59

Ben set off across country. Starting out from the western edge of the village he discovered a winding route down the hillside. With stones and loose dirt sliding under his feet he scrambled downwards. Sometimes the bone-dry ground gave way under him and he slipped a few metres, struggling to keep his balance. By the time he reached the tree line a hundred metres below, the going was firmer and branches offered a handhold down the last of the slope. The trees were sparse at first, but as the ground levelled out they became a dense forest.

He picked a leafy path between the tightly clustered conifers, oaks and beeches. The birds were singing in the trees above him and the milky rays of the autumn sun flickered through the green and gold foliage. For the first time in days he was almost able to clear his mind of troubled thoughts. Though he missed her badly, it was a relief to know that Roberta was safely out of the way. Whatever happened, she’d be all right.

Beyond the wooded valley the ground began to rise again. A kilometre away across a rocky plateau, an escarpment sloped dramatically upwards to a high ridge. He saw that his route was going to take him straight over the top of it. He walked on steadily through the rocks, ignoring the thorny shrubs that caught at his ankles. The jagged ridge loomed closer.

Far away, Franco Bozza was watching the tiny figure of his quarry through powerful binoculars. He’d followed Ben Hope all the way from Palavas, staying carefully out of sight. He’d watched him scramble down the hillside away from Rennes-le-Château and cut a straight path across country. He obviously knew where he was heading. Whatever the Englishman was looking for, he would find it too. This time, he wasn’t going to let him get away.

Bozza had stalked in a semicircle around Ben’s flank. A goat path through a copse of trees shielded him from sight. Keeping low through the increasingly rocky terrain, stopping from time to time to check the progress of the small faraway figure, he’d worked his way right round and now he was high above Ben, near the escarpment’s summit. Behind him, where the ground sloped away far below into a green valley, was a house in the distance.

The rock face soared up to a flat ledge, like a shallow plateau, and then rose up again to the summit. To the right, the hillside plunged dramatically away down some 300 metres into a deep valley thick with trees. Ben began the long climb. After half an hour or so he reached the first level, some ten metres across. A jutting shelf of grey rock overhung the cliff face to create a shallow cave. He stopped and rested for a few minutes, squinting up at the slope that he still had to climb.

Above him, Bozza crawled out a little further across the big rock. From this vantage point he had a good view of the Englishman through his binoculars. The wide, flat rock hung out over the edge of a steep slope. It felt stable enough under his weight, and it was secure enough to have stayed where it was for a thousand years. But Bozza was a heavy man and the further he moved towards the edge, the more strain he was putting on the rock’s balance.

By the time he knew it was beginning to slide, it was already too late to do anything about it.

Bozza rode the falling rock flat on his belly for the first few metres of the drop. It plunged over the edge and smashed into a cluster of smaller boulders and sent them spinning down with it. Bozza was thrown clear and went rolling and tumbling down thirty metres. He clawed frantically for a handhold but everything was sliding with him. The landslide gathered momentum, carrying away a slice of the hillside.

Ben could see the dust from a hundred tumbling rocks from where he was standing looking up at the rest of his climb. His blood froze. It was coming straight towards him. He dived under the shelf just as the spinning rocks reached the ledge. They hammered down all around and tore most of the ground away. He shielded his face from the loose earth and dust that poured down in a choking curtain. Suddenly the ground was giving way under his feet. He reached out in desperation and grasped the edge of the shelf above him. He hung there, praying it wouldn’t break away and crush him. A large jagged stone bounced off the cliff face and struck him on the shoulder, tearing his grasp away from the hanging rock. He slid and rolled a long way down the slope, boulders and dirt crashing all around him. A white flash of pain jolted through him as his body hit a protruding tree root. Somehow he managed to get a hold on it as the landslide battered him on its way past. The root held. The violence of the slide diminished, and then it was over.

The air was thick with dust. He spluttered and coughed, his mouth and throat full of it. He managed to find a secure footing, and slowly he let his weight onto his feet, testing the fragile slope. He gave the tree root a grateful pat and made his way cautiously back up the escarpment, heading for solid ground.

Bozza had come to a stunned, bloody stop among the rocks. His fingertips were raw from where he’d been scrabbling for a hold. He picked himself shakily up off the ground and looked around him at the debris from the landslide. He’d slid and tumbled a long way. Another couple of metres and he would have plunged straight over the edge of a sheer drop down the face of the escarpment and into the steeply sloping wooded valley below.

He heard a noise and spun around to see Ben Hope standing ten metres away.

Bozza didn’t have time to reach for his gun. Ben’s sights descended squarely, deliberately on the man’s chest and the Browning barked twice in rapid succession.

The flat reports hammered through the silence of the mountain air. Bozza’s body jerked back like a shaken doll. For a moment he teetered on the edge of the precipice, his arms outflung as he struggled to keep his balance. Ben watched him coldly and then fired again. Bozza clutched at his chest, and with a last wild look of hatred he disappeared over the edge and was gone.

It was another hour before Ben found his way down to the tree-dotted valley beyond the hill. He sat down on a mossy fallen trunk and caught his breath. He could have done with a pair of decent army boots. His lightweight shoes were just about wrecked. His feet were painfully raw inside.

