Tammy bounced into the breakfast room, where Maureen and Peter were having coffee while waiting for her.
“Sorry I’m late. My flight into Carcassonne was delayed, and by the time I arrived it was after midnight. Took me forever to fall asleep and then I couldn’t get up.”
“I was worried when I didn’t hear from you last night,” Maureen said. “Did you drive in from Carcassonne?”
“No. I have other friends coming in for Sinclair’s bash tomorrow night and I traveled with them. One of them is a local and he picked us up.”
A basket of flaky croissants was deposited on the table and the waiter took Tammy’s beverage order. Tammy waited for the server to retreat to the kitchen before continuing. “Now, we need to check out this morning.”
Maureen and Peter looked puzzled. “Why?” they asked in unison.
“Sinclair is raging that we stayed in a hotel. He left a message for me last night. He has rooms at the château for all of us.”
Peter looked wary. “I don’t like that idea.” He turned to plead his case to Maureen. “I’d prefer to remain here; I think it’s safer for you. The hotel is neutral territory, a place we can retreat to if something happens that makes you uncomfortable.”
Tammy looked annoyed. “Listen, do you know how many people would kill for this invitation? The château is fantastic; it’s like a living museum. You really do run the risk of offending Sinclair if you refuse, and you may not want to do that. He has too much to offer you.”
Maureen was stuck. She looked back and forth at the two of them. Peter was right — the hotel provided them with neutral territory. But her imagination was sparked by the idea of staying in the château and observing the enigmatic Bérenger Sinclair at a closer proximity.
Tammy sensed Maureen’s dilemma. “I’ve told you that Sinclair isn’t dangerous. In fact, I think he’s a wonderful man.” She looked at Peter. “But if you feel differently, look at it this way: it’s like taking the approach of ‘Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.’ ”
By the end of breakfast, Tammy had convinced them to check out of the hotel. Peter watched her carefully as they dined, noting to himself that she was a very persuasive woman.
Rennes-le-Château, France
June 23, 2005
“YOU’D NEVER FIND THIS PLACE for the first time unless somebody showed you how to get here.” Tammy gave directions from the backseat. “Turn right up here — see that little lane there? It leads up the hill to Rennes-le-Château.”
The narrow road was roughly paved as it twisted upward in a steep series of switchbacks. At the top of the hill, a utilitarian sign partially obscured by scrub announced the name of the tiny hamlet.
“You can park over here.” Tammy directed them to a small, dusty clearing at the entrance to the village.
As they exited the car, Maureen looked down at her watch. She did a double take before commenting, “How strange. My watch has stopped and I just put a new battery in it before we left the States.”
Tammy laughed. “See, the fun is starting already. Time takes on a new meaning up here on the magic mountain. I guarantee your watch will return to normal when we leave this area.”
Peter and Maureen looked at each other, following where Tammy led them. She didn’t bother to explain, just kept walking as she tossed a quip behind her at the pair of them. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are now entering the Twilight Zone.”
The village did give an eerie impression of a land that time had forgotten. It was surprisingly small and appeared strangely deserted.
Peter asked, “Does anybody live here?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s a fully functional village. The population is less than two hundred, but it’s a population all the same.”
“It’s uncannily quiet,” Maureen noted.
“It’s always like this,” Tammy explained, “until a tour bus unloads.” As they entered the village, to their right was what remained of a château, a near ruin of the house that gave the village its name.
“That’s the Château Hautpol. It was a stronghold of the Knights Templar during the Crusades. See the tower?” She pointed to a decrepit turret. “Don’t be fooled by this backwater location and its worn condition. The Tower of Alchemy is one of the most important esoteric landmarks in France. Maybe in the world.”
“I assume you’re going to tell us why?” Peter was finding his annoyance increasing. He was tired of games wrapped in mysteries; he just wanted somebody to give him some answers that made sense.
