Above him the plaster had been stripped away, leaving a colourful mural with the bottom edge ragged, promising a revelation in the ecstatic gleam from the central figure’s eyes. There were smaller figures around her, their reduced size indicating lesser importance, not diminutive stature. She was a young woman, not much more than a girl, with flowers woven through her long hair like a Pre-Raphaelite siren. Around her head was a diffuse halo of radiant light. Her hands, which were just emerging from their plaster shroud, were turned palms outward, with blood-red signs of stigmata at their centres.
“Take a look at the others,” said Alexander Pope without looking around. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
To his left there were three murals that had already been revealed to the light. Whether they had been restored or the original colours had been preserved by their plaster shrouds, they were startling in their vivid portrayal of the same young woman. Both Morgan and Miranda gazed with astonishment at their exquisite beauty, an appreciation for the merging of aesthetics and the spiritual not at all tempered by their differing degrees of agnostic resistance.
The first panel showed her in a posture of acquiescence, dressed in the clothes of a Victorian farm girl. She was sweeping up, in what appeared to be the opulent austerity of a rectory kitchen, witnessed by a disturbingly animate crucifix looming from the wall. Two cassocks could be seen hanging from a peg rail on the adjoining wall. The slight smile on her face was curiously distracted; she seemed detached, as if her mind was on less worldly things than her domestic labours.
In the second panel, her features had softened. She was kneeling at prayer in landscape much like that surrounding the church on the limestone plateau. In front of her was a makeshift shrine of small boulders. The crucifix around her neck gleamed against the rough cloth of her sombre dress. Her eyes were raised to heaven, which seemed in the arrangement of shadows and light to be hidden by clouds that were about to spread open in divine revelation.
The third panel showed the young woman prostrate on the left side of the Virgin and the same young woman kneeling in adoration to her right. Mary, in the centre, stood apart from the landscape, not hovering in the air, but foregrounded and free of earth’s gravity, casting no shadow. Her right hand was raised, revealing a stigmata impressed on the palm. Her pale-blue robe draped sensuously over her body, portraying her as a worldly woman, and yet her face showed the innocence and sorrow of a suffering child. She was the maiden of Bethlehem and the grieving mother at Golgotha, the Queen of the World and Eve restored to the Garden. The young farm woman on her right gazed with rapturous wonder and seemed to be listening, as if she were hearing Mary’s voice inside her own head. She had become quite beautiful, her hair had fallen untangled across her shoulders, her eyes glistened, her lips parted softly, her skin glowed in a light emanating from within.
Miranda and Morgan were so enthralled with the narrative unfolding in such rich detail, neither of them heard Alexander Pope approach them until he spoke.
“Hello Miranda Quin, hello Detective Morgan. I didn’t realize it was you. Welcome to Beausoleil.” He pronounced the name in a mid-channel accommodation of both French and English: “Bo-slay.” “This is the Church of the Immaculate Conception — or was. I do try to keep it immaculate.” He chortled briefly at his own contrived wit. “It fell on hard times, you know. Welcome, welcome. I hadn’t been expecting you.”
“You invited me to pop in,” said Miranda, a little defensively. “So, here we are.”
“Of course. And you’ve brought your partner. Your other friend, Miss Naismith, she’s not with you? No, never mind. I’ve had a stream of visitors, more every week. It seems there’s some interest astir in the old place. How are you, Detective Morgan?”
“I’m fine, Mr. Pope. And you?”
“Enough of the formalities,” he said abruptly, unfolding his long arms and shaking Morgan’s hand vigorously. Then, leaning down and, with his hands clasping her shoulders, he kissed Miranda on both cheeks. “I really would like a bit of a break. May I show you around?” He loomed over them both, a gaunt figure in the unusually bright but indirect illumination, his frame almost skeletal under work clothes caked in plaster dust. His cheekbones pushed against his sallow skin and his eye sockets were starkly circumscribed by the marks left from his safety goggles. His face showed a stubble of three or four days neglect. Miranda judged that he had been working obsessively on his newest project and she felt a strong nurturing urge, wishing she could protect him from his own excesses.
