*
Gamache held the Dominican’s eyes.
Frère Sébastien looked curious. In fact, he looked deeply curious. But not anxious, thought Gamache. He seemed like a man who knew the answer would come, and he could wait.
The Chief liked this monk. In fact, he liked most of them. Or, at least, he didn’t dislike them. But this young Dominican had a quality that was disarming. Gamache knew it was a powerful and dangerous quality and it would be folly in the extreme to allow himself to be disarmed.
The Dominican exuded calm and invited confidences.
And then the Chief Inspector realized why he was at once attracted and guarded. Those were, he knew, the qualities he used in an investigation. While the Chief was busy investigating the monks, this monk was investigating him. And he knew the only defense against it was, perversely, complete honesty.
“The tune I hummed at dinner comes from this.”
Gamache opened the volume of mystical writing he’d carried with him since the murder, and handed the yellowed vellum to Frère Sébastien.
The monk took it. His young eyes needed no help reading it, even in the weak light. Gamache looked away for an instant, to catch Beauvoir’s eyes.
Jean-Guy was also watching the monk, but his eyes seemed almost glazed. Though that might have been the light. All their eyes looked odd in this secret little room. The Chief turned back to Frère Sébastien. The Dominican’s lips were moving, without sound.
“Where did you find this?” the monk finally asked, looking up briefly from the page before his eyes dropped, yanked back to the paper.
“It was on Frère Mathieu when we found him. He was curled around it.”
The monk crossed himself. It was rote, and yet he managed to invest it with meaning. Then Frère Sébastien took a huge, deep breath. And nodded.
“Do you know what this is, Chief Inspector?”
“I know those are neumes,” he moved his index finger over the ancient musical notes. “And the words are Latin, though they seem to be nonsense.”
“They are nonsense.”
“Some of the Gilbertines seem to think the words are deliberately insulting,” said Gamache. “And the neumes a travesty of a chant. As though someone took the form of Gregorian chant and deliberately made it grotesque.”
“The words are silly, but not an insult. If this,” Frère Sébastien held up the page, “belittled the faith then I’d agree, but it doesn’t. In fact, I find it interesting that the words never once mention God or the Church or devotion. It’s as though whoever wrote this deliberately stayed away from that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I do know it isn’t heresy. Murder might be your specialty, Chief Inspector, but heresy is mine. It’s what the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith does, among other things. We track down heresy and heretics.”
“And did the track lead you here?”
The Dominican considered the question, or more likely, he considered his answer.
“It’s a long trail, covering tens of thousands of miles and hundreds of years. Dom Clément was right to leave. In the archives of the Inquisition there’s a proclamation signed by the Grand Inquisitor himself, ordering an investigation into the Gilbertines.”
“But why?” asked Beauvoir, focusing his attention. It seemed akin to investigating bunnies, or kittens.
“Because of who they sprang from. Gilbert of Sempringham.”
“They were going to be investigated for extreme dullness?” asked Beauvoir.
Frère Sébastien laughed, but not long. “No. For extreme loyalty. It was one of the paradoxes of the Inquisition, that things like extreme devotion and loyalty became suspicious.”
“Why?” asked Beauvoir.
“Because they can’t be controlled. Men who believed strongly in God and were loyal to their abbots and their orders wouldn’t bend to the will of the Inquisition or the inquisitors. They were too strong.”
“So Gilbert’s defense of his archbishop was seen as suspicious?” asked Gamache, trying to follow the labyrinthine logic. “But that was six hundred years before the Inquisition. And he was defending the Church against a secular authority. I’d have thought the Church would consider him a hero, not a suspect. Even centuries later.”
“Six hundred years is nothing to an organization built on events millennia old,” said Sébastien. “And anyone who stands up becomes a target. You should know that, Chief Inspector.”
Gamache gave him a sharp look, but the monk’s face was placid. There seemed no hidden meaning. Or warning.
“If the Gilbertines hadn’t left,” said the Dominican, “they’d have gone the way of the Cathars.”
“And what was that?” asked Beauvoir. But one look at the Chief’s face told him it probably wasn’t to Club Med.
“They were burned alive,” said Frère Sébastien.
“All of them?” asked Beauvoir, his face gray in the dim light.
The monk nodded. “Every man, woman and child.”
“Why?”
“The Church considered them free thinkers, too independent. And gaining in influence. The Cathars became known as the ‘good men.’ And good men are very threatening to not good men.”
“So the Church killed them?”
“After first trying to bring them back into the fold,” said Frère Sébastien.
“Wasn’t Saint Dominic, your founder, the one who insisted the Cathars weren’t real Catholics?” asked Gamache.
Sébastien nodded. “But the order to wipe them out didn’t come until centuries later.” The monk hesitated and when he spoke again his voice was low, but clear. “Many were mutilated first, and sent back to frighten the others, but it only hardened the Cathar resolve. The leaders gave themselves up, in an effort to appease the Church, but it didn’t work. Everyone was killed, even people who just happened to be in the area. Innocents. When one of the soldiers asked how he was supposed to tell them from the Cathars, he was told to kill them all, and let God sort them out.”
Frère Sébastien looked as though he could see it. As though he’d been there. And Gamache wondered which side of the monastery walls this monk from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would have been on.
“The Inquisition would’ve done that to the Gilbertines?” Beauvoir asked. He no longer looked dazed. The monk had hauled him back from whatever reverie he’d found.
“It’s not a certainty,” said Sébastien, though that seemed more wishful than real. “But Dom Clément was wise to leave. And wise to hide.”
Sébastien took another deep breath.
“This isn’t heresy,” he looked down at the paper in his hands. “It speaks of bananas and the refrain is Non sum pisces.”
Gamache and Beauvoir looked blank.
“I am not a fish,” said the Dominican.
Gamache smiled and Beauvoir looked simply confused.
“So if it isn’t heresy,” said the Chief, “what is it?”
“It’s a singularly beautiful tune. A chant, I think, though not Gregorian and not a plainchant. It uses all the rules, but then adjusts them slightly, as though the old chant was the foundation, and this,” he tapped the page, “a whole new structure.”
He looked up, first at Beauvoir then over to Gamache. His eyes were excited. The smile on his face back to its radiance.
“I think far from being a mockery of Gregorian chant, it’s actually a homage, a tribute. A celebration, even. The composer used the neumes, but in a way I’ve never seen before. There’re so many of them.”
“Frère Simon made copies so that he and the other monks could transcribe the neumes into notes,” Gamache explained. “He seemed to think the neumes were for different voices. Layers of voices. Harmonizing.”
“Hmmm,” said Frère Sébastien, again lost in the music. His finger rested, awkwardly it seemed to Gamache, on one place on the page. When the monk finally moved it, Gamache saw that the finger had covered a small dot at the very beginning of the music. Before the first neume.
“Is it old?” asked Gamache.
“Oh, no. Not at all. It’s made to look old, of course, but I’d be surprised if this was written more than a few months ago.”
“By whom?”
“Now that I can’t possibly say. But I can tell you, it would have to be by someone who knows a lot about Gregorian chant. About the structure of them. About neumes, of course. But not a great deal of Latin.” He looked at Gamache with barely disguised wonder. “You may have been one of the first people on earth to hear a whole new musical form, Chief Inspector,” said Frère Sébastien. “It must have been thrilling.”
“You know, it was,” admitted Gamache. “Though I had no idea what I was hearing. But after he sang, Frère Simon pointed out something about the Latin. He said that while it’s pretty much just a string of funny phrases, it actually makes sense musically.”