NARBONNE—DECEMBER 1208
“I lived in terror that Castelnau’s assassin would return for me,” said Jordí Bonafé. “But the man who confessed was torn apart by a mob, and war against the Cathars was declared. I thought I was free. I tried to forget what had happened and continue with my training to enter the priesthood.” He hid behind his mug of wine, swallowing the truth before he told too much of it. Nearly a year after the murder of Archdeacon Pierre de Castelnau, Jordí felt again the cold tiles grinding into his knees and the tension clenching his belly. Sitting before his dear friend Manel de Perella, under the grace of his kind eyes, Jordí longed to tell all he had seen and heard that day and to confess his betrayal.
King David’s psalms of repentance came unbidden to his mind: You know my folly, O God; my guilt is not hidden from you. Deeper and deeper I sink into the mire; I can’t find a foothold to stand on. I am in deep water, and the floods overwhelm me. The words made a mockery of his secret life. The wine rose in his gorge, and he choked back his confession. Manel shifted, clearing his throat, and Jordí returned to the small room in a wayside inn outside Narbonne’s walls.
“Two months after the murder, Abbot Bonnín introduced me to the new sénéchal of the Aude and Hérault, Lucas Mauléon.” Jordí had told no one that the sénéchal and Castelnau’s assassin were one and the same. His face flamed at the memory of how he’d pissed his robes at the sight of Mauléon, and he was grateful the room was illumined only by firelight. It was one thing to admit fear. It was quite another to explain why.
“I tried to send word to you that I had met Mauléon in Paris,” Manel interrupted. “He knew we’d been in the seminary together, but he claimed not to know where you’d been sent. I learned only recently you never left Languedoc.” Taking the pitcher of wine from a low table beside him, Manel refilled both tall cups of fired clay. “I’ve interrupted you enough, Ósbru,” he said with affection as he handed Jordí a cup of wine. “Please, continue.”
“The sénéchal informed me that I was to depart from Saint-Gilles immediately. He escorted me here to the church of Saint-Paul. After the burning of Cluet, I was moved again. To Gruissan.” He watched Manel carefully. The handsome priest kept a smooth countenance, but he couldn’t keep the flinch from showing in his eyes. His pupils widened, black pushing into soft blue.
LE PÈLERIN, MINERVE—WEDNESDAY
The clock chimed midnight. Lia had remained silent while Jordí took her back to the end of that wretched, bloody year of 1208, but this coincidence was too much. “Gruissan?” she burst out. “Where Raoul’s family was killed! Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Lia, there is so much I need to tell you. And I’m trying. Please, allow me to finish.”
Although the questions hammered in her throat, she nodded, wrapping her arms around her knees and pressing her lips together. The priest poured out his story with downcast eyes, deflated in his wool coat, designing circles with his finger on the tabletop.
NARBONNE—DECEMBER 1208
“What of your dealings with the sénéchal?” Manel asked.
“I haven’t seen him since we parted ways in Toulouse.” Jordí’s lie spilled easily, one more to join the many that had come fluidly from his mouth over the months. Bells chimed in the distance. He pressed his hand against his thick thighs and hoisted himself up with a sigh. “It’s late. I must take my leave. I’ll be expected at vespers.” He looked around the modest room. “Manel, you should be staying in honor at the bishop’s home and sleeping in silk sheets, not hiding in this dreadful hostel. Why are you here?”
“There is much I wish to tell you, but it will have to be some other time, my friend. And I would ask again that you tell no one you’ve seen me.”
“Of course. You move at the will of His Holiness. I’d be a fool to interfere.” Jordí gathered his cloak around his shoulders. “And what news of your cousin?”
“My cousin?” Manel echoed sharply.
“Raoul d’Aran is well-known in these parts. Married a local woman and farms an estate in Lagrasse? I hear he and his family are no longer in residence there.” Jordí fussed over the clasp of his cloak to keep from meeting Manel’s eyes. “His wife’s father is wealthy. Hugh Gervais of Limoux? A Cathar, it’s rumored.”
“Yes, I know of Gervais, but we’ve never met. Why do you ask after my cousin?”
LE PÈLERIN, MINERVE—WEDNESDAY
“You were with Raoul’s cousin!” Forgetting her promise not to interrupt, Lia slammed her feet to the floor. “He was tied to the Vatican? He knew the sénéchal who killed Raoul’s family!”
“Manel de Perella was Raoul’s aunt’s second son, his mother’s kin. He… Lia, what is it?”
She bolted from her chair to the far end of the table where her research materials were piled in stacks. She pulled out a file folder and slapped it open on the table in front of Jordí. Inside were photocopied letters—the materials Jordí had left on her front porch—and the translations she’d started to create. Lia cursed herself for not having asked Raoul about the materials the previous night. But her mind and body had been elsewhere.
“Manel. You called him Manel.” She rifled through the sheets until she found the odd one out: a page written in a different hand, in a dialect of Occitan or possibly provincial Catalan. “There are words I can pick out here and there. Look: cosí. That’s cousin.” She pointed farther down the page. “And here is Manel.” Her finger punched at the paper. “Jordí, is this the Manel you’re talking about?” Lia scattered the papers across the table, and several floated to the floor. “I’ve been struggling through these translations while you can read them as if they’d been written yesterday. What do they say? Who are they from?”
