The Priest's Madonna (23 page)

“The woman described her visions to this priest as they visited her, one by one, and as he heard them it seemed to him that she was receiving a new gospel, told to her directly by Marie Madeleine. The priest took to writing each vision down, showing them to no one. They terrified him. When she died, he was greatly relieved, and he buried the book of the transcribed visions with her. But the visions haunted him day and night until he was compelled to dig up the grave. He planned to burn the book. But when he exhumed the grave—a few years after the lady’s death—he found that the woman’s body was uncorrupted. The book of her visions—which the priest had tucked beneath her, lay open on her belly as if she had been reading it.” He stopped. He appeared shaken.

Gently, I prompted, “What did the priest do?”

“He removed the book and reinterred the body. Soon enough, the Revolution came, and he fled the country.”

“He must have been terrified,” I said.

Bérenger was quiet.

“But what was his friend—
l’abbé des sourires
—supposed to do for him?” I asked. “What was the task?”

“Just before he left, the priest wrote
l’abbé
a note, telling him to come as soon as possible. Apparently he feared the church would be looted, and he had hidden something he wanted
l’abbé
to protect.”

“The book,” I said.

“Probably.”

“But did
l’abbé des sourires
have any idea where to look? Was he supposed to find the flask?”

“One can assume. The archduke didn’t say specifically.” Bérenger was scowling. I wanted to comfort him—I rarely saw him so agitated—but I knew I would not be able to keep the excitement from my voice. We sat in silence for a long moment.

“What a story,” I offered weakly.

“Ridiculous,” he huffed.

Then, cautiously, “What about that book you found beneath the stone? The old church register?”

“That’s merely a list of baptisms, weddings, funerals, and burials. Church business.”

“Are you sure? Have you read the entire thing?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Cover to cover. There’s nothing in there about any visions.”

“Can I see it?”

“Why? You don’t believe me?”

“It’s not that. I just—I just want to see it. It’s interesting, Bérenger.” I was losing patience.

He shrugged unconvincingly.

“I’m surprised the Austrian didn’t ask to see it himself.”

“Why should he? He didn’t know it exists.”

“Didn’t you write him about it? When you found all the other things?”

“I didn’t list every item we’d found. I merely mentioned that we’d found a stash of old church paraphernalia. Nothing very interesting, or even all that unusual for that matter.”

“But surely he asked you about those things on his visit.”

“Yes. He did. He asked if I had found a book matching his description. I said no.”

“You didn’t even mention the register?”

“No. Why should I? It’s not relevant.”

“It simply seems like you were keeping it from him for some reason.”

“I didn’t trust him. He spoke too freely about sacred ideas. The man is a Freemason, Marie. He’s been seduced by the Templar Knights. He thinks they harbored some secret knowledge that they learned during their residence in Jerusalem and passed down through the centuries, knowledge about the whereabouts of Jesus’ bones. God help the poor man.”

I hummed sympathetically.

“Apparently, one of the ancestors of the madwoman was a Templar himself,” he added. “Bertrand de Blanchefort.”

“Blanchefort. The castle ruins just east of us.”

“Yes. That was the Blanchefort family home centuries ago.”

“But what does the Austrian think the Templars have to do with the madwoman’s visions?” I asked.

“He thinks the woman might have known something. He thinks she may have revealed some of the Templars’ secret knowledge in her ‘visions.’ ”

“I see.”

“The whole thing is completely absurd. The man is a maniac.” He rubbed his face with both hands.

“So you turned down his offer, I assume.”

Bérenger was silent.

“The money he offered you,” I said. “You accepted it?”

“Don’t speak that way to me. It was a gift.”

“In exchange for a service.”

“Nothing more than to keep my eyes open.”

“And to report to him what you found.”

“I was not prepared to have such a man rooting around our church.”

“You should have refused his money, then,” I insisted.

“Our church is in need, Marie.”

“But you lied. You promised him something in exchange for his money with plans never to deliver it.”

