Well…this was a moral dilemma. It was one thing to suspect that my mysterious friend was an antiquities thief. It was quite another to see her on Interpol’s top-ten most wanted list. The gut-punch of seeing that picture, that name—Lune means “moon” in French, of course—held me through the day. It tainted my further visits with Analise “Call me Ana” Reisner and even my phone conversations with the always-charming Joshua Adriano.
Joshua had agreed that the necessity for haste—fund-raisers in response to a disaster really should be held while the shock is fresh and the need immediate—might prove useful. Anyone who would hide the existence of these new Madonnas would have little time to plan trouble. And once enough people saw the Madonnas, and enough press covered it, they could no longer be denied, and the most dangerous period—for the Black Madonnas and for me—would have passed. The Cluny was hiring extra guards for the event, and the Adrianos were contributing extra security.
Which would mean what, if Aubrey de Lune arrived?
I told myself that it did not matter. I would not inform on her. She would not steal from me. But I discovered a touch more sympathy for the handful of people who knew about me liberating that chalice the previous year and did not wholly trust me.
What I needed was to talk to Rhys. Even without knowing names, he could surely put this into some kind of moral perspective. But by midafternoon, Scarlet telephoned. “Good! You’re there,” she shouted over the echoing sounds of a train station. “Have you heard from Léon Chanson?”
“No, and I left another message.” Either he was too busy to respond—not unlikely—or something may have happened to him.
Or he may not want to speak to me, but…really. Please.
“My train will be in Paris in just over two hours. I’ll walk you home, okay? Wait until you hear what I found!”
At least that, and her call from Gare de Lyon when she arrived in Paris, helped distract me from my own discovery about Aubrey de Lune until Scarlet arrived to escort me home.
“I have no idea how they found them so quickly,” Scarlet told me as we strolled along the twilight streets of Paris to my flat. She was practically skipping with excitement. “But someone along the way donated their old family correspondence to the historical society, and among them were a whole stack of letters to Lisse Clairon from Isabeau Volland, Alinor Geoffrin and Manon Cannet. Cross-hatched in that purplish brown color that the invisible ink becomes when it’s heated. So we know Lisse—or someone who knew the secret—read them.”
“You brought them with you?” I asked.
“I brought copies,” she admitted. “That’s why I couldn’t catch an earlier train—I was busy copying everything, and making sure it was legible. Wait until you read them! These women were into astrology, just like me. They say things like how they should have known it was too early for ‘the world to shift,’ that they just have to keep the memory alive until the new age. They mean the Age of Aquarius. Catrina, we’re already on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius right now!”
My doubt must have shown on my face, because Scarlet moved ahead of me to walk backward, frowning. “You think that’s just something the bohemians thought up in the 1960s, don’t you?”
Bohemians like my failure of a mother. “Yes.”
“It’s not! The idea of ecliptics is ancient.” She sighed with exaggerated impatience. “You really should read my blog. It’s all there. Ecliptics are periods of somewhere between two and three thousand years, when a particular Zodiac sign affects society. The Age of Gemini, being an air sign and all about communication, hit like seven or eight millennia ago, at about the same time mankind was getting a good handle on languages. The Age of Taurus—the earth moves through these backward from the sun signs—that was all about the earth and matriarchy, and it’s when people developed agriculture. The Age of Aries was all about war, very men-in-power. And the Age of Pisces has been about dualism. Right versus wrong, good versus evil, man versus woman—and winners versus losers—without a lot of room for compromise. I think the Marians were the losers, and knew that if they could just hold out for the Age of Aquarius, they’d have a chance to return.”
I wasn’t sure I bought all of this…but neither was I sure I did not. “So now it’s the Age of Aquarius, which means…?”
“Aquarius is all about personal enlightenment, but we aren’t there yet. We’re in the cusp, an overlapping period. Personal sun-signs last for about thirty days each, and the cusp goes three days in each direction. So for ecliptics, which stay over two thousand years, the cusps…”
“Would cover several centuries,” I guessed.
We reached my building, and Scarlet had to face forward again to tackle all the stairs. But she talked over her shoulder. “Here’s the other thing that was really interesting—of course you’ll be reading it all, but this is the abridged version. Of all the Sisters of Mary, Alinor in particular was into engineering and science. And she discovered a connection between electricity and the ‘tesserae,’ which I assume…?”
“Are the tiles,” I agreed. “One tile is a tessera—”
“I thought so. She calls them ‘our sacred tesserae,’ and she tells Lisse about her attempts to use the Leyden jar to electrify them, getting different results depending on which way they faced. Catrina, we have just got to try this. You’ve got the tiles you found at the Hotel du Montfort, right?”