The priest sighed and patted the lapels of his coat. “I’ll need to get my reading glasses from the car,” he said.
“I’m sure that letter is from me. To Manel, my cousin. Your friend. Or so he thought.” Raoul stood in the kitchen threshold, arms crossed over his chest, fists clenched against his biceps. Rhythmic pulses of his jaw betrayed his struggle for composure.
The priest started from his chair, but Lia placed a hand on his arm to steady him. With a sad smile, he patted her hand, lifted it gently away, and shook his head.
“Raoul d’Aran. It’s an honor.” Standing, Jordí pressed his palms together and bowed his head in a gesture of respect.
“Honor? What would you know of honor?” Raoul stepped around the corner of the kitchen island. “‘Ósbru,’ Manel called you,” he spit at Jordí. “Your nickname at the seminary. The brown bear. ‘The bear is a traitor. A falcon flies south, and the dove will die.’ Those were Manel’s words to his steward. They were a message to me, to let me know my family had been betrayed. And by whom.”
Lia gasped, and a scene where she had inserted herself between the two men flashed in her mind. The world slowed to a nightmarish crawl, yet it was spinning out of control.
“You were that bear, weren’t you, Jordí?” Raoul advanced, and Lia stepped in front of him, pressing a palm hard against his chest. He stopped at her touch but kept his eyes on Jordí. “And Paloma, my wife. She was the dove.” Raoul wore the same expression of pain and sadness she’d seen in her window three months before.
How many times had she wondered about Raoul’s Paloma since the Cité at Carcassonne, when he’d called her by his wife’s name? What she had looked like, what had made her laugh, how she’d been as a mother, a wife, a lover. Paloma. Such a beautiful name. Latin in origin, it meant dove. Paloma was the dove. She must be. She couldn’t be.
“Jordí.” Lia spoke to the priest without turning from Raoul. “The letter you found near Pierre de Castelnau’s body. You told me it read, ‘The bear is a traitor. A falcon flies south, and the dove will die.’” Raoul opened his mouth, and Lia gave a warning shake of her head.
“This is the truth,” Jordí replied. “I know there is little reason to trust me, but I promise you, this is what I read.”
“How did Manel know those words?” Lia asked. “How could he have repeated them to his steward?”
“I gave him the letter.”
She snapped her head to the priest. “What? You told me you never returned to the abbey, that you had no idea what happened to that letter!”
“It’s the rest of my story. It’s what I need to share with you. Please.”
NARBONNE—DECEMBER 1208
I have seen the spirit of God. They are not heretics. They are the Trinity. A dying man’s final words. A letter acknowledging the truth. And in truth, death.
Jordí could stand his deceit no longer. He grabbed his friend by the arm and pulled him close. “The Gervais family are known heretics, but be aware it is Raoul d’Aran’s agitation for a resistance against the Church that has put his family in grave danger. It’s no secret the woman and children are hiding in Gruissan,” he rasped. “A reward is offered for d’Aran’s capture, and his life may be traded for theirs. If you have any way to warn him, do it.”
From a leather satchel he’d strapped over his head, Jordí removed a thin wallet and spoke the only words that still had meaning for him: “And David said to God, ‘I have sinned greatly, in that I have done this thing. But now, put away, I beg you, the iniquity of your servant; for I have done very foolishly.’”
He pressed the pouch into Manel’s hand and whispered, “Castelnau was holding this when he died. I’ve held it too long, but I’m too much of a fool to know what to do with what’s written inside. I am sorry.” He kissed Manel on each cheek and backed away, his hand raised to stifle further conversation. Jordí passed into the dark hallway.
Outside the inn, he turned into an alley and pressed a coin into the palm of the boy he’d hired to keep watch over his horse. The boy dashed away and yelped as he nearly collided with a tall, cloaked figure. Jordí’s departure was delayed for a few minutes more.
LE PÈLERIN, MINERVE—WEDNESDAY
“You fool, Bonafé,” Raoul hissed. “You told Mauléon that my family was in Gruissan.”
“Raoul, please. This is my story too.” Lia’s back pressed into his chest, her arm bent around his waist, and she held his body, rigid with anger, tightly against hers. “I’m in the middle of whatever is happening to you,” she countered gently, turning into him. She held his face and forced him to look at her with his hard, furious eyes. His jaw clenched under her palms.
“It’s all right, Lia.” Jordí’s smile was slight and sad. “His anger is no more than I deserve.” Gray and old, he sagged into the chair. “No, Raoul.” He remained still, his hands resting on his knees, and Lia sensed his withering regret. “Mauléon’s network of spies was so vast, he likely knew even as you sent your family to Gruissan. I was sent to watch them, but I never meant to bring your family harm.”
Raoul pushed Lia’s hands away and tried to step around her. His voice erupted in a snarl. “Did you wield a weapon against them? No, the murderer wasn’t you. But your complicity makes you as guilty as the hands that set that fire.”