“I’ll tell you, but not yet. Only because it won’t mean anything to you until you know the story of the village. We’ll leave that for last. I’ll tell you on the way out.”
They passed a small bookshop on the left. It was closed, but volumes featuring occult symbolism graced the windows.
“Not your average Catholic farming village?” Maureen whispered to Peter as Tammy walked ahead.
“Apparently not,” Peter agreed, looking at the strange inventory of books and the pentagram jewelry in the window.
Another oddity on the opposite wall of the narrow street caught Maureen’s attention as they followed Tammy through the ancient stone streets of the odd little village. Engraved on the side of a house at eye level was what appeared to be a sundial. The metal centerpiece had long since fallen out, leaving a weathered hole in the center. Closer inspection showed that there was nothing ordinary about the markings. They began with the number nine and continued through the number seventeen, with half hours marked in between. But scratched above the numbers were a series of arcane-looking symbols.
Peter looked over Maureen’s shoulder as she pointed out the strange glyphs. “What do you think these mean?” she asked him.
Tammy was walking back toward them, smiling like the cat who ate the cream. “I see you’ve found the first of our important oddities here in RLC,” she said.
“RLC?”
“Rennes-le-Château. It’s what everyone calls it as the full name is too damn long. Gotta start learning the local lingo so you fit in at the party tomorrow night.”
Maureen turned back to the engraving on the wall. Peter was inspecting it closely.
“I recognize these symbols, the planets. That’s the moon, and Mercury. Is that the sun?” He pointed to a circle with a dot in the center.
“Sure is,” Tammy answered. “And that’s Saturn. The rest of the symbols deal with astrology. Here is Libra, Virgo, Leo, Cancer, and this is Gemini.”
Maureen had a thought. “Is Scorpio on there anywhere? Or Sagittarius?”
Tammy shook her head, but pointed to the left side of the sundial, which would have been the seven o’clock position on a normal clock-face.
“No. See here where the markings stop? That’s the planet Saturn. If the markings continued in a counterclockwise direction, you’d have Scorpio following Libra and then Sagittarius after that.”
“Why does it stop in such an odd place?” Maureen asked.
“And what does it mean?” Peter was far more interested in an answer.
Tammy raised her palms in an I-can’t-help-you gesture. “It’s a reference to a planetary alignment, we think. Other than that, we really don’t know.”
Maureen continued to stare at it. She was thinking about Sandro’s fresco in the Louvre, trying to determine if there was a connection to the scorpion in the painting. She wanted to understand the possible use of such a strange sundial, if that’s what it was. “Is it like a ‘when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars’ kind of thing?”
“If you two start singing ‘The Age of Aquarius,’ I’m leaving,” Peter announced.
They all laughed as Tammy explained. “She’s right, though. It’s probably a reference to a specific planetary alignment. And since it was placed here on the front of a prominent home, we have to assume that it was important for every person in the village to know about it.”
Tammy led them away from the sundial and resumed her tour, pointing to the
villa up ahead. “The focal point of the village is the museum and the entire villa area. It’s up there, just ahead of us.”
At the end of the narrow street ahead of them stood a residential building, a quaint stone villa. An oddly shaped stone tower rose in the distance behind it, clinging to the side of the mountain.
“The mystery of this village centers on a very strange story about a famous — rather, infamous — priest who lived here in the late eighteen hundreds. Abbé Bérenger Saunière.”
“Bérenger? Isn’t that Sinclair’s first name?” Peter asked.
Tammy nodded. “Yes, and it’s not a coincidence. Sinclair’s grandfather hoped that if his grandson had the same name, perhaps he would inherit some of the qualities of his namesake — Saunière was fearless in his protection of the local histories and mysteries, and absolutely devoted to Mary Magdalene’s legacy.
