LIMOUX—THURSDAY EVENING
“The scar on his face. You were responsible for that?” Lia asked.
Lucas closed his eyes and nodded.
“Why did you attack him?” Lia pressed, thinking somehow that if she understood, she could turn back the centuries and change what had happened.
“He’d drawn his weapon, Lia. My instincts overcame my reason.”
“How did Raoul die?” she whispered.
“I would tell you if I could.” His cool, firm fingers closed over hers. “When I came to, he and his horse were gone. Soldiers surrounded me, and it was over soon after. My last thought was a prayer: that God would grant me the chance to beg Paloma’s forgiveness should we meet in whatever lay beyond.” He pulled back his hunched shoulders. “There was never a beyond for me. I never left Languedoc.”
“They escaped.” Jordí’s voiced startled them. They’d nearly forgotten the priest still sitting in his own fog of memories. The room had grown almost completely dark while they spoke. The only illumination came from a small table lamp in the far corner. Jordí sat in shadow.
“No, Father,” said Lucas. “Raoul and I met at that terrible place. We saw the bodies—your body. You were buried on that plain with proof of Castelnau’s heresy and the riddle of his murder underneath your corpse. I know you tried, but no one left that church alive.”
“Lucas, it’s true. Paloma and the children escaped.” Lia recalled Paloma’s words. “She lived to hold her children’s children.”
“How do you know this?” Lucas grasped her hands, squeezing with icy fingers.
“In my car is the letter of safe passage Lucas Mauléon wrote on behalf of Paloma Gervais and her children,” she replied, offering his very words as his own salvation.
OUTSIDE MINERVE—DECEMBER 1208
Four days after they were spirited away from Gruissan, Paloma arrived with her children in Minerve. She would not be separated from Bertran and Aicelina until they reached the village, where they could shelter with trusted friends. She left the children playing at Félix’s hearth with a litter of kittens in the very house Raoul had helped to build, and she continued alone on horseback to the river canyon.
She dismounted at the top of the gorge and tied the horse in the shelter of a holm oak, Languedoc’s flourish of evergreen in the deep of winter, and descended into the canyon. Paloma followed the Cesse, past familiar boulders half the size of a parish church. In the distance, she heard a horse whinny, sharp and short.
“Mirò,” Paloma gasped. Frantic, she scrambled down a short slope to her husband’s beloved mare. Mirò lifted and tossed her head at Paloma’s approach, stamping in recognition as she caught familiar scents. The horse wore no saddle and only a loose rope bridle. Raoul was nowhere to be seen.
“He can’t be far, Mirò.” She rubbed the horse’s forehead as Mirò pushed her snout into Paloma’s cloak, snorting. “You’re hungry,” she whispered into the tangled black forelock. Paloma’s stomach thudded in hollow despair. She lifted her skirts, stepping around a shallow pool near the river’s edge, and ascended a rise toward the wall of the gorge, Mirò trailing behind.
Minutes later, Paloma’s howl reverberated through the canyon, horrible and tortured. It silenced all sounds but the eternal chatter of the river.
LIMOUX—THURSDAY EVENING
Lucas held Lia’s gaze as firmly as he held her hands. Lia caught a glint of warm gold in his black eyes before he let go and walked away, melting into the shadows.
He returned to her side and handed her an archival sheet. In the dim light, she could barely make out the cursive Latin scrawl on the priceless paper tucked inside. She skimmed it, struggling to decipher and understand what had been written. At the bottom, however, two sentences stood apart.
The appended words, penned in fine script, were easily read. They formed phrases she’d memorized a few days before. Bears, falcons, doves. Remnants of the past. With only this scrap of history to prove how those words had changed Languedoc forever.
“Plessis’s betrayal of the archdeacon, followed by Amalric’s betrayal of me. Those words told Pierre de Castelnau what I had come to do. But the betrayals ended in a field outside Gruissan.”
“Where did you get this letter?” she asked.
“I followed a suspicion that turned out to be correct.” Lucas gathered his bag and hung the strap from his shoulder. “Jordí told me you went looking for the letter and found that photograph instead. I never meant for you to find it,” he said. “I am sorry. I’m sorry for what that photograph means.”
Lia shook her head, uncomprehending. “That photo was of the road where my husband died.”
“I know, Lia. I took that photograph and gave it to Jordí as a warning. When I threatened to expose his secret, he gave me Castelnau’s letter. Maybe he thought we’d both agree to bury the past. But I’ll leave it to him to explain.”
Lia glanced at Jordí. Lamplight sparkled in his eyes and on his cheeks. He was crying.
“Lia,” Lucas continued. “I didn’t return to this world as Lucas Mauléon. I returned as I left, as Lucas Moisset. And I had no idea why I was here until I saw you. I thought you were Paloma Gervais and that I’d been given a second chance. But I know now that you aren’t her. And that my chances are gone.”
