Timeline - Michael Crichton [47]
Beneath her, she heard a young girl say, “Another castle. Why do we have to go to all these stupid castles, Mom?”
The mother said, “Because Daddy is interested.”
“But they’re all the same, Mom.”
“I know, dear. . ..”
The father, a short distance away, was standing inside low walls that outlined a former room. “And this,” he announced to his family, “was the great hall.”
Looking down, Kate saw at once that it wasn’t. The man was standing inside the remains of the kitchen. It was obvious from the three ovens still visible in the wall to the left. And the stone sluice that had brought water could be seen just behind the man as he spoke.
“What happened in the great hall?” his daughter asked.
“This is where they held their banquets, and where visiting knights paid homage to the king.”
Kate sighed. There was no evidence a king had ever been to La Roque. On the contrary, documents indicated that it had always been a private castle, built in the eleventh century by someone named Armand de Cléry, and later heavily rebuilt early in the fourteenth century, with another ring of outer walls, and additional drawbridges. That added work was done by a knight named François le Gros, or Francis the Fat, around 1302.
Despite his name, François was an English knight, and he built La Roque in the new English style of castles, established by Edward I. The Edwardian castles were large, with spacious inner courtyards and pleasant quarters for the lord. This suited François, who by all accounts had an artistic temperament, a lazy disposition, and a propensity for money troubles. François was forced to mortgage his castle, and later to sell it outright. During the Hundred Years War, La Roque was controlled by a succession of knights. But the fortifications held: the castle was never captured in battle, only in commercial transactions.
As for the great hall, she saw it was off to the left, badly ruined, but clearly indicating the outlines of a much larger room, almost a hundred feet long. The monumental fireplace—nine feet high and twelve feet wide—was still visible. Kate knew that any great hall of this size would have had stone walls and a timber roof. And yes, as she looked, she saw notches in the stone high up, to hold the big horizontal timbers. Then there would have been cross-bracing above that, to support the roof.
A British tour group squeezed past her on the narrow ramparts. She heard the guide say, “These ramparts were built by Sir Francis the Bad in 1363. Francis was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. He liked to torture men and women, and even children, in his vast dungeons. Now if you look to the left, you will see Lover’s Leap, where Madame de Renaud fell to her death in 1292, disgraced because she was pregnant by her husband’s stable boy. But it is disputed whether she fell or was pushed by her outraged spouse. . ..”
Kate sighed. Where did they come up with this stuff? She turned to her sketchbook notes, where she was recording the outlines of the walls. This castle, too, had its secret passages. But Francis the Fat was a skilled architect. His passages were mostly for defense. One passage ran from the ramparts down behind the far wall of the great hall, past the rear of the fireplace. Another passage followed the battlements on the south ramparts.
But the most important passage still eluded her. According to the fourteenth-century writer Froissart, the castle of La Roque had never been taken by siege because its attackers could never find the secret passage that permitted food and water to be brought to the castle. It was rumored that this secret passage was linked to the network of caves in the limestone rock below the castle; also that it ran some distance, ending in a concealed opening in the cliffs.
Somewhere.
The easiest way to find it now would be to locate where it ended inside the