The Sixth Key(133)

‘I don’t know, was he? Why don’t you tell me how the story ends?’

‘Me?’ I said, surprised.

‘Yes; just write the end. If there is anyone capable of judging your abilities it’s me. Perhaps this is the test you spoke of? Could you see yourself replacing me on this island, in this library of galleries?’

I looked at him. He wasn’t joking. I realised I was being cheated of my ending. Perhaps that had been his intention all along, to drag me like a laboratory mouse, through his labyrinthine galleries, only to deny me my hard-earned cheese at the end.

‘Think of it as an exercise in reasoning,’ he said. ‘What is the most likely thing to happen next?’

I was so annoyed I could say nothing in reply.

He paused and lifted the lamp to look at my face. I returned the look with a wild stare. I was angry, resentful.

‘You’re upset. You thought I was going to make it easy for you, didn’t you? Every story gets the end it deserves, don’t you agree? Now, what is the end this one deserves?’

‘I have no idea!’

‘Perhaps it would help you to see another gallery, then? I can tell it to you as we walk. It is the gallery called Penitence.’





47


Penitence, Penitence!

‘ . . . and, as the saying goes, the dead to the grave and the living to the loaf.’

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote


Rennes-le-Château, 18 January, 1915

The snow fell over the mountains in icy sheets, making the promenade dangerously glassy. Even so, Madame Dénarnaud insisted on wheeling the body of the Abbé Saunière to the greenhouse herself, so as to be alone with him one last time.

She was dressed in black silk. It had cost a fine fortune but it was the latest fashion in funerary wear from Paris. After all, people expected it. They would soon be arriving from every place to see the body and they would leave after taking a tassel from his gown, as was the custom – as if those old clothes had been impregnated with power. She smiled at the thought of it now – if only they knew.

She could hear the bell-ringer’s son digging the grave in the cemetery, cursing the frozen ground. Yesterday, before the abbé had taken his last torturous breath, Abbé Rivière of Espéraza had come to hear Saunière’s confession, but upon hearing it his face had paled and he had refused to give the abbé the prepared wafers and wine. It had delighted her to see the villagers’ faces when they heard of it. They believed that Saunière had whispered something diabolical to the priest, but she knew Saunière had said nothing into that hairy ear – because he knew nothing. Yes, that greedy priest from Espéraza had been hoping to hear, in Saunière’s confession, how he had come by his fortune. When the confession was not forthcoming he decided to take his revenge on Saunière by withholding the sacrament. In the end, Madame Dénarnaud had given it to him herself, in secret.

Well, she thought, let them all imagine that Saunière was the mastermind of everything: the refurbishment of the church; the building of the villa and the tower, the greenhouse and the gardens. As long as this was what they believed, she could continue with her work unnoticed.

In truth, her life had been filled with predestined events: at birth, she had been accepted into that section of the Grand Orient created especially for women; at the age of seven, her mother, also a member of the Lodge, had taken her to Toulouse to be initiated; and as a young woman, she was schooled to be the next Madame Blavatsky, the celebrated Russian theosophist. But she did not allow herself to become like that woman, who had been used by various groups for their own ends. She had decided long ago that she would do as she pleased; she would owe allegiance to no group!

In the beginning her powers had been crude and unsophisticated. Occasionally she would lapse into a trance in which disembodied spirits spoke through her; sometimes she saw visions of future events; and at other times she would write long sentences, pages and pages of them, automatically. But these childhood aptitudes had graduated, under expert instruction, into powers that were polished and chillingly exact. Moreover, she was a handsome woman, possessed of the dark good looks of her heretic ancestors, and intelligent enough to use them to enhance her talents. These, combined with her knowledge of the lesser magic of perfume-blending had taken her far.

Yes, she had been much admired by various suitors, and there had been many marriage proposals, but she had ignored them with a cold disdain. The ignorant, miscreant villagers of Rennes-le-Château had thought her a strange girl to pass up such advantages, choosing instead to remain a poor shepherdess, who wanted nothing more than to tend her family’s little herd of goats or to work occasionally in the hat factory at Espéraza. They did not know that she was waiting for her time to come.