The Beautiful Mystery (11 page)

Please, dear Lord
, Beauvoir prayed,
let this be over
.

Then they stood, and started another chant.

Tabernac,
thought Beauvoir, getting to his feet. Beside him, the Chief was also standing, and resting his large hands on the wooden pew in front. His right hand trembled slightly. It was subtle, barely there, but in a man so still, so self-possessed, it was remarkable. Impossible to miss. The Chief didn’t bother to hide the tremor. But Beauvoir noticed Captain Charbonneau glancing at the Chief. And the tell-tale tremble.

And Beauvoir wondered if he knew the tale it told.

He wanted to take him aside and scold Charbonneau for staring. He wanted to make it clear that slight quiver wasn’t a sign of weakness. Just the opposite.

But he didn’t. Taking his cue from Gamache, he said nothing.

“Jean-Guy,” Gamache whispered, his eyes straight ahead, never leaving the monks, “Frère Mathieu was the choir director, right?”

“Oui.”

“So who’s directing them now?”

Beauvoir was quiet for a moment. Now, instead of just biding his time while this interminable, intolerable, tedious chanting droned on and on, he started to pay attention.

There was an obvious empty spot on the benches. Directly across from the abbot.

That must have been where the man now laid at their feet had stood, and sat, had bowed and prayed. And led the choir in these dull chants.

Beauvoir had earlier amused himself by wondering if the prior had possibly done it to himself. Stoned himself to death rather than have to live through yet another mind-numbing mass.

It was all the Inspector could do to not run shrieking into one of the stone columns, hoping to knock himself out.

But now he had a puzzle to occupy his active mind.

It was a good question.

Who was leading this choir of men, now that their director was dead?

“Maybe no one is,” he whispered, after studying the monks for a minute or two. “They must know the songs by heart. Don’t they do the same ones over and over?”

They sure sounded the same to him.

Gamache shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think they change from mass to mass and from day to day. Feast days, saints’ days, that sort of thing.”

“Don’t you mean, et cetera?”

Beauvoir saw the Chief smile slightly and shoot him a glance.

“And so on,” said Gamache. “Ad infinitum.”

“That’s better.” Beauvoir paused before whispering, “Do you know what you’re talking about?”

“I know a little, but not much,” admitted the Chief. “I know enough about choirs to know they don’t direct themselves, any more than a symphony orchestra can conduct itself, no matter how often they perform a work. They still need their leader.”

“Isn’t the abbot their leader?” asked Beauvoir, watching Dom Philippe.

The Chief also watched the tall, slender man. Who really led these monks? both men wondered, as they bowed and sat again. Who was leading them now?

*   *   *

The Angelus bell rang out, its deep, rich notes pealing over the trees and across the lake.

Vespers was over. The monks bowed to the crucifix and filed back off the altar while Gamache and the others stood in their pew and watched.

“Should I get the key from that young monk?” Beauvoir waved to Frère Luc, who was leaving the altar.

“In a moment, Jean-Guy.”

“But the boatman?”

“If he hasn’t left by now, he’ll still be waiting.”

“How d’you know?”

“Because he’ll be curious,” said Gamache, studying the monks. “Wouldn’t you wait?”

They watched the monks leave the altar and pool on either side of the church.
Yes,
thought Beauvoir, shooting a glance at the Chief,
I’d wait
.

With their hoods down and heads up Gamache could see their faces. Some looked as though they’d been crying, some looked wary, some weary and anxious. Some just looked interested. As though they were watching a play.

It was difficult for Gamache to trust what he was sensing from these men. So many strong emotions masqueraded as something else. Anxiety could look like guilt. Relief could look like amusement. Grief, deep-felt and inconsolable, often looked like nothing at all. The deepest passions could appear dispassionate, the face a smooth plain while something mammoth roiled away underneath.

The Chief scanned the faces, and came back to two.

The young gatekeeper, who’d met them at the dock. Frère Luc. Gamache could see the large key dangling from the rope about his waist.

Luc looked the most blank. And yet, when they’d first met him, he’d clearly been very upset.

Then Gamache turned his gaze on the abbot’s glum secretary. Brother Simon.

Sadness. Waves of it washed off the man.

