The Mistletoe Bride & Other Haunting Tales Read online

  On the counter, she noticed a round wooden board containing chèvre, a generous wedge of cantal, thick slabs of cured mountain ham and tomatoes. Next to it was a wicker basket of bread. She picked up a piece, then pulled off a corner and ate it. Fresh, pain du matin rather than yesterday’s stale baguette. As if someone had known she was coming.

  Claire looked at her watch and found it had stopped. She tapped the face, but the hands were stuck at ten past eleven, about the time she’d arrived in Montségur. She hesitated, then, like Goldilocks, she took the food and went back into the dining room. No doubt the owner had simply nipped out to run some errand or another. She would settle with him when he came back.

  She sat down at the table closest to the window. She could see her hire car, a layer of snow already covering the windscreen. Even if she decided not to go through with things, she had no choice but to stay in the village for the time being at least. She had no snow chains and no snow tyres.

  Claire helped herself to a glass of red wine from a demi-carafe on the table, amazed to realise she was properly hungry, hungry for the first time in three years. Normal sensations, feelings, were coming back. She smiled. It seemed appropriate that here, at the top of the world, at the end of the world, her emotions should be thawing and coming back to life. She felt she had come home.

  She must have dozed, though she had no memory of laying her head down on her arms at the table. She woke with a start, not sure who or what had disturbed her, only that something had.

  For a moment, she felt calm. Then, the familiar weight on her chest once more as grief tapped her on the shoulder. Today, though, there was a sense of purpose too as she remembered where she was and why.

  A red letter day, yes.

  Claire stood up. The fire had burnt a little lower, her glass and plate were empty and the light was different. When she looked out, she saw the weather had cleared. The snow, sleet and mist had gone and now white clouds were scudding across a piercingly blue sky.

  Claire was keen to be gone now, before she lost her nerve. She was surprised the owner still hadn’t come back, but she left a twenty euro note on the table to cover her meal, then emptied the rest of the contents of her purse on the table. She had no more need of money and she wanted them to know – whoever they were – how much she appreciated their hospitality. That even in their absence, she had been made to feel welcome.

  She hurried down the stairs and out into the cold, exhilarating air. Although still deserted, the streets were brighter and a pale sun cast shadows on the ground. Beyond the village, now Claire could see the citadel itself, high above the road, a grey castle set against the Pyrenean blue. She walked steadily, leaving the village behind her. Once or twice she thought she heard whispering, women’s voices carried on the wind, but each time she turned, there was no one there.

  She paused, breathless, at the foot of the mountain, to gather her strength for the climb. According to her guidebook the summit was nearly four thousand feet above sea level, so she would need to take it steadily and slowly. After all, there was no need to rush. Not now.

  Claire slowly approached the Cathar memorial on the Prats dels Cremats, the Field of the Burned, which marked the place where the hundreds of Cathars had walked into the flames. The stone monument, a small stèle, was less imposing than she’d expected. There was nothing defiant about it, rather a humble and modest memorial of haunting beauty. Small tributes had been laid at the foot of the column. Flowers, scraps of poetry, ribbons, personal offerings left by those who had been here before her. A pair of tiny knitted blue boots for a baby.

  Claire crouched down and picked them up. Blue for a boy. She wished she had thought to bring something of sentimental value to mark her passing. A photograph, perhaps. Too late now.

  Resisting an urge to cross herself – she knew Cathars rejected such gestures – Claire stood up. Here, she felt the presence of the past all around her, benign ghosts who understood her purpose and had come to keep her company on her journey. In her mind’s eye, she could see images of the women who had stood here before her, who had lived and loved and died in the protective embrace of the mountain.

  She followed the path over the grass, then into the woods at the bottom of the mountain, climbing up through the box and evergreen, following a narrow track covered in ice and fallen leaves and the last vestiges of winter. Everything was silent, quiet.

  Peaceful.

  As the path turned a hairpin, Claire suddenly was out in the open, above the tree line. Now, she could see the road far below, snaking through the winter landscape, and ahead, the great white wall of the Pyrenees that divided France from Spain.

  The higher she climbed, the more history came rushing back and pushed out her own, small memories. Claire imagined how those medieval pilgrims might have felt looking down from the citadel after ten months of siege to see the standards and banners of the Catholic Church and the fleur-de-lis of the French King flying below. In the castle, a hundred defenders. In the valley, between six and ten thousand men. An unequal fight. She thought of the mothers and fathers choosing to die in their faith, surrendering their children to be cared for by others before walking into the flames.

  Higher into the clearer air, leaving the world far behind. Now Claire could picture the enemy mercenaries scaling the vertiginous slope on the south-eastern side of the mountain, attempting to take possession of the Roc de la Tour, a spike of stone rising up on the easternmost point of the summit ridge. Catapult and mangonel, an endless bombardment. For those trapped in the citadel, the relentless noise of the missiles must have broken their spirit as surely as they battered the castle walls.

  Higher still and higher, up through the clouds.

