society. And then he laughed about what he’d done. I heard him one night at the manor house.” Sasha made no effort to hide her bitterness as she remembered the last poverty-stricken years of her father’s life spent in the cold tenement room in Oxford while Cade lived in the lap of luxury only a few miles away.
“Well, we’ve certainly found something we agree about,” said Mary, looking Sasha up and down with a new regard. “You know, I wasn’t even six when he and Ritter killed my parents. But I still knew it meant nothing to Cade. And he didn’t just kill them either. He tortured my mother and our old servant before they died. I heard him shouting at them down in the crypt before he shot them.” Mary spoke in a flat, even voice that was strangely at odds with the terrible events she was describing. It was as if she was talking about something that had happened to somebody else, not to her at all. Perhaps that was the only way she could cope with such terrible memories.
“Where were you?” asked Sasha.
“When they came into the church? I was in the tower. There are windows on the stairway, and I spent a lot of time up there when I was a kid, watching the Nazis down below. I liked seeing them when they couldn’t see me. Most of the windows look outside, but one of them faces down into the church. You can see it over there,” said Mary, pointing to an opening halfway up the back wall. “I had a grandstand view. And then, after I heard the gunshots, I ran up to the top of the tower and stood there, watching our house burning up in the twilight. It’s funny: if they hadn’t done that, they might have found out about me. And Cade might still be alive.”
“But he isn’t,” said Sasha harshly. “He’s dead, and you’ve got what he was looking for. I know you have.”
“The cross, you mean,” said Mary, staring Sasha straight in the eye.
“Yes. You said in the note that you’d show it to me.”
“Only if you’ve got the codex. That’s what I said.”
“How did you find out I’ve got it?”
“It wasn’t hard to guess once I heard you’d come back here again. I have friends in the village, you know. This was my home once upon a time.”
“The codex is here,” said Sasha, tapping her bag. “Now show me the cross.”
“So you can steal it? Have it for yourself? Is that why you want to see it?” asked Mary, making no effort to conceal her contempt.
Sasha said nothing. She bit her lip, and her hand trembled on the gun in her pocket.
“What would you do to get it, I wonder?” asked Mary, smiling. “Would you kill defenceless men and women, execute old people like Cade did? How much is it worth to you, Sasha?”
Sasha’s temper finally snapped. There was clearly only one way to get what she wanted, and that was by force. She should have seen that at the outset, instead of wasting time talking. Taking a step back, she took the gun out of her pocket and pointed it at Mary’s chest.
“Give me it,” she said. “You know what I’ll do if you don’t.”
For a moment Sasha felt a sense of power rush through her veins, but then doubt set in. Mary didn’t seem in the least frightened of the revolver, and the odd air of authority that she carried with her was in no way diminished.
“You better follow me,” she said in an even voice. “It’s down here.” Then, without any hesitation, she turned her back on Sasha and the gun, went through the door into the vestry, and began climbing down the winding stairway to the crypt. Sasha followed a little way behind, listening to Mary’s voice coming back up to her from below.
“The cure who was here before this one, Pere Martin, was my father’s best friend. He took me in when my parents died, and afterward he helped me escape to another part of France. But before I left he gave me a locket that my father had entrusted to him when the Nazis came, to give to me if anything happened. There was a picture of my parents in the front and the code was written inside the back.”
“Crux Petri in manibus Petri est.”
“That’s right. I don’t know if my father knew what it meant. Pere Martin certainly didn’t.”
“But you know, don’t you?” said Sasha, retraining the gun on Mary now that she had reached the bottom of the stairs. “Tell me what it means.”
“It means just what you think it means. Simon Peter’s cross is in Simon Peter’s hands.”
“Abbot Simon’s hands?”
“Yes. Of course it wouldn’t have taken Cade long to work that out, but he had to crack the code first,” said Mary, who continued to seem entirely unfazed by the gun. “He didn’t come back here for four long years after 1944, and when he did, he found nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because he looked in the wrong place. Just like you did. And then he got impatient and opened up all the tombs, and still he found nothing. He tore the place apart, and that’s when Pere Martin found him down here among all the skulls and bones, beating his head against the wall in frustration. I wish I could’ve seen him,” said Mary, with a faraway look in her eye.
“Cade told Pere Martin he was looking for a jewelled cross that the Nazis had hidden somewhere in the church. Of course Pere Martin knew it was a lie. He was the one who’d told me about the legend of the Marjean cross years before when he gave me the locket. But he said nothing. Just waited until Cade had gone, and then he told me everything that had happened. I already knew that Cade was after the cross. After all, I’d heard him torturing my mother for it before he killed her. And after Cade came back, I made the connection between the Peter in the code and the Abbot Simon who was buried down here. But I didn’t need to open his tomb to know that the cross wasn’t there, because I knew from Pere Martin that Cade had already done that. I realised the answer was somewhere else, but it still took me a long time to work it out.”
“So what is the answer? Where is the cross?” demanded Sasha, unable to contain her impatience any longer. But Mary ignored the questions. It was as if she was determined to tell the story her own way, and neither Sasha nor the gun were going to deflect her from her purpose.
“I found the cross and Cade didn’t,” she said, “because I knew this place a great deal better than he did. That was the difference between us. You probably haven’t noticed, but down beyond the house there are a few old broken-down walls. They’re almost disappearing in the long grass now, but I played there a lot when I was a child, spying on the German soldiers as they went backward and forward from the house. And one day I was digging, making a tunnel to Australia, and I found an old moss-covered stone buried in the ground with a Latin inscription indented in its surface. It was square, the wrong shape for a tombstone, and I never told anyone about it because it was my secret, my lucky stone, and I kept it covered up with leaves and grass. It was only much later,
years after I’d left this place, that I realised it was the foundation stone of a chapter house for the monastery, laid by Simon, Abbot of Marjean, in the year of our Lord 1328.”
Mary spoke slowly, emphasising the date, but Sasha just looked perplexed, and Mary had to say the year again.
“1328, Sasha. Doesn’t it mean anything to you?” she asked pointedly. “It was the year after Abbot Simon died according to the dates on the wall over there. Except that that’s not what the dates mean. The foundation stone made me realise that. Look. You see the same thing all along both these walls. One date for each name. And the date is the year they became abbot. But Simon is different from everyone else. He has two dates. 1321 and 1327. Why’s that?”
“Because there are two Simons,” said Sasha breathlessly, suddenly beginning to understand.
“Yes. Two. And the second one died within a year of his promotion. That’s why the next abbot, Josephus, has the year 1328 under his name. And the beauty of the whole thing is that there’s no record anywhere of this second Simon. Nothing except the foundation stone lost under the grass. The monks who hid the cross must have seen to that. And so no one knew about his existence except me. That is, until I told Cade all about him in the summer of 1956.”
“Why? Why would you do that?” asked Sasha, shocked. It was the last thing she’d expected to hear.
“To lure him over here so I could take a shot at him. Give him back a little of what he’d done to my parents. The cure helped me, although perhaps he wouldn’t have done so if he’d known what I had in mind. But still there was no need to spell it out. Back in 1948 Cade had promised him a reward for any new information that might lead Cade to the cross, and so the opening was already there. Everything went perfectly. The cure wrote to him about the foundation stone, and less than two weeks later he was here with Ritter. I waited to see him come out empty-
