The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse
Freddie pulled out a fifty-franc note all the same and laid it on the counter.
‘To donate to a good cause, then,’ he said.
Saurat acknowledged the gift with a nod. He did not pick it up, but neither did he attempt to give it back.
At the door, the two men shook hands, on the afternoon, on the story, on the secret they now shared.
‘And what of your brother?’ Saurat said. ‘In your travels, your work for the War Graves Commission, did you ever find the answer to the question you were seeking? Did you find out what happened to him?’
Freddie put on his trilby and slipped his hands into his fawn gloves. ‘He is known unto God,’ he said. ‘That is enough.’
Then he turned and walked back up the rue des Pénitents Gris, his shadow striding before him.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to all those who have worked so hard on The Winter Ghosts.
My agent, Mark Lucas, continues to be an inspiration, a wonderful editor, and makes it fun despite the absence of Post-it notes! To Mark, Alice Saunders, and everyone at LAW, thank you.
At Orion, a huge thank you to everyone in the editorial, publicity, marketing, sales and art departments, especially the editorial dream-team of Jon Wood and Genevieve Pegg, as well as Malcolm Edwards, Lisa Milton, Susan Lamb, Jo Carpenter, Lucie Stericker, Mark Rusher, Gaby Young and Helen Ewing; and to Brian Gallagher for the beautiful illustrations.
I would not have finished the book without the affection and practical help of family and friends, especially my mother-in-law, Rosie Turner; my parents, Richard and Barbara Mosse; fellow dog-walkers, Cath O’Hanlon, Patrick O’Hanlon and Julie Pembery and my sister, Caroline Matthews; Amanda Ross, Jon Evans, Lucinda Montefiore, Tessa Ross, Robert Dye, Maria Rejt, Peter Clayton, Rachel Holmes, Bob Pulley and Mari Pulley.
Finally, without the love and support of my husband Greg Mosse, and our children Martha and Felix, none of this would matter. It is to them, as always, that the book is dedicated.
Author’s Note
By 1328, the medieval Christian heresy now referred to as Catharism had been all but destroyed. After the fall of Montségur in 1244 and the fortress of Quéribus in 1255, the remaining Cathars were driven back into the high valleys of the Pyrenees. Many Cathar priests - parfaits and parfaites - were executed, or driven into Lombardy or Spain.
Despite this, the early fourteenth-century saw a remarkable renaissance of Cathar communities in the upper Ariège, principally around Tarascon and Ax-les-Thermes (then known as Ax) and key villages, such as Montaillou. The Inquisitional Courts in Pamiers (for the Ariège) and Carcassonne (for the Languedoc) continued to persecute and hunt down the heretics (as they were considered). Those taken were imprisoned in dungeons known as Murs. Principal in this was Jacques Fournier, a Cistercian monk, who rose quickly through the Catholic ranks, becoming bishop of Pamiers in 1317, of Mirepoix in 1326, a cardinal in 1327, and, finally, Pope in Avignon in 1334, as Benedict XII. It is an irony that Fournier’s Inquisition Register, detailing all interrogations and depositions made to the courts on his watch, is one of the most important surviving historical records about Cathar experience in fourteenth-century Languedoc. The last Cathar parfait, Guillaume Bélibaste, was burnt at the stake in 1321.
During the vicious final years of the extermination of the Cathars, whole villages were arrested - such as at Montaillou in the spring and autumn of 1308. There is evidence that entire communities took refuge in the labyrinth network of caves of the Haute Vallée of the Pyrenees, the most infamous example being in the caves of Lombrives, just south of Tarascon-sur-Ariège. Hunted down by the soldiers in the spring of 1328, hundreds of men, women and children fled into the caves. The soldiers of the Inquisition realised that, rather than continue to play cat-and-mouse, they could use traditional siege tactics and block the entrance, bringing the game to an end. This they did, entombing everyone inside in some kind of medieval Masada.
