Isabeau stuffs papers into a small, carved chest. She is surprised to see her hands shake as she locks it. She has feared this moment for so long that it almost feels anticlimactic.
The panic in Manon’s voice, downstairs—that frightens her. “My husband fights in the army. We marched for liberté!”
Isabeau wraps herself in a cloak, then ducks into a large, empty fireplace and locates a brick at face height. Arching her fingers around it, she eases the brick out and stuffs the chest behind it. Retreating, she sheds the now-sooty cloak.
Bunching it into a ball, wiping soot desperately from her hands, she tosses the cloak onto the roof of the building beyond. She hopes whoever finds it is grateful enough to keep silent.
Then she retrieves her quill and scribbles her last few lines with colorless liquid. Downstairs, she hears Manon’s cry. She slides the letter and the cask’s key into a lockbox, the smaller key to which can, if necessary, be swallowed—
I opened my eyes to find Scarlet and Rhys staring at me. “Did I say something?” I asked, but they shook their heads.
“You looked terrified, though,” said Scarlet.
“There are more letters.” I somehow caught my breath, calmed myself. The world I’d just inhabited had ended over two hundred years ago. “If you can find the address, Scarlet, I think I can find them.”
That, sadly, would not happen instantly. And I had other distractions. One, foolish or not, was my man troubles. When Scarlet delivered me to the Cluny later that morning, I had flowers from both Léon Chanson and Joshua Adriano, while the one man I wanted, despite all logic, seemed abruptly unavailable. Rhys did walk me home that evening, as temporary bodyguard. We had a light dinner, wine, and discussed the project. But when night came, he spread his sleeping bag on my living room floor.
The second distraction hit the next morning. I crossed my front room to leave for work—frustrated and annoyed about my empty bed—and Rhys said, “Shouldn’t you wear something darker?”
I looked down at my peach-colored suit. “Why?”
“Because today is your grandmother’s funeral mass.”
Of course he would remember. He set it up. “I’m not going.”
“Why not?” When I shrugged, Rhys said, “You should go.”
“I did not like the woman so…no.”
Now he looked angry. “That ought not to matter.”
“It does.” I stalked to the counter for a cup of coffee, not to be near him. Even if he did smell freshly showered.
“She is dead.” He handed me a cup, scowling. “She raised you when your mother could not and your father would not. If you stay away, it may haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“Haunt me,” I clarified. “For the rest of my life. Which means even if it were true—which it is not—it is my problem, not yours. Now if you are ready, I need to get to work.”
“Drink your coffee.” He put his down to head back toward the WC. Or so I thought. Then he returned to the front room with a hanger over his shoulder. Its black contents were half-hidden by a Galleries Lafayette wrapping. “You can change at lunch.”
“Put that back!”
“No. Now, are you ready to go?”
The bastard! I tried to snatch the dress from him, but he easily lifted the hanger beyond my reach, and I knew better than to risk dragging on the gown itself. Damn him! Had he really been a priest? Because he was acting more like a bully.
In fact, “You are a bastard and a bully.”
“You’ll be late for work,” he warned calmly.
But he was not the only one who could do calm, merci beaucoup. I was quite capable of choosing my battles. Rhys could carry the dress to the Cluny if he wished—he even got me to take it from him once there by tossing it…should I have let it hit the cobblestone courtyard? But he could not force me to wear it.
I was the one who forced things around here, damn it.
When Rhys arrived at lunch, he wore a dark suit, probably his best. He must have headed back to his own flat to change clothes. Supposedly for me and my nasty grand-mère, which, yes, was sweet of him. But against my firm protests, which was not.
I was not wearing the black dress. But I locked my office door behind him, pulled the shades, and shrugged out of my peach-colored jacket. Then I began to unbutton the beige shell beneath it. He wanted a battle of wills? So be it.
For a moment he seemed to think I would change clothes. “I should wait—” But he made no real move to leave as I revealed my favorite bra, antique gold lace. “Ah.”
“Could you help me with this zipper?” I came to stand in his body’s escalating warmth, gazed for a long moment up into his clouding blue eyes, then at his lips. Only when he moved instinctively to lick them did I spin and present my back, drawing my hair off my neck to give him a better view on his way down to the waistband of the peach skirt.
“I…” But Rhys fumbled at the zipper with his long fingers. It purred open, and my skirt sagged downward on my hips. I turned back, enjoying his focus on my cleavage, then on my legs as the skirt fell to reveal my matching panties and garter belt.
I stepped up against him, circled my arms behind his neck, and kissed him. Deep. Seductive. After a moment’s hesitation—always with the damned hesitation!—Rhys kissed me back.
