“God bless you,” she told him. “In our prayers, we ask for God to make a good Christian out of us and lead us to our rightful end.”
He smiled at her.
She returned his warmth and felt his pain.
The Melhoramentum completed, she stood.
She’d driven from Toulouse after watching Beláncourt Aerospace for most of the day. Its owner had come to work, gone to lunch, returned, then left exactly on his regular schedule. Cassiopeia Vitt had not reappeared over the past two days.
A dead end.
And frustrating.
She flushed the anxiety from her mind and tried to concentrate on her duties. Tonight was a special joy, one every Perfecti relished in performing. She’d come to this rural farmhouse, near the village of Aug, to perform the Consolamentum. Consolation. The laying-on of hands. A spiritual baptism, marking the transition from simple believer to Perfecti.
The most sacred ceremony for a Cathar.
No water or submerging was involved, as established by John the Baptist for Catholics. Instead, as practiced by Jesus, this rite depended on the Holy Spirit to penetrate the soul and offer redemption and purity. Striking in its simplicity, but powerful in effect, the ritual had been handed down from generation to generation of Bons Crestians.
“Take me to her,” she said.
The old man led her to a small bedchamber. The wan and weak light of a lamp barely lit the room. An elderly woman lay under a colorful quilt. Her face was gaunt, like a cadaver, her thin white hair nearly gone. She’d been sick a long time and death was near. The God of Good was coming to claim another spirit.
She removed the leather-bound gospel from her shoulder bag and held it over the woman’s head. “Bless us, bless us, O Lord God, the Father of the spirits of good men, and help us in all that we wish to do.”
From the sacred book she removed a sheet of paper upon which she’d printed the Lord’s prayer. She handed it to the husband, who slowly read the sacred words aloud.
Our father, which art in Heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our super-substantial bread,
And remit our debts as we forgive our debtors.
And keep us from temptation and free us from evil.
Thine is the kingdom, the power and glory for ever and ever.
Ordinarily, simple believers would never invoke God in this way, the prayer reserved only for the Perfecti. But this was a special occasion. A new soul was being welcomed into the fold, the husband speaking for the wife, who would now become a child of God, with God becoming her father, conferring the right onto her to address Him as Our Father.
“Scriptures say that the spirit dwells within the Good Ones, those who have been adopted, as a son, by God,” she said. “Tonight I have come to welcome another. Please repeat the Lord’s Prayer.”
He read the words again.
The old woman lay still, her breathing labored, a slight smile to her thin lips.
“Can she speak?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not for the last week. I doubt she can hear us either.”
“Then you must speak for her.”
The Consolamentum was usually given to the dying. Simple believers facing imminent death, who were ready to ascend to the next level of faith. Where papists baptized at birth in anticipation of a long life serving the Church, the Good Ones waited until death, when the spirit would finally be free of the evil physical world, headed for the glory of the God of Good. As long as the believer died quickly, no opportunity would come to fall back into sin. But, if the postulant recovered, then he or she became a Perfecti, required to live the rest of their life as one.
That did not appear to be a possibility here.
“Do you renounce the harlot church of the persecutors?” she asked the old woman. “Their replica crosses, sham baptisms, and magical rites?” She laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder, then touched her head with the Gospel. “I must remind you of all that is forbidden, and all that will be required of you.”
The husband bowed his head.
“We are the poor of Christ, who have no fixed abode and flee from city to city like sheep amidst wolves. We are persecuted, as were the apostles and the martyrs, despite the fact that we lead a most strict and holy life, persevering day and night in fasts and abstinence, in prayers, and in labor from which we seek only the necessities. We undergo this because we are not of this world. False apostles, who pollute the word of Christ, who seek after their own interest, will lead you and our fathers astray from the true path. We, and our fathers of apostolic descent, have continued in the grace of God and shall so remain to the end of time. To distinguish us, Christ said By their fruits you shall know them. Our fruits consist in following the footsteps of Christ. Pardoning wrongdoers, loving enemies, praying for those who calumniate and accuse, offering the other cheek to the oppressor, giving up one’s mantle to him that takes one’s tunic, neither judging nor condemning. Will you fulfill these requirements?”
Tears filled the old man’s eyes. “She has will and determination. Pray God for her that He give her His strength.”
The correct response.
This man had prepared himself well.
“Do you ask pardon for all her past sins?” she asked.
“By the grace of God, I do.”
She laid the Gospel upon the old woman’s head, her right hand atop the book. Together, she and the husband adored the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, asking God to welcome His new servant and send down the Holy Spirit to inhabit the postulant’s corporal body.
“Repeat after me,” she said. “Holy Father, welcome thy servant in thy justice and send upon him thy grace and thy holy spirit.”
The old man said the words.
She opened her Gospel to John 1. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
She smiled down at the old woman. Only a Perfecti could welcome another, which meant the line from one to the next stayed unbroken back to the time of the apostles and Christ. How special. And wonderful. She bent down and bestowed the kiss of peace on a dry cheek. “You are now one of us.”
The husband knelt beside the bed, holding his wife’s hand.
Crying.
She retreated to the front room and prepared to leave.
Her work done.
Chapter 9
Cassiopeia was impressed with Beláncourt’s plane, one of his company’s private jets, outfitted in the same caramel tinted leather from his office. True to his word, the aircraft had been waiting in Lyon at eight a.m. The ride through smooth, warm air had taken less than an hour and, when the plane landed at a tiny landing strip near Lavelanet, Beláncourt was waiting for her.
“I trust you had a pleasant ride?” he asked.
“It would be hard not to.”
He smiled. “It’s one of our premier products. About forty million euros, fully outfitted. Should I reserve you one?”
She smiled at his attempt at charm. “Maybe two.”
He laughed. “From what I’m told, you could afford them both.” He motioned. “I have a car.”
They walked toward a black Mercedes sedan and he opened the front passenger door for her, then slipped in behind the steering wheel. She was surprised at no chauffeur, but assumed privacy was the theme for this day.
She was familiar with the west Ariège department, the land abutting the Spanish border, where rivers cascaded out of the Pyrenean foothills forming magnificent valleys. She loved Foix, a jewel of a town, tucked between two of those rivers, crowned by an ancient chateau high on a hill. The counts of Foix once ruled the area who, along with the counts of