“Anyway, there are various legends about what the Abbé found here when he set out to restore the church. Some believe he found the lost treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem. Because the adjacent château was associated with the Templar Knights, it’s possible they used this remote outpost to hide their spoils from the Holy Land. Who would look for anything valuable up here? And some say Saunière discovered priceless documents. Whatever it was, he became a very wealthy man, suddenly and mysteriously. He spent millions in his lifetime, yet he made the equivalent of about twenty-five bucks a year in salary as a local priest. So where did all that cash come from?
“Back in the 1980s a trio of British researchers wrote a book about Saunière and his mysterious wealth that became a bestseller. It was called Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the States, and is considered a classic in esoteric circles. The bad news is that the same book created a treasure-hunting craze in this area. The natural resources were exploited, and local landmarks were vandalized by religious fanatics and souvenir hunters. Sinclair even had to put armed guards on his land to protect the tomb.”
“Poussin’s tomb?” Maureen asked.
Tammy nodded. “Of course. That’s the centerpiece for the whole mystery, thanks to the Shepherds of Arcadia.”
“We went to see the tomb yesterday. I didn’t see any guards,” Peter said.
Tammy laughed in her rich, throaty way. “That’s because you’re welcome on Sinclair’s land. Believe me, if you were there, he knows about it. And if he didn’t want you there, you’d know about it.”
They arrived at the large building that dominated the village. A sign announced “Villa Bethania — Residence of Bérenger Saunière.”
As they entered the museum doors, Tammy smiled and nodded to the woman at the front desk, who waved them through.
“Don’t we need to buy tickets?” Maureen asked as they passed the sign displaying ticket prices.
Tammy shook her head. “Nah, they know me here. I am using this as a setting for a documentary on the history of alchemy.”
She led them past glass cases displaying priestly vestments worn by the Abbé Saunière in the nineteenth century. Peter paused to look at these as Tammy walked on to the end of the hallway. She stopped at an ancient stone pillar engraved with a cross.
“It’s called the Knights’ Pillar, and is believed to have been carved by the Visigoths in the eighth century. It used to make up part of the altar in the old church. When Abbé Saunière moved the pillar during the villa’s restoration, he discovered some mysterious, encoded parchments, or so they say.”
The display of the parchments had been enlarged by the museum curators to make the code more obvious. Scattered letters stood out in bold print, but upon closer inspection there was nothing random about the placement. Maureen pointed to the phrase ET IN ARCADIA EGO as it appeared within the darkened capital letters.
“There it is again,” Maureen said to Peter. She turned to Tammy. “So what does it mean? It’s a code of some sort?”
“There are at least fifty different theories I have heard on the meaning of that phrase. It’s spurred a cottage industry almost by itself.”
“Peter came up with an interesting theory in the train on the way down here,” Maureen chimed in. “He thought it pertained to the village of Arques. ‘In Arques, the village of God, I am.’ ”
Tammy appeared impressed. “Good guess, Padre. The most common belief is the Latin anagram explanation. If you rearrange the letters it reads “ ‘I tego arcana Dei.’ ”
Peter translated. “I conceal God’s secrets.”
“Yep. Not much help, is it?” Tammy laughed. “Come on, I want you to see the house from the outside.”
Peter was still thinking about Poussin’s tomb. “Wait a minute. Wouldn’t that imply that something was hidden inside the tomb? If you put it all together it’s something like ‘In Arques, the village of God, I conceal the secrets.’ ”
Maureen and Peter waited for Tammy to answer. She paused to think for a moment. “It’s as good a theory as any other I’ve heard. Unfortunately, the tomb has been opened and searched many times. Sinclair’s grandfather excavated every inch of that property for a square mile surrounding the tomb, and Bérenger brought in every type of technology imaginable to search for buried treasure — ultrasound, radar, you name it.”
“And they never found anything?” Maureen asked.
“Not a thing.”
“Maybe somebody got to it first,” Peter offered. “What about this priest Saunière? Could that be what made him so wealthy? Some treasure he found?”
