“Then you also know that Marie was very fond of dressing as the Shepherdess. In all of her private gatherings, she alone wore that costume.”
Maureen shook her head in amazement as pieces fell into place. “Marie Antoinette always dressed as the Shepherdess. I knew that when I went to Versailles, but I didn’t know then about all of this.” She gestured to the wild scene surrounding them.
“That’s why the hamlet was built away from the palace and with very strict security,” Jean-Claude continued. “It was Marie’s way of celebrating the bloodline traditions in privacy. But, of course, others knew about it, as nothing was a secret in that palace. Too many spies, too much power at stake. It would be one of the factors that led to Marie’s demise — and to the revolution.
“The Paschals were loyal to the royal family, of course, and were often invited to Marie’s private fêtes. But the family was forced to flee France during the Reign of Terror.”
Maureen could feel the goose bumps running down her arms. The story of the tragic Austrian queen of France had always been a source of intense fascination for her and had become a major motivating factor behind her book. Jean-Claude continued.
“Most settled in the States, many in Louisiana.”
Maureen snapped back to attention at this. “That’s where my father was from.”
“But of course. Anyone with eyes to see would know that you are of that strain of the royal bloodline. You have the visions, no?”
Maureen hesitated. She was reluctant to speak of her visions even with those closest to her, and this was a complete stranger. But there was something immensely liberating about being in the company of others like her — others who felt that it was perfectly natural to have such visions. She answered simply. “Yes.”
“Many bloodline women have visions of the Magdalene. Sometimes even the men, like Bérenger Sinclair. He has had them since he was a child. It’s very common.”
It certainly doesn’t feel common, Maureen thought. But she was very curious about this new revelation. “Sinclair has visions?” He certainly hadn’t mentioned this to her.
But she would have the opportunity to ask the man himself, as Sinclair was gliding across the floor, dressed impeccably as the last Count of Toulouse.
“Jean-Claude, I see you’ve found your long-lost cousin.”
“Oui. And she is a credit to the family name.”
“Quite. May I steal her from you for a moment?”
“Only if you will allow me to take her out for a drive tomorrow. I would like to show her some of the landmarks that pertain to the Paschal name. You have not been to Montsegur, have you, cherie?”
“No. Roland took us out today, but we didn’t go as far as Montsegur.”
“It is sacred ground for a Paschal. Do you mind, Bérenger?”
“Not at all, but Maureen is perfectly capable of making her own decisions.”
“Will you do me the honor? I can show you Montsegur, and then take you to a traditional restaurant. They serve only food that has been prepared in the authentic Cathar manner.”
Maureen couldn’t see a graceful way to say no, even if she had wanted to. But the combination of French charm and an insight into more of her family history proved irresistible.
“I’d be delighted,” she replied.
“Then I will see you tomorrow, cousine. Eleven o’clock?”
Jean-Claude kissed her hand again as she agreed, then said his farewell to Bérenger. “I shall take my leave now, as I have plans to make for the morning.”
Maureen and Sinclair smiled at him as he departed.
“You made quite an impression on Jean-Claude, I see. Not surprising. You look marvelous in that dress, as I knew you would.”
“Thank you, for everything.” Maureen knew she was blushing, completely unused to so much concentrated male attention. She steered the conversation back toward Jean-Claude.
“He seems very nice.”
“He’s a brilliant scholar, an absolute expert in French and Occitan history. Worked for years in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he had access to the most astonishing research materials. He has helped me and Roland immensely.”
“Roland?” Maureen was surprised at the deferential way in which Sinclair spoke of his manservant. It did not seem to be typical behavior for an aristocrat.
Sinclair shrugged. “Roland is a loyal son of the Languedoc. He has a great interest in the history of his people.” He took Maureen’s arm and began to guide her through the room. “Come, I want to show you something.”
He led her up a flight of stairs and into a small sitting room with a private terrace. A large balcony overlooked the patio and the enormous gardens that stretched beyond. The gardens, with their gilded fleur-de-lis gates, were locked, and protected on both sides by guards.
“Why are there so many guards at the gate?”
“That is my most private domain, sacred ground. I call them the Trinity Gardens and I allow very few visitors inside — and believe me, many of the guests here tonight would pay dearly to get behind those gates.”
Sinclair elaborated. “The costume ball is a tradition — my annual gathering for certain people who share a common interest.” He gestured to the revelers below them on the patio. “Some I respect — even revere, some I call friend, others…others are amusing to me. But all of them I watch closely. Some very closely.
“I thought you might find it interesting to see how people come from all over the world to investigate the mysteries of the Languedoc.”
Maureen watched the scene over the balcony, enjoying the silky breeze carrying the scent of the nearby rose garden on the early summer air. She noticed Tammy looking very chummy with Derek — and Derek looking like he was all hands on the sultry gypsy queen. She squinted at someone who might have been Peter, but decided it couldn’t be. The man in her line of vision was smoking. Peter hadn’t smoked since he was a teenager.
She turned to Sinclair suddenly and asked, “How did you find me?”
