Read Chapter 17: The Desperate Call

The knock came with the grey light of dawn, quick and insistent against the hotel room door.

Elodie woke with a start, her hand instinctively reaching for the bookmark beneath her pillow before she registered the sound. Beside her—on his side, the pillow wall still intact between them—James stirred, his eyes snapping open with the alertness of someone who had never quite fallen asleep.

“Elodie?” A woman’s voice, muffled through the wood. “It’s Janine from the front desk. There’s a telephone call for you. Your father.”

Elodie’s blood turned cold. Henri didn’t call hotels. Henri didn’t call at all.

She pulled on her cardigan over the rumpled shirt she’d slept in, crossing the room in bare feet. James was already sitting up, watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite read—caution, perhaps, or the same dread coiling in his own chest.

The phone sat on the desk in the small lobby, the receiver off the hook. Janine hovered at a respectful distance, her eyes politely averted. Elodie picked it up.

“Papa?”

A breath on the other end. Then Henri’s voice, thin and reedy in a way she had never heard it. “Élodie. Ma petite.”

“What’s wrong?” Her grip tightened on the receiver. “You never—how did you know where to reach me?”

“Your colleague at the Bodleian. Mr. Ashworth. He was kind enough to relay your itinerary.” A pause, and she heard the rasp of his breathing. “I am at the John Radcliffe. They tell me it was a burglary.”

Elodie’s knees buckled slightly. She leaned against the desk, her free hand finding its edge. “A burglary? At your flat? Papa, are you—what happened?”

“I disturbed them. Two men, I think. They were looking for something in my study.” His voice cracked on the next word. “They found my manuscript collection. They took the Villard folio, Élodie. The one your mother gave me.”

The floor seemed to tilt. The Villard folio—the illuminated French manuscript from the fourteenth century, the one her mother had brought into their marriage as a dowry of sorts, a love token from a family that had never quite approved of Henri Marchand.

“But you’re all right?” she pressed, forcing the words out. “You’re safe now?”

“They have me in a private room. Bruised ribs. A small concussion. The doctors are being theatrical.” A hollow attempt at a laugh. “But Élodie, there is something else. Something I need you to do for me.”

“Anything.”

“In my writing desk—the small one, in the study. The top drawer on the left, beneath the false bottom.” Henri’s voice dropped to a whisper. “There is a Bible. A family Bible. It belonged to Marguerite. I need you to retrieve it before they come back.”

Marguerite. Elodie’s throat tightened. The same Marguerite who had fled a heresy charge in 1259. The same Marguerite whose torn letter and silver bookmark now sat in the pocket of James’s jacket across the room.

“Papa,” she said carefully, “why do you have Marguerite’s Bible? You never told me you had anything from her. From that line of the family.”

A long silence stretched across the line. Somewhere in the background, she heard the beep of a hospital monitor.

“There are things I should have told you long ago, Élodie. Things I…” Another pause, longer this time. “When you were young, I thought I was protecting you. From the weight of it. From the scrutiny. And then you grew up and became a medievalist, and I thought—I thought perhaps you had found your way to it on your own, and I didn’t need to speak.”

“The codex,” she said, her voice sharpening. “The one in the vault. You locked it in my name. Why?”

“Because it is yours,” Henri said simply. “It always was intended to be yours.”

The receiver trembled in her hand. Behind her, she heard the soft creak of floorboards as James approached, hovering at the edge of the lobby.

“Papa, I don’t understand any of this.”

“I’ll explain when you come. Bring the Bible. It has—it has annotations. In her hand. I never knew what to do with them.” He coughed, a wet, rattling sound. “I’m tired, Élodie. I’m tired of carrying this alone.”

“I’ll come.” The words came out before she could think them through. “I’ll be there today.”

“Be careful,” Henri said. “There are people who know what that Bible contains. And they are not scholars.”

The line went dead.

Elodie stood motionless, the receiver still pressed to her ear, the dial tone buzzing like an angry insect. James reached over and gently took the phone from her, returning it to its cradle.

“What is it?” he asked quietly. “What’s happened?”

She told him. The words tumbled out in a rush—the burglary, her father’s injuries, the Villard folio, the family Bible hidden in a false bottom. The fact that Henri had known about Marguerite all along. When she finished, her voice was hoarse.

“I need to go to Oxford,” she said. “Now. The trains are still canceled because of the storm, but there must be another way.”

James was already pulling out his phone. “There’s a regional line that runs from Blois to Paris, and from Paris I can get us a flight to London by mid-afternoon. It’ll be tight, but doable.”

She stared at him. “Us?”

“You think I’m letting you go alone?” He held her gaze, and there was something fierce in it, something that had nothing to do with manuscripts or fellowships. “Your father’s apartment was just broken into. Whoever took the Villard folio wasn’t a common thief—they knew what they were looking for. And you have the bookmark in your pocket.”

“We have the bookmark,” she corrected, though the words came out softer than she intended.

James’s mouth quirked. “We,” he agreed.

The train station was chaos. Travelers crammed the platforms, their faces grey with frustration as announcement boards flickered between DELAYED and CANCELED. But James moved through the crowd with the confidence of someone who had navigated worse, his hand pressed against the small of Elodie’s back as he steered her toward the ticket window.

“Two for Paris, first available,” he said, sliding his card across the counter before she could protest. “We need to make the afternoon flight to London.”

The clerk, a tired-looking woman with ink-stained fingers, glanced at the board. “There’s a train in twenty minutes. It’ll get you to Gare d’Austerlitz by eleven, but you’ll have to change at Orléans.”

“We’ll take it.”

They stood on the platform as the train pulled in, its windows streaked with rain. James boarded first, finding them seats in a half-empty carriage, and Elodie slid in beside him by the window. The landscape blurred past—green fields, grey stone villages, the Loire sliding by like an old memory.

Elodie stared at her reflection in the glass. Her father was in a hospital bed. Her mother’s folio had been stolen. And somewhere in his writing desk, a seventeenth-century Bible held annotations in the hand of a woman who had been dead for seven hundred years.

“James,” she said quietly, not turning from the window. “Why did you turn down Cambridge?”

The question hung in the air between them. She felt him shift beside her, felt the heat of his presence even through the barrier of her own cold fear.

“I told you last night,” he said. “It was for the project.”

“That wasn’t the whole truth.”

A long pause. The train rattled through a tunnel, plunging them into darkness, and when they emerged into the grey light again, she saw that James had turned to face her.

“My mother’s family lost something,” he said. “A long time ago. A manuscript—a book they believed would restore their name. My grandfather searched for it his whole life. My mother too.” He paused. “I think it’s the codex, Elodie. I think it’s the one we’ve been studying.”

She turned to look at him then, his face earnest in the pale light, shadows pooling beneath his eyes.

“Then let’s make sure neither of us loses anything else,” she said.

James held her gaze for a long moment. Then he reached out, his fingers brushing hers on the seat between them—nothing more, barely a touch, but enough.

“Okay,” he said. “Together.”