This can’t be the place, he thought to himself, looking across the valley. And yet, according to the map and the compass, it had to be. There was nothing else anywhere, just more of the same wild landscape.

What he was looking at was a white house that nestled in the trees a few hundred metres away on the other side of the valley. It was tucked in close to the foot of a high, looming mountain. He sighed. He hadn’t known what he was going to find–maybe a ruin, even a stone circle or something. But this trim, white modern villa was the last thing he’d been expecting to come across at the site of the ‘House of the Raven’.

It was a radical design, boxy, flat-roofed and very unlike the usual stone houses of rural Languedoc. It looked as though it had been built sometime in the last few years. Yet it seemed to blend into its wild natural surroundings with almost magical ease, as though it had been there for centuries.

He approached the walled gateway and was gazing up at the house when a voice called out, ‘Hello? Is there anyone there?’ A woman was walking towards him across a pretty, well-kept garden. She was tall, thin, upright, maybe in her mid-to-late fifties. But the main things Ben noticed about her were the dark glasses and the white stick she used to probe the way ahead. She stepped carefully down the path to the gate. She smiled, looking somewhere over Ben’s shoulder.

‘I was just admiring your beautiful house,’ Ben said to the blind woman.

Her smile broadened. ‘Ah, so you’re interested in architecture?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Ben replied. ‘But I also wondered if I could trouble you for a glass of water? I’ve just come over the mountain and I’m pretty thirsty…would you mind?’

‘Of course not. You must come inside,’ the woman said, and turned towards the house. ‘Follow me-watch the latch on the gate, it’s stiff.’

He followed the blind woman up the flagstone path to the villa. She led him through a large hallway into a modern kitchen, and tapped her way to the fridge. She took out a bottle of mineral water. ‘There are glasses in the cupboard. Please, help yourself.’ She sat with him at the table, a benign expression on her face as she listened to him drink two tall glasses of water.

‘You’re very kind,’ he said. ‘I’ve walked all the way from Rennes-le-Château. I was looking for the House of the Raven.’

‘You’ve found it,’ she said simply, shrugging. ‘This is the House of the Raven.’

‘This?’ But it couldn’t be. This place was modern. How could it crop up on an eighty-year-old alchemical manuscript? ‘Perhaps I’m in the wrong place,’ he said. ‘The house I was looking for is old.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Was this house built on the site of an earlier building?’

She laughed. ‘No, this is the original house. It’s much older than it looks. It was built in 1925. It gets its name from its architect.’

‘Who was the architect?’

‘His real name was Charles Jeanneret, but he was better known as Le Corbusier. His nickname was Corbu.’

‘House of the Raven,’ Ben repeated, nodding. Corbu–the French corbeau meaning a raven. So despite its ultramodern, almost futuristic appearance, the place dated from more or less the period of Fulcanelli’s manuscript.

‘Why were you looking for the house?’ she asked curiously.

He instinctively fell back on his well-tested ploy. ‘I was doing some historical research. It’s mentioned in some old documents, and as I was in the area I thought I’d come and visit.’

‘Would you like to see round the place?’ she asked. ‘My eyes failed me some years ago, but in my mind I can see it as clearly as ever.’

She showed him around from room to room, tapping her stick and pointing out this feature and that. In the main sitting-room was a tall and elaborately carved oak fireplace. Its ornate style was completely at odds with the sparse, straight-lined, almost ascetic design of the rest of the house. Ben stared at it. It wasn’t its craftsmanship and beauty that drew his eye, impressive as they were. He was staring at the carving above the mantelpiece, which dominated the whole fireplace.

It was a raven carved on a circular emblem, just like the one in Fulcanelli’s manuscript and Notre Dame cathedral. He ran his eye along the carving, its bladelike feathers, curved talons and cruel beak. Its eye was a glittering ruby-red glass inset that seemed to stare back at him.

‘Is this an original feature?’ he asked. ‘The fireplace, I mean,’ he added, remembering she was blind.

‘Oh yes. It was carved by Corbu personally. In fact he began his career studying carving and jewellery-making before he became an architect.’

Below the raven, the Latin words HIC DOMUS were carved in gold-lettered gothic script. ‘Hic… here,’ Ben translated under his breath. ‘Here the house…this is the house…This is the House of the Raven…’

But where was this leading? Why had Fulcanelli put the house on the map? There had to be a reason. There must be something here. What?

As he searched his mind for some kind of connection, he gazed around the room. His eye lit on a painting hanging on the opposite wall. It showed an old man dressed in what looked like medieval garb. In one hand the man clutched a large key. In the other he held up a circular shield, or perhaps a plate, that was oddly blank as though the artist had never completed the painting. The old man was smiling mysteriously.

‘You never told me your name, monsieur,’ said the blind woman.

He told her.

‘You are English? It was nice to meet you, Ben. My name is Antonia.’ She paused. ‘I’m afraid I will have to ask you to leave now. I am going to visit my son in Nice for a couple of days. The taxi will be arriving soon.’

‘Thanks for the tour.’ He bit his lip, trying to hide the frustration in his voice.

Antonia smiled up at him. ‘I’m glad you found the place. And I hope you will find what you are seeking, Ben.’