He moved the candle for her as she searched out the contours of Europe and the Middle East. “The lines,” he said, pointing to dark red routes that looked like they belonged in a road atlas. “They are pilgrimage routes.” He followed along with her as she traced Saint James’s way to the scallop shell marking Santiago de Compostela.
“Do you think the treasure is under this tile with the shell?” she asked excitedly.
“I thought it might be at first, but there’s no Templar symbol by it.”
“Have you found one anywhere on the map?”
He nodded, and led her across Europe. “This is the most popular route between Paris and Jerusalem,” he said, pointing out a line. “The Templars began their existence as armed protection for pilgrims heading to the Holy Land. There,” he said, pointing to a picture halfway along the route. “Two men on one horse.”
Caitlyn nodded. She’d seen the image online. It was supposed to represent the initial poverty of the Templars, who began so poor that they had only one horse for two knights.
A feeling of disquiet went through her. How did she learn that, if none of her time at the Fortune School had been real? Could that piece of information have come from Bianca, as well as everything else new she thought she’d experienced?
“So where’s the next clue?” she asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
She gnawed a fingernail, looking at the two men on the horse, riding toward Jerusalem. Her glance flicked to Jerusalem itself. It was at the very edge of the map, beneath the wall on which Fortuna had hung.
She remembered Madame Snowe’s album about Château de la Fortune, and the picture of Antoine Fournier. The caption had said he’d chosen where to hang the painting. Caitlyn closed her eyes and summoned an image of the painting.
Fortuna treaded the clouds, one hand on the jeweled wheel, one hand pointing downward. One foot rested on a wisp of vapor, while the other pointed down in the same direction as her hand.
Caitlyn opened her eyes. If Fortuna were hanging on the wall right now, she’d be pointing at Jerusalem. “Where do all the pilgrims go, exactly?” Caitlyn asked carefully. “What’s there to see in Jerusalem?”
He gave her an incredulous look. “Are there many people in two thousand and eleven who do not know these basic things?”
“I never went to church. And hey, I might not know where pilgrims go in Jerusalem, but I’ll bet I know more than you do about biology, geology, and dinosaurs.”
“Assuredly, you do. I have never encountered a dinosaur, and do not even know what one is. But to answer your question, there are several holy sites in Jerusalem, but the main one is this,” he said, pointing to a picture of a blocky building with two domed roofs. “The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It’s where Christ was crucified and buried.”
Part of the building reminded her of something … recognition sent a bolt of excitement through her. “That smaller dome,” she said, pointing, “the one on the short round tower! It looks like the well in the château’s courtyard, doesn’t it? The stone base of the well is exactly like the base of that building, and the ironwork that holds the bucket looks like the dome.”
Raphael dropped the candle in surprise. He scrambled to pick it up again, its flame still burning.“The well! I always thought there was something peculiar about its design. That has to be the next step.”
“I solved the scallop clue?”
“It all fits! Water.
Stella Maris
, the scallop shell, the water under the sun on the window; they all refer to water, like in a well!”
Caitlyn grinned, pleased with herself. “I thought it was the
gouffre
for the same reasons, and some reasons to do with death, too.” She quickly ran through her reasoning about Finisterre and the Abyss of Death. “But that painted tile definitely looks like the well.”
“We’ll find out either way, won’t we?” He scooped her up in a bear hug.
“Find out what?” a voice asked from the doorway.
Caitlyn turned her head.
It was Beneto.
CHAPTER
Twenty-seven
The flaming scrap of oil-soaked cloth fell deep into the narrow darkness of the well until it was no more than a faint point of light, and then it suddenly went out.
“That’s a long way down,” Caitlyn said.
“You didn’t see it?” Raphael said.
“See what?” Caitlyn and Beneto said in unison. Caitlyn realized with vague surprise that they were all speaking Italian. Were the dead natural linguists? Too bad she hadn’t had that gift while still alive.
“My eyes are not as strong as they once were,” Beneto said.
Caitlyn cast a dark look at the old man who formed the third point of their triangle of people bent over the edge of the well, staring into its depths. As Raphael had warned her, she was invisible to Beneto, and he could not sense her presence. At Raphael’s insistence she’d tried to touch Beneto, to give him some sense that she was real, but her hand had slid away from him as if repelled. It had felt like trying to press together the positive sides of two magnets.
It was the hour before dawn, a faint hint of purple touching the horizon to the east. They were hoping to complete their exploration of the well before anyone else in the château stirred.
“There was a dark spot in the shaft wall about a quarter of the way down, between me and you, Caitlyn,” Raphael said.
Beneto’s gaze flicked to the space where Raphael had told him she was standing. She could see the hesitant disbelief in his eyes, the old man unable to either fully accept or refute Raphael’s claims that a ghost was helping him find the Templar treasure. Caitlyn was surprised he was going along with the idea of her without protest. Surely even a man who had spent years around the psychic Bianca de’ Medici would have had a few more questions for Raphael than Beneto had, about his fantastical claims. Anyone rational would assume Raphael was insane.
“I don’t trust him,” Caitlyn complained, staring at the art teacher.
“Then trust me and my judgment.”
Caitlyn scowled. What else could she do? She had voiced her concerns. She couldn’t force Raphael to take her point of view.
Raphael tied a lantern to the end of a rope and started lowering it down the well, its flame casting an orange glow onto the stones. About twenty feet down, a jagged fissure opened in the wall, looking like a black slash in the orange lantern light. It was big enough for a man to crawl through.
