The Beautiful Mystery (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #8)

“He is in charge, Jean-Guy.”

“Oh, come on.”

But the laughter died on Beauvoir’s lips. The Chief was serious.

“He’s the Chief Superintendent of the Sûreté,” said Gamache. “I’m … not. He’s my boss. He’ll always be in charge.”

At the thunderous look on Beauvoir’s face Gamache smiled. “It’ll be all right.”

“I know it will, patron. After all, nothing bad ever happens when a senior Sûreté officer starts abusing his power.”

“Exactly, mon vieux,” the Chief grinned and caught Beauvoir’s eye. “Please, Jean-Guy. Stay out of it.”

Beauvoir didn’t need to ask “Out of what?” Chief Inspector Gamache’s calm brown eyes held his. There was a plea in them. Not for help, but for the opposite. To be left alone to deal with Francoeur.

Beauvoir nodded. “Oui, patron.”

But he knew he’d just lied.

TWENTY

Most of the monks were already in the dining hall by the time Gamache and Beauvoir arrived. The Chief Inspector nodded to the abbot, who sat at the head of the long table, an empty chair beside him. The abbot lifted his hand in greeting, but didn’t offer the seat. Neither did the Chief offer to join him. Both men had other agendas.

Baskets of fresh baguettes, rounds of cheeses, pitchers of water and bottles of cider sat on the wooden table, and monks sat around it in their black robes, white hoods hanging down their backs. Gamache realized Superintendent Francoeur hadn’t told him why Gilbert of Sempringham had chosen this unique design nine hundred years ago.

“That’s Brother Raymond,” whispered the Chief, nodding toward a space on the bench between the doctor, Frère Charles, and another monk. “He’s in charge of maintenance.”

“Got it,” said Beauvoir, and walked quickly to the other side of the table.

“Do you mind?” Beauvoir asked the monks.

“Not at all,” said Frère Charles. He looked happy, indeed almost hysterically so, to see the Sûreté agent. It was a welcome Beauvoir rarely received while on a murder investigation.

Gamache’s lunch companion, on the other hand, looked far from pleased to see him. He looked far from pleased to see the bread, or the cheese. Or the sun in the sky, or the birds outside the window.

“Bonjour, Frère Simon,” said the Chief, taking his seat. But apparently the abbot’s secretary was maintaining his own strict personal vow of silence. He also seemed to have taken a vow of annoyance.

Across the table, and a little way down, Gamache could see that Beauvoir was already engaged in conversation with Brother Raymond.

“The first brothers knew what they were doing,” said Raymond in answer to Beauvoir’s question about the original plans for the abbey. His answer surprised Beauvoir. Not for the content, but for the monk’s voice.

He spoke in a broad, almost unintelligible, country accent. A twang yanked from the woods and mountains and tiny villages of Québec. It had been planted by the first settlers and voyageurs from France, hundreds of years ago. Rugged men, schooled in what mattered here. Not politesse, but survival. The aristocrats, the learned administrators and mariners might have found the New World, but the hardy peasants had settled it. Their voices had taken deep root in Québec, like some ancient oak. Unchanged, for centuries. So that a historian speaking to these Québécois might feel she’d traveled in time back to medieval France.

Over the generations most Québécois had lost the accent. But every now and then this voice emerged from a valley, from a village.

It had become popular to mock such accents, thinking if the voice was rustic the thinking must be backward too. But Beauvoir knew different.

His grandmother spoke like this, as they’d shelled peas on the rickety old verandah. As she’d talked about her garden. And the seasons. And patience. And nature.

His gruff grandfather, when he chose to speak, also sounded like a peasant. But he thought and acted like a nobleman. Never failing to help a neighbor. Never failing to share what little he had.

No, Beauvoir had no inclination to dismiss Frère Raymond. Just the opposite. He felt drawn to this monk.

Raymond’s eyes were deep brown and despite the robe Beauvoir could see the monk’s body was strappy. His hands were lean and sinewy, from a lifetime of hard work. He was, Beauvoir guessed, in his early fifties.

“They built Saint-Gilbert to last,” said Frère Raymond, reaching for the cider bottle and pouring some for Beauvoir and himself. “Craftsmanship, that’s what it was. And discipline. But after those first monks? Disaster.”