The Last Secret Of The Temple by Paul Sussman

Author:Paul Sussman [Paul Sussman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781407041247
Publisher: Transworld

JERUSALEM

Bloody Castelombres. The night before Layla had been euphoric about the new lead, convinced it was the breakthrough she needed to solve the William de Relincourt conundrum. After a day of scratching and digging, however, she now felt almost as confused as she had before she'd even heard of the bloody place.

She'd called Cambridge first thing, hoping to speak to Professor Magnus Topping, only to be informed by a blandly officious college porter that the professor possessed neither a phone ('The ringing disturbs him, madam') nor an email address ('Prefers his typewriter, madam').

'So how the hell do I get in touch with him?' she had asked, picturing some crusty, pipe-smoking academic closeted away in a book-filled study, wholly oblivious to the outside world.

'Well, madam,' the porter had replied – he seemed to insinuate a polite-but-patronizing 'madam' into every sentence – 'you could write to him, although between you and me he's never been very good at answering his letters. Or you could simply turn up and knock on his door, which is generally the best way of getting hold of him.'

'I'm calling from Jerusalem.'

'Ah. Well, then, that's going to be a problem, isn't it? Madam.'

With the Topping option closed to her, she had gone back to the internet. Unlike William de Relincourt, Castelombres had barely figured on the web, half a day of careful searching and cross-referencing failing to add to the six brief matches she had turned up the previous night (of which the sixth had turned out to be for a Castelombres Sanitary Porcelain company in Antwerp). Of the other five, one was the truncated genealogy that had given her the Esclarmonde de Rolincoeur connection; one a rather bad translation of a French academic article on the troubadour tradition of twelfth-century Languedoc; one a site devoted to the history of the cabbala and Jewish mysticism; one a footnote to an article about a medieval Jewish scholar called Rashi; and one a passing reference in the 'Haunted Ruins' section of a site titled 'Hidden France'.

From these she had picked up various scattered shards of information, random glimmers of some wider mystery. Not, however, the revelation for which she had been hoping. On the contrary, far from helping to clarify the whole William de Relincourt thing, the Castelombres lead had only seemed to cloud the waters further, adding new and confusing angles to a picture that already resembled some obscure and muddled Braque composition – a jumble of disparate elements all hinting at something significant without ever fully resolving themselves into a form she could recognize.

She hunched forward and stared at the notepad in front of her, wondering what to make of the whole thing, where on earth it was leading her.

Castelombres

'The Castle of Shadows'. Seat of Comptes de Castelombres. Castle destroyed Cathar Crusade 1243 – only few ruins left (ghosts!) Arriege Dept. Castelombres village 3 km away. Esclarmonde de Rolincoeur (Relincourt). 'Esclarmonde the Wise' 'White Lady of Castelombres'. Married Raymond III of Castelombres c. 1097. No extant biog. details. Renowned for intelligence, beauty, charity etc.

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