It took us two days to reach Paris, listening to reports of the disaster the entire drive. Expecting bad traffic into and out of Chartres, Rhys took us the long route through France, looping west near Italy and Switzerland before coming into Paris from the Luxembourg direction. We never left the Madonnas unguarded. Not at rest stops. Not to eat. When we stopped in Lyon to ask the historical society about records of a Lisse Clairon, Rhys stayed with the car. We slept in the Saxo, with the seats leaned back, which disallowed any lovemaking. When we stopped at a small town outside Dijon on Sunday morning, so Rhys could attend mass, I stayed with the car.
Our cell phones would turn on, but the network was saturated, mobiles and landlines alike. So the second stop we made when we reached Paris was Scarlet Rubashka’s apartment.
Is it wrong that our first stop was the Cluny, to get the Madonnas into a safe? Rhys agreed with it, so I hoped not.
“I’m so glad you’re safe!” Scarlet exclaimed, giving us a big double-hug right there in her flat’s doorway. “I was afraid you might’ve been passing Chartres when the quake hit, and that would be awful, but I couldn’t reach you, and even if you were safe, I needed you to get in touch with that geophysicist who took you to Le Jules Verne last week so that we can tell him—”
“Wait,” I protested, near to laughing myself. “Rhys has to go check on his students.” And on Brigitte Taillefer, from whom he’d borrowed the car. But I didn’t like mentioning her.
“He’ll want to hear, too!” Scarlet insisted with a bounce.
“I’ll still want to hear after I know that everyone is accounted for,” Rhys insisted. “And after I’ve seen what sort of manpower the relief efforts need. If I’m not at the apartment tonight,” he added to me, “I’ll leave a note.”
“And if I’m not there, the little madman got me,” I teased. When Rhys actually hesitated, I did laugh. “I will be fine! If Scarlet does not watch over me, I’ll ask one of the Cluny’s security guards to walk me home, agreed?”
We both knew I would spend most of my day with our find.
Not wholly convinced, Rhys nevertheless gave in with a nod and then a long, tender kiss. “Until tonight, then,” he said, then winced and whispered, “Le Jules Verne?”
“It was anticlimactic,” I assured him huskily, loving how concerned he looked and earning another kiss.
“Take care of yourself, Scarlet,” he said to our friend.
She didn’t wait for him to reach the bottom of the stairs, much less the door, before whistling. “Look at the two of you!”
Until this weekend, that sort of comment would have worried me, like a jinx. Happiness this intense does not usually last, after all. But I was learning to count on Rhys for more than just his conscience, kindness and incredible lovemaking. So instead I smiled and said, “Wait until you hear my news.”
Scarlet squealed. “You’re getting married!”
Well…that set me back. “No. I don’t plan to marry, and Rhys…” Rhys said he didn’t plan to, either. Ever. I hoped it was true, because surely he’d choose a different kind of woman. Some of my glow faded. “It’s different news.”
“Then mine’s bigger,” she warned. So we spoke at once.
“We found an entire cache of Black Madonnas,” I said, while Scarlet announced, “I know what’s causing the earthquakes!”
We stared at each other. She was right. Her news was bigger. “The scientists don’t yet know, but you do?”
“Well, I have a theory, which is why I need to contact the geophysicist. To run it by him, so he can inform the sort of people who should know. But I can’t remember his name.”
Instead of giving her his name, I asked, “And what is causing the earthquakes?”
Scarlet looked around us, then drew me into her tiny flat and closed the door. She had a lot of plants, folding furniture and many pictures tacked on the wall. I had the impression she moved around a lot. “Solar flares,” she announced emphatically.
Sinking onto a metal chair, I waited.
“Solar flares,” she insisted. “Don’t you remember? That’s why I was on Denfert-Rochereau during the first earthquake—I’d gone to the observatory to check out the solar flares.”
L’Observatoire de Paris, established in the 1600s, was the oldest working research observatory in the world. “And…?”
“There were also major flares the morning of your date with the geophysicist, when we had that tremor, but I didn’t make the connection because, well, you went to dinner, not breakfast. But the electromagnetic effect on earth is strongest in the twenty-four-to thirty-six-hour window after the flares, so it doesn’t matter if it’s light out. But I noticed when the quake hit Chartres, because that’s why I didn’t go with you!”
