Bright Hair About the Bone (16 page)

CHAPTER 16

W
as there a cooling in the previous day's warm camaraderie to be felt in the trench the following morning? Letty decided there was. Though on the surface perfectly polite, the three diggers she was working with, one local and two Parisian students, were avoiding conversation with her. Replies to questions came in monosyllables; eyes skittered sideways when she addressed a remark to them. She gathered that the news of her evening spent with the count had spread and, as d'Aubec had anticipated, a link of the most dubious kind had been forged between them. No skin off Laetitia Talbot's nose, of course, but the Stella she was fast becoming was distressed and aggrieved.

Phil and Patrick, on the other hand, behaved with their normal joking friendship and, sensing the problem, did their best to rectify it. “So—Cinderella was back early from the ball last night? Prince Charming failed to impress, I guess?” Phil asked in a carrying voice. The pair had been sitting in the Huleux's parlour when she got back and knew very well that her evening had been short and miserable.

“I'll say! I've spent less tedious evenings playing snakes-and-ladders with my deaf aunt Daisy. I didn't wait around for the pumpkin—I dashed for home at nine-thirty.” She was grateful for the opportunity so kindly thrown her to retrieve her reputation.

For the rest of the day she kept her head down, worked hard, shared information, and consulted the other diggers in an unemphatic way. When the time came to clean up and put away the equipment, friendly relations seemed to have been restored. Paradee had not put in an appearance. When she enquired about his absence, Phil told her cheerfully enough, “You've got a day's respite, Stella. He set off early for Lyon in the site van. He goes every month to make his report to the Church authorities and pick up supplies.” The well-trained group seemed to get along very well without him.

Gunning had arrived at the trench towards the end of the day's steady dig to sketch his record, and he timed his departure for a careful minute or two after her own. His long strides brought him level with her as they reached the old church of Mary Magdalene.

“Step inside for a moment, Stella. There's never anyone about at this time of day and I notice my shadow seems to have been called off.”

She followed him to a side aisle where he stood to admire a fresco. It was painted on the plastered wall of the nave and was lit by the warm radiance of the late afternoon sun streaming through the lead-paned windows.

“Page forty-one?” she asked, watching him take Daniel's guidebook from his pocket. “Are you about to show me page forty-one?”

He nodded. “Tell me what you make of this.”

Challenged again by the feeling that she was under male scrutiny, she replied briefly. “Fresco. Contemporary with the rest of the church fabric, I suppose. Look in your book. It's a much better authority than I am.” She sighed and, led on by his silence and one slightly raised eyebrow, began again: “We're looking at a depiction of the patron saint of the church. It's Mary Magdalene. Identifiable by her appearance and the presence of the usual accompanying icons—there's the skull…there on the left…and under her arm that highly decorated pot represents the unguent jar she used to anoint the Lord's feet…. And down here on the ground at her feet is a rather charmless bit of earthenware—large and rounded—something in the nature of a funerary urn, I'd have thought. There's nothing special here…lots of churches in this area have chosen her as their patron…even the cathedral at Vezelay is dedicated to her. And she's popular in Provence, too—
worshipped
there, you'd say. They have a ceremony on the coast each year at Les Saintes Maries de la Mer where they parade a black statue through the town and walk it into the sea. It's supposed to represent Sarah, the servant who accompanied the three Marys. She's much revered by the Gypsy tribes who come from all over Europe each year in May to take part in the ceremony. Have you seen it?”

He shook his head.

“Well, according to the folktale, Mary Magdalene, Mary Salomé, the mother of James and John, Mary Jacobé, Jesus' aunt, and their servant Sarah sailed across the Mediterranean after the death of Christ and ended up in Provence.”

She paused for a moment and added, “I've seen her skull.”

“You've seen whose skull?”

Pleased to have startled him, she explained. “Mary's! An ancient skull was found in the mountains of the Sainte-Baume, where Mary is said to have led the life of a healer and holy woman. They claimed that it was that of Mary herself. They dress it up in a rather improbable blonde wig and display it in procession about the streets on her saint's day. I was there with my family five years ago. Tante Genevieve said the skull was a fake but I must say it looked convincingly old to me. It had the brownish yellow colour of tobacco-stained teeth. Rather gruesome. Especially when you compare it with this picture of her—so young and lovely.”

They stared at the alluring fresco in silence, enchanted by the slight shift in angle of the declining sun whose rays had now reached the stained glass of the western window and shone through, dappling the saint's pale features with a glow of amber and rose.

“Oh, Lord!” whispered Letty. “She's coming alive! Do you see it, William? Tell me—I expect this is the sort of thing vicars know—why is she always shown with flowing fair hair and a red dress? Is this a medieval convention?”

“I think so. And both attributes false. Entirely mistaken.”

“Mistaken? The red dress, surely, is an indication of her loose nature? The colour signals her status—identifies her as the prostitute that she was.”

“That was the intention. But Daniel was wrong in this—the lady was no prostitute.”

“But…but…I could quote chapter and verse that—”

“And all misrepresentations. There is just one word in the Gospels that gives rise to the stories:
harmartolos,
in Saint Luke. It doesn't mean ‘prostitute,' as people have said—the Greeks had quite a different word for that. It means ‘outside the law,' and Jewish law, at that. It could refer to other less reprehensible types of behaviour, like failing to pay your taxes. It could even be a comment on her foreignness. A further problem is that there was no town of Magdala in Galilee after which she could have been named, though there was a Magdolum just over the border in Egypt. At all events, we can assume from the brief references in the Gospels that Mary Magdalene was an independent woman—in those days women were always referred to in the context of their relationship with a man…Miriam: mother, sister, daughter of…But the Magdalene stands alone. She must also have been wealthy. The unguent with which she anointed Christ was spikenard. Imported from India. Much used by temple priestesses…” He paused. “Worth a workingman's wages for a year.”

