Read Chapter 14: Aftershock at the Abbey

The silence in the crypt was total, a weight pressing against her ears. Elodie stood where James had left her, the silver bookmark cold and solid in her palm. His footsteps had faded up the stone stairs, and the heavy door had clanged shut, leaving her alone with Marguerite de Beaumont’s emptied box and the smell of damp earth.

She exhaled slowly, forcing her shoulders down. She would not run after him. She would not apologize for calling him exactly what he was—possessive, competitive, and insufferably convinced that every scrap of evidence belonged in his pocket first. The fact that he had, again, claimed the physical prize, that he’d walked out with the torn letter fragment in his jacket, burned under her skin.

But standing in the dark, fuming, helped no one.

Elodie turned back to the stone shelf where the box had rested. The crypt was lit by a single low-watt bulb hanging from a wire, casting long shadows against the rough-hewn walls. She pulled her phone from her coat pocket and set the torch on, its beam cutting hard through the murk. The box itself was a plain oak thing, its hinges corroded with centuries of damp, its lid resting open like a mouth exhausted of speech. The interior was lined with faded velvet, now brown and crumbling, and in the centre, a shallow indentation, as if something round had once sat there.

She photographed everything. The box from every angle. The velvet. The indentation. The carving on the lid, a simple circle interlaced with a trefoil, worn soft with age and touch. She zoomed in, held her breath, and grew certain that the trefoil mirrored the marginalia in the Beaumont manuscript exactly. The same hand that had drawn in the margins of vellum had carved here, or directed the carving.

Her boots scraped on stone as she moved around the shelf, shining her torch along the walls. She found nothing else—no carvings, no inscriptions, no hidden alcoves. But she did not rush. She photographed the floor, the ceiling, the doorframe. Her research instincts, honed by years of chasing footnotes across half of Europe, told her the crypt had given up what it could. The box was the object. The box, and the bookmark.

She slipped the bookmark into her inner coat pocket, against her chest.

When she finally emerged up the narrow stairwell and blinked into the grey afternoon light of the abbey grounds, the chill air hit her face with a sharp slap. The caretaker was nowhere to be seen. The garden, with its clipped yew hedges and worn flagstone paths, lay empty. The wrought-iron gate she and James had climbed over earlier now stood closed, its latch newly padlocked.

Elodie’s stride lengthened, then broke into a jog. She rounded the corner of the small visitor’s lodge where she’d left her satchel—the same satchel, stuffed with her research notes, the photographs from Oxford, her marked-up printouts of the manuscript’s marginalia, and the letter from Henri outlining the commission. She’d set it down against the stone wall next to the entrance, not twenty minutes ago.

It was gone.

The space was empty. The wall was clean, grey, indifferent.

“No,” she said out loud, the word small in the open air.

She turned in a full circle, scanning the flagged path, the hedges, the closed gate. Nothing. Her satchel had been battered, unremarkable, the kind of leather bag carried by a hundred postgraduate students. But it held her only copies of her transcriptions, her annotated diagrams of the interlocking circles, her notes on Marguerite’s disappearance from the convent in 1348. Weeks of work. The physical sum of her scholarship.

Her chest constricted. The crypt door behind her stood open, and she forced herself to walk back into its shadow, the beam of her phone light sweeping over every pillar, every recess, every shadowed corner. Perhaps she’d simply left it inside. Perhaps she’d been more disoriented than she thought.

She searched methodically for five full minutes, the silence of the crypt filling her ears, and found nothing. When she emerged again, the sky had dimmed further, the afternoon sliding toward evening. She stood near the gate, hands on her hips, breathing hard.

_James._

The thought came unbidden, and she loathed the shape of it even as it formed. He had stormed off, angry, possessive, convinced she was withholding information. He had been the last one alone above ground. But he wouldn’t, she told herself. He was an academic rival, not a thief. He would go to extremes to win a fellowship, certainly. He would pocket a scrap of parchment the moment it emerged from a box. But stealing a colleague’s notes—her photographs, her transcriptions—was not a crime of opportunity; it was a premeditated act of sabotage. And to what end? What could he possibly gain from destroying her work but a hollow victory before the fellowship committee’s ultimate judgement?

Still, her heart hammered.

She checked her phone. A single missed notification, nothing more. No message from Henri, though she’d left him the voicemail about the map nearly two days ago now. No return of the polite, careful concern she’d come to rely on. He’d been so deliberately present when they’d left Oxford, so attentive to the chairs, the trains, the route through Chartres. And now silence. Every unanswered call widened the crack of unease she’d been ignoring for days.

The gate’s padlock gleamed. She grabbed the iron bars and shook them. They didn’t budge.

“Marcel!” she called out. No answer. She called again, louder, but her voice just bounced off the abbey’s stone face and died in the hedges.

She stood there, heart hammering, and scanned the ground at her feet. A folded square of cream paper lay on the flagstone, as if tucked beneath the gate’s lower rail. She hadn’t noticed it in her panic. She bent and picked it up, unfolding it with shaking hands.

The handwriting was James’s, neat and angular, with the distinctive upright capitals she’d seen in his marginal annotations.

_Meet at the Angel Hotel, Blois. I’ll be waiting. J._

No explanation. No apology. No mention of her satchel.

A dozen interpretations raced through her, each worse than the last. He had taken it. He had taken her work and left her a note, as if luring her to a negotiation table. Or—another voice, smaller, less corrosive—he’d seen the gate locked, found her satchel, and carried it out for safekeeping before storming off to cool down. The note was a courtesy, not a ransom.

But why not wait for her at the abbey? Why leave her to climb the gate alone, stranded in a shuttered village with no transport and a closed crypt behind her?

Elodie folded the note along its crease, then shoved it into her pocket. The silver bookmark pressed against her ribs, a small cold reminder of what she still possessed.

She walked.

The path from the abbey led back through the village’s single street, past shuttered houses and a closed bakery, the silence of an afternoon nap settling over everything. Her footsteps echoed on the cobblestones. She checked her phone again, then pocketed it. The bus stop at the edge of the village had a laminated timetable behind cracked plastic. One bus to Blois, forty minutes from now. She sat on the bench, its wood worn smooth and grey, and watched a ginger cat slink across the road.

The trust question chased itself in circles. Could she trust James? He’d been sharp, cutting, almost cruel on the train, accusing her of using him as a vessel for Henri’s secret commission. And she’d answered with equal force, questioning his devotion to his own career, his willingness to bend evidence to fit a competitive narrative. The truce they’d reached before the crypt was thin, strained, stretched by the very discovery that should have united them.

And Henri. He knew more than he was saying. She felt that now with a certainty that sat like a stone in her stomach. He’d chosen Chartres for them. He’d pointed them toward the map without ever telling her what the map might contain. Perhaps he’d orchestrating their path to Blois, to the crypt, to a bookmark that unlocked something far older than either of them had realized.

The bus came, lumbering and diesel-scented, and she boarded, taking a window seat near the back. The village faded behind her as the bus climbed out of the valley, the abbey’s tower glimpsed once more between trees before it vanished entirely. Her satchel was gone. Her notes, her photographs, her careful transcriptions—all of it either in James’s hands or lost forever. And all she had was a silver bookmark and a scrap she hadn’t even been allowed to hold.

She closed her eyes as the bus rounded a bend, the river appearing below in the grey evening light. The road to Blois unfolded ahead of her, dark and uncertain, leading toward a man she could not determine—ally, rival, or something more complicated still.

The bus’s engine hummed beneath her feet as she watched the Loire slide past, its waters grey and quick, as if hurrying somewhere they already knew and she did not.