“Please,” she said, “if we’re not interfering.”
“Tell us about the paintings,” asked Morgan, genuinely interested.
“Well, I have to proceed slowly. They are frescoes done by an anonymous master, one of those itinerant artists from the old country — I’d suspect in this case from Tuscany — making his way through the new world until domesticity took hold in one form or another and he became a common immigrant, like the rest of us, one generation or another in our past. His offspring probably became bakers or farmhands or lawyers. He was inspired, yes, and you’ll notice he was also very accomplished — trained in the best schools of Florence. And, fortunately for us, his work was covered over in haste. Relatively little damage was done. If anything, the work has been preserved. The plaster covering was smeared on, in some places it barely adheres, nothing more holding it in place than inertia and the will of the Lord.”
“Are you Roman Catholic?” asked Morgan, surprised by Pope’s turn of phrase.
“In spite of the papal surname, I am not. In fact, I am rather opposed to religion. I was speaking of the Lord ironically, Detective. I am sure whatever God might have dwelled in this building has long since taken refuge in Rome.”
“Yet,” observed Morgan, “there is something of the sacred remaining.”
“Perhaps the residue of God, Detective. The deity has fled but his influence remains. Gods do not die easily in the Western world.”
Miranda found his condescension irritating, although it didn’t seem to bother Morgan, perhaps because she wanted to like the man and Morgan was indifferent. She was fascinated by the quality of the frescoes, but Morgan’s interest had shifted to the story they revealed and it would take more than an overbearing interlocutor to keep him from finding how it unravelled.
“Are you doing the restoration for the Church?” Miranda asked.
“Absolutely not. This building no longer exists as far as the Church is concerned. A private enterprise — my mentors.”
“Art lovers, no doubt,” she said.
“It is a labour of love, yes it is.”
“So tell us, Alexander. What happened here?” Morgan asked.
They were walking about slowly, absorbing the atmosphere of what seemed, away from the murals, a vast, grey sepulchre robbed of its resident bones. Alexander Pope apologized for being abrupt with them, which struck them as odd, since he seemed quite relaxed. He explained that he had had interruptions not so welcome as theirs and his work was impeded by what he described as his natural inclination to be hospitable. All three laughed at that and they were friends.
“Beneath this floor,” he said, “lies the body of a saint. Her story is inscribed on the walls. She was never sanctified, canonized, or beatified and she died in disgrace. But for many she was a folk saint, the people’s saint, and to this day there are believers who come here in defiance of their Church and pray for her intervention with God. They have kept the place up for over a hundred years, carefully leaving no sign of their presence. That in itself is a miracle. If the Vatican requires three miracles as the prerequisites for sainthood, their quiet devotion is a good place to start.
“Imagine, people coming here to pray and pay homage. They are not supplicants, they are pilgrims. They ask for nothing. They come singly, sometimes in twos and threes. They come at all hours. Sometimes in the dead of night, when I’m working late, I’ll turn around and find someone just behind me, staring at the revelation of their venerable saint. Often, when I return in the mornings, I’ll find my instruments have been carefully cleaned, the floor underneath my scaffold meticulously dusted. In the daytime, they tend to stay clear of me, labouring quietly, especially the women, sweeping and scrubbing and dusting and polishing. The men sometimes pick up bits of debris. They seem more distant — they follow the women as helpers or stand by, passively observing. When I try to engage any of them in conversation, they are shy. They listen, but they do not ask questions. When I tell them something from my research about the church building itself or about Sister Marie Celeste, they nod knowingly. I’m not sure whether I offer nothing new, or merely nothing surprising.
“These pilgrims converge on this place from other worlds and treat it as home. I look forward to them, although at times I do find them intrusive. They are not a community, a secret society — as far as I can tell, they
