NARBONNE—JANUARY
The holidays came and went, the new year arrived, and finally, Lia received a call from Father Jordí Bonafé. On a fresh morning in mid-January, she drove to Narbonne and parked just outside the center of town. Early for their ten o’clock appointment, she wandered the small city’s boulevards and through its squares, rediscovering favorite haunts.
Winter might return to deliver an icy slap at any time, but an exuberant sun found a way to leapfrog the season into spring, and it beamed white-gold through the bare branches of the chestnut and plane trees that lined the translucent waters of the Canal de la Robine. The tramontane wind had swept down from the Massif Central during the night and scoured the clouds from the sky before rushing out to sea, leaving a brilliant blue stillness in its wake.
Lia walked into the covered pavilion of the marché. Fish caught before dawn released aromas of the sea that mingled with the scent of vanilla-sweet crepe batter on a hot griddle and the sultry whiff of cumin and cardamom as spice merchants opened their bags. A tiny patisserie stood tucked between the long, refrigerated cases of a cheese-monger and a vendor of cured meats. The shop specialized in the pastries of Catalunya, the territory just across the Spanish border that shared so much of Languedoc’s history and culture, and Lia made her last purchases there. She meandered from the pavilion and across the canal to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville.
The Gothic facade of the Palais des Archevêques loomed over the open square and pulsed gold in the morning light. A café at the far end came to life as waiters, sullen with sleep, removed chairs perched upside down on tabletops. Waiting tourists sat down the moment a table was cleared, lifting their elbows as an irritated waiter swiped a damp rag over the surface and smacked down small pots of sugar and shakers of pepper and salt.
Lia took a seat on a low wall surrounding the preserved stretch of the Via Domitia, the oldest portion of the Roman road that had passed through southern France. The monument was set at one end of the square, a perfect perch to watch Narbonne greet the day. From her basket, she took out a small stainless steel thermos of coffee and a tender, yeasty brioche.
She filled the thermos cup, and when she brought the steaming coffee to her lips, she saw him at a table on the edge of the café’s patio. Wearing a black suit and a pale lavender dress shirt, he sat with one arm stretched across the back of a chair and a black leather loafer resting on the opposite knee. An espresso and a croissant sat on the tiny table before him like props on a stage set. A breeze funneling through the passage lifted his golden-brown hair. Sunglasses shielded his eyes from the glare of sunlight on wet stone, sunlight that glinted off a platinum watch as he raised the miniature cup to sip his coffee.
He glanced at the watch and stood, his suit falling into place over long limbs. Even the most insignificant gestures—placing coins on the table, smoothing his jacket—were sensual, and from behind her sunglasses, Lia’s eyes lingered over his trim, graceful frame. Imagining toned muscles underneath the elegant, bespoke suit, she bit her lip against a rush of desire.
The stab of guilt that followed her body’s yearning dimmed the brightness of the day. The coffee tasted sour, and the brioche had staled in the cool air. Lia turned her back on the café and dumped the black coffee on the cobblestones. Standing, she brushed crumbs from the front of her loose, gray wool trousers.
“Lia Carrer?” She glanced over her shoulder, and surprise became an awkward self-awareness. She wondered if she had coffee breath or crumbs on her face, and she resisted the urge to touch her hair, lick her lips.
“Pardon me for disturbing you.” The man from the café removed his sunglasses to reveal ebony irises ringed by bands of gold. “I’m Lucas Moisset, a freelance photographer. I was working for the Federation of Mountain Cyclists that day, in Arques.” His broad Languedoc vowels were clipped by a Parisian inflection. “I recognized you from photos. I am so sorry for your loss.”
Lia flinched. Her mouth opened to repeat the canned reassurance she offered to everyone. But she found she couldn’t say “Thank you” or “It’s all right.” All she could manage was “What a strange coincidence.”
“I’m also a mountain bike enthusiast,” he said. His gaze drifted over her like he was searching for something. It made Lia more uncomfortable than if he’d merely ogled her. A roué she could shut down and walk away from. But he seemed sincere. “I was devastated by what happened. Everyone connected with the circuit had such great respect for your husband.”
This softened her. “You’re kind to say that about Gabriel,” she replied. “I should be prepared for memories to come from the most unlikely places now that I’m back in Languedoc.” She wondered if she should recognize Lucas Moisset, if they’d met before. She would surely remember so striking a face.
He pulled a thin wallet from the inner breast pocket of his jacket. “My studio is here in Narbonne. If there is anything you need, call me at any time.” He handed her a business card.
