The Book of Love (9 page)

The chamber appeared perfectly still and no one moved as the leader flipped through the pages of the coveted book.

They were blank.

As he turned to the final page, there was one single Latin word scrawled across the parchment. It said simply
INLEX.

The leader of the hooded men threw the book with apparent disgust at the henchman who had acquired it. While Maureen did not know what
INLEX
meant, it was clear that this was not what any of these men had expected.

The little girl’s ubiquitous giggle returned Maureen’s attention to her surroundings. The child stood before her exactly as she had earlier that day, hands behind her back. With another sweet smile, she handed Maureen a canvas bag with a large book.

“It is not what you think it is.”

And she laughed as she ran off around the corner, leaving Maureen to wonder just exactly what her attacker had stolen from her.

The first light of day broke through the window of Maureen and Tammy’s monastic cell. Maureen rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and looked over to where her friend was still deeply dozing. After the dream last night, she had gotten up long enough to jot down her notes of the experience, focusing on the word
INLEX
. If it was a Latin word, then
she was in the right place. Every brother in Orval would have a classical education and should be able to translate a single word for her.

She threw on her clothes and went in search of the helpful Brother Marco, whom she found preparing the dining hall for breakfast.

“Inlex?”
He gazed in thought for a moment. “Definitely Latin, but a strange word. Follow me to the library and we’ll look it up to be certain.”

Maureen accompanied the monk into a marvelous room filled with aged tomes. She was grateful that he hadn’t asked her any questions about why she needed the meaning of this particular word. He was simply gracious and accommodating to his guest. Removing a Latin dictionary from one of the shelves, Brother Marco flipped through it until he found what he was looking for.

“Here we are.
Inlex.
It means decoy. A ruse or a lure. Does that help?”

Did it ever. Maureen resisted the urge to grab him and kiss him on the cheek. She thanked him politely instead and hurried back to the room to wake up Tammy.

“It was a decoy, Tammy!” Maureen burst through the door of their little cell, waking Tammy with her exuberance.

“What?” Tammy sat up, confused.

“The book. The book that was stolen from us yesterday. It wasn’t the real one, it was…”

Maureen stopped. In her excitement to tell Tammy about the meaning of
inlex
, she had nearly missed it. Sitting in the middle of her unmade bed was a canvas bag.

“What’s that?” Tammy was waking up now. “And…dare I ask where it came from?”

Maureen’s heart was pounding as she shook her head. Where indeed, and from whom? Who was reading her dreams and sending her mysterious heretical relics? Who had access to the very bed that she
spent the night in, next to her sleeping friend? And then there was a most disturbing question: Who had robbed them at gunpoint, and what was he looking for?

She walked to the bed and picked up the sack. Opening it, she removed the very heavy book contained within. It was different from the stolen tome in that the crimson leather was more weathered and cracked, and it was far weightier. This one looked truly ancient, as if it had been hidden away for a thousand years. Unlike the decoy book, this one did not have a strap or a lock on it, and Maureen opened it very gently. There were hundreds of parchment pages bound within it, and an exacting Latin script filled them all. The first page was emblazoned with an illuminated emblem, one that Maureen had come to recognize recently. It was the Latin cross with the strange signature:

Matilda, by the Grace of God Who Is.

Florenville, Belgium
present day

“
T
hat whore Matilda eludes me again!”

The leader of the hooded men growled his outrage as he threw the decoy book across the hidden basement room in a fit of uncontrolled rage.

One of the brothers responded, venturing into troubled waters. “How can you be so certain that it is Matilda’s book that was to be delivered to the Paschal woman?”

The elder hissed. “You dare to question me? Is there a man among you who would challenge my knowledge or my authority on this matter?”

When silence met the question, the leader continued his tirade. “Because of the painstaking and tireless efforts of our brothers through history, we have successfully eradicated all known references to the Book of Love in writing. There is no evidence that it ever existed outside the fantasies of dead heretics. During the Inquisition, we confiscated every known document that alluded to it and destroyed them—the documents and the heretics. There is only one manuscript that has escaped our grasp in all of these centuries, and that is…Matilda’s.”

He spat her name, his voice dripping venom. All the women in history who claimed the title of prophetess infuriated him. But none more than the hated countess of Canossa, who had evaded attempts to silence her for almost a thousand years.

The young henchman who had attacked Maureen and Tammy stepped forward. “What would you like me to do, Your Holiness?”

His leader snarled the command. “Go to the source. Find Destino.”

Of all the male followers, only the blessed Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were present on the hill of Golgotha on the Black Day of the Skull. It was they who extracted the nails and they who removed our Lord from the cross. In the presence of the women, they carried the body of their messiah on a stretcher made of linen. Their destination was a nearby tomb that had been commissioned for the family of Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph provided this resting place out of both reverence and kinship as Jesus was not only his teacher but also his nephew by blood.