A crueler woman would take him this far—perhaps a little farther—and then laugh at him and say no. Foolishly, I wanted him too much. And I was already struggling with too many guilt issues about him as it was. So I slid my knee up to his hip, along his crisp trousers, and was glad I had locked the door.
But as we drew breath he said, “Catrina…we have to go.”
“No going,” I protested softly, drawing him by the hands to my desk, which I’d cleared for this purpose. I liked this plan. Two birds with one stone. “You should come. Here. With me.”
Rhys swallowed hard but shook his head. “No, I should not.”
Determined not to let that hurt, I released his hands—see, I was not forcing him—and perched on the edge of the desk. “But have you ever done it surrounded by ancient objets d’art?” We decorate our offices with pieces that don’t fit the exhibits.
“You know I haven’t. Perhaps another time, but not now. You’re not distracting me.” He ducked his head and grinned then, stepping farther back. “Not sufficiently, at any rate.”
His grin somehow infuriated me. I folded my arms, which improves my cleavage nicely. “That is your last word?”
“About sex on your desk just now? It is my last word.”
“Then leave.” And I coolly picked up my beige shell.
Rhys groaned. “You were going to put on the black—”
“No!” And I surprised myself by throwing the sleeveless blouse at his head, instead. “No, I was not going to put on the black. No, I will not be attending my grandmother’s mass. No means no, or do they not teach you these things in seminary?”
He drew the silk off his shoulder and stared, processing the last few minutes. “Then all this was just…”
“As you say, a distraction. That is the kind of whorish bitch I am. I would rather screw you than go to mass. Surprise!” I’d wriggled back into my peach skirt, and now snatched the shell from his hands.
“Whorish…who ever said…? Catrina, what is wrong?”
“You are wrong!” I felt better with clothes on—of course I could zip and unzip my own skirt. “You are wrong to think that you know what is best, that you can force me through sheer stubbornness to do something that I have vowed not to do.”
He raised his voice. “But it is just one mass!”
“I asked you to leave!” I screamed back, professionalism be damned. So, wordlessly, he left.
Only then, safely alone, did I sink to the floor—and silently sob. It did not matter that I did not know why, damn it. Feelings have their own truth, even without understanding. This is your fault, Catrina. Did a night in jail teach you nothing, Catrina? How dare you behave that way, say those things, steal that chalice, not attend mass, seduce a priest…
It was all a jumble—the attacks, the visions, and now being all alone in the world…but no, that could not be part of it. I had hated Grand-mère, so very much….
Only after I’d sobbed the worst of it out was I able to recover my poise, with copious tissues and a reapplication of makeup. I thought perhaps I would walk to the river and have a crêpe in the sunshine, in sight of Notre Dame. Then perhaps I could think clearly. What to do about safety, without Rhys in the apartment. How to learn more about the Soeurs de Marie. Whether I should give up on men for a while…or just until the next time Joshua Adriano was in town.
But when I opened my office door, Rhys sat on the floor just across from it, despite his best suit. He had his head in his hand, and his elbow on one raised knee. When he lifted his gaze to mine, his eyes were fathomless…and no longer angry.
He looked as empty as I felt.
I said, “Do not dare try—”
He interrupted. “I apologize for trying to force you. Just…let me walk with you for a while? I think we should talk.”
Talk. That meant a breakup, n’est-ce pas? If we’d had a relationship to begin with.
“Fine,” I said, walking away from him and expecting him to follow. No time like the present. “Talk.”
Perhaps he could get it over with while I was still numb.
“I am sorry,” Rhys said again, as we strolled toward the Seine without touching. And now he would say, But you’re quite insane and I must get far, far away from you.
Instead he said, “You’re right. I was being high-handed and petty. I was just annoyed—never mind that. I should have tried harder to understand why you wish to avoid the funeral.”
“You asked,” I reminded him, suspecting a trick. “And when I tried to explain, you said it didn’t matter.”
He didn’t defend himself. Instead, he winced—and, catching my hand, he drew me to a seat at an outdoor bistro table. He pointed at something for the waiter and held up two fingers, then turned back to me. “I did not mean that it did not matter. Of course your history with your grandmother matters. What I should have said was that affection is not the only reason to attend services. They can bring closure. It’s—”
I pushed my chair back and stood. So much for staying numb. “You’re still trying to convince me!”
“I’m not—” He stood, too, took my shoulders, bowed his head over me in that way he had of making me feel oddly…venerated. “It’s your decision. Don’t go. I can attend for you.”
I searched his blue gaze, suspicious.
“Please believe me,” he murmured, softly.
Warily, I sat. Rhys sank into the chair across from me, his leg touching mine where the X of them intersected. He reached across the table and took my hands in his.