“What do you want to do?”
“To leave the past behind.” At last, a smile without deceit, a hint of the man he might have been. He reached into his bag and handed her a manila envelope. She felt the flat, round shape of a computer disk inside. “You’ll know what to do with this,” said Lucas.
“Where will you go?”
“I hoped you could tell me,” he said.
And Lia understood. His story had ended; he was freed from the burden of guilt over Paloma’s death. The document to show his role in history had been found and was now in the hands of someone who could continue its journey toward the truth. Lucas Mauléon had died in that field long before; it was time for Lucas Moisset to be at rest. Lia saw Paloma. She saw Raoul walking toward his wife. She rose to embrace Lucas.
“Go and seek forgiveness,” she whispered in his ear. She whispered of a stairwell in a winery, of a great hollow space within an abandoned fortress and a small door set in its mighty wall. She whispered of wheat fields and wildflowers spreading out beyond the door. Her whisper was the laughter of children and the rush of wind through the fields, warm and healing, as eternal as the Languedoc sun. She watched as he walked out the door.
• • •
“Where did you get this?” Lia sat next to Jordí on the sofa, holding the letter written by Philippe du Plessis and added to by Arnaud Amalric. “Where did you get those materials you left for me? Did they really come from the institute?”
He shook his head. “Months ago, one of my parishioners brought me a small wooden box full of documents he was certain were ancient; he was terrified of handling them, so in good sense and good intention, he brought them to me. That man was a notary, in charge of probating the estate of Hermès Daran of Lagrasse.” Jordí nodded at Lia’s sharp inhalation. “Yes, Logis du Martinet,” he said in response to her unspoken question. “The notary himself had found the box in a closet inside the old winery. He admitted to me that the search for an heir had all but been abandoned and the estate was being inventoried. Anything of value would be sold to pay off Daran’s debts. I convinced the notary that it would take months to verify the veracity of the documents’ age and provenance. I haven’t heard from him since, and I’ve stayed away from Lagrasse.
“With the memory of who I am and where I come from came the memory of what history those materials contain. It may even be that I put them there in some other time. Perhaps I’ve been waiting for the right person to come along who would know what to do with this.” He touched the protective sheet she held, the ancient warnings passed between men with enough power to direct the course of history. “But I fear I put you in the middle of something that’s bigger than we are. Once again, I made a dreadful error.”
Lia considered the letter she held as the puzzle pieces of the past shifted and fell into place. “It would take me all night to decipher this handwriting. Read it to me. In French.”
Jordí patted his pockets until he found his reading glasses. Before he began, he cleared his throat and said, “The night in Paris, when we were to meet for dinner, I had planned to tell you everything. But Lucas appeared, I played my hand, and I gave him the letter.”
Lia nodded her understanding, and he read.
The letter wasn’t long, just a few paragraphs. The blood emptied from Lia’s limbs as Jordí spoke and rushed through again, leaving her hot and nauseated.
“Castelnau believed them, didn’t he?” Astonishment thundered through her. “He believed the Cathars!”
“If this letter is true, yes,” said Jordí. “And he tried to plead their case to Plessis.”
“And Plessis wrote to warn Amalric.”
“Who thought he could play both sides.”
“Which he did.”
“Yes. But in the end, who was right?”
“‘I have seen the spirit of God. They are not heretics. They are the Trinity.’” Lia repeated Castelnau’s dying words. “He was saying the Cathars, or reincarnation, were evidence of the Holy Spirit?”
“Lia, there is so much we don’t know. One letter. One man’s memory…”
“But it all makes sense. Castelnau’s murder makes sense!” Lia exclaimed. “If he’d started spreading the word that he believed the Cathars, that could have ripped the Church apart. It would have changed Christianity.” Visions of her dissertation becoming a book, a sensation, the ripple effect of her theory gaining traction until it grew to a tsunami, flared before her mind’s eye. Then the visions sputtered and died out. “But these materials are meaningless. Even when we have them verified, they’ll be meaningless without Raoul’s and Lucas’s stories, without yours. Stories no one will believe. This is the truth, but it’s not history.” Historian and priest sat, weary and bewildered.
Lia smoothed the letter and placed it in her bag. She wanted to ask after the rest of the documents, where Jordí had stashed the box found on Hermès Daran’s estate, but there was something else she had to know first.
“Jordí, what did Lucas mean when he said he’d threatened to expose your secret? Was he talking about what you’d taken from the institute?”
The priest dropped his face in his hands. His shoulders heaved in a great, shuddering sigh. Then he looked to Lia. “There is something I must show you.”
He rose and walked to the front door. Isis bounded past him when he opened it to the blue night. Lia followed, and the three made their way to a stone shed with double wooden doors behind the house.