Bérenger lunged forward and swiped the surface of his desk. A glass paperweight flew against the wall, shattering. Papers sprayed into a momentary storm before settling haphazardly at our feet. He stood before me, glowering with rage. “And how do you make your living, I ask you? Preying on a man’s weakness! Wriggling your way into his home and his heart through your constant, unrelenting temptations! Don’t pretend to such purity, my dear Marie. You’re wiser than that.”

I exhaled sharply, feeling his words as a blade in the gut. I reached behind me for support and found the back of a chair. “I hadn’t thought my presence to be so reprehensible to you,” I said quietly.

He turned toward the hearth, his shoulders a stone wall.

“I’ll leave, then,” I said. And I did, shutting the door firmly behind me. I did not begin to weep until I reached the crest of the hill, where the path continued downward through the broom and brush toward Espéraza. I walked for a long time, until my tears had dried, and my hands had stopped trembling.

B
ÉRENGER APOLOGIZED LATER that day. He brought me a small bouquet of early anemone and woodrush. “I spoke rashly, Marie,” he said. “I took my anger at the Austrian out on you, unfairly. Please forgive me.”

I accepted the apology and the bouquet. But his fury left me shaken, and I found it difficult to return to my former unfettered joy in his company, not only because of the violence—the shattered paperweight, his accusation—but because I feared he was right. I had been selfish. All this time I had been so focused on my own desire to be with him that I had been blind to his anguish, how I wore him down. I was ashamed and saddened, and profoundly confused. Hadn’t we entered into things together? Hadn’t he wanted my company? His words had cudgeled the story of our companionship, knocked its features askew.

I avoided him for the next several days, asking my mother to bring his supper. When I had to address him, I did it with a new reserve in my voice and my demeanor.

Bérenger noticed. He became overly jovial, trying to lighten my mood with jokes and little kindnesses. He brought flowers often—“to brighten the house,” he said, smiling sorrowfully at me—and requested my company when he went for his daily walk. He had embarked on a project to collect a hundred round stones for a grotto he intended to build in the church garden, and said that he needed my help. I refused, declaring I had too much to do at home.

Finally, one day, he insisted. “I won’t leave your side until you accompany me,” he said. “I’ll be in your way all day.”

I relented. I wiped my hands and hung my apron on its hook. But I walked at a remove, keeping my eyes on the ground, ostensibly in search of stones.

“Why are you punishing me, Marie?” Bérenger asked after we’d walked in silence for some time. “I’ve apologized, haven’t I? What more must I do?”

I looked away, embarrassed. “I do not mean to punish you, Monsieur
le curé.
”

“Monsieur?”
he said, and laughed bitterly. “You haven’t called me that for years.”

I kept walking.

“Won’t you even look at me, Marie? Marinette?” He stopped and took my arm, gently, in his. “Please.”

I turned to face him. “I am only trying to avoid tempting you. You were right. I have been selfish.”

“No, no, Marie,” he said, pressing his thumb into my palm. “No, I was unfair. Please. I desire your friendship. I am not myself without it.”

I nodded, unable to keep a tear of relief from sliding down my cheek.

He rubbed it away with his thumb. “How I cherish you,” he whispered.

I
WAS GLAD for our reconciliation, glad to be relaxed and natural once again in his presence. But I remained cautious, and grew more judicious with my affection.

I was curious, too, about the old leather-bound book. When Bérenger was out, I took to snooping: I tunneled through his closet, rustling each of his shirts and pants and standing on a chair to look in the corners of the top shelf. I knocked along the length and breadth of each wall, searching for hollow spots. I wrested off the panel of the crawlspace, and sullied my skirt and hands feeling around in the dark. I even attempted to pry up one of the floorboards—but I was neither strong nor skilled enough to do it.