He lifted her right hand gently. “The ring.”
“The ring?”
“You’re wearing it in the photo, on the jacket of your book.”
Maureen nodded the beginning of understanding. “You know what the pattern means?”
“I have a theory on the pattern, which is why I brought you to this particular balcony. Come.”
Sinclair took Maureen gently by the arm and led her back inside to where a piece of artwork encased in glass was mounted on the wall. The piece was small, not much larger than an 8 x 10 photograph, but its central placement and the careful lighting showed it to its best advantage.
“It’s a medieval engraving,” he explained. “It represents philosophy. And the seven liberal arts.”
“Like the Botticelli fresco.”
“Exactly. You see, it comes from the classical perspective that if you embrace all seven of the liberal arts, you may attain the title of philosopher. That’s why this female figure in the center is depicted here as the goddess, Philosophia, and the liberal arts are at her feet, in service to her. But here is what I thought you would find most interesting.”
He started at the left, naming the liberal arts as he traced them with his fingers. He stopped at the seventh and final.
“Here we are. Cosmology. See anything there that looks familiar?”
Maureen gasped with excitement. “My ring!”
The figure representing cosmology held a disk decorated with the pattern on Maureen’s ring. She counted the stars and held her hand up to the image.
“It’s identical, right down to the off-center spacing of some of the circles.” She was quiet for a moment, taking it all in, before turning back to Sinclair.
“But what does it all mean? How does it all apply to Mary Magdalene? And to me?”
“There are spiritual and alchemical applications. In terms of the Magdalene’s mysteries, I believe this symbol shows up so frequently as a clue, a reminder that we need to pay attention to th
e critical relationship between the earth and the stars. The ancients knew that, but we have forgotten it in our modern age. As above, so below. The stars remind us every night that we have the opportunity to create heaven on earth. I believe that is what they wanted to teach us. It was their ultimate gift to us, their message of love.”
“They?”
“Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Our ancestors.”
And as if a cosmic timer had been set to punctuate his sentence, the fireworks began their light show over the garden as the revelers watched in delight. Sinclair eased Maureen back outside to watch bursts of color rain over the château grounds. When he put his arm around her she allowed it, feeling strangely comfortable there in the warm embrace of his strength.
Below on the patio, Father Peter Healy wasn’t watching the fireworks. At least, not those in the sky. His attention was focused on Bérenger Sinclair, who stood on the balcony with an arm placed firmly and possessively around the waist of Peter’s red-haired cousin. In contrast to Maureen, he was feeling anything but comfortable — about Sinclair, about these people, and about their plans.
There were other sets of eyes watching the evolution of Sinclair and Maureen’s chemistry that night. Derek watched from below, looking up from his place on the opposite end of the patio. Scanning the balcony, he noticed his French colleague was well positioned upstairs, perhaps even close enough to eavesdrop on the conversation between their host and the woman dressed as Mary Magdalene.
Derek Wainwright patted his body discreetly, to be sure that the blood-red ceremonial cord of the Guild was tucked safely away in the folds of his Thomas Jefferson costume. He would need it later tonight, when he returned to Carcassonne.
…Perhaps I am the sole defender of the princess called Salome, but it is my duty to be so. I regret that I have left it so late, for she did not deserve her terrible fate. There was a time when it was death to speak of her and of her actions, and I could not defend her without risking the followers of Easa and the higher path of The Way. But like so many of us, she was judged by those who did not know the truth, or even an echo of it.
First, I will say this: Salome loved me, and she loved Easa even more. Given a chance, another time or place, or another set of circumstances, the girl could have been a true disciple, a sincere follower of The Way of Light. Thus, I include her in his Book of Disciples, for what she could have been. Like Judas and Peter and the others, Salome had a role carved out for her, and little chance to escape that role. Her name was etched in the stones of Israel, etched in John’s blood, and perhaps in some of Easa’s.
If hers were the rash, childish actions of youth — of a young person who does not think things through before she speaks — then she is indeed guilty of that. But to be remembered as she is — reviled and despised as a harlot who ordered John the Baptizer’s death — I think it is one of the greatest of all the injustices that I can remember.
On the Day of Judgment, perhaps she will forgive me.
And perhaps John will forgive us all.
THE ARQUES GOSPEL OF MARY MAGDALENE,
THE BOOK OF DISCIPLES
Chapter Eleven
Château des Pommes Bleues
June 24, 2005
Maureen retired to bed shortly after the fireworks display. Peter had appeared as she descended the stairs with Sinclair, offering to escort her back to her room. She took him up on the offer, more than ready to escape into some much-needed solitude. It had been an overwhelming twenty-four hours and her head was throbbing.
Later that night Maureen was awakened by voices in the hallway. She thought she recognized Tammy, speaking in a whisper. A man’s muffled voice whispered back. Then the throaty laughter came, a trait that was as specific to Tammy as her fingerprints. Maureen listened, amused that her friend was enjoying the party.