I did, and the extra tile the old man had given me at the Métro station. And it seemed important to her. Neither Scarlet nor I had been great science students, but even we could figure out that instead of a Leyden jar, all we needed to find electrical current was to cut an extension cord in half, strip some of the rubber insulation off the end and plug it in. The exposed part, we used to touch one of the tiles.
Nothing. After we stared at it a moment, Scarlet even reached down and touched the tile, before I could stop her. “It feels nice,” she admitted. “Kind of…friendly.”
I decided to take her word at it. “Turn it around.”
She did, and again I extended the electric wire—
The tile did not move. But Scarlet, standing beyond it, was knocked back into the settee. “Holy cow!” she exclaimed, laughing. So we tried it again, this time putting boxes and cushions behind the tile, instead of her, and they flew back. We tried it with two tiles then. Facing one direction, they did nothing. Tache walked up to them, purring loudly, and I moved her to the safety of the bedroom. But facing the other direction—
Two tiles not only threw the pillows and boxes across the room, but hurled a small table and ashtray, ten feet beyond that, into the wall. Both broke, and they dented the wall.
“We should do all four,” Scarlet was saying when the door unlocked. Rhys walked in, looking tired but, tonight, not filthy. He must have had classes today. He punched the security code into the keypad while she called, “Rhys, look at this!”
“Try four in your own flat,” I argued, so she took one of the tiles away, leaving only the one again, and rearranged the pillows and boxes. “Or better yet, an empty field somewhere.”
“A field with an electrical plug?” She stepped back, but instead of wielding the exposed wire myself, I handed it off to her and reached up for Rhys to draw me to my feet. Then I slid an arm around his long waist, kissed his jaw. “Welcome home.”
He was busy frowning at the experiment. “What is this?”
“We found the letters the Marians wrote to Lisse Clairon, in Lyon,” Scarlet explained, touching the wire to the tile, front side out. “This is an experiment they did, modernized of course. Look, faced this way, nothing happens.”
Rhys was frowning—in concentration? He crouched and reached for it, before Scarlet could turn it around.
“Be careful,” I advised. He hadn’t seen their powers of destruction yet. “If the energy hits them the other way—”
He looked up, tile in his hand. “Where did you get these?”
“They’re Catrina’s,” Scarlet explained, replacing that tile with another. “You’ll want to stand back—”
But I was no longer listening to Scarlet, because I saw the accusation on Rhys’s face…and I felt suddenly ill. For a long, horrible moment, I couldn’t say anything. Perhaps I’d misread—
But I hadn’t.
“You let me report them as stolen,” Rhys said, standing, “when you’d taken them yourself?”
He thought these four tiles were the handful we’d initially recovered from the Denfert-Rochereau site. I found my voice, enough to say, “No, they just look similar.”
“You just happened to find some of the same general size, shape, coloring and age. What a coincidence!”
Scarlet had finally figured out that something was wrong. She unplugged our mutilated power cord. “She did, Rhys. When she found the letters at the Hotel du Montfort.”
I saw the way Rhys’s mouth tightened at the word found.
“Stole,” I said softly. “Right? When I stole the letters from the Hotel du Montfort. Once a thief, always a thief, even with you. That’s how you see me.”
He shook his head, still scowling. “These look exactly—”
And I slapped him. Not just because he thought I was a thief. Because he’d been living with me, sleeping with me, for over a week, letting me think he’d believed there was something redeemable about me, when in fact all I’d been, all I could have been, was a good lay, after all.
Then I turned and stalked out because otherwise I would either hit him again or start crying, and I was unsure which was worse. The alarm beeped behind me.
“Catrina!” called Rhys. I of course kept going. Beyond him, I heard Scarlet call, “Rhys, I don’t know the security code!”
That slowed him down—even in the middle of an argument, he must have had the presence of mind not to just shout the code back to her. By the time I heard him hurrying down the stairs after me, I was two floors below him. Now he was shouting.
“Catrina! Stop being a bitch and come back here!”
Yes, that was fine incentive. Two more flights of stairs—I was running now—and I reached the street. It would be an overstatement to call it dark, between the streetlights, the traffic and the brightly lit windows of the cafés and shops. But night had fallen. A light drizzle misted everything around me. I headed in the direction that had always brought me the most comfort—the River Seine and what view there might be of Notre Dame. Hopefully my lover would give up.
He did not give up—and he had longer legs. I hadn’t quite reached the river when he caught up to me, a hard hand on my shoulder yanking me abruptly back. “Catrina, stop!”
I slapped his hand away. “Do not dare accost me like some—”
“You hit me!” He towered over me, and at last I saw him at full fury—and still judgmental. “Hitting is never appropriate, Catrina, and walking out like that is childish. All I said was—”
“You accused me of stealing the tiles!” The French may have our own reserve, which other cultures do not understand. We may not smile for no reason, or behave as if a stranger is a friend. But we are passionate in more ways than one. And I’d reached my limit. “Not that it would necessarily count as stealing, since I am the one who found the site in the first place!”
