Since she’d been in the Languedoc, where the Magdalene was revered, Brigid, who would once have dismissed the notion of her marriage to Jesus out of hand, was beginning to realize that the Church she’d served for so long, and with such blind faith, had suppressed much knowledge that would have diminished their authority.

Keelin, who was an expert on such esoteric knowledge, had driven her places where the Magdalene was venerated, and even up to Rennes-le-Château, which had become famous after the publication of The Da Vinci Code. Keelin explained knowledgeably that Rennes-le-Château had been known about long before the American author had spotted its potential as a money-spinner. Keelin had given her a copy of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, one of the first books to draw attention to the esoteric secrets of the small French village, but it was the books of a superb writer called Patrice Chaplin that had most resonated with Brigid, especially when the author wrote about the mysterious, mystical Mount Canigou, a mountain of initiation, where many, including the author, claimed to have experienced a portal that led beyond earthly realms.

Brigid had visited the famous monastery on the Mount, with Keelin and Marie-Claire, and they had climbed the winding path upwards for an hour, immersed in the mystical powerful energy that the mountain seemed to radiate. As they climbed, the summit disappeared, veiled in ethereal cloud, and the wind rose, pushing against them; it was kinder in their descent, blowing against their backs and speeding their way. A path of initiation, Patrice Chaplin had called the route in her book The Portal.

She too was on a path of initiation, Brigid reflected, as a dove cooed in the eaves. Having wasted years in dull acceptance, controlled obedience, and institutionalized rigidity, she was now hungry for knowledge. Unlike Marie-Hélène, who reasoned and questioned and was true to her own sense of self, and whose religious life was vibrantly alive as a result, Brigid had been intellectually lazy, suppressing every trace of individuality to become part of the hive mind. Now, at eighty years of age, she chastised herself for her passivity and cowardice. She’d thought she was leading a spiritual life, when all she’d done was toe the party line and accept the rulings of a patriarchal, misogynistic controlling clique of men who would never know what true Christianity meant, despite their so-called theological knowledge.