NARBONNE—EASTER SUNDAY
Lia made one stop before following her hunch to Paris. The sky blushed a rose garden’s worth of pink and peach as she and the sunrise arrived together in Narbonne.
The cathedral doors off rue Gustave Fabre were unlocked. She slipped inside and inched forward as the door closed softly against her back. Mass would begin in less than two hours, but the only sign of life was the orange light flickering from thick, white wax cylinders on the altar. She skirted the nave’s outer perimeter until she reached a hallway that led to the cloisters.
A breeze pushed through the cloisters’ arched passageway, rustling a cluster of palms in the center of the manicured courtyard. Pigeons gurgled and cooed from their perch on a gargoyle with an eagle’s head and dragon’s wings. Through its open beak, the stone creature set loose an unheard, unending screech over Narbonne. Lia walked along the arcade to a wooden door opposite the choir. She grasped the black iron handle and whispered an entreaty. Then she opened the door into the cathedral’s administrative corridors and moved swiftly to Jordí’s office.
During that terrible week between Gabriel’s accident and her journey to his family’s home in Mexico with his body, she had come to the Trésor seeking solace. Jordí had brought precious tomes from the archives’ inner vault to its cool, dimly lit reading room where Lia worked, and she had found comfort in the fragrance of old paper and leather and the sight of ancient script and illustrations. On her first visit, Jordí met her at the cathedral, and they stood in the doorway in front of his office while he patted his shirt and his pants before finally reaching up to palm two keys hidden on top of the door frame. He used one to open the door. The other, a skeleton, he slipped into the keyhole in the center drawer of his desk. From inside the drawer, he had withdrawn a metal ring crowded with keys large and small, using one with a large, square head to unlock the entrance to the Trésor beneath their feet.
The mismatched pair of keys was still on the lip above the door. As Lia let herself into Jordí’s office, she replayed her conversation with the priest in the bistro, recalling the details of Castelnau’s murder. She kept coming back to the letter the young priest had found near the archdeacon’s body. Did he really leave it buried under a stone at the abbey in Saint-Gilles? Could he have carried it with him through the years?
On Jordí’s desk, amid the chaos of correspondence, half-empty coffee mugs, and pastry crumbs, a Bible lay open, and on a tissue-thin page, Romans 2:16 had been highlighted in neon-yellow marker. She followed the words with her finger, speaking under her breath. “On that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.”
Lia fitted the second key into the lock of the thin drawer that spanned the length of the desktop and slid the drawer open. Sifting through the jumble of paper clips, pens, stamps, and business cards, she found no keys. She eased it back, but the old warped wood stuck halfway. Lia gave it a bump with her hip, shaking up the drawer’s contents, and a glint of gold winked in the growing light. It came from the raised lettering of a business card. Lettering she recognized. Lucas Moisset, Photographe Indépendant. Behind the name was an etched watermark of a peregrine falcon.
She placed the card on top of the Bible, anger and confusion churning through her. Jordí. Lucas. “They have met.” Lia’s sharp voice flared in the dim office.
Jordí hadn’t told her the truth about Lucas. He’d lied about the finance committee meeting. And he’d disappeared. “What else have you lied about?” she muttered. She shoved the desk drawer, but it caught on an obstruction. Cursing, she pushed again. There was a clink, followed by a hollow smack, and the drawer slid home. A set of keys lay at her feet.
Leaving Jordí’s office with the keys cupped in her hand, Lia headed toward the Chapelle de l’Annonciade. The soles of her shoes squeaked on the cheap linoleum tiles. The hallway broke to the right and led to a cramped staircase. It was part of a much older floor plan, descending into the bowels of the cathedral to the Trésor, the disused wine cellars, and the crypts, where echoes were swallowed by stone and darkness. Steeling her nerves against the inevitable wave of claustrophobia, Lia descended.
Standing in front of a low, round door at the end of the short corridor, her bravado disappeared. The dark door glowered in the faint light cast by small sconces set in the walls. A chorus of whispers stirred the air, taunting her. It’s only the air regulator. Impatience and curiosity overcame her hesitation, and Lia pressed on the handle, expecting the abrupt stop of a locked door. It gave freely.
The column of space on the other side was tar black. Her stomach dropped, and the jagged edges of Jordí’s office keys stabbed into her palm. She released her clenched fist and dropped the keys into her front pocket. One hand groped for a light switch while the other clutched tightly to the strap of the backpack slung over her shoulder. She slid up the dimmer knob, and a calming glow seeped into the four empty corners.
The room was a perfect square, with space for two rectangular tables set one in front of the other and a pair of chairs tucked to the edge of each. No other furniture, not even a wastebasket. Of course, it offered nothing; this was only the reading room. Moving to the shadow of a reinforced-steel door in the far wall, Lia selected the key she’d once seen Jordí use and unlocked the door. Stepping inside the archival room, she guided the door back toward the threshold. Her throat closed as the steel sealed against the frame. She pushed on the handle, and a current of electric relief surged through her when the door opened. Not trusting she wouldn’t be trapped inside, Lia dropped her backpack in the gap. The heavy door crushed the polyester, but the bag’s thick straps held it open.
She raised the dimmer and a row of floor lights illuminated a strip of carpet between several low metal bookcases. Sconces glowed faintly on the walls of the cool, silent room. Despite the enclosed space, she relaxed. It was her first time in this inner sanctum of the Trésor, but she knew how to navigate the world of age-old documents. Secrets were confined to ancient script on fragile pages.
Walking down the center aisle, Lia peered between the rows. Protective glass covered the cabinet fronts, keeping out moisture and light. The cabinets were arranged by the five dioceses of the Languedoc-Roussillon region: Montpellier, Carcassonne, Mende, Nîmes, and Perpignan. The records of each diocese were divided chronologically by type of document—registers, leases, account rolls, court rolls, correspondence.