Not guilt, not sorrow, not wrath or mourning. Not
irae
or
illa
.

But pure sadness.

Brother Simon was staring at the altar. At the two men still there.

The prior. And the abbot.

Who was this profound sadness for? Which man? Or, the Chief wondered, maybe it was for the monastery itself. Sadness that Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups had lost more than a man. It had lost its way.

Dom Philippe paused before the large wooden cross and bowed deeply. He was alone now, on the raised altar. Except for the body of his prior. His friend.

The abbot held his bow.

Was it longer, Gamache wondered, than usual? Was the effort of getting back up, of turning around, of facing the evening, the next day, the next year, the rest of life too much? Was the gravity too much?

Slowly the abbot raised himself to a standing position. He even seemed to square his shoulders, standing as tall as he could.

Then he turned and saw something he’d never seen before.

People in the pews.

The abbot had no idea why there were even pews in the Blessed Chapel. They’d been there when he’d arrived, forty years earlier, and they’d be there long after he was buried.

He’d never questioned why a cloistered order needed pews.

In his pocket Dom Philippe felt the rosary beads, his fingers running over them without conscious thought. They offered a comfort that he also never questioned.

“Chief Inspector,” he said as he stepped off the altar and approached the men.

“Dom Philippe.” Gamache bowed slightly. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to take him away now.” Gamache gestured toward the prior, then turned and nodded to Beauvoir.

“I understand,” said Dom Philippe, though he privately realized he understood none of this. “Follow me.”

Dom Philippe signaled Frère Luc, who hurried over, and the three men made for the corridor that led to the locked door. Beauvoir and Captain Charbonneau followed, carrying the stretcher with Frère Mathieu.

Beauvoir heard something behind him, a shuffling, and looked.

The monks had formed two rows and were following them like a long, black tail.

“We tried to find you earlier,
Père Abbé,
” said the Chief, “but couldn’t. Where were you?”

“In Chapter.”

“And where is Chapter?”

“It’s both a place and an event, Chief Inspector. The room is just over there,” the abbot waved toward the wall of the Blessed Chapel, just as they walked through the door and into the long corridor.

“I saw you coming out of there,” said Gamache, “but when we looked earlier we didn’t find a door.”

“No. It’s behind a plaque commemorating Saint Gilbert.”

“It’s a hidden door?”

The abbot, even in profile, looked puzzled and a little surprised by the question.

“Not from us,” he finally said. “Everyone knows it’s there. It’s no secret.”

“Then why not just have a door?”

“Because anyone who needs to know about it does,” he said, not looking at Gamache, but looking toward the closed door ahead of them. “And anyone who doesn’t need to know should not find it.”

“So it is meant to be hidden,” said Gamache, pressing the point.

“The option is meant to be there,” admitted the abbot. They’d arrived at the locked door to the outside world. He finally turned to look directly at Gamache. “If we need to hide, the room exists.”

“But why would you need to hide?”

The abbot smiled a little. It was just this side of condescending. “I’d have thought you of all people would know why, Chief Inspector. It’s because the world is not always kind. We all need a safe place, sometimes.”

“And yet the threat, finally, didn’t come from the world,” said Gamache.

“True.”

Gamache considered for a moment. “So you concealed the door to your Chapter room in the wall of the chapel?”

“I didn’t put it there. All this was done long before I came. The men who built the monastery did it. It was a different time. A brutal time. When monks really did need to hide.”

Gamache nodded, and looked at the thick wooden door in front of them. The gateway to the outside world. That was still locked, even after the passage of centuries.

He knew the abbot was right. Back when the massive tree was cut down for this door, hundreds of years ago, it wasn’t tradition but necessity that turned the key in the lock. The Reformation, the Inquisition, the internecine battles. It was a dangerous time to be a Catholic. And, as with recent events, the threat often came from within.

And so, in Europe priest’s holes were built into homes. Tunnels dug for escape.

Some had escaped so far they popped up in the New World. And even that wasn’t far enough. The Gilbertines had gone even further. They disappeared into the blank spot on the map.

Vanished.

To reappear more than three hundred years later. On the radio.

