LE PÈLERIN, MINERVE—EARLY FEBRUARY
An email from Lucas Moisset arrived at the end of January, through the portal of Lia’s LinkedIn profile, just as the sharp memory of their encounter had dulled to a lingering curiosity. She scanned the message quickly, then took a breath and a seat to reread it. Once again, he caught her off guard.
Dear Lia,
I hope you’re well. Again, I offer my apologies for taking you by surprise in Narbonne. It occurred to me after we met that you’d be an ideal collaborator for a project I’m working on, so I have a business proposition for you. I could explain it over the phone or in another email, but it would be easiest in person, since it involves your research (which I’d like to hear more about) and my photography. Could you meet me Friday for dinner?
She clicked Reply but sat with her fingers poised on the keyboard for many long minutes, unable to respond. Finally, leaving the cursor blinking on a blank window, Lia pushed back her chair and changed into her running gear. Maybe pounding her feet against the pavement would deplete her anxiety. The diversion worked—until she returned from her run an hour later, only to see her computer waiting on the dining room table.
Before she had time to change her mind, she sat in her sweaty clothes and quickly started typing.
Bonjour, Lucas.
Thanks for the email and dinner invitation. I’d be delighted to talk about my research, though you should be careful what you wish for. I’m likely to bore you to tears. Dinner Friday would be
She paused, staring off into the distance. Having dinner with a man she found so attractive would be nerve-racking. It would feel wrong. It would be a relief.
“It’s just dinner, Lia,” she muttered as she typed lovely to end the sentence. Then she hit Send.
Two emails later—he hadn’t asked for her phone number, and she hadn’t offered—they’d agreed to meet at La Cauquilha, a seafood bistro in Gruissan, at eight o’clock. Then she booked an appointment at Salon Anouck in Narbonne.
NARBONNE—FRIDAY AFTERNOON
Lia rushed from the medieval alleyway off rue Littré to the Place de Verdun. From the busy boulevard Gambetta, she darted through the crowds until the doors of Salon Anouck appeared before her.
Inside the salon, quiet murmurs of stylists ministering to their clients wafted through the warm, softly humid air. Ushered into a plush chair in the foyer, she was offered a glass of wine or something hot to drink. As much as she would have liked the wine, she opted for green tea. Lia planned to drive straight from the salon to the restaurant in Gruissan. The receptionist relieved her of the garment bag that held her change of clothes, assuring Lia it would be waiting in a private changing room after her hair and makeup session.
This salon visit was long overdue. For months, Lia had done little more than pull her tangle of curls into a low chignon and brush a wand of mascara across her upper lashes. She’d borrowed a couple of cashmere sweaters and wool and silk trousers from Rose, to replace the fleece and denim that had been her Seattle uniform. But she’d refused to care any more than that.
Yet she’d become acutely conscious of her haphazard appearance since arriving in France. She was surrounded by sublime people whose elegance seemed effortless yet studied. The women were sleek and shiny as mink, their skin flawless and polished; the men had manicured hands and left clouds of sweet tobacco and orange trailing behind as they passed.
Comparing her rough presentation to the women around her, Lia was reminded of how her mother could look poised and cool in surgical scrubs in the relentless African heat, while her untamed daughter carried the desert sand and city mud on her clothes and smeared across her tanned cheeks. Her grandmother had tried, during those summers Lia spent in Limoux after her parents died, to nurture the sense of style she declared innate in all French women. But Lia, a grieving and bewildered preteen struggling to assert her independence amid the gaggle of Italian cousins, had insisted she was African. Not French, not Italian, but a white child of Somalia. And now, she wanted nothing more than to be embraced by the Languedoc culture and to make it her own.
Once seated in a reclining spa chair, Lia surrendered to the ethereal music drifting from hidden speakers. She dozed in the heated chair, its built-in roller gently pulsing up and down her spine, while her hands and feet were massaged and her nails painted. Then she moved to a stylist’s station, where a young woman with a short cap of black hair set in finger waves washed and conditioned Lia’s hair, leaving her in a cloud of jasmine and musk.
Moments later, a woman arrived, dressed in a fitted black top with a mandarin collar and slim black capris, her shining blond hair pulled into a severe ponytail high on her head. The woman placed her finely manicured hands on Lia’s shoulders. She introduced herself as Élodie, the stylist who would bring some order to Lia’s hair and see to her makeup. They exchanged a few cursory pleasantries as Élodie stood behind her, considering Lia’s curls and split ends. She separated and pinned up Lia’s wet locks and made some styling suggestions, to which Lia readily agreed, but then, mercifully, their conversation ended. Lia closed her eyes again and imagined the evening ahead. Her nerves were knotted tight at the prospect of dinner with Lucas.
• • •
An hour later, Élodie spun Lia’s chair to face the mirror, and all thoughts of dinner evaporated from Lia’s mind. She hardly recognized the woman facing her. Her hair had been blown into gentle waves, parted on one side and tucked behind her ears. The light caught its natural shades of brown, amber, and gold. Élodie had perfected the art of barely there makeup, and Lia’s skin and eyes shone with life and light she hadn’t seen since before Gabriel’s death.
