‘There are,’ the Cardinal said, ‘there are, but how do I know you will not escape, Gaspard? You are an ingenious man. Give you a large window and I might give you the world. No, dear boy, if you can produce work like this’ – he held up the crucifix – ‘then you need no more light.’ He smiled. ‘You are so very clever.’
Gaspard was indeed clever. He had been a goldsmith’s apprentice in one of the small shops on the Quai des Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité in Paris where the Cardinal had his mansion. The Cardinal had always appreciated the goldsmiths: he haunted their shops, patronized them and purchased their best pieces, and many of those pieces had been made by this thin, nervous apprentice who had then knifed a fellow apprentice to death in a sordid tavern brawl and been condemned to the gallows. The Cardinal had rescued him, brought him to the tower and promised him life.
But first Gaspard must work the miracle. Only then could he be released. That was the promise, though the Cardinal was quite sure that Gaspard would never leave this cellar unless it was to use the big furnace in the yard. Gaspard, though he did not know it, was already at the gates of hell. The Cardinal made the sign of the cross, then put the crucifix on a table. ‘So show me,’ he ordered Gaspard.
Gaspard went to his big work table where an object was shrouded in a cloth of bleached linen. ‘It is only wax now, your eminence,’ he explained, lifting the linen away, ‘and I don’t know if it’s even possible to turn it into gold.’
‘It can be touched?’ the Cardinal asked.
‘Carefully,’ Gaspard warned. ‘It’s purified beeswax and quite delicate.’
The Cardinal lifted the grey-white wax, which felt oily to his touch, and he carried it to one of the three small windows that let in the shadowed daylight and there he stood in awe.
Gaspard had made a cup of wax. It had taken him weeks of work. The cup itself was just big enough to hold an apple, while the stem was only six inches long. That stem was modelled as the trunk of a tree and the cup’s foot was made from the tree’s three roots that spread from the bole. The tree’s branches divided into filigree work that formed the lacy bowl of the cup, and the filigree was astonishingly detailed with tiny leaves and small apples and, at the rim, three delicate nails. ‘It is beautiful,’ the Cardinal said.
‘The three roots, your eminence, are the Trinity,’ Gaspard explained.
‘I had surmised as much.’
‘And the tree is the tree of life.’
‘Which is why it has apples,’ the Cardinal said.
‘And the nails reveal that it will be the tree from which our Lord’s cross was made,’ Gaspard finished his explanation.
‘That had not escaped me,’ the Cardinal observed. He carried the beautiful wax cup back to the table and set it down carefully. ‘Where is the glass?’
‘Here, your eminence.’ Gaspard opened a box and took out a cup that he offered to the Cardinal. The cup was made of thick, greenish glass that looked very ancient, for in parts the cup was smoky and elsewhere there were tiny bubbles trapped in the pale translucent material. The Cardinal suspected it was Roman. He was not sure of that, but it looked very old and just a little crude, and that was surely right. The cup from which Christ had drunk his last wine would probably be more fit for a peasant’s table than for a noble’s feast. The Cardinal had discovered the cup in a Paris shop and had purchased it for a few copper coins and he had instructed Gaspard to take off the ill-shapen foot of the glass which the prisoner had done so skilfully that the Cardinal could not even see that there had once been a stem. Now, very gingerly, he put the glass cup into the filigree wax bowl. Gaspard held his breath, fearing that the Cardinal would break one of the delicate leaves, but the cup settled gently and fitted perfectly.
The Grail. The Cardinal gazed at the glass cup, imagining it cradled in a delicate lacework of fine gold and standing on an altar lit by tall white candles. There would be a choir of boys singing and scented incense burning. There would be kings and emperors, princes and dukes, earls and knights kneeling to it.
Louis Bessières, Cardinal Archbishop of Livorno, wanted the Grail and, some months before, he had heard a rumour from southern France, from the land of burned heretics, that the Grail existed. Two sons of the Vexille family, one a Frenchman and the other an English archer, sought that Grail as the Cardinal did, but no one, the Cardinal thought, wanted the Grail as much as he did. Or deserved it as he did. If he found the relic then he would command such awesome power that kings and Pope would come to him for blessing and when Clement, the present Pope, died, then Louis Bessières would take his throne and keys – if only he possessed the Grail. Louis Bessières wanted the Grail, but one day, staring unseeing at the stained glass in his private chapel, he had experienced a revelation. The Grail itself was not necessary. Perhaps it existed, probably it did not, but all that mattered was that Christendom believed that it existed. They wanted a Grail. Any Grail, so long as they were convinced it was the true and holy, one and only Grail, and that was why Gaspard was in this cellar, and why Gaspard would die, for no one but the Cardinal and his brother must ever know what was being made in the lonely tower among the windswept trees above Melun. ‘And now,’ the Cardinal said, carefully lifting the green glass from its wax bed, ‘you must make the common wax into heavenly gold.’
‘It will be hard, your eminence.’
‘Of course it will be hard,’ the Cardinal said, ‘but I shall pray for you. And your freedom depends on your success.’ The Cardinal saw the doubt on Gaspard’s face. ‘You made the crucifix,’ he said, picking up the beautiful gold object, ‘so why can you not make the cup?’
‘It is so delicate,’ Gaspard said, ‘and if I pour the gold and it does not melt the wax then all the work will be wasted.’
‘Then you will start again,’ the Cardinal said, ‘and by experience and with the help of God you will discover the way of truth.’
‘It has never been done,’ Gaspard said, ‘not with anything so delicate.’
‘Show me how,’ the Cardinal ordered and Gaspard explained how he would paint the wax cup with the noxious brown paste that had repelled the Cardinal. That paste was made from water, burned ox-horn that had been pounded to powder and cow dung, and the dried layers of the paste would encase the wax and the whole would then be entombed in soft clay, which had to be gently pressed into place to cradle the wax, but not distort it. Narrow tunnels would run through the clay from the outside to the entombed wax, and then Gaspard would take the shapeless clay lump to the furnace in the yard where he would bake the clay and the beeswax inside would melt and run out through the tunnels and, if he did it well, he would be left with a hard clay mass within which was concealed a delicate cavity in the shape of the tree of life.
‘And the cow dung?’ the Cardinal asked. He was genuinely fascinated. All beautiful things intrigued him, perhaps because in his youth he had been denied them.
‘The dung bakes hard,’ Gaspard said. ‘It makes a hard shell around the cavity.’ He smiled at the sullen girl. ‘Yvette mixes it for me,’ he explained. ‘The layer closest to the wax is very fine, the outer layers are coarser.’
‘So the dung mixture forms the hard surface of the mould?’ the Cardinal asked.
‘Exactly.’ Gaspard was pleased that his patron and saviour understood.
Then, when the clay was cold, Gaspard would pour molten gold into the cavity and he must hope that the liquid fire would fill every last cranny, every tiny leaf and apple and nail, and every delicately modelled ridge of bark. And when the gold had cooled and become firm the clay would be broken away to reveal either a grail-holder that would dazzle Christendom or else a mess of misshapen gold squiggles. ‘It will probably have to be done in separate pieces,’ Gaspard said nervously.
‘You will try with this one,’ the Cardinal ordered, draping the linen cloth back over the wax cup, ‘and if it fails you will make another and try again, and then again, and when it works, Gaspard,