It was only 250 years later, when the troops of the Count of Foix-Sabarthès, the man who was to become King Henry IV of France, excavated the caves that the tragedy was revealed. Whole families were discovered - their skeletons lying side by side, bones fused together, their last precious objects beside them - and finally brought down from the stone refuge that had become a living tomb.
It is this grisly fragment of Cathar history that was the inspiration for The Winter Ghosts.1 The village of Nulle does not exist.
For those readers who want to know more about the final days of Catharism, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s classic Montaillou, first published in 1978, is the most complete and detailed explanation of the complications of life, faith and tradition in fourteenth-century Ariège. De l’Héritage des Cathares (available in translation as The Inheritance of the Cathars) by the French mystic and Tarasconais Cathar historian of the 1930s and 1940s, Antonin Gadal, is well worth dipping into. René Weis’ The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars 1290-1329, Anne Brenon’s Pèire Authier: Le Dernier des Cathares and Greg Mosse’s Secrets of the Labyrinth are all excellent.
Kate Mosse Toulouse, April 2009
About the author
Kate Mosse is an author and broadcaster. Her best-selling books include, amongst others, Labyrinth and Sepulchre. Kate is the Co-Founder and Honorary Director of the Orange Prize for Fiction and in 2009 was invited to be an Ambassador for the Aude Tourist Board, the region of France where much of her fiction is set. Kate lives with her family in Chichester and Carcasonne.
LA TOMBE DE PYRÈNE
Exclusive Short Story for
Waterstone’s
It was so cold in Paris in January 1891 that the beggars on the streets, the vagabonds and working girls in the Place Clichy said that the sun had died.
The Seine froze over. The poor and the homeless were dying, which prompted the reluctant authorities to open shelters in gymnasiums, shooting galleries, schools and public baths. The biggest dormitory was in the Palais des Arts Libéraux in the Champs-de-Mars, in the shadow of Monsieur Eiffel’s magnificent tower. Intended to symbolise all that was splendid, patriotic, modern about the Third Republic, the metal structure instead found itself presiding over dull, dark and soundless winter days. Masses of people huddled like refugees, fugitives from the cold. The scenes were reminiscent, the shopkeepers said, of the dark days of the Franco-Prussian war when German boots marched in the Champs-Elysées.
George Watson, formerly of the Royal Sussex Regiment, thought back to his own fighting days, to the heat of the Transvaal in December 1880, when they had subdued the uprising. Three months from start to finish. He had spent his twenty-first birthday with a rifle in his hand.
Throughout France the story of this winter was the same. In Carcassonne, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the River Aude burst its banks sweeping away the most vulnerable quartiers of Trivalle and Paicherou. In the Ariège, the villages were locked in by ice and snow. Even in England, he read in an edition of The Times some seven days old, a great blizzard had swept through the south in the spring.
Nature was fighting back.
But, for George Watson, 1891 was a year of wonder. It was a year of unaccustomed experiences. He arrived in Paris in the pale and wet spring, which came late that year, and stayed during the brief, bullying heat of summer. His father had died the previous year - a hero of Khartoum, he had received a full soldier’s send off - and George would soon have to take up his new responsibilities in England. But, for a few months, he was a free man. He was in France to come to a decision about his future and was in no hurry. Having resigned his commission, George set about transforming himself from a soldier into a flaneur, an artist, a philosopher. He had nothing in common with the poets and the artists and composers about whom he read in the newspapers, and he knew it, but he was determined to dip his toe in the water and fully experience the alternative, teeming, headlong metropolis that was Paris.
