Read Chapter 9: The Missing Person

Henri Beaumont stood in the doorway of the reading room, light spilling around his silhouette from the corridor behind him. He was a tall man, silver-haired, dressed in a charcoal suit that looked out of place among the dust and vellum. His gaze went first to the codex open on the table, then to Elodie, and finally to James, who had gone very still.

“Dr. Marchand,” Henri said, stepping inside. His voice was smooth, unhurried. “I thought I might find you here.”

Elodie’s hand moved instinctively to cover the half-erased name on the page—a foolish gesture, and she knew it the moment she made it. Henri’s eyes flicked to her hand, and his smile tightened by a fraction.

“You found the codex,” he said. “Remarkable, isn’t it? The Beaumont family has kept it in our vaults for nearly six hundred years. I don’t mind admitting I’ve never fully understood its contents. That’s why I engaged you, Dr. Marchand. Discretion and expertise.”

James shifted beside her. “You engaged her to find the letter, not to catalog your family relics.”

Henri’s gaze moved to James with the patience of a man accustomed to being challenged and never being moved by it. “The letter is part of a larger matter. One that concerns my family’s history. You’ll forgive me if I prefer to discuss it with Dr. Marchand alone.”

James did not move. The silence stretched, and Elodie felt the weight of it pressing against her ribs. She had promised James nothing about Henri beyond the commission itself. But the name on the page—Marguerite de Beaumont—that was hers to chase, and she would not hand it over to him in front of Henri, who clearly did not want it spilled across the table.

“James,” she said quietly. “Give us a moment.”

His jaw tightened. For a moment she thought he would refuse. Then he stepped back, collected his jacket from the back of his chair, and walked to the far end of the reading room, where he pulled out his phone and pretended to study it with a scholar’s focus that fooled no one.

Henri waited until James was out of earshot before he spoke. “The letter has been missing for three days. I have reason to believe it was taken from my study in Blois by someone with knowledge of my private correspondence.”

“You told me you suspected James.”

“I suspected everyone.” Henri’s voice dropped. “But I’ve since learned that the letter was not the only thing taken. A family record book—a register of births and deaths from the fourteenth century—was also removed. Pages have been cut from it.”

Elodie’s blood went cold. “The register of the Beaumont family?”

“Yes. The entries for the years 1347 to 1351 are gone.” He paused, and his eyes held hers with an intensity that made her want to look away. “Those years include the entry for my ancestor, Marguerite de Beaumont. The one whose name you were reading when I walked in.”

She felt the accusation in his words—not that she had taken it, but that she had found it, and that finding it had put her in a place he had not intended for her. She kept her face still.

“I saw the name in the margin of the manuscript,” she said. “I didn’t know who she was. I was curious.”

“Curiosity is a dangerous habit, Dr. Marchand. I would ask that you keep your findings to yourself until we recover what was stolen. There are people who would misuse that information.”

He did not say what information. He did not need to. Elodie nodded, and Henri turned to leave, pausing at the door.

“The archive will open to the public at two. I’ve arranged for you to have the room until then.” He glanced toward James. “Both of you, I suppose. Keep your discoveries discreet.”

He was gone before she could respond.

Elodie stood motionless for a long moment. Then, without looking at James, she pulled out her phone and began searching the family records databases she knew by heart—the Loire Valley archives, the ecclesiastical registers, the monastic cartularies that had survived the Revolution by the skin of their bindings.

It took her eleven minutes. James’s silence was a pressure at her back the whole time.

Marguerite de Beaumont. Daughter of Renaud de Beaumont, lord of Blois. She entered the convent of Saint-Croix in 1342 at the age of nineteen—a common enough fate for a noble daughter without a suitable marriage. The register listed her as a nun of good standing until 1348, when a notation appeared in a different hand, cramped and darker than the rest: *disparuit. Non reperta.*

She disappeared. No body was ever found. The convent’s chronicle for that year mentioned an illness sweeping through the town—the plague, Elodie knew, had reached the Loire Valley by the autumn of 1348. But Marguerite had not died of it. The register said she vanished, and the word *non reperta*—not found—had been underlined twice.

And three years later, a manuscript bearing her marginalia had turned up in the possession of a scholar in Oxford, with a companion codex that had somehow ended up in the Chartres archive, a hundred miles from Blois.

Elodie’s thumb paused over the screen. A pattern was forming in the dark, and she did not like its shape.

Behind her, James cleared his throat. “Are you going to tell me what Beaumont said to you, or are we just going to spend the next hour staring at our phones like estranged spouses at a dinner party?”

She did not turn around. “He said the letter wasn’t the only thing stolen. A family register was taken. Pages were cut out. The years 1347 to 1351.”

“Which years include our missing nun.”

She heard the creak of his chair as he stood behind her, reading over her shoulder. His nearness was a distraction she did not want to acknowledge.

“Marguerite de Beaumont,” he said slowly. “Disappeared from her convent in 1348. Plague years. Convenient cover for someone who wanted to vanish.”

“She didn’t vanish,” Elodie said. “She left something behind. A manuscript with notes in the margins. Notes that were added by someone who knew about the treasure that had been hidden in the convent walls three years before.” She hesitated. “Or she was the one who hid it.”

“You think she ran away with the treasure.”

“I think she was running from something. And I think the date she disappeared—1348—is not a coincidence.” She turned to face him. “The manuscript was written in 1349. The year after. Someone who disappeared from a convent in Blois surfaces a year later in Oxford with a codex full of her private notes. That’s not a trail that leads nowhere. That’s a trail someone tried to burn.”

James was staring at her with an expression she could not read. “You’ve been holding this back,” he said. “The name. Your research. You were going to go after this alone.”

“I was going to protect a commission.”

“You were going to cut me out.”

She opened her mouth to argue, and the sharp click cut through the air like a gunshot.

They both froze.

The sound had come from the codex—from the thick leather cover lying open on the table. Elodie looked down. A brass latch, hidden along the spine’s inner edge, had sprung open. She had run her fingers over that spine twice and felt nothing. But now, under the pressure of her arm resting against the cover, the spring had released.

The compartment beneath the latch was shallow, no deeper than a fingernail. Inside lay a single scrap of parchment, yellowed and brittle, folded into quarters.

James reached it first. She did not stop him. He unfolded it with the care of a man handling a bomb, and his breath caught when he saw the contents.

On the parchment, in faded brown ink, was a crude map of a town. Elodie recognized the bend of the river, the cathedral spire, the old bridge. She had studied enough maps of the Loire Valley to know Blois by its silhouette.

And in the lower right corner, written in a hand she would have recognized anywhere—because it was the same hand that had annotated the manuscript’s margins, the same loops and slopes she had compared to James’s writing that very morning—was a date.

*10 April 1349.*

The day after Marguerite had disappeared from her convent.

James looked up at her, and for the first time since she had met him, he looked lost.

“This is the map,” he said. “This is where the letter is.” He paused. “But it’s in Blois. And the archive doesn’t reopen until tomorrow.”

Elodie said nothing. Her phone was already in her hand, hovering over Henri’s contact. She should tell him. She should tell him what they had found.

She looked at the map, at the compass rose drawn in the corner, at the date that tied Marguerite to the place where Henri’s family still kept their vaults.

She did not press send.

“We go tomorrow,” she said. “Before the archive opens. Before Beaumont knows what we have.” She met James’s eyes. “Do you trust me?”

He held her gaze for a long moment. Then he folded the map and slid it into his inner pocket.

“No,” he said. “But I’m going anyway.”