They parted, and Caitlyn headed off for the
gouffre
. The woods were alive with the quiet sounds of spring: squirrels scrambling on tree bark, birds chirping and leaping from branch to branch, flies and mosquitoes buzzing, leaves rustling in the breeze on the limbs overhead. Her shoes crunched on the gravel and dirt path, the loudest sound of all. The tension she didn’t know she’d been holding started to release. She felt as if the forest was a shelter from the world.
A smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. She’d had to come five thousand miles, leaving behind a home state renowned for its natural beauty, to realize she felt most at peace in nature.
Her smile faded as she came out of the woods into the clearing that held the
gouffre
. She cautiously approached the viewpoint on the edge, inching forward until she could see into the depths. A pair of swifts chased each other inside the shaft, their shrieklike calls echoing off the stone walls. The sun, almost directly overhead, illuminated a wide swath of clear blue-green water at the bottom, its surface unruffled by wind. Caitlyn could see stones and fallen tree branches beneath the surface, and dark shadows that likely led to underwater caves.
The last time she was here she’d fought her way through the underbrush to the other side of the
gouffre
, to where she could see the wall of the shaft beneath where she stood now. Down near the water’s edge, sheltered by an overhang, she’d seen a glimpse of limestone drapery formations reaching down into the water. They must have formed long before the
gouffre
filled with water.
Caitlyn stretched out her arms to either side like a bird, closed her eyes, and tilted back her face to feel the warmth of the sun.
“Je suis au bord du gouffre,”
she said softly to the air, hoping for she knew not what. A heartbeat. A whisper from Raphael. A sense that she was not alone.
The shrieking swifts were her only answer.
Caitlyn dropped her arms and opened her eyes. Some small part of her had clung to a sliver of hope that Raphael was still here, waiting for her, that death had not indeed been able to part them.
“
À Dieu, mon cher
,” she said, the French coming easily to her lips in a way it never did in class. “
Jamais je ne t’oublierai
.” Good-bye, my dear one. I will never forget you.
She turned away from the abyss.
A tall young man stood blocking the path to the castle. Caitlyn took a startled step back.
“Non!”
the blond man shouted, holding out his hands palms forward, as if to hold her motionless.
“You’re Brigitte’s brother, aren’t you?” Caitlyn asked anxiously in English, recognizing him. Knowing who he was—a brain-damaged man who’d once been a suicidal drug addict—didn’t calm her.
He was staring at her, hard. “
Je ne parle pas Anglais
.”
“That’s okay. We don’t really have anything to say.” All she wanted was to get out of there. She smiled and gestured with her hand, asking him to move aside from the path. “Go on, let me by.”
He moved slightly to the side, still staring at her. She was going to have to pass within inches of him.
Dammit, why hadn’t she taken Naomi up on her offer of company?
“You’ve come to see where you had your accident, haven’t you? It’s all yours.” Caitlyn vacated the viewpoint and held her hand toward it in invitation, hoping he’d switch places with her. She’d at least get a head start running back to the château.
His gaze flicked to the
gouffre
, and he started toward the viewpoint. Caitlyn tried to give him a wide berth, alarmingly aware of his size. He was about six feet three inches, and fit. She avoided looking at his face, afraid that eye contact might somehow set him off. She watched his feet instead, coming closer, closer; a moment more, and he would be past …
He stopped right in front of her.
She gasped and looked up into pale blue eyes that held a look not entirely sane. She turned to run.
His hand shot out and grabbed her arm, stopping her. She screamed.
“Caitlyn!” he shouted, and gave her a shake.
The sound of her name shocked her into a moment’s silence. She gaped at him, her heart pounding.
“Caitlyn,” he said again, plaintively this time.
“What do you want?” she pleaded, tugging at her arm.
He sank to his knees in front of her and pressed her captured hand against his chest. “Raphael,” he said.
Shocked, and then immediately angered, Caitlyn tried to jerk away. “Who told you about him?”
