THE MARAIS, PARIS—MARCH 1208
“Are you certain you weren’t followed?”
“Le Temple was nearly empty. I would have noticed anyone near me. And the Marais was so crowded, no one could have found me.” Manel moved to the fireplace and rubbed his gloved hands before the flames. “I don’t have much time. I’m expected to depart from Paris this very morning.” He turned to his cousin. “It’s happened, Raoul. The atrocities Plessis and Amalric carried out in secret are now sanctioned war. I can’t fathom why Toulouse had the legate murdered, knowing as well as we the price Languedoc would pay for his conceit.”
“Then you must know that it wasn’t the count who called for Castelnau’s murder,” Raoul replied. “Tell me what you know of Plessis’s intentions.”
Manel relayed the content of the council’s meeting. “Anyone of the Cathar faith or seen as a sympathizer will be considered an enemy of Christianity and punished as such.” He ran a hand through his wheaten hair. “I can’t deny I’m relieved to be on the road again, away from Amalric, but what I wouldn’t give to remain in France with you, my cousin.”
Raoul approached the young man, whose smooth skin and bright eyes were little changed from the boy Raoul had known in the Val d’Aran. Manel, slight and clever, the second son of his mother’s youngest sister, had blossomed into a scholar and a priest who sat at the pope’s right hand.
“What risks you’ve taken.” Raoul clasped his cousin’s upper arms, looking at the cherished face he feared never to see again. “You’re not safe, no matter what protection you claim from the Holy See. What you’ve done, whom you’ve betrayed—your life is forfeit if you’re discovered. Yet you’ve never wavered.”
“I accepted this role,” Manel replied. “I’ll see it through to its end. Then I’ll leave the Church and return home. Or perhaps come back here and join the university. I’ll change my name and lose myself among the poor, happy students.” He laughed and broke away.
Raoul knew Manel would not leave Rome alive should his betrayal be revealed. He certainly could never return to Paris, where his radiant looks and linguistic genius were becoming known throughout the city.
“There is one more thing you should know, Raoul. A new sénéchal of Languedoc has been named. He knows of you. And now he knows we’re cousins.”
“I’ve heard nothing of this. Surely the Languedoc barons would have been informed!”
“He’s only just been announced. In fact, he’s accompanying me as far as Lyon before continuing south. His name is Lucas Mauléon, a Templar knight. Apparently, he achieved some renown with Plessis’s regiment in Anatolia.”
Raoul acknowledged this with a caustic laugh. “Of course. One of Christ’s Soldiers,” he said, his voice seething with irony, “sent to prepare Languedoc for conquest by the pope’s crusade and annexation by France’s crown.”
A sense of urgency inflamed Raoul. The threat to Languedoc, his adopted home, and to his young family, was imminent. He’d leave at dusk, before the city’s gates were closed against the night. Mirò was stabled not far from the southern edge of town, near the Porte Sainte-Geneviève.
Anxious to be on his way, he scanned the small room and his provisions, which were packed in a constant state of readiness. The space he inhabited—nothing more than a bed, table, and fireplace attached to a larger house by a muddy courtyard—had been provided to him by a Jewish merchant sympathetic to the plight of the persecuted Cathars.
“You can’t possibly return alone,” Manel said. “The roads will be crawling with Plessis’s henchmen. A solitary rider with an accent from the southern mountains will be vulnerable.”
“Not to worry,” Raoul replied. “I’ll avoid the Rhône route and use the merchant road to Bordeaux.” He plotted the course that would take the least time without catching him in a late-winter storm high in the central mountain passes. The one that wouldn’t risk him crossing paths with the sénéchal. “I’ll raise the alarm where I can. When the weather warms, the news can be spread across the Massif and toward the Alps.”
“Send word to me through Father Anselm as soon as you can,” Manel said. “I’ll be in Rome within a fortnight.” He spoke of a priest, one of several in a clandestine network of Catholics throughout Languedoc, who risked his life to offer shelter and pass along intelligence.
The cousins embraced, and Manel left the way he’d come. He returned to rue Quincampoix and continued south toward the Seine and the Île de la Cité. He didn’t notice a hooded figure in the shadow of an arched doorway. Had he seen the man’s onyx eyes, he would have known the sénéchal.
