Read Chapter 11: The Blois Detour

The train smelled of stale coffee and upholstery worn thin by a thousand passengers. Elodie pressed her forehead to the cold window and watched the flat French countryside blur past—poplar lines, distant church spires, fields still wet with morning. James sat across from her, the map folded open on his knee, his finger tracing the route to Blois as though the paper might reveal something new if he stared hard enough.

“She left the convent in February,” he said, not looking up. “The map is dated April. That’s eight weeks unaccounted for. She could have gone anywhere in that time.”

“But she went to Blois,” Elodie said. “The map says so.”

“The map says someone wanted us to think she went to Blois.”

She turned from the window. His eyes were still fixed on the parchment, but there was a hard edge to his jaw that she recognized—the same stubbornness that had made him insufferable in faculty meetings and, she suspected, the same quality that made him a good scholar. He wouldn’t let a detail go until it surrendered.

“You think it’s a decoy,” she said.

“I think we’ve been led here.” He finally looked up. “Anonymous notes. A missing letter. A hidden compartment that happens to spring open the moment I’m standing beside you. And now Henri—” he paused, the name landing with deliberate weight, “—shows up in Chartres like he’s checking on a school project.”

“Henri is my employer. He has a right to know what I find.”

“Does he?” James folded the map with careful, deliberate creases. “Or is he the one who sent us both to Chartres in the first place?”

Elodie’s throat tightened. She had wondered the same thing—had even left a voicemail to that effect, unanswered—but hearing him say it aloud made it feel more real, more dangerous. She chose her next words carefully.

“Henri wants the register recovered. He doesn’t care about the letter. He doesn’t care about Marguerite.”

“And you do?”

“Yes.” The word came out sharper than she intended. “I care about what happened to her. She vanished from her convent and resurfaced in a manuscript nobody can read, and then she hid something in Blois eight months before the plague reached France. That’s not a footnote. That’s a story.”

James’s expression softened almost imperceptibly. For a moment, he looked like the man who had conceded her dating argument in the quiet of the Bodleian—the one she’d almost mistaken for an ally. Then his mouth tightened again.

“And Henri’s commission? The private work he’s paying you for?” He leaned forward. “Does that story include what you’re really looking for?”

The train rattled over a set of points. Elodie gripped the armrest.

“You think I’m using you,” she said.

“I think you have a habit of holding your cards close. And I think—” he hesitated, then pressed on, “—I think you’d burn this entire collaboration to the ground if it meant securing Henri’s patronage. The fellowship would be a nice consolation prize, but it isn’t what you’re really after.”

The accusation hung between them like a dropped glove. Elodie felt the heat rise in her cheeks, and it wasn’t shame—it was fury. She had spent years being underestimated by men who mistook her quietness for weakness, who assumed her meticulousness was timidity. James should have known better. He had seen her work.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m not after the fellowship. I’m after the truth. And I’m sorry that inconveniences your tidy career plan.”

His eyes widened, and for half a second she thought she’d wounded him. Then his jaw set and he turned to the window, mirroring the pose she’d held moments before.

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll do it your way. We’ll follow the map and see where it leads. But when it turns out to be nothing—when Marguerite’s trail goes cold and the register is still missing—don’t act surprised.”

“It won’t be nothing,” Elodie said quietly.

But she wasn’t sure she believed it.

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The abbey at Blois rose from the mist like a half-remembered dream. Its walls were pitted with age, the roofline jagged where centuries of weather had eaten through stone, and scaffolding clung to one flank like a skeleton not yet finished with its work. A sign at the gate announced that restoration was underway and that the site was closed to visitors until further notice.

Elodie stood at the iron gate, her fingers wrapped around the cold bars, and stared at the building beyond. The map had led them here—she was certain of it. The handwriting matched the marginalia; the date was too deliberate to be coincidence. And yet the abbey was sealed tight, a fortress of renovation and red tape.

“Closed,” James said, reading the sign over her shoulder. “Typical.”

“We didn’t come all this way to turn back.” Elodie pulled on the gate. Locked, but the mechanism felt old—a chain and padlock that had seen better decades. She looked at the scaffolding, at the grey sky, at the emptiness of the road behind them.

“We could climb,” she said.

James raised an eyebrow. “You want to break into a historical site?”

“I want to see what’s inside.” She turned to face him. “The map wasn’t hidden by accident. Someone wanted us to find it. Someone wanted us to come here. And after everything—the notes, the missing letter, Henri’s convenient appearance—I’m done waiting for permission.”

Something flickered in his eyes. Respect, perhaps, or surprise that she had it in her. He scanned the perimeter, his gaze settling on a small door near the chapel’s east end.

“There,” he said. “Caretaker’s entrance. They always leave a way in for maintenance.”

He started walking, and Elodie followed, her heart beating a steady rhythm against her ribs. The grass was wet and high, soaking through the hems of her trousers, but she didn’t care. She was closer than she’d ever been—closer to Marguerite, closer to the letter, closer to whatever secret had been buried here for six hundred years.

The door was old oak, banded with iron, and it gave way beneath James’s shoulder with a groan. Inside, the air was cold and still, thick with the smell of stone dust and mildew. Light filtered through high windows, catching motes of dust that drifted like snow.

The library—if it could be called that—was a single long room lined with empty shelves. The books had been removed, no doubt carted away for restoration, leaving behind only the ghosts of their spines pressed into the wood. At the far end, a spiral staircase wound upward into shadow.

Elodie crossed the room, her footsteps echoing, and stopped before a wall where the plaster had cracked and fallen away, revealing a line of stones beneath. She reached out, tracing the mortar with her fingertips.

“This wall is older than the rest,” she said. “The stonework is different. Twelfth century, maybe. The rest is later.”

James came to stand beside her. He studied the wall for a long moment, then pulled out his phone and angled it toward the stones, illuminating a faint carving near the base—a series of interlocking circles that Elodie recognized instantly.

Her breath caught.

“That’s in the manuscript,” she said. “In the margins of folio four. The decorative border.”

James’s eyes met hers. “And it’s on the map.”

Neither of them spoke. The silence stretched, taut as a bowstring, and Elodie felt the weight of everything they didn’t know pressing down on her. Marguerite, the letter, the register, Henri, the anonymous notes—all of it converging on this single, cold room.

Then a voice cut through the stillness, sharp and tired.

“You’re not supposed to be in here.”

They spun around. A man stood in the doorway, a ring of keys dangling from his hand. He was old, his face weathered like the stones around them, and his eyes were narrow with suspicion.

“I’m the caretaker,” he said. “And this abbey is closed.”

Elodie stepped forward, her heart still hammering, but her voice steady.

“We’re scholars,” she said. “Researchers. We’ve come a long way to see this library.”

The caretaker’s gaze flicked to James, then back to her. He studied them for a long moment, and then, slowly, his expression shifted—from suspicion to something closer to calculation.

“Scholars,” he repeated. “You know about the legend, then?”

Elodie’s pulse quickened. “The legend?”

The caretaker smiled, revealing yellowed teeth.

“The woman they say was buried alive in the crypt. The heretic who ran from her convent and hid something in these walls.” He jangled his keys. “I can show you, if you have the money for it.”