Where would she find a letter a young priest had hidden under a stone in the abbey of Saint-Gilles? Jordí said he’d left it in the church, where time turned it to dust. Yet what better place to hide something than in plain sight? It must be here.
Walking among the bookcases, Lia sought out the diocese of Nîmes, which still governed the abbey of Saint-Gilles eight hundred years after the death of Pierre de Castelnau. She located the cabinet designated for the parish of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard and pulled gently on the handle. Of course, it was locked. Lia pulled the key ring from her pocket. Around it were several small keys that looked identical. She ran her fingers along their sharp edges and fit one into the cabinet lock. It slipped in easily but didn’t turn. She tried a second key, then a third. The lock clicked. She slid the glass front up.
Inside were archival binders covered in buckram cloth and set in protective slipcases, with numbers embossed in gold on their thick spines. A folio on top of the cabinet listed the contents of each. To have in arm’s reach a trove of medieval documents she’d never before explored was intoxicating.
Three binders covered a span of time that included 1208, the year of Castelnau’s murder. Two of these held tax rolls and deeds. The third was numbered, but its contents weren’t listed in the legend. When Lia withdrew it from its case, something fluttered out and into the aisle. She noted where it landed and turned back to the cabinet.
The binder contained only a clear polyester envelope with a thin wallet inside. She pulled on the white cotton gloves she’d stashed in her pocket, wishing she could feel the material with her fingers but knowing the oil from her hands would mar the surface. She snapped open the envelope and removed the wallet. The caramel leather had worn thin in places and was streaked with fine black veins, like minute canyons that had collected centuries of grime. She imagined the many hands that had touched the finely tooled calfskin, fit for a nobleman.
One side of the empty pouch bore a brand Lia recognized immediately: one horse carrying two knights, bordered by the script Sigillum Militum Xpisti, the insignia of the Knights Templar. Philippe du Plessis would have used that signet. She returned the wallet to its protective envelope, certain she knew which letter it had once held. Then Lia turned to see what had fallen out. It lay in the middle of the center aisle.
It wasn’t an ancient document. It was a photograph, one that had been printed from a digital camera. It showed an unremarkable stretch of highway bordered by low walls of stone and forest on either side, with evergreen-covered hills in the distance. The road could have been any in southern Languedoc, but something about the setting tugged at Lia’s memory. She tucked the photograph into her back pocket and returned the binder to the cabinet, leaving it as she found it, locked, nearly empty.
Next, she visited the cabinets containing materials for the diocese of Carcassonne. It didn’t take long. She knew those archives as well as any. She scanned the rest of the room, even peering into its dark corners. No unprotected piles, no boxes waiting to be unpacked.
Her search stopped. The ringing of the bells sank with muffled echoes to the depth of the Trésor, and Lia recalled vaguely that it was Easter Sunday. Resurrection all around her. She glanced at her watch. 9:00 a.m. Time to go. Sunday Mass was just beginning, and the cathedral would be packed with worshippers and tourists. She could blend in or pretend she’d gotten lost if caught where she shouldn’t be.
The hallway was silent and dark. She crept back to Jordí’s office and returned the key ring to his desk, rereading Romans 2:16 as she carefully closed the center drawer. She snorted softly at the verse’s irony and dropped Lucas’s business card into the small front pocket of her backpack. Yanking the zipper closed, Lia left Jordí’s office. She slipped the mismatched pair of keys in place on the door frame on her way out.
• • •
Lucas watched as Lia pulled her car around and took a left onto rue Gustave Fabre before easing his BMW into the street some distance behind her. She was forced to slow through the traffic vying for parking as the Easter Sunday Mass crowds grew. He followed her out of town and onto the A75. Southern France fell away as they climbed steadily toward Paris, Lucas cruising an easy distance behind, slipping into a parking space when Lia pulled off for fuel.
During a brief stop, as she walked toward her car from the market carrying a bottle of water and a coffee, the sun caught her, turning her copper hair to gold. In that moment, looking so distant, vulnerable, and pale, she was Paloma. And all the hurt and sorrow of a young Lucas Moisset and the regret of the soldier he’d become came pounding back.
• • •
He considered the years of his boyhood in Languedoc, searching for clues that could tell him when and how he’d lost everything he loved. His mother, whom he couldn’t recall, had died giving birth to a sister who hadn’t lived past her first birthday. His father had been a drunken disgrace, falling to his death in an open well when Lucas was not yet twelve.
Hugh Gervais had extended a compassionate hand to Lucas after the boy’s father died and brought him to live on the estate outside Limoux, and when Lucas was eighteen, he’d sent him to Agen to train as a knight. Lucas left with the certainty he’d won the heart of Gervais’s only daughter, Paloma. But Lord Hugh Gervais had no intention of wedding Paloma to a penniless young man with a tarnished name.
When Lucas returned to Limoux from the battlefields of Anatolia, he learned in the village that Paloma, the girl to whom he’d sworn his love, had married Raoul d’Aran, a Catalan winemaker, and had given the foreigner a son and a daughter. And that Hugh Gervais had become a disgrace himself by pledging solidarity with the heretical Cathars.
Deprived of home and wife, Lucas wanted only to excise his connections to Languedoc and obliterate love from his heart. He dropped his Occitan surname to become Mauléon and rejoined the army of his former commander, Philippe du Plessis. The men were united again in battle, this time to eradicate the infidel Cathars from the south and unite Occitania with France.
Eight hundred years later, as he watched a woman in search of a truth she didn’t understand, he realized that love had never been lost, but that he had failed Paloma when he could have saved her. Lia was his second chance. Yet once again, Raoul d’Aran stood in front of Lucas, barring the way to his future. And behind him, his past was catching up.