Those eyes filled with tears as pride and loneliness washed over her. After cooing and dabbing away Lia’s tears, Élodie swept a soft brush over Lia’s neck and face and whisked off the silky black sheath. The raven-haired assistant returned to lead Lia to a private room at the back of the salon, where she slipped into a clinging wrap dress of dark teal jersey with a plunging neckline and stepped into tall heels with delicate straps crisscrossing her ankles.
She took stock of her mood. She’d told Rose about the encounter with Lucas in Narbonne and of tonight’s meeting, but she’d downplayed the photographer’s looks and skipped over his charisma. Unsettled by the thought that she was betraying Gabriel by having dinner with another man, she reminded herself again that it wasn’t a date.
So why the new dress, the heels, the makeup, the hair? she asked her reflection.
And her reflection replied, Because you’re alive, Lia. Forgive yourself for that.
She folded her other clothes into a shopping bag, picked up a pashmina wrap from the padded bench, and turned her back on herself.
• • •
Lia parked outside Gruissan’s medieval center and stepped carefully across the loose gravel lot to a covered passageway. Following the passage to its end, she emerged at the foot of rue de la République.
Lucas waited for her outside the restaurant. He wore black wool trousers and a gray button-down shirt, with a cashmere sweater the blue-gray of the winter sea draped over his shoulders. From his widened eyes and half smile, she knew she’d made an impression. Her ankles wobbled in her heels…or was that her heart skipping a beat? They exchanged cheek kisses, his fingers encircling her forearm.
“Lia. You look beautiful.”
She’d intended to be aloof and untouchable, but with one gesture, he’d made her feel as self-conscious as a teenager on her first date.
Lucas held the door open, and she entered La Cauquilha. Clatter from the open kitchen, the clink of flatware against china, and the buzz of conversation bounced off the cozy bistro’s Grecian-blue ceilings, shell-white walls, and polished wood floors. Nearly every table was occupied, and several heads turned at their entrance.
A waiter, wearing a spotless white shirt and a black apron that draped to his shoes, swept by with plates of food cascading down one arm. He acknowledged them with a cheery “Bonsoir, madame, monsieur” and tilted his head to his left, indicating an empty table in the far corner. Lucas said something to the waiter out of Lia’s earshot before ushering her to the table, one hand touching the small of her back.
A trio of votive candles set in glass bowls filled with sand sparkled on the table. Lucas pulled out her chair and waited for her to sit before taking his seat. Servers dipped in and out to fill their water glasses and deliver a bread basket.
“I’m so glad you came,” Lucas said after their orders had been taken.
“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“I wondered if you’d think it was too soon.”
Before she could ask “Too soon for what?” the sommelier appeared at their table with a bottle of Blanquette de Limoux and presented it for approval.
“I thought this almost-spring evening called for a celebration,” said Lucas. “Do you mind if we start with sparkling wine?”
“Of course not,” she replied. “Blanquette is one of my favorites.”
He nodded to the sommelier, and the discreet ceremony proceeded. The first taste was offered to Lucas, who deferred to Lia. She drank in the wine’s bouquet of white blossoms and nectarine and swirled its bracing effervescence in her mouth.
“It’s perfect.” She smiled at the sommelier. He filled their flutes and set the bottle in the bucket of ice and water that rested in a stand beside the table.
Lucas raised his glass. “To winters that feel like spring,” he said.
She touched her glass to his. “To fresh starts.” They danced around what had brought them together with chatter about the restaurant and the delightfully warm weather and compared notes on their favorite Languedoc wines.
At last, Lia smoothed her hands across the linen tablecloth. She’d had enough of small talk. “So tell me about this business proposition. Your email was cryptic, but you got my attention.”
Lucas rested an elbow on the back of his chair, his other hand toying with the stem of his wine flute. Watching him, Lia thought of that old Carly Simon song her parents used to play. They mangled the American accent with their French- and Italian-inflected English, but she still remembered the line about a man walking into a party like it was a yacht. Lucas had that same inscrutable self-possession.
“It’s simple, really,” he said. “Several months ago, a colleague and I submitted a proposal to a British publishing company for a book on historic Cathar sights throughout the Languedoc region. You know, one of those glossy, coffee-table books with lots of panoramic shots of castle ruins at sunset, snowcapped peaks in the distance?”
Lia nodded, smiling. She had such a book, one of the few things she’d saved from her parents’ home. She’d perused it so many times, the spine was cracked. The photographs brought her to the places she loved, no matter how far away she might be.
Lucas continued. “The proposal was accepted, and the publisher offered us a contract, but my coauthor—a historian who was writing the text—pulled out a few weeks ago. A family situation I won’t go into. And it turns out, in all these months, he’d hardly written a thing. I still have a few months of layout and design ahead of me, so it’s not a crisis yet. But with an early summer deadline for the first draft, it may soon be.”
Lia remained still, hoping for and dreading what she knew he was about to ask.