Upon arrival in the sepulcher, Maria Magdalena began to wash the wounds of her beloved, praying fervently over his body all the while. She worked tirelessly to apply salves and ointments, instructing everyone else in the cramped tomb to pray along with her, to pray with all their might that their heavenly father would restore his son to them. And pray they did, but none as passionately as Maria Magdalena. Even with sweat and grime and blood smeared over her face, she had the dignity and presence of a queen. She was pale beneath it all, faint from exhaustion and grief, but she would not cease her ministrations, nor her prayers, except to check on the health and welfare of the others in the tomb. That she had the capacity to worry about all of them at such a time was most emblematic of her remarkable compassion.

Maria Magdalena worked through the night while the others slept, never losing faith that God would restore their messiah to them. But his body remained lifeless and there was no sign of hope within the sepulcher. When the first rays of sun filtered in on that Saturday morning, she wrapped the body of her beloved in the burial cloth. The symbolism of this act—the finality of it, the necessary surrender—overwhelmed her. She collapsed to the floor, still clutching the alabaster jar that held the healing ointments.

The men carried Madonna Magdalena, on the same linen stretcher that had held Jesus the day before, slowly and gingerly to the estate of Joseph of Arimathea. Luke, the blessed doctor, attended her and he was worried. Magdalena’s breathing was shallow, and beyond everything else she had endured, she was also heavy with child. She would have to be watched carefully. Now their prayers must be for her. When she was settled comfortably in a bed with her women around her, the men took their leave and met in Joseph’s private chambers.

The purity of Maria’s love and devotion to Jesus moved all three men through the searing pain of their grief. She helped them to realize that the loss of their messiah did not have to equate with the loss of his message. Maria Magdalena had mastered and embodied the teachings of the Way, proving through her actions that love was stronger than death. She lived this truth every day of her existence. Together, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and Luke pledged to protect her and to support her and the holy teachings in every way possible for the rest of her life, her children’s lives, and beyond. On that Holy Saturday, a bond was formed as the three men blended their blood and faith together in an unbreakable oath. They formed an alliance, one that would come to be known to the people as the Order of the Holy Sepulcher.

The following morning, when the risen Jesus announced his resurrection to Madonna Magdalena, the three men knew they had taken an appropriate vow. All earthly remains of the master had disappeared.

The men believed that this momentous occasion proved that Magdalena was his chosen successor to continue the teachings of the Way. Perhaps her extraordinary ministrations in the tomb had somehow aided in the holy and utterly awe-inspiring process of resurrection. Could it be that the pure power of love was all that was needed to create such a miracle? Who could know for sure? Such things were a matter of faith, and each man must come to his own understanding of God in his own way and in his own time.

But these men were unique witnesses. The traditions and understandings that they would pass on to subsequent generations were based on their own experiences combined with the pure teachings of Jesus himself. They were the blessed founders of our Order.

T
HE FOUNDATION OF THE
O
RDER OF THE
H
OLY
S
EPULCHER,
AS TOLD IN THE
L
IBRO
R
OSSO

Rome
present day

P
ANTHEON
S
QUARE
, the Piazza della Rotonda, is one of the iconic tourist sites in Rome, dominated on one end as it is by the exquisitely domed ancient structure for which it is named. Over the course of two thousand years the Pantheon evolved as a place of worship, first by the Roman pagans and then by the devout followers of Catholicism. And while it had been consecrated to a number of gods through time, the feminine curvature of the magnificent dome for which it is justly famous was a tribute to the ancient goddesses.

Divine female energy flows through the piazza. The center of Pantheon Square contains one of Rome’s great fountains, this one dominated by a 3,300-year-old Egyptian obelisk made of red granite. The monument was brought to Rome from Heliopolis to grace a temple of Isis, in honor of the goddess who was the mother of all life.

Maureen’s hotel room overlooked this square, and it was at this fountain that she stared from her window while she waited for Peter to arrive with a verdict on the mysterious red book. She had been here for two days since leaving Orval. Tammy had stayed in Belgium, where Roland came to claim her so she would not have to make the long drive back to the Languedoc alone following her ordeal. She would be with Roland and Bérenger now. Maureen sighed, thinking of her unfinished reunion with Bérenger. She’d been a fool to dread it so and put it off for as long as she had, and she wondered if his patience with her and her wanderings was wearing thin.

From her window now, she spotted Peter crossing the square, briefcase in hand.

“Buona sera,”
she called out to him, waving vigorously, then went downstairs to greet him at the elevator. Her heart was in her throat now. She could tell by the look on his face that their discovery was indeed an important one, but they had agreed for safety’s sake not to discuss it over the phone or in public.

As they entered the elevator on the way to Maureen’s room, Peter
asked her, “Remember what the little girl said to you in the dream? It is not what you think it is?”

Maureen nodded. “It’s not the Book of Love.”

“No, it’s not. But it appears to contain elements of the Book of Love, and certainly a number of references to it.”

Maureen was digesting this, trying not to be disappointed as she opened the door to her room. She had to trust the process, and she knew better than to think the Book of Love would simply fall into her lap. Such a treasure must be earned.