The man who had held Lia with such tenderness and passion had flown away, leaving an empty shell, and she fought against a quivering despair.
“I know you have more to say, Raoul,” she said in a low voice. “Just let me see this through.”
“Then ask your confessor to tell you the truth. Ask him to tell you what happened to my wife and children.”
“Let’s sit,” she murmured. “We can sort this out.” She gently pushed down on his shoulders.
“I’ll stand,” he said, barely moving his lips. But his shoulders dropped and his knees unlocked as the tension began to seep away.
“Fine. But I want you over…” She looked around. Not the kitchen. Not near the knife block. She almost laughed, it was so absurd. “Just stay where you are.” Lia pulled a stool from under the tall kitchen island and propped her feet on the seat of a dining room chair, creating a barrier between the two men with her body.
“Manel de Perella, the new papal emissary in Paris, your cousin”—she motioned to Raoul—“he knew this Mauléon. And Mauléon was appointed sénéchal by Philippe du Plessis after the murder of Castelnau?” She looked from one man to the other. They both nodded. “You’ll have to excuse me for turning pedantic professor on you, but I know this history better than I know my own family tree. There is no record of Sénéchal Lucas Mauléon of the Aude and Hérault during the first decade of the thirteenth century,” she said. “Nothing. In fact, there’s no record of a sénéchal anywhere in Languedoc during that period. By 1209, Simon de Montfort was the law of the land.”
“Mauléon wasn’t in the position for very long.” Jordí snapped his eyes to Raoul.
Lia wouldn’t be sidetracked, not while she felt so close to untangling these threads of the past. “Fine. I’ll concede for the moment that history just missed making a record of him.” She thought of the archives Jordí had spirited away from the cathedral in Narbonne, of the shuttered doors of the institute in Carcassonne. “Or it hasn’t yet been revealed. Jordí, you said Castelnau knew his assassin?” she asked.
“That is what I recall.”
“So this assassin was the falcon. Castelnau was the dove. Not Paloma.” She looked at Raoul. His face was a wall of granite—handsome, but distant and cold. His scar was a white snarl of flesh. “But there’s more that you remember, isn’t there? You just haven’t told me.” Lia recalled the cruel eyes of the eagle on the terrace railing and then the falcon etched into a business card. Although she had checked Raoul’s fury only moments before, a sudden clarity drove her anger forward, like a cresting wave. She pushed off the stool, and its metal casters screeched across the stone tile. “Mauléon was the man in the abbey. Mauléon murdered Castelnau.”
“Lia.”
She wasn’t certain which man said her name, and she didn’t care. “You know, I think I’ve known for some time,” she said softly, no longer speaking to the men in the room but working through what she didn’t want to accept. “The truth may lead you to things you’d rather not see indeed. The truth was right in front of me, and I didn’t want to see. Jordí, has he always been known as Mauléon?” Lia leaned into the table for support.
“Mauléon changed his name when he left Languedoc and joined the Crusaders,” Jordí said, his own voice gentle as his eyes flicked between her and Raoul, cautiously watching their reactions. “He wanted to escape the legacy of his disgraced father.”
She withdrew a business card from a pocket in her research binder and presented it to Jordí. “The first time I met Lucas, I made the connection between the name Moisset and the translation of falcon in Occitan. I think he wanted me to know. In some perverse way, he was trying to tell me. Lucas Moisset is the falcon in that letter.”
Jordí closed his hand over the card without looking.
Lia paced to the terrace windows, wanting to throw open the door and scream her frustration into the wind. “Lucas Moisset is the Sénéchal Lucas Mauléon. Mauléon murdered Castelnau. He murdered Raoul’s family.”
In the window’s reflection, Lia saw shapes moving, joining, separating in the room behind her. As he had in the Basilique Saint-Nazaire et Saint-Celse, Raoul moved with such speed, the empty space echoed with his passing. Jordí stood suddenly, and his chair toppled to the tile floor. Lia shoved past him.
“Raoul!” she called, though she knew it was too late. The front door was open wide, and the living room was infused with the scents of damp earth and rosemary. The street in front of Le Pèlerin was empty; Raoul had been absorbed into the dark.
“Dammit, Jordí, if he goes after Lucas…” Jordí, just behind her, grabbed her elbow, and she spun around in fury and fear. “You’ve known this all along!” she cried. “No one thought to tell me Lucas was a murderer? Are you and Lucas in this together? Am I some sort of bait? Is Lucas using me to get to Raoul?”
“Lucas means you no harm, Lia,” Jordí said. “He’s in love with you.”
Her stomach dropped. She thought of the man she’d allowed to kiss her, the man to whom she’d revealed her love for Raoul. It didn’t matter that the blood on his hands was eight hundred years old. Lia felt ill.
“Yes, the falcon is Lucas Moisset.” Jordí took hold of her upper arms, shaking her attention back to him. “Yes, Lucas assassinated Castelnau. But, Lia, listen to me. He did not kill Paloma and the children.”
She wrenched out of his grasp and made for the door.