THE MARAIS, PARIS—MONDAY MORNING
Tucked in a side street between a hardware store and a coffee shop, near the intersection of rue Réaumur and rue Beaubourg, Hôtel Bailly was at the back door of Lia’s beloved Right Bank neighborhood, the Marais. She’d discovered the hotel years before, during graduate school when she couldn’t afford a more elegant address, and she returned to it each time she traveled to Paris.
When Lia apologized for not booking ahead, the man at the front desk flashed dazzling white teeth set against blue-black skin and said she could have nearly any room of her choosing. Her favorite, on the sixth floor, meant a panting hike up the conch-shell staircase to avoid an elevator smaller than a bathroom stall. But the room had a large skylight, a deep bathtub, and an oversized framed print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night that made her feel melancholy and hopeful in the same breath. She remained in the room only long enough to leave her bags and use the toilet. Dropping her key at the front desk, Lia reentered the streets of the third arrondissement.
Her feet led her to the Square du Temple, just east of Hôtel Bailly. It was here, in the mid-twelfth century, that the Knights Templar established their European base. The area had been an insect-infested swamp well outside the city walls, but foresight and planning granted the independent knights tremendous wealth. By the early thirteenth century, when Pope Innocent III launched the crusade against the Cathars, the Templars owned vast tracts of Paris, and the Temple district had become an important financial center.
If she was in Paris when the weather was fine, Lia loved to bring a picnic lunch to the peaceful, groomed gardens of the square. Though nothing remained of the citadel of the Knights Templar, she imagined its imposing square tower surrounded by high crenellated walls; she could hear the hoofbeats of approaching horses and the clanking of armor and ringing of steel as knights practiced swordplay in the courtyard.
Lia settled on a bench that looked across rue de Bretagne to the elegant nineteenth-century buildings beyond. It was just past noon on Monday, and the park vibrated with energy. City gardeners in green coveralls turned over flower beds to work in mulch; the fecund aroma was thick with the promise of growth. The trees were grim and bare, but the sky beamed blue through the stark branches.
She didn’t have to wait long. Jordí approached wearing a layperson’s clothing: a long, black wool coat open over a dark suit, a gray shirt, and a gray-and-black-striped tie. He wore a charcoal fedora over his thinning hair. Dark sunglasses shielded his eyes, and he carried a cane that barely touched the ground between his footfalls. A bright red scarf added a splash of color to his somber attire. The sight of her friend filled Lia with equal parts relief and fury. Her multiple emails had gone unanswered for four days, but now Jordí breezed in, the epitome of Old World elegance. He strolled over and sat beside her.
“I never come this way,” he said after a street sweeper rumbled by. “There’s no reason to set foot north of the Marais, as far as I’m concerned.” He peered around. “I recognize nothing of this place. I haven’t been to Square du Temple in”—he paused—“about eight hundred years, give or take.” His body shook at the joke. “Of course, things have changed a bit.” He turned to Lia. “Yet you knew to look for me here.” Not a question, but an acceptance of the inevitable.
“I’m learning to trust my instincts and accept the impossible.” She tossed Jordí’s words back to him with a rueful smile.
“Touché, Lia. I’m sorry I had to leave so suddenly. I’m sure it’s been hard to accept all that I told you last week. Have you spoken to Raoul? Do you have the answers you seek?”
“You lied to me,” she replied, sidestepping his question. “Madame Isner did not call you away from the restaurant.”
He pursed his lips and gripped the top of his cane with gloved hands. “I left Narbonne to clear my head. Revealing the truth was unsettling. I needed to decide if my responsibilities lie with a past so distant it hardly matters anymore or with the present, where I feel as though I’m doing something of value.”
“If I believed the past were too distant to matter, I wouldn’t be a historian,” Lia snapped. “Revealing the truth is my life’s work. It’s never too late, Jordí.”
“Sometimes history is better left in the past, Lia.”
“How can you say that? It was you who wrote me that email, saying you believed that legend could be truth.”
Jordí acquiesced with a slow nod. “The musings of a lonely, bored old man.” He ignored her gasp of protest. “There’s no way to prove that the assassination of Pierre de Castelnau was a deliberate plot to start the Cathar Crusade, and what difference would it make if there were? The Church openly pursued the Cathars from the start. Their mistreatment of heretics has never been a secret.”
