I decided to tell him everything I knew. “Sévérine was kicked out of the university. About six months ago.” I watched Cranwell’s face as I talked, and I could tell that this information surprised him.
“For what?”
“Her department head called it ‘bizarre behavior.’”
“And you just found out?”
“About three minutes before you came downstairs.”
“Did you ever talk to her about her work at the university? Did she openly lie to you about being a student there?”
That made me think. “On her ‘university days’ like today, I’ve always said, ‘Have a safe trip into town,’ or something like that, but she’s never corrected me. I don’t think she’s ever lied to me either.”
“What was your employment agreement with her?”
“It didn’t hinge on her studies. It was free room and board in exchange for help with the guests. We didn’t even have a contract. Do you think she’s dangerous?”
“I don’t think so. It might be nothing, Freddie. It’s possible she was just embarrassed to tell you.”
“But why would she still be here?”
“Maybe she hasn’t found another job yet; she might not be in a position to finance a move.”
“Then where does she go on her ‘university days’?”
“I don’t know.”
We stared at each other through the flashes of lightning.
“Can I get up off this step? It’s killing my back.”
“Of course. I’m sorry. I just… I didn’t know what to think. And I’d seen you and Sévérine together… I saw her come out of your room.”
“Freddie, do you know what the odds were in seeing us that one night in my entire stay here? I swear to you that-” He’d started to place his hands on my arms, but then he read the warning in my eyes and dropped them. “Never mind.” He reached his arms up behind him, lacing his fingers together at the back of his head, and sighed. Then he released them, running a hand through his hair, and finally folded his arms in front of him.
Those arms. Those arms I had been surprised were so strong. Strong, but dangerous. I shivered. Then everything began to come together.
“Cranwell. The night of the feast. Sévérine was the only one who wasn’t at the table. She had to have been the one in my room.”
“You can’t know that. She was in the kitchen all night. Anyone could have prowled around without her knowledge. And the rest of us were in the dining hall.”
“And during the Journées de Patrimoine, she was the only one on the second and third floors. And she was probably the one who jumbled up my fruit boxes.”
“What proof do you have?”
“I don’t need any, Cranwell. I just know.” I had no doubt that it was Sévérine. She was searching for something. The question was, for what?
“What are you going to do?”
“Do you think she’s dangerous?” I was still trying to make sense of M. Dubois’ information, still trying to redraw my image of Sévérine.
Cranwell shrugged. “I think she’s been dishonest, but I don’t think she’d harm you.”
“But what’s she looking for?”
“It’s got to be something to do with Alix.”
“But what if it isn’t?” I might have thought so too, but I had seen her room. And aside from decoration, nothing in it had indicated to me that she had any interest in Alix.
“What are you thinking?”
I didn’t know. I just knew Alix no longer made sense.
Cranwell began to pace. “Let’s think about where she’s been looking.”
“Outside. Inside. In the kitchen, my room… maybe even your room?”
“So it can’t be anything very big if she thinks she could find it in our rooms. Everything’s been constructed of stone.”
“And most of the walls were torn down and put back together. During renovations.”
Cranwell’s eyes fixed on mine. “Does she know that?”
I shrugged.
“Is there anything-any room, any area-that wasn’t renovated?”
I started to say no, but then stopped myself. “The attics. They were reroofed and wires were run up through the floors, but that was it.”
“Any other rooms?”
“They didn’t touch the cellar, except for stringing wires along the ceiling.”
Cranwell sat for a long while, gazing into space. “How about the floors?”
“Every floor was renovated. All the rooms were redone.”
“But the actual flooring?”
“I never touched it. It’s all stone.”
He leapt to his feet, grabbed my hand, and ran me up the back stairs to my room. He opened the door, walked to the rug, and began rolling it up.
I bent to help him.
“Where’s that stone?”
“Which stone?” The whole room was made of stone.
“The one you said you trip on.”
I scanned the floor looking for it, but couldn’t pick it out from its neighbors. The light was dim-the storm had taken care of that. And the stone had never stuck up very far. Just enough for me to notice that it wasn’t flush with its surroundings.
“Which one?”
“I don’t know. Just a second.” I walked over to my bed and then turned around. Started walking as if I were headed toward the bathroom. But I didn’t feel anything. I went back to the bed, took my shoes off, and did it again. Still nothing.
Cranwell was kneeling now, his head against the floor, arm stretched out in front of him, sweeping back and forth across the stones. “Try it again.”
“I can’t. You’re in my way. And you’re making me nervous.”
He rose to his feet, crossed his arms.
I tried one last time. And just at the point when I thought for sure I’d missed again, I felt it. I didn’t dare pick my foot up for fear of losing the spot. “It’s right here.”
“There?”
“Right under my foot.”
He knelt beside my foot, put a hand around it.
I bent to place a hand on his neck for balance.
“Don’t move.”
“I’m trying not to.”
He slid my foot back and placed his hand where it had been.
I straightened, my eyes focused on the stone.
Cranwell was probing the edges with his fingers. “I need something with a sharp edge. And a flashlight.”
