Chief Inspector Gamache woke up. It was still dark, and not even the predawn birds were singing. His bed was warm around his body, but if he moved his legs even a millimeter they were in frigid territory.
His nose felt chilled. But the rest of him was toasty warm.
He checked the time.
Ten past four.
Had something awoken him? Some sound?
He lay there, listening. Imagining the monks in their tiny cells, all around him. Like bees in a honeycomb.
Were they asleep? Or was at least one of them awake? Lying only feet from Gamache. Not allowed to sleep. The noise too great in his head. The sounds and sights of a murder too disturbing.
For one of the monks, there would almost certainly never again be a quiet night’s sleep.
Unless …
Gamache sat up in bed. He knew only two things could give a killer a good night’s sleep. If he had no conscience. Or if he had a conscience, and that conscience had been an accomplice. Whispering to the killer, giving him the idea.
How could a man, a monk, convince himself that murder wasn’t a crime, and wasn’t even a sin? How could he be asleep, while the Chief Inspector was awake? There was only one answer. If this was a justified death.
An Old Testament death.
By stoning.
An eye for an eye.
Perhaps the murderer had believed he was doing the right thing. If not in the eyes of man, then in the eyes of God. Perhaps that was the tension Gamache was feeling in the abbey. Not that a murder had happened, but that the police might discover who did it.
Over dinner, that monk had accused the abbot of poor judgment. Not in failing to prevent a murder, but in calling in the S?reté. Was there both a vow and a conspiracy of silence?
The Chief Inspector was wide awake now. Alert.
He swung his legs out of bed and found his slippers, then putting on his dressing gown he grabbed a flashlight and reading glasses and left his cell. He paused for a moment in the middle of the long corridor. Looking this way and that. Keeping the flashlight off.
The hall was lined with doors on either side, each into a cell. No light shone under the cracks. And no sound escaped either.
It was dark and silent.
Gamache had been in fun houses with his kids, many times. Seen the hall of distorted mirrors, seen the optical illusions, where a room appeared tilted but wasn’t. He’d also been in those deprivation rooms in the fun houses, where neither light nor sound penetrated.
He remembered Annie holding tight to his hand, and Daniel, invisible in the dark, calling for his daddy, until Gamache had found his little boy and held him. That, more than any of the other fun house effects, had terrified his children and they’d clung to him until he’d gotten them out.
That’s what the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups felt like. A place of distortion and even deprivation. Of great silence and greater darkness. Where whispers became shouts. Where monks murdered, and the natural world was locked out, as though it was at fault.
The brothers had lived in the abbey so long they’d grown used to it. Accepted the distortion as normal.
The Chief took a deep breath and cautioned himself. It was equally possible he was imagining things, allowing the darkness and silence to get under his skin. It was completely possible the monks weren’t the ones with the distorted perception, but that he was.
After a moment Gamache grew used to the lack of light and sight and sounds.
It’s not threatening, he said to himself as he made his way toward the Blessed Chapel. It’s not threatening. It’s just extreme peace.
He smiled at the thought. Had peace and quiet become so rare that when finally found they could be mistaken for something grotesque and unnatural? It would appear so.
The Chief felt along the stone wall until he reached the door into the Blessed Chapel. He opened it, then gently closed the heavy wooden door behind him.
Here the darkness and silence were so deep he had the unpleasant sensation of both floating and falling.
Gamache switched on his powerful flashlight. The beam cut through the darkness and rested on the altar, on the benches, on the stone columns. This wasn’t simply an early morning stroll by a sleepless man. There was a goal. And he found it easily, on the eastern wall of the chapel.
His light shone on the huge plaque, illuminating the story of Saint Gilbert.
Gamache smoothed his free hand over the plaque. Looking for the catch, the handle, into the Chapter House. Finally he found it by depressing the illustration of two sleeping wolves, etched into the top left corner of the plaque. The stone door opened and Gamache shone his flashlight in.
It was a small, rectangular room, with neither windows nor chairs, though a stone bench ran around the wall. The room was completely bare, barren.
After shining the flashlight into the corners to be certain, Gamache left and replaced the door. As the sleeping wolves popped back into place, the Chief put on his glasses and leaned forward, to read the inscription on the plaque. The life of Gilbert of Sempringham.
Saint Gilbert did not seem to be the patron saint of anything. Nor were any miracles mentioned. The only thing this man seemed to have done was create an order, name it after himself, and die at the staggering age of 106, in 1189.
One hundred and six years of age. Gamache wondered if that could possibly be true, but suspected it probably was. After all, if whoever made this plaque had wanted to lie, or exaggerate, surely they’d choose something more worthy than Gilbert’s age. His accomplishments, for example.
If anything was going to put the Chief Inspector to sleep it would be reading about the life of Saint Gilbert.
Why, he wondered, would anyone choose to join this order?
Then he remembered the music, the Gregorian chants. Frère Luc had described them as unique. And yet this plaque mentioned nothing at all about music or chanting. It didn’t appear to be a vocation of Saint Gilbert’s. In 106 years, not once did Gilbert of Sempringham feel a song coming on.
Gamache scanned the plaque again, for something subtle. Something he might have missed.
He moved the bright circle of light slowly over the engraved words, squinting, looking at the plaque this way and that. In case some symbol was etched lightly into the bronze. Or worn down over the centuries. A staff. A treble clef. A neume.
But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest the Gilbertines were renowned for anything, including Gregorian chants.
But there was one illustration. The sleeping wolves, curled together, intertwined.
Wolves, thought the Chief, stepping back from the wall and slipping his glasses back into his dressing gown pocket. Wolves. What did he know about wolves in the bible? What was their symbolism?
There were Romulus and Remus. They were saved by a she-wolf. Suckled. But that was Roman mythology, not the bible.
Wolves.