“After I saw you in Narbonne, I pulled up as many of your articles and transcripts of your lectures as I could find online, even your course syllabi.” He sat forward and pressed his palms together. The distance between their faces could be measured in inches. She inhaled his cologne and the mint of toothpaste on his breath. “I realized I could never have collaborated with this other historian. What little he’d written sounded straight out of a tourist’s guidebook. He’s not even French. Lia, there’s no one who can capture the Languedoc spirit, who can take dry facts and make them come alive, the way you can. You know this place—its languages, its secrets.”
The waiter arrived with their starter plates of mussels with rouille and grilled octopus on saffron rice. As they ate, Lucas described the contract he’d negotiated, and the sums of money floored Lia, accustomed as she was to the pittances paid by academic presses. She laughed and held up her hand to stop him. Her mind was whirling.
“This is a lot to get my head around. I’m supposed to be finishing my dissertation.” She thought of the boxes of research she’d sent ahead from Seattle, of the cursor flashing on her blank computer screen. But to work on a living project that would be in the public’s hands within a year, not forgotten on a shelf along with all the other dissertations… “Tell me more,” she said.
Lucas took his time outlining the book and his vision for the editorial content, patiently answering Lia’s many questions. The text accompanying his photos would tell the history of the villages and Cathar strongholds spread across the Aude and Hérault Valleys, the Black Mountain range, and the foothills of the Pyrénées.
Their conversation was interrupted again, this time by the presentation of their entrées of seared tuna in a shiitake sauce. Lia tasted and approved the aged Provençal rosé made with the obscure Tibouren grape that she’d selected as their dinner wine.
“What could I say to convince you to work with me on this book? If we approached the publisher, made them aware of your work, I’m certain they’d grant us an extension. You could finish your dissertation and pick up the book when you’re ready.”
Lia’s ears rang with the words we and us. She drained the rosé from her glass and glanced around the restaurant. Couples sat with their heads bent toward one another in murmured conversation, sipping wine and slipping knives through succulent fish. She caught her and Lucas’s reflections in the large front window. Lean and elegant, so finely dressed, they looked as though they belonged together.
The appearance of the waiter in the reflection brought her back to the table.
“How is your meal?” he asked Lia.
“It’s perfect.”
The waiter dipped his head and glided away.
“About that dissertation.” She nodded as Lucas lifted the bottle, offering to pour her more wine. “I’d been writing about the nature of Cathar religious beliefs, particularly the afterlife and their belief in reincarnation, but since Gabriel’s death…” Lia adjusted the linen napkin in her lap, buying a moment to steady herself. “It’s become almost too personal. As though I need to come to terms with my own feelings about death and an afterlife before I can keep writing about the Cathars.” Caught between an ache to talk about Gabriel and the need to bind her grief tightly, she opted for a change of subject.
“My regret now is that I didn’t start with the question of how and why the Cathar Crusade began. I’m so near the end of this dissertation, and I have to finish the work I started, but I can’t get my mind off the murder of Archdeacon Pierre de Castelnau.” She sliced through tuna as pink as the rosé in her glass, unaware that Lucas had gone completely still, his eyes cold as iron. “He was murdered in January 1208,” she said. “In the midst of mediating a land dispute between Raymond VI, the Count of Toulouse, and Hugh de Baux, the Viscount of Marseilles. History has it that Castelnau was ambushed on his way to parley with the viscount, supposedly by a mercenary of Toulouse’s.” She bit into the silky flesh of the seared tuna.
“Toulouse was a known Cathar sympathizer,” Lucas said in a clipped tone. “The Church was trying to give his land to a rival. What greater motive could there be for Castelnau’s death?”
Lia was shaking her head before Lucas had finished speaking. “Toulouse wasn’t that committed to the Cathars. He just liked their economic policies. To the Cathars, the Church represented unmitigated greed. The sympathizers—those wealthy landowners and nobility like the count—tolerated the heretics because they didn’t demand tribute like the Church. Toulouse wanted to keep his subjects happy, but even more than that, he wanted to keep his wealth in place. And in turn, the Church loathed the Cathars for their rejection of tithing and papal taxation.” She was beginning to warm up to her theories. “The Vatican had been after the Cathars for years. They hired mercenaries—knights even—to wreak havoc in Languedoc villages and terrorize the heretics or anyone who seemed friendly with them.” She held up her knife, stabbing at the air to emphasize her point. “Then Pierre de Castelnau, the pope’s own appointed emissary, is murdered by a known sympathizer, the Count of Toulouse? It’s much too convenient a coincidence.”
Lia took Lucas’s wrinkled brow and silence for confusion and set down her knife and fork to explain. “I believe the Vatican was looking for an excuse to launch genocide,” she said. “The Cathars declared themselves free from the earthly chains of greed and wealth. They believed in the equality of men. And of women. That’s what the Catholic Church feared: loss of money and loss of power. The Church and its lackeys, the Knights Templar, used Castelnau’s murder to declare war against the so-called heretics. His death broke the stealth campaign against the Cathars wide open. I think the Church orchestrated Castelnau’s assassination, but I want to know why they chose someone as highly placed as the archdeacon. Was it merely because his death would attract so much attention? Or was he murdered for something he knew, not just for who he was?”
To her surprise, Lucas set his napkin on the table and pushed back his chair. “Would you excuse me for a moment?”
He was gone before she had a chance to respond.