“OK, I haven’t been a hermit; but I’ve avoided anything serious, stayed busy. Something always needed doing—there was always someone in a worse crisis than mine. I volunteered weekend cover, when I didn’t have Max. Transplant medicine is a philosophy course lived; your personal problems pale in the face of your patients’ struggle for just another day, another week, hoping an organ will materialize. It feels self-centered to drown in your own emotional crises compared with such life-and-death realities, so you shelve them. Or try to. But I couldn’t entirely fool Will.” He looked directly at Grace, who was listening quietly, without forcing him, and he answered her unput question: “Yes, I miss him desperately. His existence subtly permeated my own.”

She put a gentle hand on his shoulder, understanding his delay with Lucy. Whatever ethical problems there may have been, he’d also been grieving—something they’d not given proper consideration to. “Simon too. Sometimes a few beers will just set him off. Will seems to have had a big effect on people.”

Alex nodded. “Give me a spoonful of that curry, and tell me about Chartres!”

She recognized that was as much as he was going to open up, so she moved on without a pause. “There’s more than Chartres, but let’s start there. The night at your father’s got me hooked as much as Lucy and Simon. I’ve spent hours researching the history of the cathedral—the one official guidebooks hardly touch. I thought your mum must have had her reasons. Now, a good historian always checks her sources, and hard evidence for early use of the site—before about AD 500—is sketchy, so this is conjectural. But early literary sources tell us it was sacred to the Carnutes, a Gaulish tribe. A Druid grotto was dedicated to a pre-Christian virgin whom they believed would bear a son, which follows on directly from the cult of Isis and Ishtar. These were probably the same Druids Julius Caesar wrote about, with his famous mention of a “Virgini Patriae” in this region. This may be why the Christian story was adopted by the Gauls. A dolmen in the underground grotto predated even the Druids.”

“What date?”

“About two thousand BC.” Grace crossed the room to find Lucy’s guide to the cathedral, bookmarked with slips of paper, and she opened it for Alex at a pictured statue of a Madonna and child. “This existing statue of Mary with Jesus was based on another, destroyed in the sixteenth century. Some accounts suggest it was twelfth century, but the earlier object could just have been the one the Druids worshipped, a black Madonna—probably ebony. France has a rich cult in these.”

Alex looked carefully at the image. “So, the Christian church was building on an existing, powerful female iconography?”