To study the solar flares. I remembered now. “And…?”
Scarlet plopped into another chair. “Solar flares are explosions in the sun’s atmosphere. They’re superpowerful, like the energy of tens of millions of hydrogen bombs. The big ones mess with the earth—they disrupt communications, cause magnetic disturbances, stuff like that. So far so good?”
I nodded. I’d probably learned this in secondary school.
“Okay. Every eleven years the sun gets extra active—solar flares, sunspots, you name it. That’s called the ‘solar maximum.’ Then it gets quieter, until the ‘solar minimum,’ and then it increases again. And guess what this year is?”
That wasn’t a great challenge. “Year number eleven?”
But she shook her head. “This is year number ten, Catrina! So if there’s a connection between the solar flares and the earthquakes, the authorities need to know, because it’s just going to get worse over the next year. Especially if that note you got at the hospital was real, and someone’s causing them.”
“You think someone’s causing solar flares?”
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “No, I think someone’s harnessing the flares to cause the earthquakes! Think about it! The stars and the sun affect the earth all the time. That’s the theory behind horoscopes, right? The fact that we’re moving from the Age of Pisces into the Age of Aquarius has major, worldwide ramifications, not the least—”
“His name is Léon Chanson,” I interrupted, as much to fend off a speech about horoscopes as anything. “But I suspect he’s rather busy, just now.”
Scarlet sobered. Who could think of what had happened to Chartres without doing so? We hadn’t yet heard about the fate of the famous cathedral, another Notre Dame. But the deaths and injuries were already too much. Still…on purpose?
“Well,” she said. “I suppose there’s been a delay between quakes so far. But can you at least leave a message for him? He made a date with you only the day after the Paris earthquake.”
She had a point there. Having covered her unlikely announcement, we moved onto mine, and Scarlet insisted on coming to the Cluny to see for herself. As we walked first to my flat, to check on Tache, and then to the museum, I filled her in on everything. The roadtrip. The farmhouse. The people I’d spoken to about Lisse Clairon, in Lyon. “If we could only find the letters the Marians wrote back to her,” I mused.
When I took her to the vault, to show her the Madonnas, she was as awed by them as I had been, as Rhys had been, as the museum director had been. Their wise, gentle eyes. Their curving, feminine forms. Their dark strength. “But…what are you going to do with them now?” she asked, cocking her head at one of the embroideries. “You’ve decided not to keep them secret?”
Rhys and I had discussed that matter thoroughly on our long drive home. The problem with trying to keep them secret, he’d insisted, was that it would deny our find the protection of the authorities. Were we to rent a storage facility, or hide them in my apartment? And if we did, and something happened to them, what recourse did we have? But if we brought them to the Cluny, they could be safely locked away and, perhaps, displayed. We could establish their provenance, without which their value dropped significantly, and which helped protect them against being fenced, if ever they were stolen. We could have them cataloged by Interpol.
He’d made a good argument—especially since excess secrecy had been one of the things that allowed me to so easily liberate a certain medieval chalice from Brigitte Taillefer and her niece, a year earlier. But the strongest claim had come from the Madonnas themselves, and I made it now.
“Can you imagine denying the world—especially other women—the chance to see these?” I murmured. “I know the Soeurs de Marie did, but their time required it. Ours does not.”
At least, I certainly hoped it did not.
Dragging ourselves away from the Madonnas, we went to my office so that I could get the telephone number off the card that came with Léon’s flowers. This was the second day after the Chartres quake, but it still took me several tries to get through even on my landline. “Hello, Léon,” I purred into the phone, when I reached his message. “Thank you for the flowers, they are still quite beautiful. I, too, am sorry for how we left things. Call me as soon as you can, I would very much like to talk to you.”
When I hung up, Scarlet was staring. “Wow. If he doesn’t call back after that, something’s wrong with him.”
I did think it more likely to get a response than simply telling him a friend had an astrological theory regarding the earthquakes. But before I could comment, a light knock on my open door caught both our attentions.
A round, bespectacled man with a large moustache nodded at us. He was the man who’d hired me, and whose patience with my spotty schedule of late had been a great help.
