The Paris Secret (21 page)

The convent was in a state of excitement over the arrival of Pere Lachaise. In the entire time I had lived here, King Louis’s chief confessor had never graced us with a visit. While the other sisters found excuses to linger in the halls near Mother Elizabeth’s chamber, hoping to get a glimpse of the elderly Jesuit priest or perhaps overhear what they were discussing, I chose to bury myself amongst the books in the library. There was much work to be done as it had been all but neglected while I had been away.

I left the convent prepared to become Philippe’s bride and returned resigned to becoming a bride of Christ. Today was Philippe’s wedding day. In the weeks since my return I had received no messages from him. The decision to leave Fontainebleau was my own and made against his wishes. It had not been easy to leave. Becoming his mistress held the threat of becoming a hell I could not have endured nor inflicted upon any children borne of our union. What if his love for me soured? Where would I be then? Anne-Elise told me that had been the fate of so many royal mistresses. Madame de Montespan had suffered such a fall from grace. King Louis had cast her aside. She was not even invited to the wedding of their daughter to Philippe.

I tied an apron over my habit and got to work sweeping the floors and took care not to breathe in the copious dust dislodged by my broom. The sound of the heavy library door opening and closing did not distract me from my task. I imagined it was one of the sisters and did not look up.

“Excusez moi,
Louise-Marie.” An elderly man dressed in a black cassock and skullcap stood before me. A long white cloak was draped around his stooped shoulder. Pere Lachaise.

I instantly dropped my broom and knelt before him, causing him to chuckle softly and gesture for me to rise. With him was a young priest with pockmarked skin carrying a large leather-bound book tied shut with a red silk ribbon.

“Une donation pour la bibliothèque,
Pere?
”
I asked, hopeful that he had brought a wonderful new illuminated manuscript for our collection. So excited was I at the prospect that I had failed to notice he had addressed me by name.

“Non,”
he replied, gesturing for the young priest to set the mysterious book on the table in front of me.

Once the ribbon was untied, the young priest removed a false covering and revealed the book to be bound not in leather as I had originally thought but in solid gold. The front was covered in jewels set in a figure eight. I gasped and looked at Pere questioningly.

“Le Roi Louis a une tâche importante pour vous,”
he said, suddenly serious.

King Louis had an important task for me? What did he mean?

The shrill sound of my cell phone startled me awake. A glance at the clock confirmed it was 6:50 in the morning. Why had Simon let me sleep? Where was he? I didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway.

“Madame Sinclair?” came the voice of Monsieur Marcel’s lawyer, Paul Moyet.

“Yes.”

“I hope I’ve not disturbed you at this early hour.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head to clear the cobwebs. “It’s okay. Have you found anything about Sylvie Renard?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. I’m outside the home of her aunt, Annette Renard, as we speak and I have bad news.”

“What is it?”

“Annette Renard is dead. Her cleaning lady found her this morning. It appears she slipped and hit her head on her coffee table.”

“Slipped or was pushed?”

“We’ve no way of knowing that at this point.”

“And we’ve no way of knowing whether or not she was really the one who identified the bodies of her brother and niece or if Sylvie impersonated her aunt.” Deep down inside I knew Annette Renard’s death was Sylvie’s way of covering her tracks.

“All is not lost,
madame.
The parents of Shannon Davies are due to arrive here in Paris later this morning. I’ve arranged for them to view the body to see if it is indeed their daughter.”

“You’ll let me know what happens, right?”

“But of course,” he replied and hung up.

“Simon?” I called out as I headed toward the bedroom. It was empty. The bed was still made. The bathroom was empty, too. There was a note taped to the bathroom mirror.

Damn it, Simon. I need you here, not chasing after dead ends,
I thought as I balled up the note and threw it at the mirror.

I rooted through the kitchen cabinets until I found a lone bag of tea and boiled some water. I took my mug back into the living room and pulled open the blinds to let sunlight into the dark room. At the same time, the door opened, announcing Simon’s return.

“Couldn’t you at least have woken me up before you ran off?” I asked, not bothering to turn around.

