In their pajamas they returned to the study, turned on the lights, and powered up their laptops. For twenty minutes Sam sat at the keyboard, typing and following links as Remi watched from the corner chair. At last Sam turned around and smiled.
“It’s from a book I read in college—The Days of the Upright by a guy named . . . Roche. He talks about the origin of the word ‘Huguenot.’ ”
“French Calvinists, right?” Remi asked. “Protestants.”
“Right. Pretty big group from the sixteenth to eighteenth century. Anyway, there are a lot of explanations for where the word ‘Huguenot’ comes from. Some think it’s a hybrid—from the German word Eidgenosse, meaning ‘confederate,’ and the name Besan çon Hugues, who was involved in early Calvinist history.
“The etymology most historians subscribe to comes from the Flemish word huisgenooten, which was what some Bible students in Flemish France were nicknamed. Huisgenooten would gather secretly in one another’s homes to study scripture. The name translates as ‘House Fellows.’
Remi stared at him for ten seconds before murmuring, “Sam, that’s brilliant.”
“What would have been brilliant is if I’d come up with it eighteen hours ago.”
“Better late than never. Okay, so we’re talking about Huguenots.”
“Anguished Huguenots,” Sam corrected.
Remi stood up and went to their whiteboard and used the dry-erase marker to circle their list of synonyms for ‘anguished.’ There were dozens. No obvious connection between them and Huguenots jumped out at them.
“So, let’s talk about amber,” Sam said, turning to the second part of the line. “ ‘In amber trapped.’ How do you get trapped in amber?”
They brainstormed this for a few minutes before Remi said, “Let’s try this: What happens when something gets trapped in amber?”
“You die,” Sam offered.
“Before that . . . Immobilized.”
“Frozen in place.”
“R ight . . .” Head down, eyes closed, she paced back and forth. “Frozen in place . . . Like a snapshot.”
Sam, his head resting against the chair’s headrest, leaned forward. “Like a painting.”
“Yes!”
He spun around in his chair and started typing on the laptop. “Painting . . . Huguenots . . .” He scanned the search results.
“Anything?”
“Massacre,” he muttered.
“What?”
“ ‘Massacre’ could be, in a stretch, synonymous with ‘anguished,’ couldn’t it?”
“Sure.”
“Then how about this: a painting by François Dubois called The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.”
“What’s the context?”
Sam scanned the article, then summarized: “France, in 1572 . . . from August to October of that year Catholic mobs attacked minority Huguenots throughout the country . . .” Sam leaned back in his chair and frowned. “Anywhere between ten thousand and a hundred thousand were killed.”
“If that isn’t anguish I don’t know what is,” Remi murmured. “Okay, so combine that with Bavaria. . . .”
Sam leaned forward and began typing again, this time using for his major search terms “Dubois,” “Saint Bartholomew,” and “Bavaria,” in combination with “day” and “massacre.”
“Might as well throw in our synonyms for ‘Hajj,’” Remi said, then dictated from the whiteboard: “ ‘Mecca,’ ‘pilgrimage,’ ‘Islam,’ ‘pilgrim’ . . .”