Matilda pulled up on the reins and slowed the horse. “I’m sorry. It just feels so good to be out again.” She breathed in the scented air of the great pines that surrounded them in the Ardennes. They were close now, and she was tingling with anticipation. As they passed the pond where the lone swan glided, Matilda gasped in awe.
Ahead of her were the pointed arches of the nave, golden marble columns gleaming in the sunlight. The sight was positively magnificent. “Oh Patricio, look what we’ve done.”
She dismounted carefully with her friend’s help and walked toward the magnificent building. It was all she had dreamed it would be, a remarkable monument to the Way of Love.
“Come, you must see this.” Patricio was excited now that they had arrived safely, with Matilda looking no worse for the ride. In fact, she looked more alive than he had seen her since her confinement. He helped her step across the threshold and into the great chamber that held the six-petaled rose window.
Matilda stood before it and cried. When she finally spoke, it was in a whisper. “It’s perfect. Just the way I dreamed it would look.”
He took her to the scriptorium, where the three monks from Calabria, two elders and an apprentice, were at work on the Libro Rosso translations. Matilda hadn’t seen them since the earliest days of their arrival in Lorraine and was happy for the reunion. While the brothers were clearly surprised to see her, they were warm in their greeting and invited her to rest while they provided a lunch of bread, watered ale, and cheese, all of which they made on the abbey premises. Orval was already on its way to becoming a thriving and self-supporting community. Matilda could not have been happier with the progress.
After her lunch and an update from the Calabrians on the state of the translations, which were much further along than she would have guessed, Matilda was anxious to see the pièce de résistance.
“Take me to our labyrinth,” she commanded of Patricio, who humbly complied.
It was magnificent. Patricio had worked with master stonemasons for over a year to fashion hundreds of matched paving stones, which had been carefully laid into the ground one by one to create the outlines of the eleven circuits. At the center was a perfect rose, outlined in a lighter-colored rock for contrast. It was a masterpiece of stonework.
“Look here.” Patricio led her toward the entrance, which faced perfectly to the west. He walked approximately ten paces away from the entrance before kneeling to show her where the iron ring had been embedded in the earth. “For Notre Dame, our Lady of the Labyrinth.”
Matilda beamed at him as she pulled several strands from her plaited hair and tied them to the ring in the bridal knot. She kissed Patricio on the cheek and thanked him, before making the long-awaited walk into her very own labyrinth, where God awaited her at the center.
Matilda’s time in the labyrinth was beautiful, if puzzling. She saw a vision of herself in Tuscany with Conn and Bishop Anselmo and Isobel—and someone else, another man, strong and striking, whom she did not recognize. She thought it odd that she looked no older than she did today. Surely if Tuscany was in her future, it was in a more distant future. Godfrey would never allow her to travel once the child arrived. Flash to another vision of Lucca, and it was Christmastide. She was standing outside the Cathedral of San Martino. Her cathedral of the Holy Face. And she was happy in both visions, almost unbearably happy. Could such happiness be possible? What time in the future was she glimpsing? Perhaps this was just the dream of her soul that she was seeing, rather than a glimpse of a reality that awaited her. She was disconcerted that she saw no vision of her child, and yet she could feel the baby stirring in her womb. Perhaps God did not want her to see the child prior to its birth.
Patricio, waiting for Matilda outside the labyrinth, was becoming concerned. She had been in there a long time, and if she did not come out soon, there would be no way they could get back to Verdun before dark. He closed his eyes and willed her to come out, praying all the while that she would do so at once. But he waited a long time before she finally emerged, breathless with the visions.
“Tilda, there’s no time. We have to get to the horses now. You can tell me on the way.”
She nodded, looking at the sky and realizing with trepidation that it was far later than she had anticipated. Patricio helped her onto her horse and followed immediately behind her as they rode toward Verdun.
It was well into the autumn, and the days were getting shorter. Matilda had to make a choice: to ride faster and make the most of the daylight, or stay at a slow and steady pace but risk the darkness. She chose the former and kicked her horse into a canter.
“God help us both,” Patricio muttered, as he tried to keep up with her.
Whether it was written in her destiny or the actions of her free will had caused it, Matilda would never know. But the diminishing light and the enforced speed upon the older horse were a deadly combination. The mount lost his footing and stumbled, midstride, in a full canter. A more balanced Matilda might have taken the fall with an athletic roll and endured a few bruises at worst. But her ungainly body at late pregnancy and her disrupted equilibrium were no match for the circumstances she found herself in. Matilda was thrown completely from the horse, landing hard on her side.
Patricio roared with fear and anguish as he watched it happen, following behind her. He jumped from his own mount and ran to Matilda, relieved that she was breathing, if not conscious. He checked her for blood but didn’t see any immediate signs of external injuries that would be life-threatening. Removing the heavy woolen blanket from his horse, he covered his best friend with it and said the most fervent prayer of his life over her. Leaping bareback on his mount, he rode to the palace of Verdun for help, rode as if the devil himself were chasing him.
