but it seemed intrusive and she didn’t want to startle her fellow pilgrim. Even from this distance, Claire could see the top of the wall was narrow and it would be icy.

At the same time, she felt a fierce need to talk to her. She stepped up to the wall and ran her fingers over the handholds, looking for gaps in the stone, testing her weight. The woman’s outline was clearer now, silhouetted against the cold, bright sky. She was about the same height and build as Claire, although her clothes were oddly old-fashioned. A moss-green dress hung beneath the hem of the red cloak, not a coat at all. She had now pulled the hood over her head, obscuring her face. Even so, there was something familiar about her stillness, her patience, as if she was keeping vigil high on the ancient walls. As if she was waiting for something or someone.

Claire began to climb.

She thought she could hear singing. The harsh sound of male voices this time, not the sweeter tones of women.

Veni, veni.

Claire pushed her fingers into crevices, forced her unwieldy boots into cracks in the rock, and pulled herself up. She did not fall.

Luck, determination, something carried her over the gap that yawned between the lower and upper levels, until, finally, she too was standing on the wall.

Claire took a step towards the woman.

‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I’ve come.’

The woman was standing on the very edge of the wall, even though she didn’t seem to have moved. The edge of her dress skimmed the frosted ground. Claire sensed, rather than saw, she was smiling.

‘At last,’ the woman murmured as she stretched out a thin, white hand. ‘A la perfin.’

Claire took it. Together, they stepped out into the sky.

As they fell, the woman’s hood fell back from her face. Claire smiled at the sight of familiar features looking back at her. Was it her ancestor, long dead or, rather, her old self, eyes bright and singing with hope, the person she had been before grief took the life from her?

Claire was home. No more past or future now, only an everlasting present.

The hire car was found a few days later, half buried in the snow. No one understood how she’d managed to reach the village in the first place. The blizzard had been one of the most sudden and the worst in living memory, shutting all roads in and out of the village from late on the evening of 15th March until early on the 19th.

Claire’s body was never found, though they searched for weeks. After all, she had no further need of it.

Her diary, however, was discovered beneath a table in a local restaurant, lying open on the page for Friday 16th March. Since the owner and his wife had been away all winter, no one could explain how it came to be there. Not a suicide note, but the signs were all there. The unexplained death of her baby son in his cot: the not-knowing-why and the loss. The guilt. It was a grief that would never leave her, a loneliness that would never let go.

There were only two words written on the page – MONS SALVATIONIS – but the date was ringed in red.



Author’s Note



In 1989, we bought a tiny house in the shadow of the medieval city walls of Carcassonne in the south-west of France, a region known as the Languedoc. The area is the inspiration for my trilogy of novels – Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel – as well as various stories and essays.

This is one of the earliest stories I published. Written during 2003, the inspiration was my first visit to Montségur in the Pyrenees in the 1990s. My husband, two-year-old daughter and I left Carcassonne in a blaze of spring sunshine, yet found ourselves in the mountains in the grip of a blizzard.

We found a seemingly deserted restaurant, though there was a burning fire and food laid out on tables. In real life, of course, the owner had popped out and came back soon enough, but for some time we were the only people there.

In a story, things are different . . .

The title comes from the practice of illuminating manucripts where significant or important days are picked out in red, known as rubrics. The first Council of Nicaea in 325 CE decreed which were to be Saints’ Days, Feasts and other Holy Days, which came to be printed on medieval church calendars in red. The term – a ‘red letter day’ – came into wider usage with the publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, in which the calendar showed special holy days illustrated in red ink.