His father had not approved of opera. Now the old man was dead, George intended to mak
In the drawing rooms overlooking the Parc Monceau, he visited friends of his father. Their wives and daughters were reading L’Argent, the latest in Zola’s epic Les Rougon-Macquart series, and George listened with a polite expression to their literary thoughts. Later, though, he sipped absinthe in a favourite café on the rue d’Amsterdam and read less socially acceptable books purchased from Edmond Bailly’s Librairie de l’art indépendant in the Chaussée d’Antin. Baudelaire had been dead more than twenty years, yet his words lived still in the salons and taverns of Montmartre where George found himself increasingly drawn. Not only for his poetry, full of raw-boned witches and blood red moons, juxtapositions of urban beauty and decay and horror. But also for his translations of the morbid poems of the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe.
George knew he did not belong, even on the periphery, of this demi-monde. He was a tourist. But he considered it part of his essential education and knew that, when he returned to England and proposed to Anne, as he supposed he should, marriage would put a stop to such indulgences. It would change things, as his father’s death had changed things. George could see how his life would go and was happy enough to go along it with. A good life, a solid English life, the life he had been born to. A son first he hoped, also to be called George, a son who would follow in his footsteps. A strong, brave boy, destined for the Army like him and his father before him. After that, he hoped for a daughter, Sophie or perhaps Fredericka, who would play the piano and share his love of books and opera and nature.
It was at the thought of these imagined children that George spent more months in Paris than originally intended, shoring up his memories for the dusty future. But finally the sojourn reached its end. As the scent of autumn was crisp in the air, George accepted it was time to move on. Despite his strenuous efforts at literary self-improvement, in truth his preference remained for the adventure stories of Mr Rider Haggard and Jules Verne. George had read A Journey to the Centre of the Earth several times, seeing himself in the explorer-scholar role of Professor Von Hardwigg, and thought that the more violent landscape of the south of France might afford him some insight. He had seen dust in the Transvaal, he had seen heat, but he yet had to experience the claustrophobia of subterranean worlds where he felt his imagination might flourish. It was this that decided him upon the south where, he had been told, some of the largest networks of caves in Europe were to be found. Many were still closed, but the largest of them, Lombrives in Ussat-les-Bains, just south of the mountain village of Tarascon-sur-Ariège, had been excavated and was open to visitors by appointment. From there, he intended to travel into Spain, before returning to England in time for Christmas.
On a crisp October morning, where the light fell in sharp angles across the platform from the steel and glass roof, George took the Express from the Gare Montparnasse. A sharp blast from the whistle, a shriek from the engine as it belched out its first jet of steam and Paris was lost to George in a cloud of white smoke.
The voyage took seven days. Down through Laroche, Tonnerre, Dijon to Mâcon, where he broke his journey. The following morning, against an endless blue sky, on to Lyon-Perranche, Valence, Avignon and finally Marseille. George spent a couple of days in the old port, sampling the local speciality of bouillibaise, then took the coast train to Carcassonne. Everywhere there were fields of sunflowers and vines, a legacy of the Roman occupation of centuries before.
A week after leaving Paris, having transferred to the branch line that served the mountain villages of the high valley of the Ariège, George found himself in a wild and prehistoric landscape very much to his liking. Small villages crouched between sweeps of rock. The clouds hung low in the narrow valleys, like smoke from an autumn bonfire, so close that he felt he could reach out and touch them. And everywhere, black openings into caverns set high above the road, like mouths in the granite face. There was no order, no clear line, but rather a jagged and irregular ridge of mountains and hills, angry against the sky, as if the world had here been formed by some cataclysm, some violent upheaval.
George settled himself into a modest hotel in Ussat-les-Bains, a former spa town a few miles south of Tarascon. He engaged a guide and a fiacre for the morning and, after a plain meal of cured mountain ham and chicken pie, washed down with a pichet of local vin de table, he fell asleep dreaming of the adventure to come.
At ten o’clock the following morning, dressed in clothes and boots appropriate for a visit to the mountains, George and his guide, Henry Sandall, were deposited by the carriage at the head of a small overgrown path which spurred off the road. Overgrown by box and laurel bushes, it was easy going at first, but quickly the ground began to rise and George saw they were following a rough track up the mountain side.