Simon didn’t answer. Instead, his sharp intake of breath made me look up. He was staring at the wall across from the windows. I rushed forward to get a better look. And when I saw what he was looking at I dropped my mug, splashing my pants with the hot liquid. The sun streaming through the windows had hit the crucifix propped up on the coffee table and was projecting the image of the stained glass scene against the wall like a movie projector. Simon ran over and grabbed the crucifix.

“What are you doing? Put it back!”

“Flipping it.”

He turned the crucifix so it was lying lengthwise and then had to maneuver it so the stained glass would catch the sun again. The result was like a giant stained glass window in a cathedral. The colors were so vivid and the image was so clear that the nun’s brown skin glowed, and she was actually smiling.

“Wait a minute.” I walked over to get an even closer look. “Is this a different scene? I don’t remember being able to see the nun’s face before. This looks a lot like the Moret Tapestry.”

“And the book the angel is holding wasn’t open before, either, was it?” asked Simon.

“Do you still have Luc’s sketches?”

Simon got Luc’s sketchpad out of the cabinet and we confirmed that it was indeed a different scene. The nun’s face wasn’t visible and the book in the angel’s hand was closed. Simon picked up the Moret Crucifix and studied it closely, putting his hand behind the handle so light couldn’t shine through.

“Now it looks just like Luc’s sketch again.” He propped the crucifix back up on the coffee table.

“It’s the sun. Remember what Dr. Hewitt said? The sun is the key to finding the book.”

“That’s amazing,” whispered Simon. “It must be some kind of artist’s technique to make it reflect something different when sunlight hits it.”

“I can’t believe all this time no one in the Society of Moret discovered this.”

“They were stuffy old academics. They probably only studied the crucifix in their dark little faculty offices or behind closed curtains. Regular light wouldn’t have this kind of effect.”

“It still seems weird to me that in forty years no one would have discovered what sunlight did to the crucifix when Dr. Fouquet thought the sun was the key to finding the book.”

“We can hardly ask him, Maya,” replied Simon sarcastically, still clearly mesmerized by the scene on the wall. I went and stood next to him.

“Look, there’s even writing inside the book the angel is holding? What’s it say?” I asked.

“
Dans le siège de la connaissance. En raison de tous les dieux. Sous la protection bénie du saint de Lutetia.
”

I swatted his arm irritably. “In English, smart-ass!”

“In the seat of knowledge. In view of all the gods. Under the blessed protection of the Saint of Lutetia.”

“Saint Lutetia? Who is Saint Lutetia?”

“Not Saint Lutetia, Saint of Lutetia,” Simon corrected.

“But what is Lutetia?”

“I’ve no idea. But it sounds familiar. Instead of obsessing about what we don’t know, why don’t we write down what we do know?”

I handed him Luc’s sketchpad and next to him on the couch.

“Okay. We know the crucifix is the key to finding the
Aurum Liber,
” I began.

“I thought the sun was the key to finding the
Aurum Liber,
” said Simon, gesturing to the scene on the wall.

“Just write them both down.”

“What else?”

“We know Sister Louise-Marie gave the crucifix and the
Aurum Liber
to Sister Cecile on her deathbed and someone in Sister Cecile’s family hid…” I stopped midsentence when the answer to my earlier question suddenly hit me.

“What is it?”

“Of course!” I ran and got the copy of the genealogy chart we’d printed. “The sun, Simon! Don’t you get it? The reason the Society of Moret never discovered what the sun did to the crucifix was because when Fouquet theorized that the sun was the key to finding the
Aurum Liber
he didn’t mean s-u-n. He meant s-o-n. He was talking about one of Sister Cecile’s descendants.”

“Maybe,” said Simon, looking skeptical. “But it’s different in French. S-o-n in French is
fils,
and s-u-n is
soleil,
” said Simon.

“Evalyn Hewitt and Juliet Rice weren’t French so let’s just say for the sake of argument Fouquet was speaking English when he made that statement.”

