The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

The way he was looking at me would have melted the Titanic’s iceberg, and I confess it did a pretty good job on me—but that wasn’t all the ammo up his sleeve.

“I’m in love with you, Ariel,” he said simply and directly. “If I say that there are matters in which you must simply trust me, I expect you to believe me—to believe in me. Do you understand? Is this not enough?”

“I’m afraid not,” I told him firmly.

To do him credit, he registered no surprise, just complete attention, as if waiting for something. I wasn’t sure exactly how to say what I knew I must.

“Last night I believed I was falling in love with you, too,” I told him sincerely. His eyes narrowed, as they had when he’d passed me that first day in the annex lobby. But I couldn’t hold back my frustration. “How could you make love to me that way,” I said, glancing to be sure no one could overhear, “then turn around and lie to me, as you did in the vineyard? Who is this damned ‘Father Virgilio’ following us around like a wraith?”

“I suppose you do deserve an explanation,” he agreed, rubbing one hand over his eyes. Then he looked at me again with an open expression. “Father Virgilio truly is a priest from Trieste; I’ve known him for years. He has worked for me, though not in the capacity I told you earlier. More recently, by doing research here in this library. And I did want you to meet him—but not late last night when I had … other things in mind.” He smiled a little self-consciously. “After all, he is a priest.”

“Then what was all that Hans-Claus business this morning, if you knew we were coming here to meet him?”

“I was worried last night, when you thought Virgilio looked familiar,” Wolfgang said. “Then this morning, when I made that slip and you pursued it, it was already too late to change plans. How could I imagine you’d be able to recognize him from earlier yesterday, just by one glimpse in darkness last night, and at such a distance?”

I was getting that déjà-vu-all-over-again feeling as I racked my brain for when I’d seen Father Virgilio “earlier.” But I didn’t have to ask.

“You have every right to despise me for what I’ve done,” said Wolfgang apologetically. “But it was at such short notice, when I learned I wouldn’t be joining you and Dacian Bassarides for lunch—that man is so unpredictable! I shouldn’t have been surprised if he’d spirited you away and I’d never seen you again. Luckily, I had chosen a restaurant where they knew me well enough to accept Virgilio as a ‘temporary employee’—to look out for you during the afternoon—”

So that was it! No wonder he’d seemed familiar to me in the vineyard. In my frenzied preoccupation yesterday afternoon at the Café Central, I’d hardly glanced at the faces around me, yet I must have registered that same figure performing some service around our table perhaps half a dozen times. Now, torn between relief and worry, I wondered just how much our impromptu busboy had overheard of our luncheon conversation. Though it seemed Wolfgang had only been trying to protect me from the vagaries of my unknown grandfather, I cursed myself for not being more vigilant, as Sam had taught me all through childhood.

But I had no chance to dwell on these thoughts. Father Virgilio, peering through the entrance doors, seemed to have decided that adequate dust had settled to cushion his return. Seeing him, Wolfgang bent toward me and spoke quickly. “If you can read Latin half as well as you speak German, I shouldn’t comment in front of Virgilio on the first line of this manuscript of Saint Bernard’s: it might embarrass him.”

I looked down at the book and shook my head. “What does it say?”

“‘Divine love is reached through carnal love,’” said Wolfgang with a complicitous smile. “Later, when we’ve a free moment together, I’d like to test that theory.”

Father Virgilio had arrived with a map of Europe, a modern one. He unfolded it on a trestle table before us and said, “It is important that from ancient times a mysterious tribe in this region held the female bear as their totem, and that they were possessed of an almost mystical reverence for a substance with many alchemical properties: salt.”

THE BEARS

At age seven, I carried the sacred vessels … when I was ten I was a bear girl of Artemis at Brauron, dressed in the little robe of crocus-colored silk

.

—Aristophanes, Lysistrata

Bernard Sorrel—the saint’s family name—was born in A.D. 1091, at the dawn of the Crusades. On his father’s side he was descended from wealthy nobles of the Franche-Comté, on his mother’s from the Burgundian dukes of Montbard—“bear mountain.” The family castle, Fontaines, was situated between Dijon in northern Burgundy and Troyes in the province of Champagne—a region of vineyards planted from Roman stock that were consistently under cultivation since ancient times.

Bernard’s father died in the First Crusade. The young man suffered a nervous collapse when his beloved mother died also, while he was away at school. At the age of twenty-two, Bernard joined the Benedictine monks. Always of fragile health, he soon became ill, but was given a small cottage on the nearby estate of his patron Hugues de Troyes, count of Champagne, where he recuperated. The following year Count Hugues visited the Holy Land to see at first hand the Christianized kingdom of Jerusalem that had been established after the successful First Crusade. On his return, the count at once ceded part of his property to the Church: the wild valley of Clairvaux branching off the river Aube. There, at age twenty-four, Bernard Sorrel established an abbey and became first abbot of Clairvaux.

It is relevant to our story that Clairvaux is situated at the heart of the region that in ancient times encompassed today’s French Burgundy, Champagne, Franche-Comté, Alsace-Lorraine, and adjacent portions