Peter smiled at her as he opened his briefcase and extracted a series of Xerox copies of the first set of parchment pages, and his preliminary translations of them.

“Maureen Paschal, meet Matilda of Tuscany. What we have here is a previously undiscovered version of her life story, one written in her own hand.”

Maureen squealed with delight, no longer disappointed. Her passion for the role of women in history was one of the driving forces in her life. To discover something of this magnitude was true treasure, worth more than gold.

“Apparently, this is a family tradition,” Maureen observed as she scanned the pages. “We’re making quite a hobby out of discovering bloodline autobiographies.”

“Don’t laugh. I think it literally is a family tradition, and an important one. It ultimately became necessary for certain high-ranking members of the bloodline to set the record straight because they were aware that the truth was going to die if they didn’t. And this is exactly what happened to Matilda, it seems. As you know, for centuries the ‘heretics’ didn’t commit anything to writing because it was too dangerous. But Matilda wasn’t just any heretic. She was a fearless one, and clearly a woman with a profound devotion to her spiritual mission, which was to preserve the truth. There is a biography of her in the Vatican archives, written by a monk called Donizone who was her contemporary and claimed to be her personal biographer. But he was a Benedictine and recorded history with an agenda, as all monks of his
order did, and some of this biography is suspect. It reads like a polished PR piece straight from Rome. So ultimately I think she made a major decision to commit her own life to paper in her own hand as she was by all accounts incredibly well educated. Donizone refers to her as
docta
, which means exceptionally learned. And it wasn’t a term used loosely, and never for a woman. So she was very capable of recording her own life, with her perspective and feelings. But…it’s highly controversial, to say the least.”

“You have read the entire document?”

Peter shook his head. “Enough to know that what awaits us could be earth-shattering, but not enough to be able to tell you definitively who she was or what she had in her possession.”

“But she talks about the Book of Love?”

Peter nodded. “She does.”

Maureen had a thousand questions and began to rattle them off at Peter, who laughed. “I’ll let Matilda tell you about it in her own words. Ready?”

Peter picked up the translations and began to read.

Mantua, Italy
1052

“N
OT THAT STORY
, Isobel! Tell me the other story. The one about the labyrinth.”

Though she was six years old and uncommonly petite, Matilda possessed a will that completely belied her physical appearance. She stamped a tiny foot and tossed her mass of red hair imperiously as she continued to give orders to her nurse. “You know I love that story the most. I don’t want to hear any others. But stop before the bad part. I hate the bad part.”

As the tiny countess of Canossa made a face to punctuate her distaste for the bad part, the lovely Lady Isobel of Lucca nodded patiently
at her charge. Her delicate hands had wiped the birthing blood from this child’s face when she was a mere five seconds old, then had swaddled and cradled the baby as her own. Matilda had been in Isobel’s care since that early spring evening when the fiery infant drew her first bold breath and shrieked her arrival to the Tuscan countryside. For her father’s people, descended from the fierce Lombard warriors of northern Italy, the birth of a child on the vernal equinox was a particular blessing from God. The cry of this babe was so hearty that her father, waiting with his men in a neighboring courtyard, was certain he had been given a son blessed by a benevolent birth. Duke Bonifacio was only temporarily disappointed that the sanctified child was female. As Matilda grew and began to take on the characteristics of her noble parents—the exquisite features and grace of her slender mother, combined with the determination and strength of her father—she rapidly became the precious and adored daughter of the most terrifying man in Italy.

“Why do you love that story so, Tilda? I should think it would bore you by now as you know it by heart. And I have so many others to tell you.”

“Well, it does not bore me. So start from the beginning.” It was an order.

Isobel smiled benignly but did not begin the story, causing Matilda to look momentarily rebellious before caving in.

“
Please
, Isobel. Please will you tell me my favorite story? I shall play the part of Princess Ariadne and spin my magical threads while you tell it. And I did say please.”

“Indeed you did, but I should not have to beg you for manners, Matilda. Your good mother is descended from the noblest household in the world, a direct descendant of the blessed Charlemagne himself, and yet she does not behave so, even to the servants who clean her chamber pot. Have you ever seen her snap orders thus? No, you have not and you will not. And outside of your good father, who has his own reasons, you won’t see any true native of Lucca behaving thus, either. It is not our way, child. It is not
the
Way.”

Matilda was momentarily chastised. Her imperious impulses were
born of her natural high spirits combined with her father’s influence. For while the Lady Beatrice was indeed a most gentle and highborn woman, Bonifacio was pure Tuscan soldier. Her father’s lineage combined descent from the sanctified and holy city of Lucca with the fierce Lombard warrior blood that had integrated the house of Tuscany. Where Beatrice was the graceful and cultured product of the German royal family, Bonifacio was the often ruthless and always power-mad feudal lord; he was far more a son of his warlike Lombardi blood than of his spiritual Lucchesi birth. The Lombards had invaded Italy in the sixth century, wreaking havoc on what was left of a crumbling Roman Empire. Their influence gave to the region of northern Italy the name that would one day take permanent hold: Lombardy.