I wished Sévérine were there. We could have asked to borrow whatever she’d been using to gouge around my chateau. “I’ll be right back.” I ran straight down to the kitchen and grabbed an arsenal of sharp pointed implements: knives, scissors, an ice pick, and a cleaver. Pulled a flashlight from my desk drawer. Ran back to my room. I laid them all on the floor in front of Cranwell.
While I held the flashlight, the scissors and knives cleared centuries of dirt from the stone’s edges. The ice pick, used as a lever, loosed it from its place. I held my breath as Cranwell wrestled it from the hole. At the bottom, covered in dust, was a slim rod.
Cranwell fished it out, blew the dust from it. Then laid it on the floor beside the stone.
He turned the stone over, bent closer to look at the underside. It had been carved. Not much. But enough that the rod had not been crushed.
I picked it up. It was lightweight. It was plain, except that there was a design along one end. Some markings and a ring of jewels along the top. I had just held it closer toward the flashlight when I realized that Cranwell and I were not alone. “Sévérine.”
Cranwell turned around. Scrambled to his feet.
Sévérine left the doorway and walked toward us, shrouded in shadows. She stopped in front of the hole in the floor. Her gaze never left the rod in my hand.
I tightened my hold on it. Lowered my arm and brought it close to my body.
“That is mine. I have been searching for this. Thank you, Frédérique, for finding it.” She held out her hand toward me.
So compelling was her demeanor that I found myself stretching toward her, holding out the rod.
Cranwell’s hand grasped my forearm, pulled me up from the floor. When I was standing, he stepped in front of me. “It belongs to Freddie.”
“It belonged to Alix. It was from her mother. If you give this to me, I will put it in the body of research with all the other artifacts.”
I stepped out from behind Cranwell. “At the University of Rennes?”
She didn’t even blink. “Of course.”
“I talked with M. Dubois this afternoon. He asked you to leave. Six months ago.”
“But you see, it means nothing. Still I searched and look what I have found.” She smiled. “Now they will beg me to return.”
“Why didn’t you tell me they had asked you to leave?”
“Access to the journals is sometimes only granted to thésardes and professeurs. It was me the expert on Alix. And they wanted to give the journals to someone else to work on. I was angry. And why did I not tell you? Why did you need to know? I had to stay here. I knew what I would find in this chateau. I had only to search it.”
“But I looked on you as a friend.”
“You looked on me as your door against the world. I used you. You used me.”
Cranwell stepped beside me, as if to offer support.
“Et vous, Robert? All I ever hear from you is Freddie. Freddie think this and Freddie do that. I am sick in the stomach of Freddie. I will only ask this one time more: Give it to me.”
“It’s not yours to have.” I placed it behind my back.
“I must have this.”
Cranwell stepped in front of me again. If we kept this up, sooner or later, we’d both be standing in the hole. “It’s not yours to keep.”
“I must have it. You know what this is? It is a scroll. It is written by Joseph of Aramithea and it may reveal the location of the grail. And if I can find the grail, then I will be named. And if I am named, then I will exist.”
I grabbed Cranwell’s hand and tugged him closer to my side. “But you can’t make your father love you.”
“Love! I do not want his love. I want his pride. I want his honor. I want him to look at me. I just want him to see me. Give me the scroll.”
“I can’t.”
She lunged toward the floor, picked up one of the knives. “Give it to me.”
Cranwell shoved me behind him. I ran for the door.
Sévérine was brandishing the knife at Cranwell.
“You don’t want to do this.”
She sprung at him.
Cranwell dodged.
Sévérine lost her balance, fell to the floor. She hurled the knife at him.
It missed. Fell into the hole in the floor.
She looked at it for a long moment and then began to scream. Clapped her hands to her ears.
Cranwell knelt beside her.
“Leave me!”
He put a hand to her arm.
She twisted, picked up another knife, plunged it into her thigh. “Leave me alone!”
As Cranwell pried it from her grip, I ran to the lounge and grabbed the phone. Called emergency services.
By the time I got back to the bedroom, Cranwell had gathered all the sharp objects and deposited them on my bed. He’d also tied one of my scarves around Sévérine’s leg.
She was still on the floor, but she’d drawn her legs up to her chest and was rocking back and forth, staring off into space.
I knelt beside her, placed a hand on her back. “Sévérine? Do you want me to call your father?”
Her eyes never moved; she didn’t quit rocking, but she nodded her head.
“Who is he? Where does he live?”
I had to ask several times, but finally she told us. I dialed the operator, had her place the call. When her father came to the phone, I introduced myself, told him Sévérine needed him. Desperately.
“Sévérine? Sévérine who?”
“Your daughter.”
“I have no daughter.” He hung up before I could respond.
I could only stare at the phone, wondering what sort of parent would pretend a child didn’t exist.
When I walked back into the bedroom, Sévérine paused in her rocking. “He will not come, Frédérique?”
I shook my head.
“He will never come.”
By the time the ambulance came, she was curled on the floor in a fetal position, humming scraps of a tune I recognized as a French nursery-school song. They took her to the regional hospital for evaluation.