“But there has been so little acknowledgment of what the Languedoc people suffered, from genocide to total loss of independence,” Lia countered. “It’s not about forcing an apology from the Catholic Church. It’s simpler than that. It’s about correcting history when the truth is known.”
“Again, I wonder how will you prove such a thing?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “How do I take what’s happening and turn it into believable evidence? This, you, Raoul.” She gestured at him, at the air. “It’s all impossible. If I try to spin historical fact out of tales of reincarnation, I’ll be laughed out of the field. I’ll never find a job. My credibility as a historian will be shot to hell.”
And yet there she sat, in a place that could tell tales far older than the one in which she’d landed. “Knights Templar, Philippe du Plessis himself, wandered this very ground. It’s possible, isn’t it? If history has room for legends of knights and Holy Grails, could it not have room for men who roam the centuries? For a monk who witnessed a murder that changed the course of European history?”
An ambulance raced by, its siren shrieking. Lia waited as the siren’s echo drifted away until she could speak without raising her voice.
“My only hope is to keep looking for evidence.” She raised her eyebrows, staring hard at him. “Which I tried to do, incidentally. But of course the Trésor is—what did the watchdog say?—‘closed until further notice’?” Lia mimicked the secretary’s bark, and Jordí’s lips twitched but stopped short of a smile. “When Madame Isner told me there’d been no finance committee meeting and that she had no idea where you were, I was pissed, Jordí. And frightened. You’d just hit me with the most devastating news since…” Since Gabriel. But she left that unsaid. The shame on his face told her he understood. “Instead, you left a packet on my doorstep and disappeared without an explanation.”
“Lia, I—”
She held up her hand to signal that she hadn’t finished. “I sweated over those translations this weekend before finally admitting how ridiculous it was. Langue d’oïl, dialects of Catalan, medieval Latin. You can read them as easily as I can read the back of a cereal box. You manipulated me, Jordí.” Lia ran out of steam. There was too much she needed to know to waste time on anger. “But what’s done is done. Now I need the truth. What does Raoul have to atone for, Jordí? He and I ran from someone in the old city, and he took me through that tunnel to protect me. Who was after us? You must know. Were they after me? Or Raoul?”
“I don’t know, Lia.” His lie slid forth, transparent and facile.
She sat back and folded her hands in her lap. The sounds of Paris at work and play seemed very distant, part of another life, another time. A tiny woman, wearing a thin cotton dress and frayed knit shawl, approached them clutching a bouquet of red roses. She smiled, her chipped teeth stained brown, her skin a legend of wrinkles. She spoke in a language Lia didn’t understand but recognized as a Balkan tongue. Jordí began to wave the woman away, but Lia held out a two-euro piece, receiving a rose and a beaming smile in return. The Romani woman walked on, muttering.
“You took the institute’s collection out of the Trésor before you came to Paris.”
“Lia—”
“Don’t lie to me. I know it’s not there. Is it somewhere safe?”
His head snapped over. “How could you—?”
“I know where you keep your spare keys, remember?” she said. “I went searching for something, anything. A clue to this mess, to Castelnau, maybe a hint of where you were, though my first guess was right. I went looking for that letter.” She thought of the empty wallet branded with the two knights and their single steed. “You know, it occurs to me that it could have been written right here, on the grounds of the Templar’s citadel.”
“The letter?” Jordí’s hollow voice told Lia he knew exactly which letter she spoke of.
“The letter you found by Castelnau’s body. The one Plessis wrote to warn Castelnau that he’d be assassinated.”
“Plessis didn’t—” Jordí stopped. “Lia, I told you. That letter was lost to history.” His face sagged, aging as sorrow deepened the shadows under his eyes. They sat in the dead air of their unspoken truths.
Lia took a leather satchel she’d tucked against her left side and moved it between them. She opened the front flap and removed a thin envelope, offering it to Jordí.
“What is this?” he asked, setting it in his lap. He took a small case from his coat pocket and exchanged his sunglasses for reading glasses. He withdrew a photograph from the envelope and held it before his eyes. Then, he blanched.
“Where did you find this?” His voice descended to a whisper.
“In the archives. It obviously means something to you, Jordí. You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”
Jordí removed his reading glasses and pressed the pads of his fingers against closed eyes. The barrel of his chest heaved as he sighed. “This photograph is a message, Lia. But it’s not meant for you.”