The Book of Love Page 8

  Tammy was nodding. “It’s how all of the bloodline legends were preserved, through codes and symbols when it was death to speak of these things openly.”

  “Art will save the world,” Maureen observed. “And I think the definition of art covers a lot of territory in this case. Not just paintings, but architecture, literature, statuary…”

  As they rounded the next corner, they came upon a wide well encased with ancient stone. A small sign indicated that this was the Fountaine Mathilde. Matilda’s fountain. Maureen covered her right hand with her left, protecting the Jerusalem ring. She was taking no chances of losing it as she had in the dream, magical fish or no.

  The well was a place of serenity, truly peaceful. A gentle spring trickled into the well, coming somewhere from deep within the Ardennes. It reminded Maureen of the holy wells in Ireland, sacred places that were devoted to goddesses for thousands of years before being converted to Christian sites of Marian devotion. To Maureen, everything about Orval felt female, filled with pure and ancient goddess energy that sprang from the earth. Maureen was falling in love with the place and its natural beauty; it felt truly sacred. It was also stirring her growing desire to know more about the mysterious Matilda who had been the force behind this structure and its community almost a thousand years ago.

  Tammy leaned over to peer in the well, looking at herself in the dark water. “In your reflection, you will find what you seek.”

  Maureen joined her, and they both gazed into the water. She gasped as a third reflection appeared above their own. In the water looking back at them was a face identical to that of the little madonna in the statue. But this face was not stone, it was that of a flesh-and-blood child.

  Maureen and Tammy both turned quickly. Standing immediately behind them was an ethereal and beautiful little girl. Like the child in the statue, she was clothed in a very simple dress, and her hair was plaited on both sides of her face. It did not escape the notice of either woman that the girl’s braids were a lovely golden red color. Her hands were behind her back, where she was concealing something as if it were a surprise.

  “Bonjour,” Maureen ventured softly.

  The child didn’t speak. Instead, she let out an excited giggle, identical to one that Maureen had heard before. She brought her arms around to reveal that she was carrying a thin canvas bag which appeared to contain something—something that looked like a large book. She held the bag out to Maureen, a sweet smile illuminating her wide-set eyes. As Maureen took the bag, the girl turned immediately and ran, without saying a word. She rounded a corner into the ruins and was out of sight almost immediately.

  Tammy looked around to see if anyone had witnessed the exchange, but they were alone at the well with no witnesses. “What’s in the bag?”

  Maureen opened it and they both peered inside, neither wanting to draw attention to the item by removing it. But it was immediately clear to both of them that what was inside was indeed a book—an ancient-looking book, covered in red leather.

  The two women rushed out of the abbey, anxious to get to the privacy of Tammy’s car and get a close look at the red book.

  They left the abbey grounds and made the trek to the dirt clearing that was the parking lot. Tammy had her keys in hand but stopped suddenly. Something was wrong. Her car appeared to be leaning to the left. Approaching carefully, she noticed that the front and rear tire on the driver’s side were flat. Maureen came up behind her, looking over Tammy’s shoulder as her friend knelt for a closer look.

  Deep Xs were carved into the sidewalls. The tires had been slashed.

  Tammy kneeled to get a closer look, pointing out the perfectly cut X shapes to Maureen. She didn’t think that the carvings were random. The letter X had been used for centuries as a symbol for heresy by both its proponents and its opponents. The Cathar Gnostics had used it as an emblem of enlightenment. Xs could be found carved into the stone walls of Cathar castles and the more ancient caverns that were their hiding places during the persecutions. An X on the wall indicated that Gnostic teachings were at work in that location and that it was subsequently a haven for those who would pursue the true teachings. Later in Renaissance art, the masters who were sympathetic to the bloodline heresies were fond of incorporating X shapes into their paintings.

  It was the symbol of truth in issues of God.

  In this case, it appeared that the Gnostic X was being used as a symbol of hostility by an enemy.

  So engrossed were the women in examining the marks that they did not hear the steps behind them until it was too late.

  “Stand up very slowly. Both of you.”

  The voice was low, menacing yet soft. Maureen did as she was told, turning slightly to see a very tall man wearing a black hooded jacket and dark sunshades. Only his mouth was visible, and it was twisted in a snarl. Tammy let out an involuntary yelp as she felt his gun jammed in between her shoulder blades.

  “I will only ask once,” he said to Maureen in accented English. She was struggling to identify the accent for future reference. It was a strange European polyglot, which in itself made it memorable. “Give me the bag, or I will shoot her through the heart, right here, right now. And you will be next.”

  The area around them was deserted. Orval was located in the center of a forest and there was no one to hear them. Maureen did the only thing she could. She handed the bag over, praying all the while that the man wouldn’t hurt Tammy.

  He snatched it from her and continued to issue orders. “Now get in the car and stay there. Do not move for thirty minutes. Look up there,” he pointed to the rise above them, where the Ardennes forest stretched out. “I have a man in those trees. If you move one second too early, he will shoot you both, and he does not miss. Understand?” There was movement in the shadowed forest above them. Their attacker was not bluffing.