The pain that shot through her abdomen was like ten heated swords plunged into her from all sides. She was regaining consciousness, but if this was how it felt, she much preferred the delirium. Another searing pain, and then the warm gush of fluids covered her thighs. Her eyes were opened now and she could see that she was in her bedchamber, with two of Godfrey’s spies on either side of her. Midwives. The younger one wasn’t so bad. Her name was Greta, and she was the only member of Godfrey’s staff who had ever made any real effort to be friendly with the new duchess. She wiped Matilda’s face with a cool cloth now and cooed to her in German that it was all right, that she was home.
The elder woman was hardly as kind. She was giving orders sharply to others in the room and prodding at Matilda’s womb all the while.
“Push,” she commanded in clipped tones. “This baby must come now if there is any hope of saving it.” Matilda could only imagine what the rest of the sentence contained, muttered inaudibly under the midwife’s breath in angry German. No doubt it was a curse for the duchess of Lorraine’s wickedness in endangering the duke’s child.
Matilda pushed. She had no choice. The pressure on her abdomen was beyond bearing, and with a strange popping sound and another searing pain, she felt the child move through the birth canal and into the hands of the waiting midwife.
It was too early, and they all knew it. There could be no happy outcome in this birthing chamber. Matilda was in shock and exhausted with pain and fear, but she was aware enough to care. She waited in the silence that followed as the elder midwife wiped the blood from the baby.
“A girl.” There was no emotion in the announcement. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, there was the slightest cooing sound in the chamber. Matilda sucked in her breath. Could it be? Did her child live? She tried to sit up, but the younger midwife held her back gently.
The elder, for all her coarseness with Matilda, was surprisingly delicate and tender with the newborn, massaging it gently and whispering to it all the while. She snapped at the younger woman, “Fetch the priest.”
Placing the baby on a fresh blanket of virgin wool, the old woman brought Matilda’s tiny daughter and placed her next to her mother in the bed.
“She lives,” the woman said, the
emotion gone again from her words and demeanor, “but not for long. She is too small, and breathing too hard. She will die before the night is through. Before her father ever gets to see her alive.” This was a pointed condemnation. “You must give her a name so that the priest may baptize her and her soul does not get lost. A Christian name.” The emphasis on Christian was clear. The midwife would not have this witch condemning the duke’s child any further than she already had.
It took all her strength, but Matilda raised herself and lifted the tiny bundle into her arms. The baby was so small that she didn’t look real. She was perfect, even in miniature. There was no sign of her father’s congenital deformity. In fact, the one trait that Matilda recognized was her lovely mother’s cleft chin. And while there was just the slightest amount of hair on the baby’s head, she could see that it was a deep reddish color.
For an eternal moment, the child locked eyes with her, and Matilda was sure that the baby was really seeing her. It was brief, but there was an instant of intelligence and recognition, a glimpse of the soul of this child who had come here for such a brief period. In that one wrenching moment they were connected, mother and daughter, and Matilda was certain that her heart would break. She had caused this tragedy, brought it on her precious, innocent child. May God forgive her.
The priest arrived quickly, Godfrey’s dour confessor who disapproved of Matilda at the best of times. He sprinkled holy water on the child with great haste, as if certain she would be dead within the next minute.
“Have you given her a Christian name?”
Matilda ran her finger over the baby’s dimpled chin. She nodded slightly.
“I have. I would call her Beatrice Magdalena.”
The priest looked disapproving but said nothing. He baptized the infant and gave her last rites in the same few breaths, a strange sacrament of life and death all at once. Then he left the room without a second look at Matilda.
Gathering her baby to her breast, Matilda rocked the infant against her body for the remainder of the little girl’s short life. She knew no lullabies, so the baby took her last breaths listening to her mother weep, in between verses of the only song that had ever comforted her. The one in French, about love.
Matilda was smothering. Something was over her face and she could not breathe. She struggled to get out from under it, but to no avail. Her assailant was stronger than she was, particularly in her current weakened condition. As she was on the verge of slipping into unconsciousness, she heard a man’s voice raised in alarm. There was a struggle in the bedchamber and shouting in German. Then the cushion was removed from her face.
Gasping for air, Matilda tried to make sense of the room in her dizzy state and through her blurred vision. The hunchback stood over her with a cushion in his hands, the intended instrument of her demise. But he was not her assailant. Against all odds, it appeared that Godfrey was her rescuer. The murder attempt had come at the hands of the elder midwife, who was glaring at Matilda with hatred. The woman spat at her.
“Devil. Murdering witch. You killed that child just as surely as if you cut her throat.”
“Enough!” Godfrey would have to deal with the midwife later. He could not allow murder in his own bedchamber, even if it was considered justifiable, and most of his household would agree that it was. As the older woman stormed out the door, Godfrey approached his wife’s bed. Matilda attempted to speak, but the words would not come out.
The hunchback looked down at her, pitiless and full of hatred. “Do not thank me for saving you, woman. It was not for your damnable flesh that I did so. I will simply not endanger my own mortal soul for the sake of a female infant by permitting murder in my house.
“But you should know that if the child had been a boy…I would have allowed the midwife to kill you.”