It took a moment to recognize the watermark of the bird etched behind his name: a peregrine falcon. The same shape as the brass plaque that bore the name of her cottage in Minerve. Pèlerin, a pilgrim who makes a journey to a holy place; faucon pèlerin, the majestic bird of prey that haunts the Languedoc skies. Moisset meant falcon in Occitan.
“Very clever play on your name,” she said.
Lucas tilted one corner of his mouth. “Of course, you speak Occitan. I recall reading that you’re a professor of medieval history. And that you have family roots in the area?”
Again, Lia dug around in the jumbled cabinet of her memory. Maybe she’d met him the day of the accident. Those hours—from the moment she saw the ambulance pull away from the finish line in Arques where she waited for Gabriel to arrive and her heart exploded in horrific premonition, until she collapsed at the hospital when he was pronounced dead on arrival—were a blur.
“My mother was raised in Languedoc,” Lia confirmed, feeling vulnerable with this stranger who seemed to know so much. “But I’m no longer a professor. Just an eternal student trying to finish her doctoral dissertation.” She closed her hand over his business card. “And if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment.” She picked up the basket and wrapped her arms around it, creating a barrier between herself and Lucas Moisset.
“No, of course. I understand.” He placed his sunglasses back on the bridge of his nose; her somber face was reflected in the lenses. Lucas extended a hand, and in reflex, Lia met it with her own. Her hand felt lost in the firm grip of his smooth skin and fine bones, and the connection lasted just a moment too long. Then Lucas released her. “Take care, Lia.” He walked in the direction of rue de l’Ancien Courrier.
A couple dressed in matching calfskin coats and sleek leather boots approached the Roman monument where Lia stood, alone and exposed, as she watched Lucas disappear into a passageway. They trilled in Castilian Spanish, ignoring her. Behind them, three men in business suits, their polished loafers clicking on the paving stones, discussed a marketing plan in rapid-fire French. They broke around her like a wave.
• • •
The heels of Lia’s boots tapped in staccato rhythm as she walked into the covered Passage de l’Ancre. Her destination was Cathédrale Saint-Just et Saint-Pasteur, the centerpiece of Narbonne’s medieval past. She detoured into the Jardin des Archevêques to catch a breathtaking glimpse of the cathedral’s mighty flying buttresses before returning to the fourteenth-century cloisters. Pulling on the cathedral’s door, she entered the nave with her eyes closed. Only when the door clicked shut behind her did she open them. The full grandeur of Saint-Just et Saint-Pasteur rose before her.
Lined on either side by dark wood choir stalls and stone pillars, with a vaulted ceiling that loomed 130 feet above, the immense chancel exuded somber weight. High in the upper walls, windows of jewel-toned glass glowed. Someone coughed, and the sound reverberated through the vast expanse. The echoes sank between cracks in the stone floor.
Clinging scents of incense and candle wax wafted over the ancient layer of mold. A small, dark-haired woman wearing a floral print dress and a pink apron—she could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty-five—polished a panel of filigreed walnut. A bell sounded, sonorous and slow, tolling ten times.
Lia passed unnoticed behind the chapels and into a hallway leading to the drab administrative offices. A cup of coffee steamed on the front desk, but the outer area was empty. She waited a heartbeat before skirting behind the counter and tiptoeing to the corridor. She peered in both directions, but there was no sign of the cathedral’s Cerberus: secretary Madame Josephine Isner, who guarded the cathedral’s inner sanctum with a hair-shirt personality and a whip-sharp tongue. Lia seized the moment and quick-stepped down the short corridor to the right. The fluorescent lights reflected dully on the white-and-tan-checked linoleum floors.
She rapped on a low door marked Abbé J. Bonafé. It opened immediately, and she found herself in the embrace of a short, corpulent Catalan priest who smelled of old books and aftershave.
“Lia, ma fille.” The tension she’d carried from her encounter with Lucas Moisset in the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville dissolved at the sound of Jordí Bonafé’s warm and welcoming voice.
“Father Bonafé.” She stooped to kiss each cheek. “It’s wonderful to see you again.”
He held her at arm’s length, and the sparkle in his nut-brown eyes stilled. “You’re too thin,” he said. “But lovely as ever.”
He led her into his office, where the sun cast spotlights across overflowing bookshelves and a massive oak desk. An ancient computer hummed in the center of the desk, and manila file folders were scattered across the ink blotter, nearly burying a turquoise rotary phone and an outdated intercom. Just to the left of the door, a wing chair upholstered in worn brocade and a sofa set behind a low table formed a small sitting area. The office was exactly the same as the first time she’d seen it two summers before.
“Nothing ever changes here—not you, certainly not this cathedral. It’s so reassuring,” she said.