“
D’accord,
” he replied like he still wasn’t convinced.

“Remember Monsieur Marcel said the stained-glass scene was older than the rest of the crucifix and was added a hundred years or more after Sister Louise-Marie’s death?”

“By the person who must have hid it,” said Simon, nodding his head.

“Exactly.”

“But who?”

I spread the genealogy chart out on the coffee table. “Sister Cecile died a couple years after Sister Louise-Marie in 1734, right? So if we go forward by one hundred years and add an extra twenty years to be safe, that would leave us descendants who were alive between 1834 and 1854.” I circled the names within the timeframe.

“Make sure to narrow it down to only males.”

“Yeah, that’s usually what son means, Simon,” I replied, cutting him a look.

“How many names fall into that timeframe?”

“Seventeen,” I said after recounting.

Simon let out a low whistle. “So many. We won’t have time to look them all up.”

“If we’re looking for someone in the family who was a master glazier capable of doing the intricate stained-glass work on the crucifix, that would narrow it down, right?”

“Not necessarily. Back then tradesmen usually handed down such skills from generation to generation. Sister Cecile’s male descendants could have all been glaziers.”

“I forgot about that,” I said, feeling deflated.

“Think we’ll be able to find them all online?”

“Only one way to find out. And you can do the typing.” I pulled out the computer chair for him.

Lucky for us, France had started taking census records in 1836. Many of these records were available online in various databases. Twelve of the seventeen names were for male descendants living in and around the village of Fontainebleau where Sister Cecile had been born. And Simon had been right. A skill had been handed down from the male descendants of Sister Cecile’s family. But they weren’t glaziers. With the exception of a barber, an innkeeper and a couple of butchers, the rest were bakers. We still had five names to account for and weren’t having much luck finding anything other than their dates of birth and death.

“Dr. Fouquet tracked Albertine Dumaire to Paris. According to the chart she never married or had children. Maybe her obituary would give names of her relatives,” I said. Simon wasn’t listening. He was staring at the clock. It was a little after eight. I touched his cheek.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“We need to find Albertine Dumaire’s obit from 1970.”

“Now, that I can do. I’ve got a friend who writes obits for
Le Monde
who could look it up in the archives.” He pulled out his cell phone, dialed a number and asked for Etienne.

The conversation was in French and I couldn’t follow along but after about fifteen minutes, Simon grinned, said
merci
and hung up.

“He’s emailing it to me.”

The obit was brief. Albertine Dumaire was born in Paris in 1874 the only daughter of Gillaume and Colette Dumaire. She worked her entire life in her family’s bakery, Boulangerie Dumaire, taking it over in 1920. She was a lifelong member of Saint Severin church and was preceded in death by her parents and beloved fiancé, Yves Messier.

Next, I had Simon do an Internet search for Boulangerie Dumaire and discovered a mention of it on a website dedicated to the gastronomic history of Paris. Boulangerie Dumaire was listed as the place to get the best
pain au chocolat
in Paris from 1812 to 1955, when it was taken over by another family and renamed. The names of the Dumaire family were also listed and included all five of the names we’d been looking for.

“So they all came to Paris and worked in the family bakery. This is useless!” he said, waving the genealogy chart in the air. “We’ll never find that damned book.”

“Juliet figured it out. The answer has to be here, Simon.”

“We don’t have time to figure it out, Maya. Francoise’s life is at stake!”

He was right. It was 9:00 and we were no closer to finding the book. Francoise was going to die and there was nothing we could do. It was on the tip of my tongue to suggest we call the police when Simon spoke up.

“I thought you said you got all the men’s names between 1834 and 1854?”

“What?” I said as he handed me the genealogy chart.

“You missed this one.” He was pointing to the name Hilaire-Marion Dumaire.

“That’s a man’s name? I thought it was a woman.”

“It can be both. I had a friend in high school named Hilaire. It was a family name and all the firstborn sons got saddled with it but they all went by their middle names.”

“If this is man’s name, then why wasn’t he listed as having worked in the family bakery?” I wondered aloud.