“I hope I did not overstep,” said Monsieur Gaspard, the museum director. “Joshua Adriano telephoned to ascertain the safety of the museum employees, and those working on your little project at the Sorbonne. He asked specifically about you.”
So far, he hadn’t overstepped. “I hope he’s well,” I said, not only to sound polite.
“He is. His father has asked him to help organize a fund-raiser among French patrons of medieval art, for Chartres. Paris seems the logical location for such a benefit, and the Cluny, in recognition of the two cities’ medieval significance.”
He was right about that as well. Paris and Chartres had a great deal in common, particularly our cathedrals, each named Notre Dame. Each had been completed in the thirteenth century, with similar facades, even similar rose windows. Each had been built on the site of previous churches.
Gaspard continued, “I mentioned that you had come across an amazing discovery.”
Ah. This was where he had overstepped.
Still, the opportunity of it outweighed my caution. Word would spread. Why should it not spread first to those who had shown particular support for my work? More important, I remembered what had happened to Joshua’s grandfather…Max? I could not ask for guidance from anyone better versed in protecting unconventional antiquities—and their supporters—than an Adriano.
“I appreciate you telling him,” I said, as much because it was politic as because it was true. “Better that he hear of the Madonnas from us.”
Gaspard glanced at Scarlet, who was doing her best to look unobtrusive, despite her bright pink boots. And matching earrings. Apparently deeming her safe, he turned back to me.
“Catrina,” he said—so telling Joshua Adriano had not been the overstep, either. “Might you consider allowing us to exhibit your Madonnas as the centerpiece of our fund-raiser? As you know, the Virgin of the Pillar is one of the many medieval treasures which may have been damaged by the quake.”
Scarlet risked being obtrusive. “The Virgin of the Pillar?”
“A famous Black Madonna,” I said softly. I’d known about her, of course—I’d included Chartres among my lengthy list of Black Madonna sites throughout France. But overwhelmed by the threats to Chartres’ Notre Dame, and her famous labyrinth, and the loss of human life, it hadn’t occurred to me….
“It is one possible theme,” said Gaspard, looking anxious.
“Of course I will consider it,” I said. He smiled, nodded and moved on to his other duties, and I turned back to Scarlet.
“If Joshua comes to Paris for the fund-raiser, do you think Caleb will come with him?” she asked. “He called me on Friday, did I tell you? There’s something about that man….”
Me, I was remembering Joshua’s story about his grandfather—and starting to worry. “We need to get Interpol in here, now.”
“It’s Sunday,” she said.
“Then tomorrow. The insurance adjusters, as well. And Scarlet, is there someplace you can load pictures we’ve taken of the Madonnas, so that they can’t be erased? So we can still distribute them if something happens to the originals?”
“I could set up a Web site,” she said. “Link it to my blog. We could even let viewers download the pictures, copyright free. But you’d be losing some of the money you might’ve made granting exclusive rights.”
I shook my head. “What matters is that they don’t vanish again. The more press they get, and the faster it happens, the less likely that they’ll fade right back out of history.”
Because as Rhys and I had told his archeology students, history was subjective. These Black Madonnas represented a completely new chapter. And if there really was someone out there who wouldn’t want the world to know about them?
We needed to get this new chapter read by as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.
The next two days flew by. I saw very little of Rhys, between his graduate studies, his work on the Denfert-Rochereau project, and his volunteer efforts. He traveled to Chartres itself on Tuesday, with a relief group. When I asked him what he did there, he said, “Whatever they needed.”
“I do not like feeling so guilty,” I complained after he’d gotten in, dirty and thoroughly exhausted, and helped himself to some wine. But I’d bottomed out my savings and maxed out my credit cards for the down payment on the farmhouse, and I was so busy with both the details of my mortgage and the fast-tracked Black Madonna Charity Exhibit that I felt overwhelmed.
Rhys surprised me by putting down his wine and coming to me. “You already went through one earthquake this month, and a cave-in. And isn’t your Madonna event supposed to raise far more money for the victims of the Chartres quake than any one person could give? Let me get cleaned up, and—”
I did not let him get cleaned up. I could not remember anyone ever making me feel better about myself than he just had…and I had one sure way of returning the favor.
