Descartes hit the water flat on his back, and the double impact — first from hitting the water, then from being slammed by me — forced the air from his lungs like a punch in his gut. I’d braced myself as best I could, taking a deep breath and tensing my stomach muscles against the ossuary’s weight.
The water closed swiftly over us, the momentum of our fall and the weight of the stone box driving us downward. Plunging through the cold blackness, the light fading fast above us, I felt Descartes struggling and clutching and scrabbling at me, as if I were a tree or a ladder he would climb to safety. I also felt the edges of the plastic webbing clawing at my hands and face as the loose ends fluttered and swirled around us.
I had no more than a few seconds of air in my lungs, and I was plunging toward the river bottom, entwined with a drowning man and thirty pounds of stone. In desperation, I slammed my head backward, making solid contact with the inspector’s face. His grip slackened long enough for me to twist free. I still had hold of the ossuary, clutching the edge of one end in my left hand. Let it go, a voice in my head screamed. Let it go. Pull him to the surface.
I ignored that voice. I redoubled my grip on the ossuary, and with my other hand I grabbed a fluttering end of plastic mesh and wrapped it around the box. Then, fumbling for the other end of the mesh, I cinched it around Descartes’s foot. Only then, having trussed him to a stone anchor, did I push myself away and begin a desperate, breathless ascent. I felt his fingers clutch at my legs and then slip away as I kicked upward and he descended.
Only the faintest glimmer of light showed overhead, and as I flailed toward it, running out of air, the light began to dim. My last thought, as my mouth opened and my lungs filled with water, was for Miranda. Keep her safe, I thought — no, I prayed. Then: It is finished. Now.
And then there was blackness.
CHAPTER 43
Sirens wail and tires scream to a stop on the pavement at the base of the bridge. Eight men leap from the caravan of police cars, running toward the stairs, weapons in hand.
One of the officers cries out and points upward, and the others look just in time to see a figure — a young woman — climbing onto the railing of the bridge and scanning the water below for ripples, bubbles, anything. She balances there briefly, arms stretched wide, as if Jesus and Mary, Savior and Virgin, manifested at one and the same time. Then she sees something; she does not hesitate, but hurls herself headfirst, as heedless as a seabird that spies a flash of silver scales in the water. She cleaves the surface with scarcely a splash, and the policemen stand transfixed, staring at the widening circles that are the only evidence of what they have just witnessed. Long moments pass; one man clutches his partner’s arm; another crosses himself.
At last the waters stir. The woman breaches, gasping and coughing and retching in the river. With one arm she pulls for the bank; with the other, she encircles the lifeless body she has harrowed from the depths.
She drags him onto the bank and presses water from his lungs, then — holding the shattered silver medallion he wears around his neck — she covers his mouth with hers and exhales, breathing into him the breath and prayer of life.
The man — Brockton — stirs, and groans, and lives again.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: ON FACT AND FICTION
Spoiler alert: This explanatory note refers to key details of the book’s plot. If you haven’t finished the book and don’t want to risk spoiling the suspense, stop reading now … if you’re strong enough to resist temptation.
Avignon — the city of the popes — is both faithfully and lovingly portrayed in this book. First settled by Celts several centuries before Christ, Avignon was forever changed in 1309 when Clement V, the first French pope, settled there with his court to avoid the perils of Rome, which was in the grip of a deadly feud between two powerful clans. Over the next seven decades, the Avignon papacy — called “the Babylonian captivity” by critics who believed that Rome was the only legitimate location for the papal palace — transformed Avignon from a small, sleepy town of some 5,000 to a booming, wealthy, and cosmopolitan city of 50,000. Avignon became the crossroads of money and power in medieval Europe. Kings, emperors, and other movers and shakers came to Avignon to seek papal favors, to apply political pressure, and to revel in luxuries that far surpassed those at the Parisian court of King Philip of France.
No surprise, then, that fourteenth-century Avignon was also a crossroads of artistic talent. Within Avignon’s walls, popes, cardinals, and nobles rubbed shoulders with gifted painters and poets. Several famous figures from Avignon’s glory days play prominent roles here in this book. Nothing here contradicts the historical record, though their actions in these pages do — admittedly, exuberantly and occasionally wickedly — go considerably beyond the bare-bones record history offers us.
Francesco Petrarch — the prolific poet and philosopher whom some historians call “the father of humanism”—bitterly criticized the Avignon papacy and the Babylonian captivity, even as he lived off the tithes and other proceeds collected by the “whore of Babylon.” Petrarch’s decades-long adoration of the unattainable young noblewoman, Laura — an infatuation that continued even after she died during the Black Death of 1348—is one of history’s most famous unrequited romances. Petrarch wrote reams of sonnets to and about Laura; even at the time, though, some critics wondered if he was more in love with the idea of being in love — more smitten with himself as tragic hero — than with the actual, flesh-and-blood Laura: a woman whose lips he never even kissed.
Painter Simone Martini did, indisputably, paint a small portrait of Laura for Petrarch. Alas, that portrait — the world’s first commissioned portrait, say art historians — has been lost; if it could be found, it would surely fetch millions on the auction block at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Little is known about Simone’s personal life. He married into a family of Sienese painters; he and his wife, Giovanna, moved to Avignon in 1335 or 1336, and the couple had no children. When Simone died in Avignon in 1344, he left behind surprisingly few works from his time there, besides four frescoes (now undergoing restoration) in the portal of Avignon Cathedral and the sinopia studies for two of those frescoes: the powerful portraits of Mary and Jesus, that I — like Brockton and Miranda — found myself captivated by within the Palace of the Popes.
The Palace of the Popes, Europe’s biggest Gothic palace, was begun in 1335 by Pope Benedict XII, who — prior to becoming pope in 1334 and taking the name Benedict XII — was named Jacques Fournier. In his six years as a cardinal in Avignon, Fournier was indeed known as le Cardinal Blanc, the White Cardinal, because of the white Dominican habit he always wore, even after he was entitled to far more sumptuous vestments. Fournier is a fascinating and (to me, at least) frightening study in contrasts. Immune to most of the temptations of luxury (except, apparently, food and drink), he built the fortress-like papal palace at least partly to safeguard the 17,500,000 gold florins amassed by his shrewd predecessor, Pope John XXII.