She had to get out of here, immediately. Matilda was certain that as long as she stayed in Verdun, her life was in danger. Everyone in the household was loyal to the hunchback, and they all believed her to be a murdering witch who had intentionally killed his child. She had found that the younger midwife, Greta, was something of an ally, as the girl came in to check that she was recovering and bring her some bread dipped in watered wine. Matilda coerced the girl into talking, through a combination of guilt and bribery.
Greta informed Matilda that the whisperings in the household were that it was just as well that the baby died, as it had the same unholy red hair as her mother. No doubt she would have been a witch and a curse on their good duke. The danger to the duchess was immediate, however. It had been mentioned, more than once, that if Matilda were to die in the next few days, it would be easy enough to say that it was from complications of childbirth. No one in the castle would argue the point, and Godfrey would inherit all her properties and be free to take a younger wife and start anew.
Matilda offered Greta a portion of her jewel chest if she would arrange a horse for her. As fate would have it, the girl’s brother was one of the stable hands, and a ruby necklace fit for a queen was payment enough for him to prepare a horse for Matilda.
In the dead of night, Matilda left the palace through the rear servants’ exit with only the clothes on her back and waited in the stable for the boy to come. Once the horse was prepared, she rode out into the night, praying that the moon was bright enough to light her way, and pacing herself so as not to repeat her fateful fall.
“I need to stay here, Matilda. Everything we built is at risk. The hunchback will not hurt me. He wouldn’t dare. I am a monk, and this is a house of God. Remember, he has no idea what you are really creating here, and neither does anyone else. To the rest of Lorraine, we are simply building the most beautiful monastery in Northern Europe. That is a feather in Godfrey’s cap.”
Matilda nodded, praying this was true. She wanted Patricio to stay here in Orval, to finish the work, to complete the construction on their grand vision, which was coming to life in such a magnificent way. She had long since transferred all the funds into the abbey’s coffers, which Patricio controlled, so that Godfrey couldn’t halt the flow of money or their progress. But she was concerned that her husband would attempt to harm Patricio in some other way, as retaliation for what he believed was compliance in her treachery.
“My greater concern is what happens now. You have to get out of Lorraine immediately, but you cannot ride across the Alps as a woman alone.”
“No. But my mother has relations here, outside Stenay. A cousin. I will go to her and tell her what has happened. From there, I will send a messenger to Tuscany and ask that they send a guard to escort me home.”
“Can you trust this relation of your mother’s?”
“I have never met her, but she is a duchess in her own right and one who has had to defy Henry on more than one occasion. So we have much in common, I think. I hope. But the truth of the matter is, I have no other choice, do I?”
“No. Godspeed, sister. And contact me as soon as you can. From now on we will have to use the Sator Rotas code for our communication.”
The Master had taught them a cryptic for encoded messages when they were children. The code had existed from the earliest days of Christianity in Rome, when certain violent death awaited anyone discovered to be a practicing Christian. It was through the cryptic that the earliest converts had been able to communicate in secret. For the young Matilda and Patricio, it had been like a great game, sending notes back and forth in the strange sequence of letters and numbers that occurred within the magic square. Now it would be employed once again in the serious business of preserving true Christianity and securing Matilda’s safety.
“God takes care of his own.”
The Master had said this to her on many occasions, and she had known it to be true throughout her life. When Matilda was in the direst need of divine assistance, it always arrived for her. On this occasion, the divine will manifested in the person of her mother’s cousin, Giselda, who had been named for the queen who raised Beatrice when she was orphaned. It appeared that stren
gth and grace followed this name within their family. An eccentric, educated woman, it happened that this Giselda was disgusted and outraged by both the licentious reputation and the acquisitive nature of Henry IV, who had encroached upon her own hereditary territories a few too many times. She was herself a direct descendant of Charlemagne who deserved better treatment than she was receiving at the hands of this decadent upstart, king or not.
Matilda’s arrival on her doorstep was a godsend, and before long the two women had formed a conspirational bond. Matilda pledged support from Tuscany when and if it was needed to protect Giselda’s territories, and the woman had, in turn, provided luxurious accommodation, competent doctors, and enjoyable company. She had also dispatched her most efficient messenger to Mantua.
It took weeks for the Tuscan retinue to arrive in Lorraine, giving Matilda much-needed time to heal. She tried, through prayer and spiritual practice, to work through the grief of her loss, the wrenching guilt, and the trauma of the hateful, nightmarish aftermath in Verdun. Giselda’s sympathetic ear and the peace of safe solitude nourished Matilda’s soul with new strength, while expert physicians helped her body to mend before she attempted crossing the Alps with winter approaching.
By the time the Tuscans were sighted, the sun shining off the ginger hair of the giant on horseback who had come to see her safely home, Matilda was ready for the journey.
A letter arrived from Patricio, carried by a messenger from a Benedictine monastery, the following day as Matilda and her Tuscan escort were preparing to depart for home. Written in the cryptic, it was a plea of desperation that required some deciphering. Matilda sat down and drew out the cryptic, determined to remember how precisely the letters were converted to numbers and then back again into letters to create a cohesive message: