Smiling, she put her face to the window.
The lace curtains parted to reveal a young woman with blue braids wound shell-like above her ears, and matching lipstick. A punkette wearing a dirndl, no less.
The window frame cracked open. “Juno’s working in back.” She jerked her thumb. The window slammed shut, and there was the sound of a lock tumbling.
Aimee pushed open the door, stepped over the frame into a courtyard lined with potted plants. Miniature bonsai trees in animal shapes—a rabbit, a bird. Whimsical.
Keeping her heeled boots out of the cracks between the worn pavers, she reached the atelier in the rear. On the wall were framed certificates from the Artisan Glassmaker Association, a notice of completed apprenticeship to a master glass-maker. Both with the names Juno Braud.
She’d come to the right man.
Hot molten-metal smells filled the atelier. Bundled lead rods stood upright like a forest against the glass walls. A man in overalls worked copper foil along the edges of a piece of blue glass using a soldering iron.
“Monsieur Juno?”
A wayward brown hair hung over a work mask that covered half his face. He looked young. “Attends,” came the muffled reply.
He set the soldering iron down on a brick, switched off the generator box. “
“Sorry to bother you,” she said, focusing on his eyes. “My cousin Sebastien’s in the atelier next to yours.”
He tapped his thick fingers. “So?”
Impatient. She’d make this quick. “He suggested you could help me. Those for sale?” She gestured to a shelf of shimmering indigo-blue glass boxes.
“Rejects.”
“But they’re beautiful.”
“Imperfections, the glass bubbled …” He paused, a nervous swipe of his hand over his mouth. “But that’s not why you’re bothering me.”
She gave what she hoped he took for an enthralled gaze. “I need your expertise for five minutes. And I’ll buy those.” She pulled out the copy she’d made of the Latin alchemical formula. The black-and-white encrypted copy. “Could you tell me about this, besides the fact that it’s incomplete?”
“Where did you get this?”
She could go two ways here: offer some version of the truth, or coax him and see how far she got.
“Does it matter?” she leaned forward. “Is it valuable?”
“Would you ask me if it weren’t?” He stared at it. “It’s medieval symbols, an archaic formula, I’d have to guess.”
“Meaning it’s a formula for a stained-glass window in a cathedral?”
“Did I say that?” For a moment she thought she’d lost him.
But he sat down on a battered stool, ran his fingers over the paper. Nodded. “The Revolution disbanded guilds in 1791. The guild emblem’s unique.”
“Meaning?”
“This guild, deTheodric, was one of the oldest, going back to the thirteenth, fourteenth century. They were known for working with the Templars. Not much survives of their work now, though,” he said sadly.
What did the Templars have to do with anything, she wondered. But Samour lived in what had been the Knights’ old enclave.
“But why the Templars?”
“Stained glass was for cathedrals and monasteries.” He ran his fingers over a warm metal frame. “Apart from the aristocracy, tell me who else financed cathedral building? Promoted and used the artisans, the trades and the guilds?”
She figured it was a rhetorical question.
“The Templars ran it all. That’s until the Pope outlawed the Templars and took over their coffers.” He paused. “Like I said, little’s left of deTheodric’s work. They went the way of the Templars in 1311. Disbanded or executed, some accounts say.”
But a connection had to exist. “It’s your metier, what do you think?”
“There were stories,” he said, his words slow. A shrug. “But all glass artisans hear them.”
“Like what?”
He let out a puff of air. “Well, all trades and guilds were regulated at the time. Statutes and regulations in force until the Revolution. The powerful guilds paid the most tax and kept their craft secrets. Think of the windows at Chartres, no one’s replicated their technique.” He shook his head in rueful respect. “Or Abbe Suger, who developed that resonant blue ‘sapphire glass’ used at Saint-Denis.”
“But wouldn’t the techniques be passed down by word of mouth?”
“Or they died with the alchemists,” he said. “Like so many things, secrets lost, shrouded in time. Who knows?”
Something tugged in her mind.
“Art can happen by mistake,” he continued, a distant look in his eye.” In the thirteenth century, for example, a monk dropped his silver button into the glass and created indigo for the first time. We only found this out two hundred years ago. This discovery gave us a chance to make the indigo the hue guilds used before the Revolution in 1791.”
She heard other things in his voice now. A quiet excitement, almost awe. Any self-consciousness about his cleft palate had disappeared.
“For me it’s expression, glass gives form to beauty,” he said. “A painting with light. Not like the one- dimensional painting, where light shines on it. With glass, the light shines through.”
A purist, she thought, immersed in his trade.
He gestured to the diagram and its rows of Latin. “Of course, as journeymen we visited this guild’s masterpiece, a church window, the only one left of their work.”
Her pulse raced. “But you said this guild collapsed with the Templars.”
“Rumors handed down through time hint at conspiracies, plots …”
She straightened up. “Secret lost formulas?”
“So you think you’ve got one here, eh?”
“You tell me.”
He grinned. “But even so, it’s incomplete. Worthless.”
She pulled several hundred-franc bills from her wallet. “Say the other part of the formula were discovered. How valuable would it be?”
“More than a historical treasure.” His eyes gleamed. “Think of modern stained-glass windows made from an original ancient formula. The enhancement of cathedral restoration techniques.”
Ancient techniques for new windows in old cathedrals—interesting—but not sexy enough. Or worth murder. There was more, she knew it in her bones.
“Hasn’t anyone analyzed the components of this guild’s masterpiece?”
“A hundred feet up in the nave? Any exploration would damage the glass. It’s protected under historic preservation.”
Her mind went back to the Templars, the end of the guild. An angle to explain the questions swirling in her mind. “What if this powerful guild owed the Templars for some reason? The Templars demanded their secret formulas as payment. After their downfall the formula was lost and with it the guild’s influence?”
“Everything’s possible.”
“This window’s far away?” She imagined a long trip to Chartres or to a countryside cathedral hours away.
“You call Saint Nicholas des Champs far?”
Six blocks away and across from the Musee des Arts et Metiers. A block from where Pascal spent his youth.