Cranwell brought the leather rod down into the kitchen after Sévérine was taken away. He placed it in the middle of the island. We each took a stool, sat down, and stared at it. It was innocuous. Only a foot long, and two inches in diameter, it didn’t look like anything important. The leather had worn to a smooth patina, but the amethysts still glittered. And etched into the leather on one side was a curious-looking ‘N’ with a wavy line set on top of it.
After a while, I got up, opened a drawer, and took from it a butter knife. Then I reached for the case and gently probed for an opening. Finding a slit near the top, I pried it open.
Inside was a scroll. It was not very big. Perhaps the size of three normal sheets of paper set side-by-side.
Cranwell left his stool and came to stand beside me.
The lines of script were very small and very tight. As little as I knew about Near Eastern script, the letters looked to be formed by a disciplined hand. I looked at it from every angle and felt cheated when it revealed nothing to me.
Cranwell reached out to finger a corner. It looked like vellum. He rolled it up and then fit it back into the case.
The next day, I drove it to Rennes and entrusted it into the care of the University of Rennes II.
The next week I received an enthusiastic letter from M. Dubois. In collaboration with the University of Nantes, the scroll was to be analyzed and translated. He promised to keep me informed of the progress and invited me to visit at the first opportunity. At the very least, he wanted me to know the scroll was 1,900 years old and that its author was a Joseph or Yosef of Arimathea.
It turned out that Alix was probably a Jew. At least on her mother’s side. In the 1300s, one of the French kings ordered all Jews expelled from the realm. Many who lived near Brittany went to Spain or Italy; others went to what was then called the Kingdom of Provence. Some kept their faith, others converted and tried their best to disappear or blend in with the culture around them. After several generations, some even journeyed back to the northern parts of France.
It’s possible that Alix’s father never knew his first wife’s origins, but I suspect he did. Why would he otherwise have given the scroll to his daughter? Jewish identity is passed from mother to child. Alix’s father might not have been a Jew, but she would have inherited that identity from her mother.
If the scroll were determined to have been written in ancient Hebrew, how did Alix’s mother come to have it? It’s likely that the ancestors of Alix’s mother originally came from the northwestern region of France, the part that bordered the old Kingdom of Bretagne. It’s also possible that the legend is true: that Joseph of Arimathea did flee from Israel to Gaul after the death of Christ.
Julius Caesar conquered the region in the first century BC and Gaul was integrated into the Roman Empire. If Joseph did flee to Gaul, he may have brought the grail with him. If he brought the grail with him, he may have written about it. He was a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme Court. In order to have been a member of the Sanhedrin, he also had to have been a master student of the Torah and highly educated. There’s no disputing that he knew how to write.
Family heirlooms have been passed from generation to generation for hundreds of years. Why could the scroll not have been passed down through generations? Why could family legend not have imbued the scroll with enough importance that it was regarded as a treasure to be kept safe and protected?
Sévérine must have recognized the Hebrew letters Y and A from Alix’s description of the baton, the container of the scroll. In Hebrew, each letter is also assigned a numerical value. The initials of Joseph of Arimathea, or Yosef of Arimathea, would have been Yod, Aleph. The letters Yod and Aleph taken together add up to eleven.
Eleven symbolizes incompletion.
From her study of the journals, Sévérine knew that the twelve stones that decorated the lid were amethysts; Alix had said so herself. And from her studies of ancient texts, Sévérine knew that the amethyst represented the number twelve.
Twelve symbolizes completion.
If the scroll belonged to Yosef of Arimathea, as the initials indicate, why did he use twelve amethysts when his initials totaled eleven? Perhaps because the instructions inside would lead to completion. To the grail. To a symbolic communion with Jesus, where he again would join his disciples.
At least, that had probably been Sévérine’s reasoning.
Why my room?
The scroll, the books, and the journal were entrusted to Agnès. And Agnès was the maid of Alix’s mother. Why can we not assume that she also knew the value of the scroll? Otherwise, she would have put it in the trunk with Alix’s journals and books.
If she did not hide it with the books, what other place was left to her to hide it? Her room. The maid’s room and other servants’ rooms would have been on the top floor of the castle. Exactly in the present location of my bedroom.
Cranwell insists he never slept with Sévérine. He claims that they were discussing the journals when he got a horrible headache and asked Sévérine to leave so that he could sleep.
When asked, Sévérine verified that she had drugged him lightly, just enough for him to fall-and stay-asleep. The lacy black underwear had been a ruse, just in case I saw her leaving Cranwell’s room. She had determined that his room would have been the one Alix had used, and she had searched it. She searched it thoroughly enough to know that the scroll was not hidden in his room, so she decided to search mine.
And to think, to me that stone had just been a nuisance.
I had to admit that I was wrong about Cranwell and Sévérine. And I was completely wrong about Cranwell himself: He really did seem to have changed.
Does the scroll contain the secret of the grail? I leave it to the Universities of Nantes and Rennes to decide.
In the calm of the aftermath, Cranwell wrote, and I cooked.