“Yes, well, if more people in this heathen country worshipped, perhaps there would be enough money to renovate this heap.” Father Bonafé huffed. Motioning Lia to the sofa, he settled into the chair with a sigh. On the table stained by round water marks sat a tray with two cups and saucers, a teapot in the shape of an elephant, and a delft-blue platter covered with a yellow linen cloth.
“Now, for the more immediate problem—filling out your flesh.” Chuckling, he rubbed his palms together and folded back the cloth. Placed in two neat rows on the platter were a dozen golden xuixos, a deep-fried pastry filled with custard, the specialty of Father Bonafé’s Catalan hometown of Girona. The aroma of cinnamon and browned butter was a sensual mix of comfort and seduction.
With a groan, Lia pulled a wax paper bag from the basket at her feet and handed it to the priest. She’d purchased a dozen xuixos at the Catalan bakery. “I see we share the same predilection for sinful pleasures.”
He peered inside and clapped his hands in delight. “These are from Iolanda’s stall!”
“Perhaps you can offer those instead of a Communion wafer,” she teased.
He selected a pastry from the tray and nibbled with an affected delicacy before setting it on a saucer.
“I’m not nearly so restrained,” she said and bit a xuixo in half, one hand underneath the pastry to catch the oozing cream. Crystals of sugar clung to her lips, and her eyes closed as the intoxicating mix of fat and sugar melted on her tongue. One heady taste was enough.
“Have you come home for good?” Father Bonafé asked as he filled their cups. She waved away his offer of milk and chased the brazenly sweet pastry with bitter black tea.
“Is this my home?” she mused. “Somalia has only the ghosts of my parents and childhood memories. Papà’s family hates that I’m alone and so far away, but if I returned to Italy, there would be an endless stream of second cousins and family friends I’d have to meet. Potential suitors,” she added in response to the priest’s questioning look. Lia leaned into the cushions piled onto the sofa and balanced her cup and saucer in one hand. “The only place that answered when I asked myself ‘Where do I belong?’ was here. Languedoc. I had to get out of Seattle, Father. There’s nothing and no one for me there.”
“It seems that in America, death is viewed as something almost shameful, not spoken of in polite company,” said Father Bonafé. “I don’t sense much respect for the ritual of mourning.”
“There is an expectation that you must pick up and move on,” Lia agreed. “People stop calling after a while. But I don’t blame them. No one wants to be around a young widow. It’s just too sad.” Her gaze drifted to the windows and the cloisters beyond. “I’ve spent all these years considering how the Cathars viewed the afterlife, their belief that souls are reborn to play out their destinies on earth. Yet I’ve always considered reincarnation as some sort of primitive mysticism,” she said. “But now that this has happened to me again—losing someone I love before their time—the Cathars’ sense of the continuity of life seems so full of hope. There’s always a chance for redemption.” She turned back to Father Bonafé. “How is reincarnation any more farfetched than heaven and hell?”
The outer corners of the priest’s eyes crinkled in a canny smile, but to her relief, he didn’t offer pat guidance. Hers was a question without an answer.
Lia’s hand shook as she set her cup and saucer on the table, and she hugged a small pillow to her chest. She wasn’t sure if she was speaking as a researcher to a fellow scholar or as a grieving widow to a man trained to offer comfort, but it no longer seemed to matter. The borders between personal anguish and scholarly interest dissolved in this storied setting.
“For a long time, I wanted to believe in their world,” she said quietly, squaring the pillow on her lap and smoothing its embroidered surface. “I prayed that Gabriel waited for me in some in-between place, and he’d find a way back to me.” To her dismay, tears burned her eyes. “Ah, damn. Just when I think I’m done with the crying.” She pushed the pillow aside and pressed a paper napkin against each eye. “I can’t carry that anger with me, Father. No more than I can carry around the belief that Gabriel will come back.”
“So there’s no room in your heart for a life beyond this, Lia? Either the heaven I peddle or the reincarnation and redemption that your beloved Cathars preached? No hope that you will see your husband again in some other world or time?”
She pressed her lips together and made tiny rips in the napkin. Without looking up, she said, “It’s not lost on me, as someone who rejected God long ago, that I’ve made it my life’s work to study a mystical faith, and yet I have no beliefs of my own. No way to frame my own grief with rituals of remembrance and letting go. Perhaps that’s why I’ve felt so lost.” She crumpled the napkin and met Father Bonafé’s eyes. “But no. There is no life but this.”
The room was still except for the hum from the aging computer. Lia took the opportunity to change the subject.
