Dear Reader
The medieval Cité of Carcassonne sits on a small hill alongside the river Aude. This extraordinary fortress was at the heart of my novel Labyrinth. But cross over the Pont Vieux, with its vaults of ancient stones, and you enter the 19th century bastide of six-storey houses. And it was here that I discovered the themes and plotlines that came together in my new timeslip adventure Sepulchre.
At the top of the 19th century town – as charming and as intriguing as a story by Henry James – there’s a canal, serene and picturesque. Yet it was here that, in my imagination, I first saw a boatman pull a well-dressed woman’s body from the sluggish water. And beyond the canal is the railway station. On these platforms I imagined my heroes – Léonie and her brother Anatole – arrive hot and bothered but happy from Paris, then later flee in despair.
Paris was crucial, of course, its esoteric salons and dabbling with the occult. Léonie lived in the flat above Claude Debussy. She walked with her mother in the Parc Monceau and was caught up in an anti-Wagner riot at the Opéra. But I also needed a contemporary heroine to investigate the tragedy of 1891, a woman with sufficient bravery and determination to lead me to the heart of the mystery. I first met her in Paris, like a ghost out of the corner or my eye – an American author and critic, Meredith Martin, researching an autobiography of Léonie’s neighbour Debussy.
But the heart of the Sepulchre story takes place further south and can be glimpsed from the gothic St-Vincent cemetery set on the hill above the railway station in Carcassonne. From a vantage point between the ornate tombs I found an uninterrupted view south, the whole history of Carcassonne laid out in front of me. In the foreground, the turn of the century Hôtel du Terminus. In the middle distance, the battlements of the biscuit-coloured fortress Cité. In the far distance, the eternal green hills and snowbound peaks of the Pyrenees. That was Léonie and Anatole’s destination, a mysterious estate dominated by a beautiful manor house on a thickly-wooded hillside above the fashionable Pyrenean spa town of Rennes-les-Bains, just a couple of miles from Rennes-le-Château, home of the enigmatic priest Bérenger Saunière.
Today, the pomp and opulence of the 1890s spa has long since given way and there is an air of the ghost-town that hangs over Rennes-les-Bains. But it is, for all that, a beautiful and peaceful place. The trees are deep green, copper and gold, the paths between them sinuous and intriguing. When I raise my eyes to the horizon, if I am lucky and the sky is clear, I can see the Pyrenees – even pick out Saint-Barthélémy mountain towering above the Cathar stronghold of Montségur. Here, I feel sure, no story-teller could ever be lost for inspiration or any visitor fail to be charmed by the beauty and splendour of a natural landscape sculpted by time in forests and rivers, limestone and brown and red earth.