“Caitlyn,” he said again, and then a torrent of Italian spilled from his lips.
The words flowed around her, incomprehensible for several long moments, but then her mind began to catch them, their meaning sinking into her as easily as if she had been born to the tongue.
“I have waited so long to find you,” he said. “For four hundred years my soul was kept tied to this earth by my mother’s promise that I would be with you again.”
Caitlyn stopped her struggles, her blood feeling as if it were draining from her body. She looked down into his imploring face, each feature of it unknown to her, but the look in his eyes said that he knew her. “It can’t be you,” she said in Italian, confused, not able to believe it. “How can you be Brigitte’s brother?”
“Thierry died in the water below, a suicide. After he abandoned his body, I took it.”
Disbelief mixed with insane hope bubbled in Caitlyn’s chest. “That’s impossible.”
“But when I came back into the world I was in the hospital, and nothing was as I knew it. I did not know this body in which I live, or the people supposed to be my family. But I knew I must come here, to find you. When I saw you headed this way, I escaped from Brigitte and her friends and followed.” He grinned. “I learned to drive a car so I could come. It’s much better than a horse.”
Caitlyn’s heart thundered in her chest, hurting her with the hope that flamed to life. She gently tugged her hand free of his grip and put her palms to either side of his face, the feel of his cheeks and jaw not what she remembered from Raphael. “Can it really be you?”
“My beloved, even death could not keep us apart.”
A sob of joy tore from Caitlyn’s throat. Raphael wrapped his arms around her hips and pulled her against him, burying his face against her belly. Caitlyn sank down inside his embrace, her arms around his neck, and then he was kissing her with the pain of four centuries of solitude. He lowered her to her back on the rough ground and covered her with kisses.
“Get off of her!” a girl shouted, and a leafy branch came beating down on Raphael’s head. He braced himself to protect Caitlyn from the branch, and then female hands pulled him away from Caitlyn, the branch still beating at him. “Why did you follow her? Leave her alone!”
“Amalia, Naomi, no!” Caitlyn cried, and threw herself between branch and man. Her friends were panting, their hair wild, their stance that of warriors. “It’s not Thierry! It’s Raphael!”
Amalia and Naomi pulled in their chins. “What?”
“Buon giorno,”
he said over Caitlyn’s shoulder.
“Raphael took Thierry’s body after he died in the
gouffre
. Sort of, you know, recycling.” Caitlyn started to laugh, feeling herself on the edge of joyful hysteria. Behind her, Raphael wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her against him, his own body shaking with laughter, although she knew he hadn’t understood her words. “It’s Raphael,” Caitlyn repeated, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It’s Raphael.”
Epilogue
MAY 23
The water felt like ice against Caitlyn’s skin, despite the short wet suit. Her fear did her no favors, either, chilling what blood in her body remained warm. Through her mask she watched the ends of Raphael’s flippers disappear under the curtain of limestone at the bottom of the
gouffre
pool. She groaned. It was her turn. She took one last, ragged breath through her snorkel and dove to follow.
Caitlyn went down until her ears ached with the cold and then slid through the opening under the drapery formation, certain that at any moment she would find herself trapped against the stone. A moment later, however, she was swimming upward toward a luminous ball, like a fish drawn to the moon. She emerged gasping from the water, her pulse pounding.
Raphael reached down and pulled her out of the water so that she was sitting on the edge of the pool with him. Madame Snowe and the geology teacher, Madame Brouwer, were already there, taking off their flippers and snorkels. A waterproof diving light sat on the stone beside Madame Brouwer.
“You’re okay?” Raphael asked in Italian, having adopted the Americanism “okay” with the same enthusiasm he’d brought to cars, ice cream, MP3s of classical music, and the Internet.
“Yeah. The anticipation was worse than the reality.”
Madame Snowe chuckled as she got to her feet, dripping water from her lithe frame. “I am still surprised and delighted with your language skills, Caitlyn,” she said in French.
