Vilette took another sip of cognac. She smiled. “You see the image of a rebellious young woman, like a book or the part in a film, acting out her anger, but it is far more. You see here, this scene.” She pointed to the one with the arbor and the images of the young man and woman.
“You think it is a simple garden scene!” she said emphatically. “And then the young woman kneeling and praying? But no! They spoke vows even though there was no priest to bless them before he was sent to Spain with the others. She defied both her father and the church.”
And the panel with the young woman in knight's armor came after. Not just rebellion against her father, but something more?
“The knights who went there never reached Jerusalem,” Vilette continued. “It is well known that all but a few perished in Spain.” She looked over at James.
“He was taken prisoner there with others, to be ransomed for gold, or left to die.”
Diana Jodion had spoken of it—a story within a story. A young woman of great wealth who rebelled against her father and took her mother's family name, then lived out the rest of her life in seclusion at a remote abbey?
But that wasn't all of it. There was more, in that panel with Isa Raveneau in knight's armor.
“She went after him?”
It was the sort of thing written about in romance novels that they published. But was it real?
Vilette nodded. “She had the means and the ability, and a companion. Supposedly he was a distant cousin of James' who had gone with him to Spain. He was loyal to James, a Scot,” she turned and looked over at James Morgan.
“He escaped and brought word to Isa, and then returned with her to Spain to free him.”
“She bought his freedom?”
Again Vilette nodded. “According to the story my grandmother told, a very dangerous enterprise.” The old woman sat back, the tumbler now empty.
She was tired. It showed in the lines on her face.
“When they returned from Spain, Isa took him to the Abbey Mont St. Michel. The wounds he had received in Spain had not healed. They had a little time together there at the abbey.” She was silent for a long time, her expression sad.
“When he died, she was determined that he would be buried in his own land, in spite of the father who would never claim him, and so she took him home.”
“To Scotland,” James commented.
“Just so.”
“But she returned to the abbey,” Kris added what was known about the history of the tapestry.
Vilette nodded. “Yes, and became a patron out of gratitude for the care they were given by the monks when they returned from Spain. It was there her only child was born, his child.” She pointed to the printouts. “My ancestor.”
“It is all there,” she continued. “In the tapestry—her story, and his.”
This was what Cate had learned after finding that photograph. A lost tapestry, history captured in a black-and-white photograph in those last desperate days of World War II.
“I was told there's a secret in the tapestry.”
Beyond the historic value of the tapestry as an archive, like the Bayeaux tapestry, there was nothing she had told them that was worth the lives of two people. There had to be more. Obviously, Cate had thought so.
Those blue eyes narrowed on her. “Myths, legends, secrets—so many questions, like your friend.”
“Is there a secret?” Kris asked.
Vilette smiled. “It is there in the tapestry, stitched into the fabric, the secret brought back from Spain all those years ago.” That blue gaze watched her.
“What do you believe?” She smiled faintly. “Do you believe in God?”
A question that she'd asked herself many times over the past few years. James Morgan had asked her the same question.
“I don't know,” Kris answered truthfully. “I did, once.” She exchanged a look with him. The truth was she had turned her back on it when Mark died. She felt betrayed by everything she had once believed, by the God she had believed in.