Letty was sorting through the mixed bag of knowledge she had been left by girls' school Divinity Class and yawned-through sermons in the local church. She acknowledged that she was on shaky ground and in the presence of an expert.

“But why mistranslate? Carelessness or deliberate intent, do you think?”

“Deliberately done, I'd say. Pope Gregory cast the first stone in the sixth century. He declared Magdalene to be a sinful woman, quoting the mistranslation from Luke, and calling up the evidence of the perfume pot to strengthen his argument. Only a professional harlot, the Pope surmised, would have been in possession of such an expensive substance and he could well imagine—and he proceeded to rather fervidly conjure up—the erotic uses to which it might well have been put by such a woman. Part of the age-old male struggle to keep women in their rightful place. It suited the early Church and the medieval clergy to dismiss her as a harlot whom they could despise and hold up as an awful warning and—a
reformed
harlot, one who repented and owed her rehabilitation to Christ—all the better! Repentance is always to be applauded.”

“Mmm…The sort of thing that goes down well in certain quarters in women's Colleges, too. But I like this lady,” said Letty, eyes still on the fresco. “She doesn't look repentant, does she? And can you explain the hair? If she came from the Holy Land or Egypt, she would have been dark-haired, wouldn't she?”

“Undoubtedly. And here's another possibly deliberate mistranslation of her name: in ancient Hebrew it can be taken to mean ‘wavy fair hair'—and, of course, the symbol in the Middle Ages for a harlot was uncoiffed, flowing golden hair. Combine that with the story of a woman drying Christ's feet with her hair and there you are—a damning convergence.”

“Well! So you're saying that the original, living Magdalene—assuming her to have, indeed, once lived—was a dark-eyed, dark-haired, modest Semitic girl of untarnished reputation and some consequence?”

He smiled and shook his head. “Won't quite do, either. I think the lady was a firebrand,” he said, “whatever her appearance. In the male-dominated society of the day—and even Christ speaks dismissively of his own mother at times—Magdalene stands out. She was intelligent, determined, and resourceful. Praise is not exactly heaped on her by the men who wrote the Gospels—you wouldn't expect it in that society—but anyone can deduce her quality purely from her behaviour and her reported words. And if her critics, some might say her enemies, who recorded events weren't able to conceal her abilities, she must have been a remarkable woman. I've always been intrigued by her.”

“She does shine through,” said Letty slowly, “though never in the fire-and-brimstone sermons your profession delivers from the pulpit. Have you ever heard a vicar preach about her courage—the way she stood at the foot of the Cross with Mary and John when everyone else had run away? That's the bit that always impressed me. What about all those tough fishermen? Where were they? In hiding. And who was first on the scene at the tomb? Who rousted out the disciples and opened their eyes to the significance of what was happening? Magdalene.”

He gave Letty a glance, a glance in which surprise was mingled with calculation. “There are those who would say, particularly amongst
German
Bible scholars—and with very good evidence at their disposal—that Magdalene was more influential than Peter himself. That she was the Apostle of Apostles.”

“William, where on earth do you come by your information?” She looked at him doubtfully, and as he made no reply she turned her attention again to the fresco. “That's an astonishing claim.” She stared with fresh eyes at the portrait. “And yet I have a feeling that whoever was responsible for this picture might well have agreed with you…I know what's different about this one! Sorry! I've been a bit slow on the uptake, William. Let's sit down for a moment…ease your leg a bit—and my back. Give me a chance to absorb all this.”

“So you've seen it at last?”

“Yes. In all the other portraits, she's shown on her knees, looking upwards and sideways to the heavens with a beseeching look on her face. Like this…” She affected a pious pose. “But not here. Here, she's looking straight at the camera, you could say. Is that a challenge or a question in her expression? It's disconcerting, anyway. William! That's what Daniel saw! He saw a girl who, whatever else she may be, is quite definitely
not
a saint. A girl with all the conscious seduction of a Botticelli girl—an Aphrodite, a Persephone…a goddess, anyway, with the power to do good or evil at her whim.”

“Anything else you notice?”

“You really want me to plod on? Very well…The countryside. The scenery. It's here. It's Burgundy. But you'd expect that. The artist was probably home-bred and familiar with no other. But it's very precise, isn't it? It's not an idealised picture of Arcady. The outline of those hills on either side of her…that abrupt slope over there…the way that wooded valley curves down…is that a spring leaping from her right forefinger? I think it is. And those sheaves of corn at her feet? It's an actual scene familiar to some medieval artist. He's claiming her. Planting her firmly in the soil of Burgundy.”

“I think so, too. I was so intrigued by the artist's view of the horizon I made a copy of it.” He searched in his pocket and handed her a folded sheet of paper. “Over the centuries, forests and fields change their shape, encroach on each other's territory, but I'd say the range of hills we see here has stayed more or less the same over the centuries.”

“May I keep this?”

“Of course. Perhaps one day in a far corner of the county you'll look up and see this very formation. My new friend the parish priest tells me Provence doesn't have exclusive rights to this saint. There have always been folktales which stress that her body was carried north from Provence and buried here in Burgundy.”

“Perhaps here? In Fontigny Sainte-Reine,” murmured Letty. “I had assumed the Holy Queen title referred to Mary the mother of Christ, but it could, I suppose, be honouring the Magdalene?”