The Chief Archeologist was standing in the center of the room, his long arms hugging his chest perhaps trying, unsuccessfully, to contain his anger. The same two technicians who’d accompanied him before were there again, as was Inspector Langlois, who immediately took Gamache aside.
“I can explain,” Gamache began before being interrupted.
“I know you can, it’s not that. Let Croix stew for a while, he’s an asshole anyway. Have you heard?”
Langlois searched the Chief Inspector’s face.
“About the video? Oui. But I haven’t seen it.” Now it was Gamache’s turn to examine his companion. “Have you?”
“Yes. Everyone has.”
It was, of course, an exaggeration but not, perhaps, by much. He continued to examine Langlois’s face for clues. Was there a hint of pity?
“I’m sorry this has happened, sir.”
“Thank you. I’ll be watching it later this afternoon.”
Langlois paused, as though he wanted to say something, but didn’t. Instead he turned swiftly to look back at the Chief Archeologist.
“What’s this all about, patron?”
“I’ll tell you,” smiled Gamache, touching the man on the arm and guiding him back to the larger room and the gathering. He spoke to Serge Croix.
“You were here almost a week ago, I know, to see if maybe Augustin Renaud’s wasn’t the only body in this basement. To see if the man you considered a menace might actually have been right, that Champlain was buried here. Not surprisingly, you found nothing.”
“We found root vegetables,” said Croix to the snickers of the technicians behind him.
“I’d like you to look again,” said the Chief, smiling too, and staring at the archeologist. “For Champlain.”
“Not here I’m not. It’s a waste of time.”
“If you don’t, I will.” Gamache reached for a shovel. “And you must know, I’m even less of an archeologist than Renaud.”
He took his cardigan off and handed it to Émile then, rolling up his sleeves, he looked around the basement. It was pocked with fresh-turned earth, where holes had been dug and filled back in.
“Maybe I’ll start here.” He put the shovel in the earth and his boot on it.
“Wait,” said Croix. “This is absurd. We searched this basement. What makes you think Champlain would be here?”
“That does.”
Gamache nodded to Émile, who opened the satchel and handed the old bible to Serge Croix. They watched as the Chief Archeologist’s life changed. It began with the tiniest movement. His eyes widened, fractionally, then he blinked, then he exhaled.
“Merde,” he whispered. “Oh, merde.”
Croix looked up from the bible and stared at Gamache. “Where did you find this?”
“Upstairs, hiding where you’d hide a precious old book. Among other old books, in a library no one used. It was almost certainly put there by the murderer. He didn’t want to destroy it, but neither could he keep it himself, so he hid it. But before that it was in Renaud’s possession and before that it belonged to Charles Chiniquy.”
Gamache could see the man’s mind racing. Making connections, through the years, through the centuries. Connecting movements, events, personalities.
“How’d Chiniquy find this?”
“Patrick and O’Mara, those two Irish laborers I told you about, found it and sold it to Chiniquy.”
“You asked me to find out about digging sites in 1869, is this what that was about? They were working at one of the sites?”
Gamache nodded and waited for Croix to make the final connection.
“The Old Homestead?” the Chief Archeologist finally asked, then brought his hand to his forehead and tilted his head back. “Of course. The Old Homestead. We’d always dismissed it because it was outside the range we considered reasonable for the original hallowed ground. But Champlain wouldn’t have been buried in hallowed ground. Not if he was a Huguenot.”
Croix gripped the bible and seemed himself in the grip of something, a great excitement, a sort of fugue.
“There’d been rumors, of course, but that’s the thing with Champlain, so little’s known about the man, there were rumors about everything. This was just one more, and a not very likely one, we thought. Would the King put a Protestant, a Huguenot in charge of the New World? But suppose the King didn’t know? But no, it’s more likely he did and this would explain so much.”
The Chief Archeologist was now like a teenager with his first crush, giddy, almost babbling.