Cranwell dodged.
Severine lost her balance, fell to the floor. She hurled the knife at him.
It missed. Fell into the hole in the floor.
She looked at it for a long moment and then began to scream. Clapped her hands to her ears.
Cranwell knelt beside her.
“Leave me!”
He put a hand to her arm.
She twisted, picked up another knife, plunged it into her thigh. “Leave me alone!”
As Cranwell pried it from her grip, I ran to the lounge and grabbed the phone. Called emergency services.
By the time I got back to the bedroom, Cranwell had gathered all the sharp objects and deposited them on my bed. He’d also tied one of my scarves around Severine’s leg.
She was still on the floor, but she’d drawn her legs up to her chest and was rocking back and forth, staring off into space.
I knelt beside her, placed a hand on her back. “Severine? Do you want me to call your father?”
Her eyes never moved; she didn’t quit rocking, but she nodded her head.
“Who is he? Where does he live?”
I had to ask several times, but finally she told us. I dialed the operator, had her place the call. When her father came to the phone, I introduced myself, told him Severine needed him. Desperately.
“Severine? Severine who?”
“Your daughter.”
“I have no daughter.” He hung up before I could respond.
I could only stare at the phone, wondering what sort of parent would pretend a child didn’t exist.
When I walked back into the bedroom, Severine paused in her rocking. “He will not come, Frederique?”
I shook my head.
“He will never come.”
By the time the ambulance came, she was curled on the floor in a fetal position, humming scraps of a tune I recognized as a French nursery-school song. They took her to the regional hospital for evaluation.
Cranwell brought the leather rod down into the kitchen after Severine was taken away. He placed it in the middle of the island. We each took a stool, sat down, and stared at it. It was innocuous. Only a foot long, and two inches in diameter, it didn’t look like anything important. The leather had worn to a smooth patina, but the amethysts still glittered. And etched into the leather on one side was a curious-looking ‘N’ with a wavy line set on top of it.
After a while, I got up, opened a drawer, and took from it a butter knife. Then I reached for the case and gently probed for an opening. Finding a slit near the top, I pried it open.
Inside was a scroll. It was not very big. Perhaps the size of three normal sheets of paper set side-by-side.
Cranwell left his stool and came to stand beside me.
The lines of script were very small and very tight. As little as I knew about Near Eastern script, the letters looked to be formed by a disciplined hand. I looked at it from every angle and felt cheated when it revealed nothing to me.
Cranwell reached out to finger a corner. It looked like vellum. He rolled it up and then fit it back into the case.
The next day, I drove it to Rennes and entrusted it into the care of the University of Rennes II.
The next week I received an enthusiastic letter from M. Dubois. In collaboration with the University of Nantes, the scroll was to be analyzed and translated. He promised to keep me informed of the progress and invited me to visit at the first opportunity. At the very least, he wanted me to know the scroll was 1,900 years old and that its author was a Joseph or Yosef of Arimathea.
It turned out that Alix was probably a Jew. At least on her mother’s side. In the 1300s, one of the French kings ordered all Jews expelled from the realm. Many who lived near Brittany went to Spain or Italy; others went to what was then called the Kingdom of Provence. Some kept their faith, others converted and tried their best to disappear or blend in with the culture around them. After several generations, some even journeyed back to the northern parts of France.
It’s possible that Alix’s father never knew his first wife’s origins, but I suspect he did. Why would he otherwise have given the scroll to his daughter? Jewish identity is passed from mother to child. Alix’s father might not have been a Jew, but she would have inherited that identity from her mother.
If the scroll were determined to have been written in ancient Hebrew, how did Alix’s mother come to have it? It’s likely that the ancestors of Alix’s mother originally came from the northwestern region of France, the part that bordered the old Kingdom of Bretagne. It’s also possible that the legend is true: that Joseph of Arimathea did flee from Israel to Gaul after the death of Christ.
Julius Caesar conquered the region in the first century BC and Gaul was integrated into the Roman Empire. If Joseph did flee to Gaul, he may have brought the grail with him. If he brought the grail with him, he may have written about it. He was a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme Court. In order to have been a member of the Sanhedrin, he also had to have been a master student of the Torah and highly educated. There’s no disputing that he knew how to write.
Family heirlooms have been passed from generation to generation for hundreds of years. Why could the scroll not have been passed down through generations? Why could family legend not have imbued the scroll with enough importance that it was regarded as a treasure to be kept safe and protected?
Severine must have recognized the Hebrew letters Y and A from Alix’s description of the baton, the container of the scroll. In Hebrew, each letter is also assigned a numerical value. The initials of Joseph of Arimathea, or Yosef of Arimathea, would have been Yod, Aleph. The letters Yod and Aleph taken together add up to eleven.
Eleven symbolizes incompletion.
From her study of the journals, Severine knew that the twelve stones that decorated the lid were amethysts; Alix had said so herself. And from her studies of ancient texts, Severine knew that the amethyst represented the number twelve.
Twelve symbolizes completion.
If the scroll belonged to Yosef of Arimathea, as the initials indicate, why did he use twelve amethysts when his initials totaled eleven? Perhaps because the instructions inside would lead to completion. To the grail. To a symbolic communion with Jesus, where he again would join his disciples.
At least, that had probably been Severine’s reasoning.
Why my room?
The scroll, the books, and the journal were entrusted to Agnes. And Agnes was the maid of Alix’s mother. Why can we not assume that she also knew the value of the scroll? Otherwise, she would have put it in the trunk with Alix’s journals and books.
If she did not hide it with the books, what other place was left to her to hide it? Her room. The maid’s room and other servants’ rooms would have been on the top floor of the castle. Exactly in the present location of my bedroom.
Cranwell insists he never slept with Severine. He claims that they were discussing the journals when he got a horrible headache and asked Severine to leave so that he could sleep.
When asked, Severine verified that she had drugged him lightly, just enough for him to fall-and stay-asleep. The lacy black underwear had been a ruse, just in case I saw her leaving Cranwell’s room. She had determined that his room would have been the one Alix had used, and she had searched it. She searched it thoroughly enough to know that the scroll was not hidden in his room, so she decided to search mine.
And to think, to me that stone had just been a nuisance.
I had to admit that I was wrong about Cranwell and Severine. And I was completely wrong about Cranwell himself: He really did seem to have changed.
Does the scroll contain the secret of the grail? I leave it to the Universities of Nantes and Rennes to decide.
In the calm of the aftermath, Cranwell wrote, and I cooked.