  Claire was only a few dozen yards from the main entrance. Her breath tore in her chest and her red duffel coat felt cumbersome, but she kept going, head down, until finally she reached the Great Gate.

  Having planned this journey for so long, now she was finally here, she was suddenly reluctant to break the spell and enter. She needed to savour the moment. She feared the voices would be too strong. Or, perhaps worse, that she would not hear them at all. She took one last look out across the Ariège spread out below her, a patchwork of bare fields and evergreen firs, and then she stepped through the low, wide arch and into the ruins of the castle.

  It was all much smaller and more confined than she’d expected, longer and thinner too. There was no beauty here, no mystery, just an empty shell of stone and rock. Claire stood in the uninhabited space. She had hoped to feel an immediate sense of homecoming, proof that she had made the right decision, but she felt nothing. An absence of emotion, neither good nor bad. And though she’d passed no one on the path going up or coming down, she was nonetheless surprised to find herself alone. She had thought the anniversary of the fall of Montségur might have drawn others, pilgrims like her, in search of the spirit of the past.

  Claire looked around to get her bearings. Immediately opposite the Great Gate was another smaller arch, more like a door than a gate, which hundreds of years ago she knew had led down to the medieval village. Slowly, she began to walk around, examining the walls as if she could see pictures in the rocks. She went first to the western tip, where the main hall had been, peering, looking for significance, for meaning, in the stone and finding none. She persisted, walking now along the northern wall until she came to a crumbling staircase that had clearly once linked the lower to the upper floors of the keep. When she tilted her head and looked up, she could see the holes in the rock walls where perhaps the joists had rested.

  Only then did Claire see she was not, in fact, the only visitor.

  Someone was standing on the very top of the outer wall of the citadel, looking out over the valley. It was hard to be certain, but it looked like a woman. She narrowed her eyes. A woman with black hair in a long red coat that reached almost to the ground.

  Claire took a step closer, wondering how she’d failed to notice her before and how she had managed t
o get up to that section of the wall. There were so many broken steps. The lower flight presented no problems, but then it simply stopped. It was as if two different workmen, one starting at the top, one at the bottom, had failed to meet. She wanted to call out, but it seemed intrusive and she didn’t want to startle her fellow pilgrim. Even from this distance, Claire could see the top of the wall was narrow and it would be icy.

  At the same time, she felt a fierce need to talk to her. She stepped up to the wall and ran her fingers over the handholds, looking for gaps in the stone, testing her weight. The woman’s outline was clearer now, silhouetted against the cold, bright sky. She was about the same height and build as Claire, although her clothes were oddly old-fashioned. A moss-green dress hung beneath the hem of the red cloak, not a coat at all. She had now pulled the hood over her head, obscuring her face. Even so, there was something familiar about her stillness, her patience, as if she was keeping vigil high on the ancient walls. As if she was waiting for something or someone.

  Claire began to climb.

  She thought she could hear singing. The harsh sound of male voices this time, not the sweeter tones of women.

  Veni, veni.

  Claire pushed her fingers into crevices, forced her unwieldy boots into cracks in the rock, and pulled herself up. She did not fall.

  Luck, determination, something carried her over the gap that yawned between the lower and upper levels, until, finally, she too was standing on the wall.

  Claire took a step towards the woman.

  ‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I’ve come.’

  The woman was standing on the very edge of the wall, even though she didn’t seem to have moved. The edge of her dress skimmed the frosted ground. Claire sensed, rather than saw, she was smiling.

  ‘At last,’ the woman murmured as she stretched out a thin, white hand. ‘A la perfin.’

  Claire took it. Together, they stepped out into the sky.

  As they fell, the woman’s hood fell back from her face. Claire smiled at the sight of familiar features looking back at her. Was it her ancestor, long dead or, rather, her old self, eyes bright and singing with hope, the person she had been before grief took the life from her?

  Claire was home. No more past or future now, only an everlasting present.

  The hire car was found a few days later, half buried in the snow. No one understood how she’d managed to reach the village in the first place. The blizzard had been one of the most sudden and the worst in living memory, shutting all roads in and out of the village from late on the evening of 15th March until early on the 19th.

  Claire’s body was never found, though they searched for weeks. After all, she had no further need of it.

  Her diary, however, was discovered beneath a table in a local restaurant, lying open on the page for Friday 16th March. Since the owner and his wife had been away all winter, no one could explain how it came to be there. Not a suicide note, but the signs were all there. The unexplained death of her baby son in his cot: the not-knowing-why and the loss. The guilt. It was a grief that would never leave her, a loneliness that would never let go.

  There were only two words written on the page – MONS SALVATIONIS – but the date was ringed in red.

  Author’s Note

  In 1989, we bought a tiny house in the shadow of the medieval city walls of Carcassonne in the south-west of France, a region known as the Languedoc. The area is the inspiration for my trilogy of novels – Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel – as well as various stories and essays.

