A.K.A. Goddess (14 page)

He still loves Mary, I reminded myself.

“But,” he added, “I do…I do apologize, anyway.”

“Me, too,” I said quickly. “Sorry about that.”

Then we just sat there, feeling embarrassed and weirdly guilty. At least, I did, because I’d really liked sleeping in a man’s arms after all these months. His body had felt solid and warm and alive against mine. Now I felt chilled and alone….

Until I remembered a great distraction. “Sun’s up. Let’s grab breakfast and I’ll tell you what I’ve figured out.”

He looked hesitant. And wonderfully disheveled.

“Or…?” I asked, wanting nothing more than to be on the road to Fontevrault. Now. Ten minutes ago. Well…maybe not ten minutes ago, considering where I’d been then.

“It’s Sunday morning,” he said.

Oh. He wasn’t an ex-Catholic. He wasn’t even an ex-priest.

I admired his dedication, even if it made me feel even guiltier. “Then let’s go clean up. I’ll get some food and check us out of the B&B while you’re at mass. Then we can head out. I have some phone messages to check, too.”

Maybe Lex had called back with more information about whom I shouldn’t trust, and why.

And how he could possibly know about it.

But he hadn’t called.

On the plus side, Rhys insisted Fontevrault Abbey had not been on Bridge’s list. That meant we should manage to be there and gone before the Comitatus even knew about it. After all, how many hiding places could there be in an abandoned convent?

On the minus side—it turned out Fontevrault was the size of a small town. And turns out it was the Cultural Center for all of Western France. No complications there, right?

“At the height of its power,” said our tour guide, leading us through sculpted gardens amidst neat medieval buildings, “there were over five thousand nuns living at the Royal Abbey of Fontevrault. That is not counting the monks.”

“Excuse me,” said Rhys, while I eyed the breadth of this place and thought—yeah. This could hold five thousand people. “Did you say nuns and monks? In the same abbey?”

The guide, a perky blond French girl, nodded. “Fontevrault was the first of only a few holy orders that allowed both men and women. Very forward of them, do you not think?”

Was she flirting with Rhys?

“It is shockingly so,” he agreed with his friendly grin.

Was he flirting back?

“More unique was that the abbess, not the abbot, ruled the entire convent. She answered only to the pope and, sometimes, the king. This point was established in Fontevrault’s charter, based on the Biblical instruction to ‘Behold thy Mother.’”

Rhys said, “St. John, Chapter 19, verse 27.”

“I am impressed,” purred our tour guide.

As she turned away to point out the gardens I touched his arm. “Something going on between you and the guide, Romeo?”

He blinked, then laughed. “Her name is Claire, and I doubt we’ve anything in common but an interest in clerical history.”

“And did you notice that this particular history reads like a 12th-century sexual revolution?”

“Surprisingly so, yes.”

After trailing past the conical tower that had been part of a massive kitchen, we continued to the dining hall.

The refectory bordered a beautifully tended cloister, quartered by footpaths, with a burbling fountain in the center.

“Excuse me,” I asked. “Claire? Is the fountain natural, or was it built here?”

“The fountains are supplied by artesian wells which were likely here before the abbey was built. The area is riddled with caves and underground rivers.”

Like Glastonbury. Like Lourdes. Like Bath. Goddess sites.

As we continued along weathered, white-stone buildings with gray slate roofs, my theories felt all the more solid. Nothing here contradicted what I knew about goddess worship, except for one tiny thing:

As Rhys had put it in the car, It’s a convent.

Claire listed some of Fontevrault’s abbesses, like a Who’s Who of power. Widows of crown princes. Granddaughters and sisters and bastards of kings, both English and French. The more I heard, the more I had to change my idea of medieval goddess worshippers as frightened and victimized, scurrying to secret meetings in the safety of the woods with their heads down and their faces hidden. If the abbesses of Fontevrault had been involved—and surely a good abbess knew what went on in her own convent—these women had access to far more resources than I’d ever guessed. And the things they’d done with it! Teaching. Nursing lepers.

They withstood quite a few efforts by the monks to put men back in charge, too.

Why did these stories so rarely make the history books?