“I just want to understand,” he said. “To understand you.”
I felt a strange flicker of panic. “Why?”
Annoyance darkened his expression. “Because you are more than a beautiful, empty body, that’s why.” When the waiter put the glasses in front of us, Rhys snapped, “Thank you!”
The waiter narrowed his eyes. When Rhys paid him, the man turned with an indignant sniff toward the back of the café. Not all French are rude, but waiters can certainly hold their own.
Rhys had his head in his hands again. But when he slanted his gaze back at me, his eyes smiled wearily over the mask of his fingers. “You really do bring out the worst in me.”
I folded my arms. “You are welcome.”
“I mean to say—” he began, but I interrupted him.
“Could you simply say things once, and correctly the first time? It would speed matters up considerably.”
“I’m figuring it out as I go along. What I meant to say is that you have the ability to make me angry. And high-handed. And petty. I am so used to presenting this composed, moral face to the world, I think I began to believe I was immune to…to the rest. Even after leaving the priesthood, I acted like I was some kind of damned saint, and a martyr at that. And then I hook up with you….”
“And I turn you into a man-whore?” I suggested icily, and took a sip of wine.
“I’m unsure whether to be insulted or flattered.” But he grinned as he said it.
I almost smiled myself. “Both.”
“In any case…” Again he offered me his hand, and I warily gave him mine. “You have not turned me into anything. Something in me may respond to you rather…unexpectedly. But I am responsible for my own decisions. Agreed?”
“My decisions are my own, as well.” But we both knew that did not mean quite the same thing.
“We still have half an hour before I must leave for the mass,” Rhys assured me, looking at his watch. “So talk to me, Catrina. Please. Tell me about your grandmother.”
He did say please. So, with him still holding my hand, I made the effort. “She was a bitch.” Now he would know where I got it, anyway. “She resented being burdened with me, and held my mother’s death against me, and relished telling me so.”
“Your mother died in childbirth?” Rhys asked.
“My mother overdosed at a party,” I clarified. According to Grand-mère, only once she had identified the body did she think to ask, And what about the girl? Which is how the authorities thought to come looking for me, where I’d been left alone for several days. Even at four, I’d been trained not to cry lest I get us in trouble with the concierge. “Grand-mère felt that had my mother not been burdened with me, she may not have turned to drugs. Me, I suspect the drugs were a way to escape Grand-mère.”
Rhys nodded, but otherwise made no comment. He did look a touch too sympathetic for my comfort, however.
“She did not beat me, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I protested. “The old bat made sure I had food, went to church, got an education. And without the education…”
I’d always been drawn to history, to a past distant enough that the gritty realities of the present felt glossed over by time. But only school had helped me into that world, helped me become a part of it. Not to mention, it had made an excellent escape from constant criticism. So had all my boyfriends.
“You once said you lived with your father as a teenager,” Rhys said. “In the United States. Why did you contact your grandmother when you came home?”
But here, I shrugged. Perhaps to prove that despite her dire predictions, I had reached adulthood? To show off my scholarships, or each degree as I advanced? Sometimes when I had a particularly impressive lover, I would allow him to ask Grand-mère to join us for dinner. But she had never approved.
And now she never would. But that was not my fault.
“Walk me to the station?” asked Rhys, draining the last of his wine. So I held his arm and walked with him to the St-Michel Notre-Dame stop, barely a block away now. When we reached the station and Rhys hesitated, I started down the stairs.
Rhys followed me from the stairs, through the turn-stiles, to the long escalator. It is quite a deep station—between that, and the wait for the next southbound train, he had plenty of time to look questioningly at me. As well he should.
“I might leave at any time,” I warned him at last, focusing on one of the oversized advertisements gracing the curved, white-tiled wall across the track. “And I am wearing this.”
Rhys kissed me on the top of my head, which was far too chaste for my tastes, but the easiest spot for him to reach. He wisely said nothing. And now…now that he’d stopped trying to force my hand?
I found myself holding quite tightly to his.
The next hour was something of a resolute blur—my childhood church, a casket, flowers, Grand-mère’s old friends. Scarlet was there, invited no doubt by Rhys. And mass…The ritual lies dormant in one’s bones and reawakens when one is surrounded by the scent of candlewax and furniture polish, the priest on the altar…and, in my case, another one beside me. Of sorts.
Heaven help me, I felt comforted by that—and guilty when, like me, he declined taking the Eucharist at Holy Communion. I’d given up communion out of rebellion, but him? If Rhys Pritchard thought himself to be in a state of sin, I suspected I knew why.
But what stood out most for me?