“That’s what a lot of people believe. But you know what’s funny? After decades of research by very determined men and women, nobody knows what Saunière’s secret was, even today.” Tammy was leading them through a lovely courtyard dominated by a stone and marble fountain.
“Very impressive for a simple parish priest in the nineteenth century,” Peter observed.
“Isn’t it? And here’s the stranger thing. While Abbé Saunière spent a fortune building this place, he never lived here. In fact, he refused to. Ultimately, he left it to his…housekeeper.”
“You paused there,” Peter observed, “paused before you said ‘housekeeper.’ ”
“Well, there are many who believe that she was more than Saunière’s housekeeper, that she was his life partner.”
“But wasn’t he a Catholic priest?”
“Judge not, Padre. That’s my motto and always has been.”
Maureen had wandered out of earshot, her attention captured by a weathered sculpture in the garden. “Who is the statue?”
“Joan of Arc,” Tammy answered.
Peter moved to look closer at the statue. “Oh, right. There’s her sword and her banner. But she seems out of place here,” he commented.
“Why?” Maureen asked him.
“She just seems…very traditional. A classic symbol of French Catholicism. Yet there doesn’t seem to be anything else here that is even remotely conventional.”
“Joanie? Conventional?” Tammy burst out laughing again. “Not in these parts. But that’s a major history lesson that we’ll tackle later. You wanna see something really unorthodox? You’ve got to see the church.”
Even in the warmth and sunlight of midsummer, Rennes-le-Château was a place of strangeness and shadows. Maureen had the disconcerting sense of being followed, of a silhouette creeping up on her at every turn of the gardens. She found herself spinning quickly around on several occasions, only to find that there was no one there when she did. The village made her jumpy — this strange place where her watch wouldn’t work and she constantly felt that someone was creeping up on her. Fascinating as it was, she would be happy to get out of there, sooner rather than later.
Tammy took them out of the gardens and around the house. Through another courtyard they saw the entrance of an aged stone church.
“This is the parish church for the village of RLC. There has been a church dedicated to Mary Magdalene on this site for a thousand years. Saunière started to renovate it somewhere around 1891, which is about the time he supposedly found the
mysterious documents. He took them to Paris, and the next thing we know, he’s a millionaire. He used his money to make some very unusual additions to the church.”
As they moved toward the church, Peter stopped to read a Latin inscription on the lintel above the door. “Terribilis est locus iste.”
“Terribilis?” Maureen questioned.
“This place is terrible,” Peter explained.
“Recognize it, Padre?” Tammy asked.
Peter nodded. “Of course.” If Tammy wanted to test his Biblical knowledge, she was going to have to work much harder than this. “Genesis, chapter twenty-eight. Jacob says it after dreaming about the ladder to heaven.”
“Why would a priest choose that to inscribe above his church?” Maureen asked, looking to both Peter and Tammy for an answer.
“Maybe you should look inside the church before you try to answer that question.” This was Tammy’s suggestion. Peter followed it and entered.
“It’s pitch dark in here,” he called back to them.
“Oh, wait a minute,” Tammy said as she fished in her bag for a coin. “The lights are coin-operated.” She slipped the euro into a box near the door and the fluorescent lights flickered on. “The first time I came here, I tried to view the church in the dark. I brought a flashlight with me the second time. It was then that one of the caretakers showed me the coin box. This way the tourists can give something back to the church. It gives us about twenty minutes of light.”
“What is that?” Peter exclaimed. As Tammy was explaining the light situation, Peter had turned to see the statue of a hideous demon crouched at the entrance of the church.
“Oh, that’s Rex. Hi, Rex.” Tammy patted the statue playfully on the head. “He’s like the official mascot of Rennes-le-Château. As with everything else here, there are tons of theories about him. Some say that he is the demon Asmodeus, the guardian of secrets and hidden treasures. Others say that he is the Rex Mundi of Cathar tradition, which is my personal belief.”
“Rex Mundi. The King of the World?” Peter was translating.
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