He had not planned to tell Ambrose about Tuesday morning.
He had planned, going in, to present the findings from the safety deposit box - the seal device, the preamble, the legal form of address. He had the legal pad with the block letters he had written, the forty-seven new photographs on his laptop, the specific questions he had developed from three weeks of working with the cipher sections Daniel had decoded. He had a structured agenda, in the way that historians of ideas develop structured agendas: organized, defensible, buildable.
He presented these things. The meeting was productive in the way that the Thursday meetings had become productive - a specific texture of careful people working carefully on something that mattered. Daniel had decoded an additional twelve percent of the marginalia since the previous Thursday, which brought the total to fifty-two percent. Claire had confirmed the provenance of the vellum through a contact at the Newberry Library - mid-thirteenth century, consistent with the date in the preamble, consistent with the region implied by the scriptorial hand. Margaret listened with her particular quality of complete attention, the kind of listening that does not require response but whose presence is not passive.
At the end of the formal portion of the meeting, when the papers were being gathered and the evening was doing the thing evenings do when they begin to close, Joshua said - not intending to, or rather intending to and then doing it before he had finished intending to: "I went to Mass on a weekday. In March."
Ambrose, who had been reaching for his coat, did not reach for his coat.
The room was quiet.
"A Tuesday morning. There were eleven people. An elderly priest." He paused. "Something happened at the consecration."
He stopped. He had arrived at the edge of what he had language for.
Ambrose waited. He had a quality of waiting that Joshua had come to understand as structural rather than temperamental - not the patience of a man who was comfortable with silence but the patience of a man who had learned that silence was sometimes the only container large enough for what needed to be said.
"I can't describe it precisely," Joshua said. "The apparatus stopped. The part of me that categorizes and files and maintains the observer's distance." He paused again. "I found myself in the parking lot. I don't remember leaving the church. I sat there for forty-three minutes and then I drove home."
The quality of the room had changed in a way he couldn't account for. Margaret had her eyes closed. Daniel was looking at the floor with the expression of a man who recognizes something he has been carrying for a long time.
Ambrose said: "It happens to most people the first time."
Joshua looked at him.
"The question," Ambrose said, "is what you do the second time."
"What is the second time."
Ambrose was quiet for a moment. The sanctuary lamp burned above the altar. The candles on the side altar had burned lower than they had been at the beginning of the evening.
"The second time," Ambrose said, "is the moment when you are standing in front of something you cannot categorize, and you have to decide whether to stay or go back to the parking lot."
Joshua understood that this was not a metaphor.
He said: "How do I know when the second time is."
"You'll know," Ambrose said. "It announces itself."
He drove home on Route 3, the Great River Road, the levee on his left and the Mississippi invisible beyond it. He had told Ambrose about Tuesday morning. He had not planned to and then he had, and the room had received it in a way that made it feel less like a confession than like a report - a piece of data that had been expected, that fit into a pattern the others could see more clearly than he could.
This was not entirely comforting.
He was partway home when he remembered the other thing Ambrose had said, near the end, almost in passing in the way that Ambrose delivered things of consequence. He had mentioned a researcher at the Vatican Archive in Rome. A woman who had been working, for three years, on a parallel thread - following references in a newly accessioned Barcelona collection to a notation system that matched the marginalia. Ambrose had been corresponding with her. He had told her about Joshua. She was expecting to hear from him.
Her name was Mara Leclerc.
Joshua sat with this for the rest of the drive. A Vatican Archive researcher in Rome who had spent three years following the notation system from the Barcelona end, who had been in correspondence with Ambrose, who was expecting to hear from him. The other end of the thread Ambrose had mentioned weeks ago. The person who knows how to read what she finds.
He got home at eleven. He made coffee he didn't drink. He sat at the kitchen table for a while, looking at nothing in particular, and then he opened his laptop and found the Vatican Archive's staff directory and located Mara Leclerc, who was listed as a senior researcher in the Department of Medieval and Early Modern Documents, with a contact email and a list of published work that he read for twenty minutes with the focused attention of a man assessing a colleague he has not yet met.
Her work was precise. It was careful. It was the work of someone who knew how to read what she found.
He opened a new email.