From the chapter house, Claire led us into the echoing choir of the abbey church, a tall gothic structure whose height and beauty rivaled most cathedrals. Beyond, in the nave, lay the four effigies Rhys and I had come to see.

Eleanor d’Aquitaine. Henry II. Richard the Lionheart and his brother’s bride, Isabelle d’Angoulême. Three fair figures, side by side. Except there were four, like the French version.

I edged in their direction before the rest of the group went that far. I had to see. The tombs sat on a raised dais, surrounded by a railing. Each crypt held a carved, painted effigy, as if the nobles had fallen asleep there. Eleanor even held a book in her hands, as if spending eternity reading.

Four nobles with one heart. The Lionheart. I shivered.

“Are you all right?” asked Rhys, behind me.

“It feels…” But I had no words for the power surging through me like a rush of water, a tingle in the air. Anticipation, I imagine. Or even…magic.

I still had to find the “hole where hid her queen”—which I now knew would be where Queen Isabelle had hidden from the French crown, after too many rebellions. But this still felt magic.

Drawing the others into the nave, Claire spoke of the four Plantagenets. I continued to look around at the faded, painted crest of English royalty on the wall beside the royal names. Intricately carved monsters and magical beasts paraded in a frieze across the tops of columns and windows. Angels. Animal heads. Rows of haloed men in the same repeated position, as if they were singing backup. And…

Melusine.

She sat at the cornice of a pilaster, her sculpture half-hidden behind a dragon. But the heraldic pose with her double tail curling to either side was unmistakable, church or no church.

I stared at her, hardly able to breathe. She, in stony silence, stared back at me, coyly guarding her mysteries.

It was still a very large church.

Claire was saying, “The very last abbess, Julie de Pardaillan d’Antin, was driven from the abbey in the 1790s. What happened to her, nobody knows.”

Melusine looked even more coy. I spun away from her to stare back at our tour guide. “Who?”

“Julie Sophie Charlotte de Pardaillan d’Antin. The Revolution was a dark time for the abbey.”

But I’d stopped listening. I’d almost stopped breathing. As Claire led the group across the soaring church, I couldn’t have moved if I wanted to.

“Are you all right?” Rhys put a hand on my shoulder. “Magdalene? What is wrong?”

“That last abbess.” I swallowed, unsure if I was even awake anymore. It seemed so fantastical…even more so than the creatures that clustered along the frieze above us. “Her name.”

Rhys waited. “Her name…?”

“My grandmother’s name was Charlotte,” I said. “Her mother’s name was Sophie. And her mother’s name was Julie. Julie d’Antin…after her own grandmother.”

“You think you’re related to an abbess of Fontevrault?”

Julie de Pardaillan d’Antin, fleeing the Revolution, must have been the one who passed down the nursery rhyme about Melusine. That meant its familial sources were nowhere near as ancient as we’d all thought.

Two hundred years and change. That was all.

“How long was Melusine worshipped here, anyway?”

I looked back up at her figurine—and that’s when I saw it. Really, finally, saw it. I slowly sank to my knees right there on the church floor, staring upward.

Carved into the stone wall beside Melusine’s pilaster, at about shoulder height, two circles intersected to create a vesica piscis. And somewhere behind that, I knew, lay a hidden chamber.

The chamber of my ancestors. And Melusine’s Chalice.

“The abbey closes in half an hour,” a guard warned as I hurried through the gates for the third time that day.

“I’m just checking to see…” I flashed my day pass from earlier, scanning the gardens that spread out before me. Since I wasn’t actually looking for anybody, I wasn’t surprised to not find him. “Nope. Guess he’s gone on to the car. Thanks!”

And I headed out toward the parking area.

Across the street stood a high stone wall, fronted by tall spires of cedar trees. I ducked behind them, doubly sheltered by a row of tour buses, to where Rhys waited with extra clothing.

“Have I mentioned,” he said, low, “that this is an insane idea?” But he handed me the black T-shirt I’d picked up in town as he said it.

“Once or twice.” Making sure the buses hid me—and trying not to breathe too deeply of diesel—I pulled the shirt on over my worn blue camisole. Rhys handed me a black ball cap.

It wouldn’t mislead anybody who looked closely, not for a second. But if anybody was looking closely, we were already sunk. I’m a college professor, not a criminal master-mind—which is why I’d gotten help.