“There,” Raphael said, and tied off the rope on one of the iron posts piercing the rim of the well.
“It looks like the entrance to Hell,” Caitlyn said.
“Only if it kills me,” Raphael said with a grin, and started tying a thicker rope to two of the iron posts, anchoring it firmly. The ropes attached to the bucket and winch were too old for even Caitlyn to be willing to risk her ghostly weight to.
“Bianca will protect you,” Beneto said to Raphael.
Caitlyn looked in surprise at Beneto. That was a lot of faith to have in a dead woman. One might as well build a temple in her honor and worship her as a goddess who could interfere in the lives of mortal men.
“Let me go first,” Caitlyn said, as Raphael tossed the free end of the rope into the well. He had knotted it every few feet to make climbing easier.
“What type of man would send a woman first into danger?” Raphael asked incredulously.
“How could I possibly be hurt? I’m dead, remember?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what laws of nature are at work here. I have yet to see you walk through a wall or fly. Nor are you dressed appropriately.”
Caitlyn reached down and tied up the hem of her nightgown between her legs, making a rough sort of romper out of it. Her feet were still bare.
“She wants to go first?” Beneto asked, eyes searching the space where Caitlyn stood.
“She thinks she’s invulnerable.”
“She will be less vulnerable than you.”
“Thank you, Beneto,” Caitlyn said.
“She says thanks,” Raphael passed along.
Beneto grunted in acknowledgment. “Let her go first. Don’t let your eagerness blind you to what is practical.”
“It was chivalry, not eagerness.”
“That’s sweet of you,” Caitlyn said, and climbed up onto the edge of the well, swinging her legs to the inside.
“Caitlyn, no!”
Her stomach flipped as she got a good look at the distance between her dangling feet and the lantern glowing down below. It seemed much farther than it had a moment ago. She didn’t want to think about the even farther distance between the lantern and the water. “It’s the best way, Raphael. You know it is.”
He started to come around the well, and she knew he was going to try to stop her. There was no time for hesitation or second thoughts. She grabbed the rope and swung to the center of the shaft, her bare feet finding balance on a knot. “Whoa,” she said, feeling the strain of her weight on her arms. For a ghost, she seemed awfully heavy. The last time she’d climbed a rope had been when she was in gym class, in fourth grade. It had been a lot easier then, when she was still a scrawny monkey of a child.
“Careful!” Raphael cried.
She grinned at him. He looked half out of his mind with worry, and afraid to interfere lest he knock her from her precarious perch. “Fear not! The girls of the future are a resourceful lot.”
He put his hand to his forehead, eyes wide with worry.
His fear made her feel daring. She began to lower herself down the rope, glad for her bare feet that let her feel for the next knot. It took only a minute to reach the level of the lantern and fissure. The orange light reached a few feet into the limestone opening, and Caitlyn peered into the shadowed depths, half expecting to see the glint of gold.
All she saw was rock and shadow.
“Anything?” Raphael called from above.
“No treasure. But I think it might be the entrance to a tunnel or cave system. I can’t see the back.”
“Come back up.”
She looked up at him, his face framed by a faintly lightening sky. The only time she’d seen him in full daylight had been on that first day, when he was riding near the Dordogne River.
The cleft in the rock was a foot away from where she clung to the rope. She reached out, feeling for handholds.
“Caitlyn! What are you doing?”
She found a grip in the edge of the rock and pulled herself toward it, her heart thumping. How to make the transfer? She didn’t see how she could get enough of her upper body into the opening to keep from falling down the well once she released the rope.
“Caitlyn!”
She let go of the stone and swung back to the center of the well. With a firm grip on the rope, she released her foothold on a knot and dangled for a moment, one foot cautiously kicking at air until it met the stone lip of the fissure. She dug in her heel, pulling her body closer and then sliding both legs onto the cold stone. There came a precarious moment when she was half in the cave, half out, and she had to lower her grip on the rope to move any deeper. Her arm muscles were beginning to quiver. She took a brief look downward at the black depths. “Not a good place to be, Caitlyn,” she whispered to herself.
She shifted her grip. Her hands slipped, her body tilting forward for an endless moment before she caught herself.
She heard a keening groan from above.
She used her feet and buttocks to inch herself deeper into the opening until at last she felt her center of gravity shift to inside the mouth of the cave. She let go of the rope and grabbed solid rock.
Her breath released in a heavy sigh of relief, and she realized she was shaking.
“Caitlyn! Are you all right?”
She poked her head out the opening and looked up. “There’d better be another opening to this cave somewhere, because I am not doing that again on the way out.”
He chuckled and repeated her words to Beneto.
“What do you see?” Beneto called down, a note of embarrassed self-consciousness in his voice. Caitlyn suspected he thought he might be talking to air.
“Let me look.” Caitlyn crawled deeper into the cave. It was only as she moved that she remembered what Madame Brouwer had said about natural cave floors not being paved and flat.
But this one was. She was inching her way over a surface built of square blocks of stone.
A few feet in, the roof above her head rose out of her reach, and the stone floor began to slant downward. It was too dark to see what lay beyond. She returned to the opening.
“It’s man-made!” she called up. “It goes somewhere.”
“Take the rope down behind us,” Raphael said to Beneto. “We don’t want anyone to guess where we are and follow.”
Beneto handed him a leather bag, and Raphael slung its strap across his chest. It held the chest with Bianca’s heart, Caitlyn knew. They’d decided to bring it with them in hopes that they could at last entomb it as Bianca had requested.