  Maureen and Tammy got into the car, hearts pounding. As the doors closed, the man walked quickly away from them and toward the forest, never looking back.

  It was the longest thirty minutes of their lives, and both Maureen and Tammy spent it praying and whispering quietly about their dilemma. For safety they gave themselves an extra few minutes before leaving the car and heading back to the abbey. When the sweet girl told them that they were closing for the day, Tammy explained to her that their car had been vandalized. She left out the bit about the gunmen and the robbery. They were hoping the monastery would offer them lodging for the evening, as it was known to house pilgrims of both genders on a regular basis, but pilgrims pursued by hooded thugs might not be the most welcome guests.

  It was a wise decision not to elaborate on their ordeal. The poor Belgian girl was so distraught by the report of vandalism in the idyllic beauty of Orval that she looked as if she would cry. One of the younger monks, Brother Marco, was called in to help in the crisis, and he set to finding rooms for the women as well as contacting a garage in Florenville to repair the car. There was an air of comfort and concern from the monks and the staff at Orval, and both women began to relax in the relative safety of the monastery. It was as if Matilda’s spirit still permeated the place, and while Maureen and Tammy were within her grounds, they were safe. Brother Marco invited the women to supper, which was taken in silence in the monastery’s dining hall. They were too exhausted and overwrought by their ordeal to accept, and he packed them some bread and cheese, as well as the Orval beer with the golden fish on the label, to take back to their room.

  The room was typically monastic and spotlessly clean, containing two single beds, a nightstand, and a washbasin. Maureen was grateful for every inch of it. She needed to call Peter and sort through the events of the day. Who attacked them and stole the book? What was the book? She felt sick at the thought that she may have had one of the treasures of human history in her hands for a few brief minutes, and now it was lost to…to whom?

  When Tammy left to take a shower in the shared bathroom down the hall, Maureen found Peter via cell phone at his home in Rome.

  He became
understandably agitated as she recounted the events.

  “Didn’t I tell you to call me back and that it was important? I wanted to warn you that you were in potential danger.”

  Maureen was tired and prickly. “You should have told me everything, even with Tammy present. I trust her. And if Tammy had been injured…”

  She let the sentence drop. It was plain and implicit that Peter would have borne some responsibility if anything had happened to Maureen or her friend.

  “I’m sorry. Very sorry. And I’m just grateful that you’re both all right. Maureen, I want you on a plane to Rome in the morning. There is someone here you need to meet. I think he can help us to sort through everything. We can have a car pick you up at the monastery and get you to the airport in record time. Tammy can come with you if it makes you feel better.”

  “Thanks, Pete. Ah, the irony. You know, sometimes I am truly grateful for the power of the Vatican.”

  If ever there was a place to dream, it was within the magical monastery of Orval.

  Maureen was moving through the ancient ruined nave of the monastery. The filtered light shone through the skeletal rose window as she stepped carefully over the scattered stones. This time, she knew where she was going. She was heading toward the fountain.

  Then she heard the giggle.

  Maureen followed it, not surprised when the little girl with the bright copper braids was standing by the well, gesturing emphatically for her to come forward. She had yet to speak, although she looked supremely pleased with herself as she continued to laugh. The child pointed to the water, indicating that Maureen should gaze into its depths.

  As Maureen peered into the well, the surface shimmered as images began to take shape, coming into a crystal clear, cinematic focus. Maureen gasped at what she saw. Their attacker was entering a room, holding her precious book in his hands. She watched as the scene took place in what appeared to be a stone chamber or a basement. The room was filled with men, dressed ominously in strange, hooded robes that covered their heads completely and appeared to be midnight blue in color. All faces were obscured, with only narrow slits where the eyes should be. The men sat at a long, rectangular table; the central chair was larger and more ornate, indicating that its occupant was somehow the leader of this strange order.

  Maureen’s attacker, still wearing his more modern clothing and sunglasses, presented the book to the central figure, who examined its cover, which was encircled with a heavy leather strap and a lock. The man seemed prepared for this, as he reached into the sleeve of his robe and pulled out a dagger. A quick slice of the blade over the strap and the book fell open.

  The chamber appeared perfectly still and no one moved as the leader flipped through the pages of the coveted book.

  They were blank.

  As he turned to the final page, there was one single Latin word scrawled across the parchment. It said simply INLEX.

  The leader of the hooded men threw the book with apparent disgust at the henchman who had acquired it. While Maureen did not know what INLEX meant, it was clear that this was not what any of these men had expected.

  The little girl’s ubiquitous giggle returned Maureen’s attention to her surroundings. The child stood before her exactly as she had earlier that day, hands behind her back. With another sweet smile, she handed Maureen a canvas bag with a large book.

  “It is not what you think it is.”

  And she laughed as she ran off around the corner, leaving Maureen to wonder just exactly what her attacker had stolen from her.

  The first light of day broke through the window of Maureen and Tammy’s monastic cell. Maureen rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and looked over to where her friend was still deeply dozing. After the dream last night, she had gotten up long enough to jot down her notes of the experience, focusing on the word INLEX. If it was a Latin word, then she was in the right place. Every brother in Orval would have a classical education and should be able to translate a single word for her.