I turned to leave, with my friends—and I saw the statue I’d blocked from my memory, along with so much else of my youth. A three-foot-tall Madonna statue presided over a rack of votive candles. She was no Black Madonna, though centuries of hard use had darkened her with soot and age. And yet the peaceful expression on her carved, painted face as she cherished the child in her arms struck something deep inside of me.
For months, when I was ten, I had lit a candle each week in prayer for my mother’s soul…and perhaps I’d begun to blur the two figures. Because whenever I imagined the perfect mother, I pictured the Madonna. Not the Mary that catechism taught—the Mary of the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption, none of which I disbelieved so much as…neglected. Orthodox teachings were not what spoke to me. What spoke to me was the look in her eyes, the curve of her body, the way she held her baby, not because he was the Christ Child but as if to say that all children were precious.
Somehow I had ignored the doctrinal Madonna and worshipped an archetypal Madonna, both at the same time—at least until my grand-mère thought to ask how I was paying for the candles, learned I was lighting them without leaving an offering, and turned that tiny hint of sanctuary into another wrong I had committed.
What if I were not the only person to have blurred the two?
“What if they were not strictly Catholic?” I asked Rhys, after we’d escaped the church and were headed into the Métro station. “The Sisters of Mary? What if they were into Mary, but for a reason other than church doctrine, like with the Black Madonnas?”
Rhys and Scarlet looked mildly surprised—should I still be focusing on my loss? I’d worn peach to the funeral. I’d not danced on the casket. Grand-mère and I were as good as we’d get.
Scarlet spoke first. “Like the Black Madonnas?” So I filled her in on what Rhys said about the bride in the Song of Songs, and how medieval devotees may have merged the two figures.
I must have gotten it right, because Rhys simply asked, “You saw Josette’s sketch, didn’t you?” When I shook my head, he clarified. “Josette sketched the image on the Mary medals we recovered, in detail. The iconography is definitely confused.”
“Confused how?”
“The medal pictures a mother and child, the standard Madonna. But she wears a sword, which would be symbolic of the archangel Michael, and she has a large key, representative of St. Peter. There also seems to be some kind of jar by her feet, but a jar would indicate Mary Magdalene. When I get back to the Sorbonne, I will look more closely at the medals themselves.”
“I can walk Cat to the Cluny,” Scarlet suggested quickly, as our train arrived with a rush of air and a long squeal of brakes. We all three got on, since the Cluny and the Sorbonne share a stop. “I have to talk to her about something privately, anyway. Girl talk, dontcha know.”
I felt somehow relieved that Rhys hesitated, and even more so when he asked, “Shall I come for you after work, then?”
He had not completely written me off, at that.
“Yes.” When the train lurched into motion, it threw me hard against him. Rhys’s arm closed hard around me, and I looked up at him, and I understood at least some of my fears from earlier. I was fighting the need to count on him…and I was losing.
Without straightening away from him—we had four stops to go before changing lines, then four more to the Cluny La Sorbonne station—I asked quietly, “Why were you annoyed?”
His brows drew together in honest confusion.
“Earlier,” I insisted, over the noise of the rush of train off of tunnel. “You said you’d been annoyed even before we argued, but not why. How did I annoy you? This time, I mean.”
Rhys squinted down at me, looking embarrassed, especially when he glanced to Scarlet and back. “It shows me in a poor light,” he murmured, stalling.
Whistling with no subtlety at all, Scarlet strode to the other side of the car as if to study one of the overhead ads, the flounce of her black ballet skirt bouncing as she went.
With a half laugh, half scoff, Rhys bent closer to whisper his confession, “I was angry about sleeping on the floor.”
I stared, truly stunned. “You wanted to come to bed?”
A stocky old lady in a nearby seat, who wore black despite that she likely had not attended a funeral today, pretended not to overhear me. But her scowl deepened.
Squinting again—and blushing—Rhys nodded.
He’d wanted…“Then why did you not just say so? Or just climb in? If you want to come to bed, get in the damned bed. It is not as if we have not set a precedent.”
“Ah. But if I want you to attend an old lady’s funeral?”
“Oh, then definitely try to drag me there against my will. I am sure that will work wonders.” But in the end, it had.
Rhys shook his head. “You’re never boring, Catrina.”
“I have had better compliments,” I flirted up at him.
“It is not necessarily a compliment.” But somehow, the way he had his head bowed over mine as he said it? Somehow, it was.
Everything seemed right as we left the Cluny La Sorbonne station—I had a lovely, sexy man to spend the night with, and a friend who was helping me track down the Sisters of Mary, and…
And why did I feel an unnerving sense of prescience as a police car drove past us, in the direction of the université?
Rhys dropped my hand and ran, quickly outdistancing Scarlet and me. But even he was too late to do anything.
The Denfert-Rochereau project had been robbed.