The voices of an order everyone had thought was extinct were heard first by a few, then by hundreds, then by thousands and hundreds of thousands. Then, thanks to the Internet, finally millions of people listened to the odd little recording.

Of monks chanting.

The recording had become a sensation. Suddenly their Gregorian chants were everywhere.
De rigueur
. Deemed a “must listen” by the intelligentsia, by the cognoscenti, and finally, by the masses.

While their voices were everywhere, the monks themselves were nowhere to be seen. Eventually they’d been found. Gamache remembered his own astonishment when it was discovered where the monks lived. He’d assumed it was some remote hilltop in Italy or France or Spain. Some tiny, ancient, crumbling monastery. But no. The recording was made by an order of monks living right there, in Québec. And it wasn’t just any order. The Trappists, the Benedictines, the Dominicans. No. Their discovery seemed to astonish even the Catholic Church. The recording had been made by an order of monks the Church seemed to think had died out. The Gilbertines.

But there they were, in the wilderness, on the shores of this far-flung lake. Very much alive, and singing chants so ancient and so beautiful they awakened something primal in millions worldwide.

The world had come calling. Some curious. Some desperate for the peace these men seemed to have found. But this “gate,” made from trees felled hundreds of years ago, held firm. It did not open for strangers.

Until today.

It had opened to let them in, and now it was about to open again, to let them out.

The
portier
came forward, the large black key in his hand. At a small sign from the abbot he inserted it in the lock. It turned easily, and the door swung open.

Through the rectangle the men saw the setting sun, its reds and oranges reflected in the calm, fresh lake. The forests now were dark, and birds swooped low over the water, calling to each other.

But by far the most glorious sight was the oil-stained boatman, smoking a cigarette and sitting on the dock. Fishing.

He waved as the door swung open, and the Chief Inspector waved back. Then the boatman struggled to his feet, his considerable bottom all but mooning the monks. Gamache motioned Beauvoir and Charbonneau, with the body, to leave first. Then he and the abbot followed them to the dock.

The rest of the monks stayed inside, clustered around the open door. Craning to see out.

The abbot tipped his head to the red-streaked sky and closed his eyes. Not in prayer, Gamache thought, but in a sort of bliss. Enjoying the meager light on his pale face. Enjoying the pine-scented air. Enjoying his feet on the uneven, unpredictable ground.

Then his eyes opened.

“Thank you for not interrupting Vespers,” he said, not looking at Gamache, but continuing to soak in the natural world around him.

“You’re welcome.”

They took a few more steps.

“Thank you too for bringing Mathieu to the altar.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I don’t know if you realized it, but it gave us a chance to offer special prayers. For the dead.”

“I wasn’t sure,” admitted the Chief Inspector, also looking ahead at the mirror lake. “But I thought I heard
Dies irae
.”

The abbot nodded, “And
Dies illa
.”

Day of wrath. Day of mourning.

“Are the monks mourning?” asked Gamache. Their gait had slowed almost to a halt.

The Chief had expected an immediate answer, a shocked reply. But instead the abbot seemed to consider.

“Mathieu wasn’t always an easy man.” He smiled a little as he spoke. “No one is, I suppose. One thing we learn early when committing to a monastic life is that we have to accept each other.”

“And what happens if you don’t?”

The abbot paused again. It had been a simple question, but Gamache could see the answer wasn’t simple.

“That can be very bad,” said the abbot. He didn’t meet Gamache’s eyes. “It happens. But we learn to set aside our own feelings for the greater good. We learn to get along.”

“But not necessarily to like each other,” said Gamache. It wasn’t a question. He knew the Sûreté was much the same. There were a few colleagues he didn’t like, and he knew the feeling was mutual. Indeed, “didn’t like” was a euphemism. The feeling had gone from disagreement, to dislike, to distrust. And was growing still. It had settled, for now, on mutual loathing. Gamache didn’t know where it would stop, but he could imagine. The fact these people were his superiors made it simply more uncomfortable. It meant, at least for now, they had to figure out how to exist together. Either that, or tear each other and the service apart. And Gamache, as he tilted his own face to the glorious sunset, knew that was a possibility. In the calm of the early evening it seemed far away, but he knew this peaceful time wouldn’t last. Night was coming. And it was a fool who met it unprepared.