It seemed to work, too.
So why, when I woke alone in the middle of the night, did I find Rhys staring out my window and wearing his fallen-angel expression, a glass in his hand, and almost a whole bottle of wine gone? I am embarrassed to admit that I was afraid to ask what was wrong.
Because I was still afraid it was me.
Wednesday morning—the day a representative from Interpol would finally be in to catalog the Madonnas—I also had a phone message from the Lyon historical society. They had tracked down some letters I might find interesting. Only because Scarlet had walked me to work and come in to see if Léon Chanson had returned my call—he had not—did she overhear the message. She volunteered to catch the train down to Lyon for me.
Frustrated not to be pursuing the lead myself, but unwilling to leave the Madonnas in someone else’s care during this significant step in their validation, I agreed to let Scarlet go in my place. And just as well. Analise Reisner, an art specialist for Interpol’s Cultural Property Division, proved to be a pleasant surprise. After my first impression, that is.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said with an American accent and a grin, pumping my hand. She was an athletic woman of above average height, with pale blond hair pulled into a ponytail that did nothing to improve her somewhat harsh, Germanic features. With makeup, she might be striking, but she’d bothered with neither makeup nor, I thought, an iron. Other than our similar age, we could hardly have less in common.
But I was being a professional. “And you,” I purred. “I appreciate Interpol responding on such short notice. If we are to unveil these pieces on Saturday night, for the benefit…”
“You’ll need to make sure they’re protected, sure,” she said. “And confirm the provenance, ascertain the pieces were never stolen. Sheesh, after World War Two, there are no guarantees. You’ll want to legitimize the whole kit and caboodle. Makes sense. But that’s what I’m here for.” She patted the heavy satchel over her shoulder, the strap of which did her tweed coat no favors. “Have laptop, will travel.”
I took her to the vault, my suede heels tapping a light harmony to her walking boots, and punched in the security code to open the door. When I led her to the tables where we’d laid out the Black Madonnas, she whistled through her teeth, and her hand caught my shoulder. “Holy Mother of God.”
“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” I asked, suddenly liking her. There was something about this Analise, something unusually…approachable. Like what I felt with Scarlet.
“Beautiful doesn’t begin to…wow!” She moved from one piece to the next, not quite touching the smooth cheek of the taller statue, the sweep of skirt on one of the tapestries. “Look at the features! I’ve always wondered how a culture that could give us the lines of gothic architecture had so much trouble portraying a proportional human figure, but these…”
“How long will this process take?” I asked, drawing a chair nearer for her to work.
She cocked her head and squinted at the work ahead of her, then nodded. “I might be finished by end-of-day, if everything goes well. Assuming I don’t keep losing my concentration and just staring at these beauties. First, I’ll closely check the pieces to make sure they haven’t already been identified—Interpol uses subtle but permanent markings, and you have to know what you’re looking for. Then I’ll check them against our database of notable artwork, looking for specific details…like this. Any idea what it means?”
She’d noticed the same detail I had on one of the embroideries, a small symbol like two Xs, framed with a straight line to each side.
“No.” I had my suspicions, but it would require more research before I ever breathed a word. “A signature, certainly, but whose…?”
“Even if we don’t figure it out today, I can start a search,” she assured me. “Don’t worry. We’ll get a definitive answer one way or another as to whether or not these pieces are cleanly yours. Once these ladies clear the database, I input as much information as possible—full description, known provenance, the reports your experts have provided—and mark them for future identification. After that, you can exhibit them, sell them, anything your heart desires.”
I hesitated while she set up her workspace, glad to see that she’d brought the appropriate tools—including cotton gloves—with which to handle the artwork. And it was only because I’d lingered that I saw the Most Wanted notice that came up on her homepage for Interpol, when she turned on the laptop. My stomach dropped. The figure on the top of the list, represented by a police-artist sketch instead of a photograph, looked unnervingly familiar.
No, it was not me. Thank the heavens, it was not me. The name beside it read, “Dr. Ginny Moon,” and it listed a whole series of antiquities thefts with which she may have been involved.
It looked like my old friend Aubergine de Lune.