Read Chapter 16: A Shared Room

The rain had made a decision for them. What had been a drizzle when they left the abbey had become a solid curtain by the time they reached the small station at Blois, and the departures board flickered with a single word in angry red: ANNULEE.

“All of them?” Elodie asked the station master through the ticket window, though she could see the empty platform well enough.

He shrugged with that particular French resignation that said *nature is nature and the SNCF is the SNCF*. “The line to Paris is flooded near Amboise. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Monday.”

Monday. Today was Friday. Elodie pressed her palm against the cool marble of the ticket counter and tried to calculate how many nights that meant in this town with no codex, no answers, and—she glanced sideways at James, who was studying the map on the wall as if it might offer a different itinerary—no escape route.

“There’s a bus,” he said, not turning around.

“To where? Tours? And then what? We’d be further from everything.”

He turned, finally, and she saw the exhaustion under his eyes. They had both been running on adrenaline and bad coffee since the crypt. “So we’re stuck.”

“We’re stuck.”

The hotel was a half-timbered relic two streets from the castle, its vacancy sign glowing amber against the storm-dark afternoon. The woman at the desk looked apologetic before she even opened her mouth.

“One room,” she said in careful English, as if the word might hurt less that way. “The wedding party has taken everything else. And the roads—the guests who cannot leave, they stay. You understand.”

Elodie understood. She understood very well that James was already pulling his wallet from his coat before she could argue, and that the single key the woman placed on the counter was brass and heavy and attached to a fob shaped like a fleur-de-lis.

“I’ll take the floor,” he said as they climbed the narrow stairs.

“You will not.”

“I’ve slept on worse.”

“In your college rooms with a fourteenth-century mattress? I doubt that.” She pushed the door open and stopped.

The room was small, which she had expected. The bed was large, which she had not—a great canopied affair that dominated the space like a ship under sail. The wallpaper was patterned with faded roses. It was, in its way, the most romantic room she had ever seen, and she hated it.

“This is ridiculous,” she said.

“Which part?”

“All of it. Us. The universe’s apparent desire to put us in this exact situation.”

James laughed, a short surprised sound. “The universe, or your father?”

She shot him a look that should have drawn blood. He raised his hands in surrender and set his bag by the wardrobe. “I’ll take the chaise.”

The chaise was a slim velvet affair barely wide enough for a child. Elodie looked at it. She looked at the bed. She looked at James, who was already pulling the blanket from the bed, and something in her chest twisted.

“There’s enough room for both of us,” she said quietly. “If we build a wall.”

He paused. “A wall.”

“You’re not going to try anything.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’m not in the habit,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he was offended or amused. Probably both. “Where would you like the wall?”

They built it out of the two spare pillows and a bolster that looked older than the château itself. James arranged them with an absurd seriousness, lining them up along the center of the mattress, checking that the seam was straight.

“You’re treating this like a diplomatic negotiation,” she said.

“I’m treating it like the important work it is. The future of our professional relationship depends on this barrier.” He patted the top pillow. “The Pillow Wall of Blois. Neither side shall cross.”

“What do the terms say about snoring?”

“The terms say that whoever snores loses the right to complain about the other’s research methodology.”

“That’s not in the terms.”

“I’m rewriting the terms.” He sat on his side of the bed and pulled the scrap of parchment from his coat. “Come on. We have a code to break.”

She fetched the silver bookmark from her bag—the satchel he had returned, though she still didn’t fully trust that it had simply been “found behind a pillar”—and sat cross-legged on her side. The pillow wall loomed between them like the Alps.

“The watermark,” she said, holding the bookmark up to the lamp. The trefoil glowed, delicate and greenish. “On the scrap, where does it align?”

James shuffled the parchment near the bookmark’s head. Together they angled it, a slow dance of light and shadow. Just above his thumb, she saw it: the trefoil was only one leaf of a larger pattern. When the bookmark covered one end of the scrap, the foil’s faint impression extended into the parchment, creating a stem. A stem that curved left toward a series of tiny numerals she hadn’t noticed before.

“13 June 1259,” she read. “And there—look, it continues.” She shifted her finger. Now the stem pointed to a small margin notation, almost invisible, as if a previous reader had scratched it with a fingernail.

“Seven,” James said. “Then two. Then.”

“Fourteen,” she finished. “7-2-14.”

Silence hung between them, broken by the patter of rain against the window.

“Folio seventy-two,” James said slowly. “Page fourteen.” He looked up. “The codex has at least two hundred folios. If the transposition uses the codex’s own structure as its cipher key…”

“We need folio 72 recto, page 14, and we need the Oxford bookmark to finish the pattern.” She set the bookmark down. “And the codex is in a vault in Henri’s apartment.”

The words landed like a stone. They were so close—the code was beginning to crack, she could feel it, a physical pressure behind her eyes—and still miles from the finish.

“He’ll tell us eventually,” James said. “He wanted us here. He wanted this.” He gestured at the scrap, the bookmark. “This is all designed.”

“Designed for what?”

“I don’t know yet. But I think your father’s playing chess, and we’re the pieces he’s moving toward the queen.”

Elodie looked at a misshapen mole on his upper arm. “The ‘J’ in Marguerite’s letter. You ever think that might stand for a family name?”

“Jourdain,” he said, and the word hit her like cold water. "My mother's family name. We traced it to the Loire Valley."

He said it simply, with a shrug. As if it cost him nothing. But she could see the way his hand tightened on the parchment.

“You knew that when we found the letter.”

“I suspected.”

“And you didn't say anything?”

“I'm saying it now.” He held her gaze. “I didn’t come here to claim ancestry, Elodie. I came here because the manuscript matters. The work matters. And you—” He stopped, looked down at the scramble of pillows between them. Even the flea-bitten hotel in Blois couldn't fully flatten the truth. “And you made me realize I've spent my whole career protecting a name that may never have been mine to protect.” He paused. “They offered me a fellowship at Cambridge last March.”

“Cambridge.” She blinked. It would have been a crown jewel for his father. For most people.

“I turned it down,” he said flatly. “I wanted this one. The one Henri arranged for us. It was a stupid thing to do—people spent years building to that chair, and I just let it slide. But I couldn’t stop thinking that if I took it, I'd have to leave the project behind. Leave the mystery unfinished. I couldn't live with that.”

James met her eyes again, looking less like a rival and more like a man stranded on the wrong side of his own choices. “So that’s my confession. That’s the extent of the pathetic grandeur of James Fairfax.”

The laughter came out of her before she could catch it—a warm, surprised sound that carried through the damp air of the hotel room. “You turned down Cambridge to prove your father wrong? That's the most scholarly form of revenge I've ever heard.” She picked up the nearest pillow, prepared to hurl it at him, and he caught it, grinning. The wall between them sagged, then fell flat, and somehow they were laughing together, matching each other's startled joy like two slightly broken instruments finding a chord.

“You couldn’t make this up,” he said. “Two academics, a heretical nun, and a secret code, all leading to a flooded hotel in Blois. It’s like one of your French farces.”

“Except the French farces end with everyone happily married or dead.”

“Which one are we?”

She didn’t have an answer. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The storm rattled the window. Somewhere down the street, music drifted from a bar—a sad song, half-washed by rain.

“I think,” she said finally, “we're the ones still on stage.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he reached over the fallen pillow wall and lightly touched her hand. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll find a way to the codex.”