  She threw on her clothes and went in search of the helpful Brother Marco, whom she found preparing the dining hall for breakfast.

  “Inlex?” He gazed in thought for a moment. “Definitely Latin, but a strange word. Follow me to the library and we’ll look it up to be certain.”

  Maureen accompanied the monk into a marvelous room filled with aged tomes. She was grateful that he hadn’t asked her any questions about why she needed the meaning of this particular word. He was simply gracious and accommodating to his guest. Removing a Latin dictionary from one of the shelves, Brother Marco flipped through it until he found what he was looking for.

  “Here we are. Inlex. It means decoy. A ruse or a lure. Does that help?”

  Did it ever. Maureen resisted the urge to grab him and kiss him on the cheek. She thanked him politely instead and hurried back to the room to wake up Tammy.

  “It was a decoy, Tammy!” Maureen burst through the door of their little cell, waking Tammy with her exuberance.

  “What?” Tammy sat up, confused.

  “The book. The book that was stolen from us yesterday. It wasn’t the real one, it was…”

  Maureen stopped. In her excitement to tell Tammy about the meaning of inlex, she had nearly missed it. Sitting in the middle of her unmade bed was a canvas bag.

  “What’s that?” Tammy was waking up now. “And…dare I ask where it came from?”

  Maureen’s heart was pounding as she shook her head. Where indeed, and from whom? Who was reading her dreams and sending her mysterious heretical relics? Who had access to the very bed that she spent the night in, next to her sleeping friend? And then there was a most disturbing question: Who had robbed them at gunpoint, and what was he looking for?

  She walked to the bed and picked up the sack. Opening it, she removed the very heavy book contained within. It was different from the stolen tome in that the crimson leather was more weathered and cracked, and it was far weightier. This one looked truly ancient, as if it had been hidden away for a thousand years. Unlike the decoy book, this one did not have a strap or a lock on it, and Maureen opened it very gently. There were hundreds of parchment pages bound within it, and an exacting Latin script filled them all. The first page was emblazoned with an illuminated emblem, one that Maureen had come to recognize recently. It was the Latin cross with the strange signature:

  Matilda, by the Grace of God Who Is.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Florenville, Belgium

  present day

  “That whore Matilda eludes me again!”

  The leader of the hooded men growled his outrage as he threw the decoy book across the hidden basement room in a fit of uncontrolled rage.

  One of the brothers responded, venturing into troubled waters. “How can you be so certain that it is Matilda’s book that was to be delivered to the Paschal woman?”

  The elder hissed. “You dare to question me? Is there a man among you who would challenge my knowledge or my authority on this matter?”

  When silence met the question, the leader continued his tirade. “Because of the painstaking and tireless efforts of our brothers through history, we have successfully eradicated all known references to the Book of Love in writing. There is no evidence that it ever existed outside the fantasies of dead heretics. During the Inquisition, we confiscated every known document that alluded to it and destroyed them—the documents and the heretics. There is only one manuscript that has escaped our grasp in all of these centuries, and that is…Matilda’s.”

  He spat her name, his voice dripping venom. All the women in history who claimed the title of prophetess infuriated him. But none more than the hated countess of Canossa, who had evaded attempts to silence her for almost a thousand years.

  The young henchman who had attacked Maureen and Tammy stepped forward. “What would you like me to do, Your Holiness?”

  His leader snarled the command. “Go to the source. Find Destino.”

  Of all the male followers, only the blessed Nicodemus and
Joseph of Arimathea were present on the hill of Golgotha on the Black Day of the Skull. It was they who extracted the nails and they who removed our Lord from the cross. In the presence of the women, they carried the body of their messiah on a stretcher made of linen. Their destination was a nearby tomb that had been commissioned for the family of Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph provided this resting place out of both reverence and kinship as Jesus was not only his teacher but also his nephew by blood.

  Upon arrival in the sepulcher, Maria Magdalena began to wash the wounds of her beloved, praying fervently over his body all the while. She worked tirelessly to apply salves and ointments, instructing everyone else in the cramped tomb to pray along with her, to pray with all their might that their heavenly father would restore his son to them. And pray they did, but none as passionately as Maria Magdalena. Even with sweat and grime and blood smeared over her face, she had the dignity and presence of a queen. She was pale beneath it all, faint from exhaustion and grief, but she would not cease her ministrations, nor her prayers, except to check on the health and welfare of the others in the tomb. That she had the capacity to worry about all of them at such a time was most emblematic of her remarkable compassion.

  Maria Magdalena worked through the night while the others slept, never losing faith that God would restore their messiah to them. But his body remained lifeless and there was no sign of hope within the sepulcher. When the first rays of sun filtered in on that Saturday morning, she wrapped the body of her beloved in the burial cloth. The symbolism of this act—the finality of it, the necessary surrender—overwhelmed her. She collapsed to the floor, still clutching the alabaster jar that held the healing ointments.