close. Jesus, Armand, when I think what might have happened if you hadn’t done what you did.”
Gamache took a deep breath and looked down at the table, his lips tight.
Émile paused. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Armand Gamache looked up. “I can’t. Not yet. But thank you.”
“When you’re ready.” Émile smiled, took a sip of strong, aromatic coffee, and picked up Renaud’s diary again. “I haven’t read it all, of course, but what strikes me immediately is that there seems very little new in this. Certainly nothing we haven’t heard a million times before. The places he’d marked as possible sites for Champlain’s grave are all places we’ve known about. The Café Buade, rue de Trésor. But they’ve all been investigated and nothing’s been found.”
“Then why did he believe Champlain might be there?”
“He also thought Champlain was in the Lit and His, let’s not forget. He saw Champlain everywhere.”
Gamache thought for a moment. “There’re bodies buried all over Québec from hundreds of years ago. How would you even know if you’d found Champlain?”
“That’s a good question. It’s had us worried for a long time. Would the coffin say Samuel de Champlain? Would there be a date, an insignia perhaps? Maybe by his clothes. He apparently wore a quite distinctive metal hat, Renaud always thought that’s how he’d know him.”
“When he opened the coffin he’d see a skeleton in a metal hat and decide it’s the father of Québec?”
“Genius might have its limits,” admitted Émile. “But scholars think there might be a few clues. All the coffins made back then were wood, with a few exceptions. Experts believe Champlain would be an exception. His coffin was almost certainly lined in lead. And it’s easier these days to date remains.”
Gamache looked unconvinced. “Père Sébastien at the Basilica said there were mysteries surrounding Champlain and his birth. That he might be a Huguenot or a spy for the King of France or even his illegitimate son. Was that just romanticizing or is there more to it?”
“It’s partly romantic, the noble bastard son. But a few things feed that rumor. One is his own near maniacal secrecy. For instance, he was married but only mentions his wife of twenty-five years a couple of times, and even then not by name.”
“They didn’t have any children, did they?”
Émile shook his head. “But others were also pretty tight lipped about Champlain. A couple of the Jesuit priests and a Récollet lay brother mention him in their journals, but even then it was nothing personal. Just daily life. Why the secrecy?”
“What’s your theory? You’ve studied the man most of your life.”
“I think it was partly the time, less stress on the individual. There wasn’t quite the culture of ‘me’ that there is now. But I also think there might’ve been something he was trying to hide and it made him a very private person.”
“The unacknowledged son of a king?”
Émile hesitated. “He wrote prolifically, you know, thousands of pages. Buried in all those words, all those pages, was one sentence.”
Gamache was listening closely, imagining Champlain bent over the paper with a quill pen and a pot of ink by candlelight in a Spartan home four hundred years and a few hundred yards away from where they were sitting.
“I am obligated by birth to the King,” said Émile. “Historians for centuries have tried to figure out what that could mean.”
Gamache rolled it around in his head. I am obligated by birth to the King. It was certainly suggestive. Then something occurred to him.
“If Champlain’s body was found, and we knew beyond a doubt it was him, they could do DNA tests.” He was watching Émile as he spoke. His mentor’s eyes were on the table. Was it deliberate? Not wanting to make eye contact? Was it possible?
“But would it matter?” Gamache mused. “Suppose the tests proved he was the son of Henri IV, who cares today?”
Émile raised his eyes. “From a practical point of view it would mean nothing, but symbolically?” Émile shrugged. “Pretty potent stuff, especially for the separatists who already see Champlain as a powerful symbol of Québec independence. It would only add to his luster and the romantic vision of him. He’d be both heroic and tragic. Just how the separatists see themselves.”
Gamache was quiet for a moment. “You’re a separatist, aren’t you Émile?”
They’d never talked about it before. It hadn’t been exactly a dirty little secret, just a private subject they’d never broached. In Québec politics was always dangerous territory.
Émile looked up from his omelette.