Hanging above their heads was a colony of white-bellied Natterer’s bats. A few took to flight, soaring through the arches, and darted crazily around the tower.
“I don’t love them.”
“I do,” she cried. “They’re adorable creatures!”
Inside the tower, he could barely stand without hitting his head. There was a view through the stone arches to neatly plowed fields and, farther away, the village church. Will hardly noticed the landscape. He was searching for something, anything, a hiding place. There was wood and masonry, nothing else.
He pushed at mortared blocks of stone with the heel of his hand, but everything within reach was solid and firm. Isabelle was already on the floor, on hands and knees, doing an inspection of the guano-covered planks. Suddenly, she stood up and started scraping at a spot with the heel of her boot, kicking up a small cloud of dried droppings. “I think there’s a carving on this plank, Will, look!”
He dropped down and had to agree there appeared to be a small, curved etching of sorts on one of the planks. He reached for his wallet and plucked out his VISA card, which he used like a trowel to scrape the plank clean. Clear as day, there was a round, five-petaled carving, an inch in length, inscribed into the wood.
“It’s a Tudor rose!” she said. “I can’t believe I never noticed it before.”
He gestured over his head. “It’s their fault.” He stomped hard on the plank, but it didn’t budge.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I’ll get the toolbox.” In a flash, she was down the stairs and he was alone with a few hundred bats. He warily looked up at them, hanging like Christmas ornaments, and prayed no one rang the bell.
When she returned with the toolbox, he hammered a thin, long screwdriver into the space between two boards and repeated the maneuver up and down the length of the inscribed plank, each time gazing upward to see if he was bothering the dormant mammals.
When he created enough separation, he drove the screwdriver all the way through and used it as a pry bar to jerkily raise the board a quarter inch. He slid a second, thicker screwdriver into the space and pushed down hard with his full weight. The plank creaked and popped up, coming away clean in his hand.
There was a space underneath, a foot deep, between the floor and the ceiling planking. He hated sticking his hand into a black space, especially with all the bats around, but he grimaced and plunged it in.
Right away, he felt glass against his fingertips.
He grabbed on to something smooth and cold and brought it into the light.
An old bottle.
The vessel was handblown into an onion shape, made of thick, dark green glass with a flat bottom and a rolled string lip. The mouth was sealed with wax. He held the glass up to the sun, but it was too opaque. He shook it. There was a faint knocking sound.
“There’s something inside it.”
“Go on,” she urged.
He sat down and wedged the bottle between his shoes and began lightly chipping away at the wax with one of the screwdrivers until he saw the top of a cork. He switched to a Phillips head and gently tapped the cork into the bottle with the hammer. It plopped to the bottom.
He turned the bottle over and shook it hard.
A roll of parchment, two sheets thick, fell onto his lap. The sheets were crisp and pristine.
“Here we go again,” he said, shaking his head. “This is where you come in.”
She unrolled the pages with trembling fingers and scanned the pages. One was handwritten, the other printed.
“It’s another letter to Edgar Cantwell,” she whispered. “And the title page from a very old and very famous book.”
“Which one?”
“The Prophecies of Nostradamus!”
Chapter 22
1532
Paris
Edgar Cantwell began to feel unwell while taking his evening meal at Madame Pucell’s boardinghouse. He had been vaguely aware of a soreness in his groin for a day or two but had thought nothing of it, a strain of the muscle, perhaps. He was eating a lamb chop and a plate of leeks when the chill hit him, flying through his body like a swarm of winged insects. His colleague, Richard Dudley, another English student, noticed the unpleasant look on his friend’s face and remarked on it.
“A chill, nothing more,” Edgar said, excusing himself from the table. He made it only to the parlor, where he was seized with an overwhelming nausea and threw up a copious amount of undigested food onto Madame’s chaise longue.
When the doctor visited him later that night in his bedroom at the top of the stairs, Edgar was doing poorly. He was pale and sweaty, and his pulse raced. The ache in his groin had progressed to exquisite pain, and his armpits too were sore. His nausea was unabated and he began to have paroxysms of dry coughing. The doctor lifted his sheet and directed his bony fingers straight for his groin folds where he palpated a cluster of firm lumps the size of hen’s eggs. When he pressed down on them, Edgar howled in pain.
He needed to see nothing more.
In the parlor, Dudley seized the doctor’s arm, and asked, “What is the matter with my friend?”
“You must leave this house,” the doctor barked. His eyes were wild and fearful. “All must leave this house.”
“Leave my house? Why?” the landlady exclaimed.
“It is the plague.”
Edgar was only scant months away from completing his studies and returning to England for good. He had grown to be a confident young man who compensated for his rodent-like looks with a quiet air of nobility and superiority. He had survived Montaigu, so he reckoned he could tackle anything in life. Three years earlier, he had transferred to the College de Sorbonne, and he had acquitted himself well there. His final examinations were looming, and if all went according to plan, he would return to his country with a prestigious baccalaureate in canon law. His father would be proud, his life would be set on a glittering course.
Now, he was alone and most probably dying in a fetid room in a small boardinghouse in this wretched, plague-infested city. He was too weak to drag himself off his soiled bed, and he barely had the strength to sip at a jug of bitter tea the doctor had left at his fleeting last visit. In his feverish and desperate state, he saw images running through his mind: a snarling boar that turned into the snarling face of a cane-wielding Bedier, a funeral procession of somber, black-robed men, his precious book, flung open with the name Edgar Cantwell, Mors, floating above the page, then the long, animated face of a reddish-haired young man with a long, reddish beard and crimson cheeks, so close, so real.
“Can you hear me, Monsieur Cantwell?”
He heard a voice, saw a full pair of lips moving.
“Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”
He felt a strong hand underneath his palm and exerted all his will to grasp it.
“Good.”
Edgar blinked in confusion into the man’s gentle, gray-green eyes.
“I met your doctor at the house of another victim. He told me he had an English student. I am fond of the English, and I am especially fond of students as I was one myself not so long ago. All the study and hard work, a pity to have it snuffed out by the plague, wouldn’t you agree? Also, I hear your father is a baron.”
The man moved away from the bedside and flung open Edgar’s window, muttering something about foul vapors. He was wearing the red robe of a doctor of medicine but to Edgar, he seemed a red angel, flying around the room, delivering a measure of hope.
