‘She’s just a friend,’ Doug said. Ellie hadn’t asked. She sat in the passenger seat, hunched forward, willing the wall of fog in front of her to clear. She wasn’t going to judge Doug.
A half-moon gap appeared in the windscreen. Doug rolled down his window.
‘Thanks again,’ he said to Lucy.
‘Drive carefully.’
They pulled away before she could have second thoughts. Halfway down the street, Doug jammed on the brakes.
‘What is it?’ Panic was never far from the surface.
‘I left the lights on at home.’
‘Leave it,’ Ellie pleaded. ‘I promise you, I’ll pay for it.’
If we ever come back. She didn’t say it, but Doug picked up the sentiment. He put the car in gear and started moving.
‘Where are we going?’
They sat at a plastic table and picked at the food in front of them: eggs, beans, anaemic bacon and sausages, slowly congealing in grease. Outside, a grey swell heaved and pressed under a grey sky.
It would have been faster to go from Dover, but Ellie insisted on avoiding London and the motorways. Doug rolled his eyes, but didn’t argue: he drove through the night, crossing the country on B-roads and backroads until they rolled into Harwich with the dawn. The wait for the ferry had been agonising, sitting in the concrete lanes constantly checking the mirrors while Doug got some sleep. She’d almost been sick when they had to show their passports, though the immigration officer had barely glanced at them. Only when the bow had slammed shut, when she’d scanned the faces of all the passengers coming up the gangway and watched the piers recede behind them, did she allow herself to relax.
Doug squinted at a piece of sausage and decided it was worth the risk.
‘Let me get this from the beginning.’
Ellie put down her coffee. ‘There are two sides to this. There’s Monsalvat, Blanchard and all them — and there’s … a rival organisation.’
Call it a brotherhood, though we’ve nothing against women.
‘Behind Monsalvat, there’s a French billionaire named Michel Saint-Lazare. Your Mr Spencer. Whatever’s in that box, Saint-Lazare’s ancestors took it from the brotherhood centuries ago.’
‘According to your friend Harry.’
‘I have to believe him.’ Two months ago, she’d never have believed she’d be saying that. ‘I can’t do this by myself.’
Doug gave her a weary look. Exhaustion bruised the skin around his eyes; his face looked grey where stubble poked through, but he still tried for a smile.
‘You’re not by yourself.’
Ellie reached across the table and squeezed his hand. ‘I know. But we won’t survive on the run for long. We’ll run out of money, for a start. All my bank cards come from Monsalvat. As soon as they work out I’m with you, they’ll probably find a way to cancel yours too — or track us if you use them.’ Doug looked sceptical. ‘They’re a bank, remember. They can do that kind of thing. Whatever we stole from them, they’ll move heaven and earth to get it off us.’
‘You could give it back.’
‘I’ve chosen my side. This organisation, the brotherhood, whatever you call them — they’re the only ones who can protect us.’ She crossed her fingers and prayed that was true. ‘We have to find them.’
‘How do we do that?’
Ellie sipped her coffee and made a face. It tasted of detergent.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Harry was my only contact.’ She’d tried the phone number he’d given her three times from the pier at Harwich. If no answer, leave a message for Harry from Jane. The voicemail had kicked in, but she hadn’t left a message.
‘Now he’s probably dead — or worse.’
The boat rocked up and down in the swell. A toddler with a yellow balloon staggered down the aisle between the tables, fell flat on his face and started to wail. Ellie felt a kick of sympathy.
‘There’s a company in Luxembourg that Monsalvat have just taken over.’ A mid-ranking European industrial concern. By an accident of history, they own something that belongs to us. ‘They’ve got something that links to Harry’s people. If we can find it, maybe we can find our way to them.’
‘If we can find it?’ Doug repeated. ‘Are we just going to walk in there and ask if they’ve got an address for an ancient, secret brotherhood?’
Ellie allowed herself a pale smile. ‘Something like that. Unless you’ve got a better idea.’
But across the table, Doug’s eyes had closed and his face nodded forward. Driving all night had exhausted him; he couldn’t stave off sleep any longer. Ellie shot out her arm just in time to stop him toppling into his breakfast.
Doug drove; Ellie sat with two sheets of paper laid out on the map book on her lap. One gave a transcription of the poem, the other was a translation.
‘Mr Spencer asked me to make the translation,’ Doug explained. ‘I wanted to keep the form of the original, so it’s written in rhyming octosyllabic couplets. Eight syllables per line — it’s the standard form for early French romance poetry.’
‘Romance as in …’
‘As in romance language. In ancient Rome there was written Latin and there was a bastardised, colloquial form called Romanice. As the empire fell apart, Latin stayed pretty much the same, but Romanice devolved into the languages that became French, Spanish, Italian and so on. In the twelfth century, when people started writing in those languages, the stories they wrote were called romances, to differentiate them from stuff written in Latin. Nothing necessarily to do with romantic love. Even today, the French word for a novel is “roman”.’
‘OK.’ Ellie bent forward and read the translation, trying not to feel carsick.
The car bumped over a pothole. For some reason, Ellie found herself overcome by bleakness.
‘What do you make of it?’ she asked.
‘Well for one thing, I think I know who wrote it. Chrétien de Troyes.’ He saw her reaction. ‘What?’
Blanchard gave me a book of his for Christmas. But Doug didn’t know she’d been in Switzerland for Christmas, didn’t know she’d been there with Blanchard, and certainly didn’t know why he’d have given her a twelfth-century manuscript as a Christmas present. A manuscript she’d left behind, along with everything else she owned, at the Barbican apartment.
‘I saw a book of his poems at one of Saint-Lazare’s houses. What made you think of him?’
‘Well there’s the language and the metre, which are the same style as Chrétien wrote in. The subject matter, too: knights and maidens. Carduel is one of the places, in the romances, where King Arthur had his court. We think it’s modern-day Carlisle.’
Doug broke off to concentrate as a white van overtook them. They were driving through the Ardennes, the road dipping and rising over steep ridges and wooded valleys. An easy landscape to imagine knights errant questing for damsels and treasure.
‘But the real clue’s in the text. Look at it. A Christian knight … from Troy. Chrétien is the French for “Christian”, and Troyes is how they spell the ancient city of Troy. Chrétien de Troyes.’
‘If you say so.’