“The one thing I do know is that I have to face my dissertation.” She grimaced. “I’m too late to save my job but hopefully not too late to salvage my dignity.” Lia mentally crossed her fingers. “I’m hoping you can help me access the archives at the Institute for Cathar Studies. There are documents there I need to see, but I’ve been trying to make contact for days and no one returns my calls or answers my emails.”
Father Bonafé cleared his throat and placed his cup and saucer on the table. “Lia, it’s been kept out of the press, but the institute is nearly kaput.” He made a slicing motion across his neck. “Funding dried up during the recession, and the government has no means to bail it out. The trustees fear that once the institute declares bankruptcy, its holdings will be auctioned off to private collectors to pay its debts.”
“What?” Lia sat upright, knocking her knees against the coffee table. The bone china clinked in delicate protest. “This is a disaster. Father Bonafé, I have to get in there to use those materials. I need to see the originals—the Internet and reproductions can only take me so far. Oh my God. I’m so close to finishing, and now this.”
The priest held up a hand. “Not to worry, my dear scholar. We’ve determined the collection will not fall into the hands of strangers. A few trusted archivists in Languedoc-Roussillon will guard the institute’s holdings until a permanent solution can be found. And this is between you and me. We’d rather the public not know just yet.”
Lia sank back. “Is that kind of distribution legal?” she asked.
“Well, it’s not technically illegal.” Father Bonafé lifted the teapot lid and peered inside.
His studied nonchalance sounded a distant alarm in Lia’s mind, and she held out her hands in mock approbation. “So I should assuage my conscience knowing those artifacts will be safely tucked away here and there? How will I find what I need? Who’s on this list of ‘trusted archivists’?” She was surprised at the snap in her voice.
He didn’t reply, and her question dropped between them in a stalemate. She wondered if behind his stony stare, Father Bonafé regretted confiding in her. But she pushed on. “Is the cathedral receiving anything from the archives?”
The priest topped off his cup and took his time sipping and swallowing his tea. At last, he nodded.
“Father Bonafé.” Madame Isner’s tart voice crackled into the room over the intercom. “The rector would like to see you as soon as you have a spare moment.” The intercom whooshed and snapped, signaling the secretary still had her finger on the button, awaiting a response.
“I’ll be right out, Madame Isner,” the priest replied.
“And would you please inform your guest that sneaking into back offices is quite against protocol? This is why we have a waiting area. Visitors should be prepared to wait.” Claiming the last word, Madame Isner silenced the intercom.
Father Bonafé pulled a face at the machine and then winked at Lia. “I swear she can see through these walls.”
He walked her down the hall and through a back exit to the sunlit cloisters, bypassing the vexed secretary. Once outside, he said, “Lia, there are documents in the institute’s archives that have escaped notice. The administration has been far too focused on staying afloat to keep up, and they’ve had to dismiss most of an already meager staff. I’d hoped to enlist your assistance in sorting through some recent acquisitions and transcribing the original Occitan.”
A frisson of anticipation vibrated in her belly. “That email you sent… What did you write?” She dug around in her bag and retrieved a Moleskine notebook. “Here, the line was so perfect, I wrote it down: What seemed like legend carried through time on the flimsy backs of folktales and rumor now appears plausible as history.” She slapped the notebook against her open palm and shifted on her feet. “Father Bonafé, have you found something related to Pierre de Castelnau?”
The noncommittal shrug and the shifting away of the priest’s eyes in the seconds before he replied shot a tendril of doubt through Lia’s excitement. “It’s too soon to say. Once the materials are in my possession, I’ll be in touch.” He placed a hand on her arm. “And please, call me Jordí. I insist, Lia. We’re talking as friends and historians, not as priest to parishioner.”
She wasn’t ready to be dismissed, not just yet. “Father—Jordí—the idea that someone would remove priceless documents from the institute, even if the goal is a noble one, I just… This secrecy feels wrong.” He answered with a weary exhalation that said nothing and meant everything, but Lia pressed on. “Those documents belong to the French people, to French history, not hidden away in a church basement or someone’s cellar.”
“A church basement?” Her friend bristled at the suggestion that the cathedral’s subterranean library was a mere basement.
“Sorry, that was petty. But these materials should be available to anyone who applies to view them through the proper channels.”
“Lia, you must trust me on this.” His brown irises, which so easily melted with laughter, had hardened into petrified wood, and his singsong, Spanish-accented French became clipped with tension. “If private collectors cannibalize the institute’s archives, we may never see those materials again. The fewer people who know, the better it is for the integrity of the collection. Now, I must run.” He said his farewells and left her standing in the sunshine and yet in the dark.
Lia crossed the cloisters and returned to the empyreal nave of Saint-Just et Saint-Pasteur, trying to sort her aching curiosity from her professional disquietude.