“You want to do what?” my friend, Officer Sofie Douglas, had demanded when I’d called her from a public phone in town.

“I want to break into a major cultural center and see what they’ve got hidden under their abbey church. You’re the only person I could think of who might have some suggestions.”

Sofie had said, “I suggest you don’t do that.”

“Here comes a crowd,” I said. “Now, let’s go.” And we headed back across the street, hoping the guard wouldn’t get a distinct look. I raised my day pass high, so the guard could see it over the heads of the departing tourists, while Rhys went to ask him the location of the nearest bathrooms.

My job was to keep walking, casual and confident and easy to overlook. If we were lucky, the guard would remember me leaving before, but not entering a second time.

I crossed the still-sunny gardens, climbed several stairs and stepped through the open doors into the echoing height of the almost-empty church. The other tourists paid me no heed, but the frieze that held Melusine seemed to be watching me.

Sofie had said, “I’m guessing the place is wired out the butt. And although I don’t know shit for French laws, I’d say that breaking and entering is a bad deal.”

Which had given me an idea. “What about just entering?”

Stepping behind a column, I tugged off the hat and stuffed it into one of the pockets of my cargo pants. Then I stripped off the shirt and tied it around my waist, reverting to the blue camisole. I wanted to look more like the woman the guard had seen leaving, for the security cameras.

By the time a recorded ten-minute warning played across the grounds in French, then English, then German, my breathing was shallow. Since taking myself through some Tai Chi forms right here in the l’église abbatiale wouldn’t count as inconspicuous, I just had to deal with it.

Rhys was right. This was an insane idea.

So why did I feel like the night before Christmas? Not just excited. Somehow…spiritually primed?

“Five minutes to go,” said Rhys softly from behind a pillar. “There’s still time to change your mind.”

“Not on your life.”

“Nobody’s followed us, anyway.” He unzipped his camera bag and handed me my halogen flashlight, my cell phone, and the disposable camera we’d bought in town. Then he surprised me with a wrapped juice box and a package of vending-machine cookies. Each item he produced, I tucked gratefully into one or another of my cargo pockets. “You’re safe to go in and out without giving away any secrets.”

“Good.” I fished out the car keys for him, but kept my passport and emergency money. On the off chance I was arrested, I might as well have my papers…and Rhys on the outside, waiting to bail me out. “Thanks.”

“You’re here to reconnoiter, not to remove, agreed?”

“‘Thou shalt not steal.’” I believed that. What we needed was proof to convince someone in authority, someone trustworthy, that the chalice was here—and needed extra protection.

Rhys brushed a gentle kiss across my cheek. “Be careful.”

But I arched upward and kissed his lips instead.

Blame it on adrenaline, or his breath on my ear, or how glad I was for an ally in this.

Except that he kissed me back.

My kiss had meant to be quick; when you’re unsure of your welcome, you don’t exactly go deep. His lips pressed their advantage, moved across mine in surprised welcome.

Savoring. Lingering. Yes.

I laid my hand on his taut back, to keep him there. No thinking. Just enjoyment. Just the determination to keep from remembering—

But we did remember, and we pulled back at once.

“I’m sorry,” I said, face flushing warm. “I…”

“Ah.” And he licked his lips. “It’s my fault. Really.”

To complicate matters, a recording announced that the abbey grounds were now closed to the public. All visitors must leave immédiatement. If Rhys stayed longer he would draw attention to the fact that he was leaving alone.

He backed away, clearly regretful, then left.

I moved as stealthily as I could to the column closest to Melusine’s pilaster, where the cameras shouldn’t be able to see me, and sank to the floor. I had a long night ahead of me.

Sofie had said, “Let me get this straight. You’re going to find it, document it, and leave it exactly where it is?”

“It will be a lot better for the chalice if someone with the proper credentials retrieves it.”

“And then…”

“Then I’ll wait for them to open the next morning before leaving.”

“So all you’re really facing is premeditated trespassing,” my police officer friend had teased. “I can accept that.”

What felt like forever later, I heard the footsteps of a security guard pacing slowly through the church. As I’d hoped, he didn’t look behind every pier and column.

His footsteps continued on. The double doors shut with an echoing bang. The sound of locks sliding into place echoed less.