“Rationalize it as you may.” So he still didn’t believe me.
“I did not steal your fucking tiles!” I screamed, spreading my arms for good measure. People on the street began to give us wide berth. “I have actually tried to do the right thing. I even bought the farmhouse, so that I would not be stealing whatever we found beneath it!”
“And paid for it how?” Rhys challenged. “With money you received from selling Maggi Sanger’s chalice.”
So now he brought up her, Brigitte Taillefer’s niece—the woman he really loved, who had married another. And I’d been foolish enough to think he’d given up on relationships because of his virgin fiancée, Mary. My eyes burned, and my throat closed with the desperate need not to cry in front of him. I tried to leave again, tried to make for the river. I did not make it half a block before Rhys was pacing me. “It was not your money, Catrina, so it really isn’t your farmhouse.”
Nice of him to say that now. I wheeled on him. “First of all, I do not know what happened to the two million dollars your beloved Maggi spent on the chalice—I only got twenty thousand.”
“Only?” laughed Rhys, but it was an ugly, accusing laugh.
“And do you know what I did with that? I used it to keep my bitch of a grandmother in a private nursing home! That was only a year or so after thousands of elderly people died in that heat wave, because of insufficient attention in the state-run homes, don’t you remember? Despite that Grand-mère made me feel exactly as misdirected and immoral and worthless as you always make me feel, I did not want to see the old bat die that way, so I spent the money first to move her up on the waiting list, and then for the residence itself, and by the time she went into the hospital two months ago, I’d already broken into my retirement savings, that is how expensive it was! Yes, I feel bad about taking money from your friends, now that I know they are the ones it came from! But I did not know until a week ago, and in any case your precious Maggi was dating a billionaire with so much money he was able to buy my tapestry, my unicorn tapestry, out from under the Cluny and donate it to the Cloisters in New York as revenge. So put things into a little perspective!”
I expected Rhys to judge me further—perhaps say that it had not technically been my tapestry the Cluny lost, just one we’d had first claim to, one I had loved. Perhaps he’d say that, by spending my ill-gotten gains first, I’d forfeited my retirement savings and the debt I’d just acquired for the farmhouse.
Instead he said, “I make you feel worthless?”
“Is that not how you see me? Why else would you immediately think the worst of someone you’ve made love to, someone…”
But then I saw something even worse in his dark-fringed blue eyes than accusation. I saw—and felt—dawning horror.
“That’s why you’ve been willing to sleep with me,” I realized out loud, my voice shaking from more than the spring rain. “Because on some level you do think the worst of me.”
“No,” protested Rhys. But he could convince neither of us.
“Yes. Your morality took a blow when you left the priesthood. You’ve been rebelling ever since—smoking, drinking too much, and now the sex. But your ethics never once allowed you to harm someone else, even so. Just yourself. You’ve only ever meant to punish yourself.”
“That is ridiculous.” But now his voice was uneven.
“You do still believe in it. You still attend mass. You refuse communion when you’re in a state of sin, despite the fact that more Catholics than not ignore that little rule.” If I’d not seen his eyes as I said this, it would have seemed too ridiculous to imagine. But I watched his eyes, eyes I’d seen naked before, and I was right. “You have been using me to commit spiritual suicide, because I was safe. I was already damned.”
That, he protested. “No, Catrina. Of course you’re not—”
But I’d had enough, and I turned away. “Leave me alone.”
He caught my shoulder, and though he was far more gentle this time, I still struck his hand away as hard as I could.
“Leave me alone!” I held his gaze. “No means no, remember?”
Then I left, finally on my own…the way I was apparently meant to be. I fought tears with all my strength and ended up feeling lost, instead. Against all good sense, I’d started to let myself love him, come to count on him for far too much. And now that he’d fallen, it felt as devastating as losing not just a lover, but…a saint.
I dodged traffic across the boulevard that fronted the Seine, then took the damp steps that angled the stone banks of the river to one of the walkways below, walkways so close to the water that they often flood when the river rises. Down here, I could watch the lights of Notre Dame, faint through the falling mist and wonder how I’d ever been so stupid as to believe.
Finally I sighed, fairly certain I could contain my tears for a while longer, anyway. “You might as well come out.”
“You said for me to leave you alone.” But Rhys came out from the shadows under the bridge behind me, its stone arch gracefully shadowing the walkway and river both. When I stared, he added, “I did not want to leave you unprotected, so late—”
But he cut off when the small, dark man stepped out from behind him and pressed a pistol barrel against Rhys’s neck.