Caitlyn grinned. Telling Madame Snowe the whole story had been a decision that she, Raphael, Amalia, and Naomi had come to together. It had been a gamble, but it was Caitlyn’s only hope of staying in France and completing her schooling after Madame Snowe had made it so clear that there were to be no second chances.
The four of them had gone together to Madame Snowe’s office, which had not amused the headmistress, suspecting as she had that they were going to plead for clemency. Madame Snowe’s first surprise had been the reverence with which Brigitte’s brother had stood in front of the portrait of Bianca de’ Medici, tears filling his eyes. Her second surprise came when Caitlyn introduced him as Raphael, Bianca’s adoptive son.
After that, she’d been quiet and listened.
Caitlyn was still astonished that they’d been believed, her inexplicable foreign language skills notwithstanding. Her expulsion had been repealed on the sole condition that she and Raphael lead Madame Snowe to the chamber where Raphael had died. Other than that, the headmistress had said very little about their tale.
Brigitte and Daniela had been surprised that “Thierry” had fallen in love at first sight with Caitlyn, but Caitlyn seemed to have gained Daniela’s respect as a result. It made Caitlyn think even less of the Spanish girl, to judge Caitlyn better just because a guy liked her. Caitlyn followed Madame Snowe’s advice, however, not to say a word to Brigitte or Daniela about Thierry not really being Thierry. Even if Brigitte believed such a tale, it could give her only pain.
The fissure in the well, they soon discovered, had been bricked shut. Rather than go to the work of breaking through it, they’d decided to try to approach the chamber from the
gouffre
. Now here they were, a week later, after some intensive lessons on rappelling and ropes.
Caitlyn and Raphael got to their feet, and Madame Brouwer raised her diving light and shone it about the room.
The walls sparkled with the crystal formations Caitlyn so clearly remembered, and within their shelter stood the circle of obsidian and gold stones, with the altar at the center. They seemed unaltered by time, the gold undimmed. The light passed over the walls and then to the dark maw of the passage, where Ursino and Giovanni had appeared with their daggers drawn. There was no sign they had ever been there: no bag of rotting bones and cloth on the ground, no ancient stain of blood on the stone. The only thing in the room was a dark mass on the altar in the center of the circle.
They all approached slowly. Caitlyn shivered, the cave’s air cold on her wet body. Raphael reached it first and drew off the rotted cloth, the fabric falling apart under his touch. Madame Brouwer aimed her light at the object.
A thousand refractions of light gleamed within the quartz cabochon atop the reliquary holding Bianca’s heart.
Raphael drew in a surprised breath, then carefully opened the lid. “It’s still here,” he said in awe.
“The heart in darkness,” Caitlyn said, suddenly understanding the words her mother had written on the tarot card.
This
was the heart, lost in darkness for four centuries until Caitlyn came to Château de la Fortune. Caitlyn was struck by a sudden realization. “The heart
is
the ruby at the hub of Fortuna’s wheel, in Fournier’s painting,” she said.
“Of course … ,” Madame Snowe murmured.
Raphael seemed not to have heard; he was still gazing upon the heart for which he had lost his life, four centuries earlier. He looked up at Caitlyn, his eyes wide. “I remember now. Philippe came and took away the bodies, but he left this here, untouched. Beneto must have survived the attack by Ursino and Giovanni, and told him to follow us down here.”
“And then Beneto was blamed for your murder,” Caitlyn said. “Philippe must have framed him.”
“No,” Madame Snowe said.
They both turned to look at her.
Madame Snowe knelt beside Raphael and gazed upon the heart, her expression rapt. She looked like she’d found the Holy Grail. “Philippe, le Comte d’Ormond, accompanied Beneto when Beneto went to Catherine de’ Medici and asked to become the guardian of Giulia and Elisabeta. Catherine was angry that he didn’t have either the heart or the treasure with him, and she thought he was trying to grab the power of the sisters for himself. She accused Beneto of killing Raphael and had him executed.