I was rewarded for my efforts one afternoon as I was replacing the freshly laundered linens in the sacristy chest. The drawer would not close properly, it felt as if something was blocking it, and so I opened the cabinet below and leaned into the dark chamber, feeling around for the obstacle that might have gotten lodged behind the drawer. My fingers found leather, gripped and pulled, and moving back into the room, I found myself holding the leather-bound book that had been buried beneath the church floor.

With no regard for the time of day or the chores I should have been attending to, I sat in a shaft of blue light—sunlight filtering through the stained-glass window—and began to read.

The pages were irregularly cut and brittle, their bottom edges broken and torn. I held the book between my knees, keeping it only partially open so as to preserve the binding, and handled the pages gingerly. It was just what Bérenger had said, an old church register, a record of the marriages, births, and deaths that had transpired in the parish between 1694 and 1726. Mercifully, the handwriting was legible, though the ink had partially faded, and despite the indirect lighting, I could decipher the text tolerably well. The first several pages held nothing of interest—names upon names, none of which were familiar. But when I arrived at the pages detailing the events of 1705, I stopped short.

I shut the book, then opened it again.
The tomb of the Lords that is beside the Balustrade.
I held the book on my lap, my pulse racing. There was a tomb, after all. Amazed, I walked into the sanctuary and knelt before the knight’s stone, running my fingers along its surface as if the tiny dips and swells of the stone might provide a tactile code I could decipher. Was this the exact location? The balustrade that separated the choir from the nave was just here, two stair-steps removed from the stone. I gripped the edge of the stone with my fingers and gave it a perfunctory tug, but it did not budge. Absurdly, I put my ear to it, as if I might be able to hear the voices of the dead calling out to me, but I felt only the cold floor against my skin.

I sat in the front pew and opened the book once more, rereading the page where I’d found the entry.
The tomb of the Lords.
I knew it was customary, during the
ancien régime,
for aristocrats to be buried beneath the church. This entry seemed to be proof that there was a tomb—or had once been—in which the notable people of the community were buried. But this Lady D—had been buried there as late as 1705, a thousand years after the Merovingian presence on this land. So what of my imagined Merovingian tomb? Was that pure fantasy? Or had this tomb been remembered and used all those many years? The numbers of corpses, then, that might have been put to rest beneath this church … they would be incalculable. The church would be resting on foundations of human bone.

I read further in the register, searching for other mentions of the tomb, but found only one: a lieutenant colonel who had been buried there in 1724. The tomb was not mentioned again, and as the register only recorded events through the year 1726, I had no way of knowing whether the tomb had been used after that date.

I closed the book, smoothing the cover absentmindedly. Why hadn’t Bérenger told me about the tomb? He knew of it—that much was certain. He said he’d read the book cover to cover. Did he not think it important? It was, admittedly, not unusual for old churches like ours to house the corpses of local dignitaries. Perhaps Bérenger had thought it too mundane to mention. But why had he hidden the book so carefully? What was he afraid of?

Had he been at home, I would have gone to him at once and confronted him with my questions. But he was away yet again—in Montazels, helping his mother nurse a dislocated shoulder (inflicted by his father). How I wished Madame were there! I would have brought her the book that very moment, shown her the mentions of the tomb, asked her about the Templars, about Blanchefort, about the lords and ladies who were buried here, somewhere beneath my very own feet. I might even have brought her to the church and asked her to help me lift the stone and dig beneath the surface earth. But Madame had been gone a long time—I had begun to doubt whether she would ever return—and I was left only with my memory of our discussions, which had yielded little about Rennes-le-Château’s recent history.

But though Madame was not available, her library might be. All I needed were the proper resources—records of Rennes during the
ancien régime
—and I might be able to find out more information about the tomb and who was buried there. If I could get permission from the mayor to peruse the library, I might find what I was looking for.

The mayor had become a different man since Madame had left. He spent most of his time in the tavern. When he wasn’t drunk, he was asleep. He no longer stopped in for visits throughout the village, as he had been used to doing, often just on the cusp of meal-time. Some of the villagers assumed he had grown lazy without a wife to check his appetites. He had become the butt of jokes.