She smiled as she drifted back to sleep, with the slightest, sleepy notion that the male voice she heard whispering intimately to Tammy was definitely not American.
Carcassonne
June 25, 2005
DEREK WAINWRIGHT GROANED as the morning sun blared relentlessly through his hotel room window. There were two things he didn’t want to deal with today — his hangover and the eight new messages on his cell phone.
Rising slowly to gauge the extremity of his headache, he shuffled over to his Italian leather traveling bag and extracted a prescription bottle. He opened it to reveal an assortment of pills. Picking through them, he found what he wanted and threw back a Vicodin before chasing it with three Tylenol tablets for good measure. Thus fortified, he glanced at his phone on the nightstand. He had turned it off late last night when he came back to the hotel; he couldn’t deal with the incessant beeping, and he certainly didn’t want to listen to the messages.
Derek had spent most of his life escaping responsibility in much the same way. A trust-fund baby from a supremely wealthy and influential East Coast family, the youngest of real estate mogul Eli Wainwright’s boys had been given a very generous ticket to ride. He breezed into Yale on his father and elder brothers’ legacies, and later, despite his mediocre academic performance, secured an executive position in a top-notch investment firm. Derek left that job after less than a year when he determined that the hours were not compatible with his party boy lifestyle. Not that he needed to work. His family trust was large enough to carry him for life, and for the lives of his children and grandchildren — if he ever settled down enough to have any.
Eli Wainwright had been surprisingly patient with his youngest son’s deficiencies. Derek lacked the scholastic drive and aptitude of his siblings, but he had shown the most interest in a vital element of the family’s life and success — membership in the Guild of the Righteous. Baptized first as an infant and then again at fifteen, as was tradition in their organization, Derek seemed to have a natural affinity for the society and its teachings. His father selected Derek to follow in his shoes as one of the top American members of the Guild, an organization that stretched across not only the Western world but into parts of Asia and the Middle East. The Guild of the Righteous counted among its members some extremely influential men from the arenas of big business and international politics.
Membership was limited strictly to blood legacies, and baptized men were expected to marry into the Daughters of Righteousness, female children of the Guild who were raised within a strict code of decorum. Girls were given special training in the appropriate behavior for a wife and mother, taking their lessons from an ancient document known as The True Book of the Holy Grail that had been handed down for centuries. Some of the largest debutante balls and cotillions on the Eastern seaboard, into the South, and throughout Texas were in essence “coming-out parties” for Daughters of Righteousness, announcing their readiness to enter the world as the obedient and proper wives of Guild members.
Eli’s older sons had all married Daughters of Righteousness and were well ensconced in perfect upper-crust lives. Pressure was coming to bear on the youngest Wainwright, now well into his thirties, to settle down in a similar fashion. Derek wasn’t interested, although he didn’t dare say so to his father. He found the Daughters immensely boring in all of their pristine virginity. The idea of bedding one of those perfectly bred ice princesses each night made him shudder. Sure, he could do what his brothers and all the other Guild members did — marry the approved and appropriate mother for your children and find a tantalizing trollop to keep things interesting on the side. But why settle for that at this stage? He was still young and terrifyingly rich, and he had few responsibilities. And as long as there were exotic, sensual women like Tamara Wisdom to entice him, he wasn’t going to shackle himself to some tedious prize broodmare who reminded him too much of his mother. If his father remained convinced that he was interested only in carrying out Guild business, Derek could get away with shirking his other responsibilities for at least a few more years.
What Eli Wainwright did not see with the blind eyes of a father who chooses not to view the flaws i
n his son was that Derek’s affinity wasn’t for the Guild’s philosophy. It was for the mystique of an outlawed society, the rituals, the sense of elitism that came with knowing secrets that had been handed down for centuries and protected in blood. The true attraction came from the understanding that virtually any unsavory act of a member could be cleaned up and swiftly concealed due to the Guild’s global network of influence. Derek reveled in these things, and in the way he was treated because of his father’s wealth and influence everywhere he went. Or at least he had previously, until the former Teacher of Righteousness died somewhat mysteriously and was replaced with this new one, the fanatical Englishman who ruled the Guild with an iron fist.
Their new leader had changed everything. He flaunted his hereditary connection to Oliver Cromwell while studying his ancestor’s ruthless and often gruesome tactics for dealing with opposition. Upon ascending to the title of Teacher of Righteousness, John Simon Cromwell made his first dramatic statement via an ugly execution. True, the murdered man was an enemy of the Guild and the leader of an organization that had opposed it for hundreds of years. But the message was clear: I will eliminate anyone who challenges me, and I will do it in an ugly way. Beheading the man with a sword and severing his right index finger carried the dramatic and literal touch of their new leader’s unstoppable fanaticism.
Derek attempted to block that specific image from his cloudy mind as he picked up the cell phone and switched it on, dialing into his voice mail. It was time to face the music. He had a mission to complete and he was committed to it, determined to show that British bastard once and for all what he was made of. He was sick of being ridiculed by him and the Frenchman. They treated him like an idiot, and no one had ever been allowed to do that before.