The Seal(123)

There was a resigned silence from the crowd. The cardinal sat down and rolled up his parchment.

‘I protest!’

The crowd gasped. The council was thrown into confusion. The cardinals were perplexed. They whispered to one another and exchanged looks of amazement.

The Archbishop of Sens was on his feet moving forward with thin lips taut and limbs trembling with rage. ‘Liar!’ he called out to the man in rags. ‘Liar!’

‘I have yielded.’ Jacques de Molay turned to the crowd. ‘I have yielded to promises, to threats and tortures. My bones have been broken and my flesh has been torn, I have succumbed because the flesh is weak! God who hears us knows I am innocent, innocent of all these crimes!’

The crowd stirred with uncertainty. Marigny watched it with disbelief and called out to the man, ‘But you have confessed to heresy!’

‘Under duress, from pain and fear of torture!’

‘To indecency, sodomy, corruption, sorcery!’

‘Under torture all of it, from hunger and cold! What man who is possessed of blood and sinew would not have done the same? I retract it! I retract everything! I retract all that I have said in the name of our Lord!’

Then his friend Geoffrey de Charney next to him called out, ‘And I, I retract it all! I am guilty only of believing in goodness and truth. I refused to see the plots and the treachery of the King and his men. Before God I vow that I am innocent!’

A man escaped the guards and came out into the open space then. He ran into the centre of the square. He was young and fair and his eyes were rimmed with red and his face was full with fever. Before the guards could take him he yelled to the crowd,

‘These men are innocent! They are innocent! I have observed their confessions and I have seen their tortures!’

The guards moved to seize him but he struggled and freed himself. ‘I was present when the Grand Master was nailed upon a door! Upon a door he was sacrificed like our Lord, by the Grand Inquisitor! These champions of Christ are honourable men. There!’ He pointed to the tribunal. ‘There is the face of the Devil in the countenance of those men! Rise up! Rise up against these injustices!’ He stumbled.

The Bishop of Paris stood, crying out words that went unheard in the din from the crowd since it had broken loose and a great chaos had ensued.

The people took these words to heart and were now prepared to champion the men. The sergeants-at-arms bore down on the crowds with blows from their staves. Everywhere guards lined up, their pikes levelled at the people, who raised their fists and shouted out, spitting and swearing.

Philippe de Marigny observed the turn of events and rage mingled with trepidation on his face. Jacques de Molay watched it, but did not feel exhilarated, he felt a sense of amazement and relief wash over him and he grasped his friend’s hand. ‘Who is that boy?’ he said.

The archbishop raised his episcopal crosier in a suggestion that he was about to speak, but there was no expected silence, instead he was insulted and shouted at. The crowd swelled towards the platforms and fear overtook the cardinals, who rose from their seats en masse and began a rushed scramble for the stairs. The platform started to rock and sway and the ropes seemed likely to loosen.

‘I pronounce these men relapsed heretics!’ the archbishop said quickly and with a flailing of arms called the Provost of Paris to him whereupon he whispered in his ear and the man began shouting orders to his archers to remove the prisoners to the King’s prisons.

The Bishop of Paris tried to make his way down to the square but guards prevented him.

When the prisoners were taken away and the people were forced to move off, he went to the square, looking for Julian, and found him upon the ground. His throat was cut and the blood made a halo of red around his head.

The bishop knelt before the figure of his charge. Filled with grief he brought the boy’s head to his lap and closed his eyes.





57


ISLAND OF THE JEWS

Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.

Seneca, DE PROVIDENTIA


The bell tolled the hour of vespers from the Sainte-Chapelle and across the water on the small Island of Jews; a crowd gathered in great numbers waiting impatiently, expectantly, to see the sentences carried out.

For many, this morning’s outburst had given way to resignation. They no longer clamoured to see justice. Their excitement, their loyalty to truth, had been drowned in wine and lunch, pacified by a good sleep and the harsh realities of life and death.

However placated his people might seem, the King had taken no chances, and a circle of armed horsemen and many more on foot guarded the little clearing where two stakes had been hastily erected.

Only a narrow channel separated the island from the palace, and this afforded the King and his entourage a perfect view of events. On the King’s right stood Enguerrand de Marigny and the Archbishop of Sens. De Marigny was now his chief counsellor since Guillaume de Nogaret’s unseemly death the previous spring. He stopped to think on it; the man had died with his tongue thrust out between two rows of teeth sunk deep enough to draw blood, while his eyes had been forced wide open by some unknown hand – a tortured death, most likely poison. He wondered vaguely if he had ordered it in one of his moments of aggravation, and decided that it didn’t matter one way or the other – the man had served his purpose.