The guide was a young English geologist, who had studied with Monsieur Noulet at the Natural History Museum in Toulouse, and stayed to marry a local girl. Sandall knew the caves well and as they climbed up to the opening through which they would descend into the first level only, Sandall explained how the temperature within the caves of Lombrives was always the same, something approximating to fifty five degrees Farenheit, regardless of the weather outside. That it was this that had meant the caves, over centuries, had been used as a refuge for those fleeing persecution in times of war. He told him that, though visitors could not go beyond the first levels, there were miles of caves on seven different levels, with evidence of calcium aragonite, limestone. Sandall explained how stalagmites and columns were formed, all in an easy and clear manner that brought to mind, even more than ever, the exploits of Professor Von Hardwigg, his nephew Axel and their guide Hans.
The path grew more precipitous and George began to feel the strain in his legs. His chest grew tight. Until now, he had not realised how quickly he had slipped from soldier to man of leisure. Too little exercise and too much reading. Seeing he was struggling, Sandall suggested they rest a while before the final ascent and the two men sat in companionable silence.
Looking out over the timeless landscape, over the leaves tipping from green to the gold and copper of autumn, George felt a surge of affection for the natural world, all the more poignant because he realised that he could put off his return to England for only a little longer. There was something about the stillness of the air and the enduring nature of the landscape which led him to reflection, so much so that he did not realise for a moment that Sandall was talking; this time, he said, telling a story that owed rather more to mythology than history or scientific study. Would he like to hear it? George said he would and sat back to listen.
Sandall’s eyes were bright with the pleasure of his narrative. Associated with a particular cavern within the caves of Lombrives was the story of how the Pyrenees had been formed and named. Going back even beyond the acknowledged history of the region - its Prehistoric, Roman, Visigoth and Huguenot pasts - was a myth of how the Greek demi-god, Heracles, had found himself in the Ariège after the tenth of his twelve labours. At that time the
There were various versions of the myth, but the most persistent was that Heracles had fallen in love with Bebryx’s daughter, Pyrène, and she with him. They had spent one night together but, under the terms of his quest, was bound to deliver the Cattle of Géryon to the Goddess Hera. Under cover of dawn, he had slipped away. Waking to find him gone, Pyrène, distraught and suffering, had followed and was torn to pieces by wild animals. Hearing her cries, Heracles turned back and finding her dead, in remorse and rage fashioned the Pyrenees from the earth and stone as a mausoleum to his lost lover.
After six months in Paris, George was in no way immune to stories from antiquity, and the écrivain-manqué in him enjoyed the fanciful explanation for the naming of the mountains to the more prosaic offerings of the men of science. But the most romantic part of the story was yet to be told. What was peculiar, Sandall added, was that there was one cave within Lombrives where a limestone deposit had formed a structure in the shape of a tomb or a sarcophagus. And although, as he had said previously, the temperature was constant within the labyrinthine networks of tunnels and openings, in times of drought the water that dripped constantly through the caves did dry up - except in this one chamber. As if, or so the local people said, the mountain itself was mourning.
‘The Tombe of Pyrène?’ George suggested.
‘Quite so. A tribute to the endless grief of Heracles for his lost lover.’
As the two men lingered on the ancient mountainside a while longer, George thought of his fiancée waiting for him in Sussex: Miss Anne Purfew, pretty and flighty. And though he knew his love was not equal to that of Heracles for his Pyrène, he would be a constant husband, steady. He smiled, then, his thoughts moving quickly to the son they would have, then the daughter too. Of how hard he would strive to be a better father than his own had been to him. Less distant, more affectionate. How he and young George would go walking, on the Sussex Downs and perhaps in the French Pyrenees. Of how he would instil in his boy a love of France. And, at home, as the winter evenings drew in, how his little girl would play the piano and he would be charmed. It would be a quiet life, no surprises, but a contented life. Safe in hearth and home. Away from the dust and the blood and the flies that had marked his youth.