  This is one of the earliest stories I published. Written during 2003, the inspiration was my first visit to Montségur in the Pyrenees in the 1990s. My husband, two-year-old daughter and I left Carcassonne in a blaze of spring sunshine, yet found ourselves in the mountains in the grip of a blizzard.

  We found a seemingly deserted restaurant, though there was a burning fire and food laid out on tables. In real life, of course, the owner had popped out and came back soon enough, but for some time we were the only people there.

  In a story, things are different . . .

  The title comes from the practice of illuminating manucripts where significant or important days are picked out in red, known as rubrics. The first Council of Nicaea in 325 CE decreed which were to be Saints’ Days, Feasts and other Holy Days, which came to be printed on medieval church calendars in red. The term – a ‘red letter day’ – came into wider usage with the publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, in which the calendar showed special holy days illustrated in red ink.

  The story was first published in an anthology called Little Black Dress edited by Susie Maguire.

  THE DROWNED VILLAGE

  The Quibéron Peninsula, Brittany

  November 1912

  The Drowned Village

  The sea has many voices,

  Many gods and many voices

  from ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets

  T. S. ELIOT

  It was mid-November. Autumn was already stripping the trees, though winter had not taken a grip on the land. Farms and market gardens were still laden with fruit and vegetables. The seas were calm enough for even the most careful fisherman to put out on the tide.

  In school it was the week allotted for the award of scholarships. Only once or twice in living memory had a child from the Three Villages gained a bursary to go and study at the secondary school in the city nearly twenty miles away.

  Gaston made his way to the front of the hall. The teachers lined each wall, all eyes upon him, as he climbed the three steps onto the stage. Choked by nerves, he could barely raise his head.

  The headteacher spoke. ‘This day, the twenty-second of November 1912, is a very proud day for the Three Villages and our school.’

  There was an immediate round of applause. It was Mme Martin who began it, Gaston was sure. She was his favourite teacher, strict without being unkind, keen on nature and science though she taught literature, considered and fair.

  The headteacher held up his hands for quiet.

  ‘Gaston, I believe you have something to say.’

  Gaston looked round at the sea of faces. Children from the age of four up to his own classmates, eleven years old, at the top of the school. With the teachers, about sixty people waiting for him to say something important. He hesitated. All he could think about was his clothes – the shabby trousers with the let-down hems and his father’s patched summer jacket, far too big but the only garment his mother said would do for a day such as this.

  Then, at the back of the hall, there was a commotion. All heads turned and, to his mortification, Gaston saw his mother and father tottering in and trying to slip into the back row of chairs. His mother was trying to put on powder even though she had her arm threaded through her husband’s, and her headscarf was crooked. They were both flushed, eyes a little too bright, in the way Gaston recognised and hated.

  He could think of nothing to say.

  Mme Martin firmly turned back to the stage and raised her hand. ‘We are all very proud of you, Gaston.’

  Gaston gave a small smile. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered.

  She quickly moved to help get Gaston’s parents seated. Silence surged through the hall. To Gaston each second lasted for ever, but though they fussed and were clumsy, finally they were seated and looking at the stage too.

  ‘Gaston,’ said the headteacher. ‘You have something to say?’

  Gaston remembered the piece of paper – Mme Martin had suggested he should write something down rather than rely on memory – and quickly pulled it from the pocket of his hand-me-down trousers.

  ‘I am very grateful to everyone. My teachers helped me to study and, because of that, I was able to win this scholarship. I will do my best to make everyone in the Three Villages proud.’

  He bit his bottom lip, folded the piece of paper and twisted it in his fingers.

  ‘Well done,’ said the headteacher, leading the round of applause.

  Gaston returned
to his seat, trying not to catch his mother’s eye. There were more prizes for each of the classes and a special gift for Mme Denis who was going to live with her sister in Quibéron.

  When the ceremony was over, everyone lingered in the hall and Gaston had to endure the adults coming to congratulate him. He never knew what to say, so he smiled and nodded and mouthed thank you over and again. The men shook his hand or clapped him on the back. The women hugged him and said how he was growing.

  Finally, he realised that the only people he hadn’t seen were his own parents.

  ‘They left,’ said Régis. ‘They asked Maman if you could come home with me. Said they’d fetch you later.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Gaston wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved. It was nothing new, but he thought today might be different.

  ‘Oh,’ he said again. ‘All right.’

  The journey to Régis’s farm took a little over an hour in an old-fashioned trap pulled by two farm horses.

  The boys sat on the second bench, behind Régis’s parents. Monsieur and Mme Hélias were talking in low voices and the hooves of the horses and the clinker rattled loud in the crisp November air. Even so, Gaston caught some of the conversation, fragments about a ceremony due to take place tomorrow in which Régis’s father, he gathered, had an important part to play.

  He glanced at Régis.

  ‘The Feast of St Colomban,’ Régis whispered.

  Gaston hadn’t heard of it, but he nodded all the same. ‘Are you going?’

  ‘Not until I’m fourteen, though Papa says I can help with the bonfire tomorrow night.’

  ‘Régis,’ his father said sharply. ‘Enough.’