Chapter 1: Research
Lucas
The long tables of the university library were empty at this hour, except for the halo of lamplight over Lucas Cross’s desk. His laptop sat pushed to one side, screen dim, as he hunched over a bound manuscript in Latin he had waited three months to see.
Marginalia in cramped medieval hands crawled along the parchment like ivy, notes from clerics centuries gone. Lucas squinted, running a finger lightly above the text, careful not to touch. He was tracing patterns: the names of French ducal families appearing again and again in Vatican correspondence during the Second Crusade.
His thesis had always been that the Church had relied more heavily on aristocratic networks than scholars acknowledged. If he could prove it — if he could show which families were pivot points for papal strategy — he’d finally have the cornerstone chapter for the book that was supposed to save his tenure-track career.
But then he came across a name that seemed familiar, not in the way that many of the noble families’ names had become familiar over his years of research. It felt more modern, even given his academic familiarity.
De Châtillon.
Lucas frowned, mouthing the syllables under his breath. The name stirred something — a footnote he had skimmed weeks ago? A lecture years earlier? Or something else, something less academic, a prickle of déjà vu in the back of his mind. He flipped through a few more folios. The name appeared again. Always near the center of alliances, often adjacent to papal signatures.
He leaned back, stretching, eyes still on the ink.
Châtillon.
He tapped the name into his laptop. The search returned the predictable: medieval lords of Champagne, crusader counts, a bishop or two. All legitimate, all scholarly. Still, the sense nagged him — as if the name belonged not only to history, but to something present.
The silence of the library pressed in. Lucas scribbled a note in his research log, underlining the name twice, then shut the manuscript with careful reverence. Tomorrow, he told himself. He’d track the family through papal charters and correspondence.
For tonight, an interesting name was enough.
Lucas shut his laptop and slid the manuscript back across the desk with reluctant care. The librarian nodded at him, and he gave a distracted smile, his mind still circling the same set of syllables: Châtillon. He slung his satchel over one shoulder and pushed through the heavy doors into the library’s front hall.
He nearly collided with Sarah Patel at the desk.
“Lucas!” she said, balancing a precarious stack of books. “God, you look like you’ve been in there since the twelfth century yourself.”
He blinked at her, then laughed, rubbing his eyes. “Feels about right. You headed out?”
“About to. Want to grab a drink? You look like you need one.”
Minutes later, they were tucked into a corner of a dim pub two blocks from campus. Sarah, coat draped over her chair, cradled a glass of red wine and spoke with the quick, sparking energy of someone who’d been waiting all day to talk. Lucas nursed a scotch on the rocks, grateful for the burn, listening as she launched into her latest find.
“I swear, everyone thinks monastic writers were these humorless ascetics, but no — some of the satire I’ve been reading is hilarious. There’s this Benedictine scribe who spends three pages mocking a rival abbot’s haircut. A haircut, Lucas! If that isn’t timeless academic sniping, I don’t know what is.”
Lucas chuckled, shaking his head. “You always manage to find the good ones. Meanwhile, I feel like my work’s just…plateaued. Like I’ve circled the same arguments too many times.” He swirled the ice in his glass. “Though — I did come across something today. A name. It felt…familiar, but I couldn’t place it.”
Sarah tilted her head. “Which name?”
“De Châtillon.”
She squinted, sipping her wine. “Huh. Well, that’s definitely a real crusader family. But I think…” She snapped her fingers. “Oh! There’s a visiting scholar on campus with that name. Philosophy, I think? That’s probably where you heard it.”
Lucas paused, then gave a small, relieved laugh. “That makes sense. I must’ve overheard it at a lecture or something.” He let the tension ease from his shoulders and took another drink. “God, for a minute I thought I was going crazy. Medieval rabbit holes.”
Sarah grinned. “The occupational hazard.”
They clinked glasses. Lucas felt the scotch’s warmth sink deeper this time, loosening the knot that had tightened in him at the library. Just a coincidence, he told himself. Nothing more.
“…and then,” Sarah was saying, a hand full of drinks later, waving her wineglass for emphasis, “you start to dream in Latin marginalia, and that’s when you know you’ve officially lost the plot.”
Lucas laughed, his second scotch softening the edge of his exhaustion. “I already had one of those, last week. A monk was chastising me for my footnotes.”
“Occupational hazard,” Sarah agreed, raising her glass.
The pub door opened, letting in a gust of late-evening chill. Neither of them noticed until a familiar voice cut across their corner.
“Well. What are the two of you conspiring about?”
They turned in unison. Professor Margaret Sinclair, wrapped in a smart wool coat, stood with one eyebrow arched, a faint smile tugging at her lips. She carried herself the way she always did — as if the whole room had quietly become a seminar.
“Professor!” Sarah exclaimed, nearly knocking her chair as she got up. “We were just complaining about the dangers of medieval research.”
“Ah,” Sinclair said, sliding a hand along the back of a chair. “A subject I know something about. How’s the work going, Lucas?”
Lucas cleared his throat. “Slow. I feel like I’ve hit a plateau. But I’ll push through.”
“You will,” Sinclair said firmly. “You’ve got a good instinct for patterns. These walls of text will yield eventually.” She softened, the stern line of her mouth easing. “Don’t lose faith in your own work.”
The words settled over him like a mantle. Lucas nodded, surprised by the sudden swell of relief he felt.
“And,” Sinclair went on, “I hope I’ll see both of you at my talk next week? On cathedral architecture and royal residences. We’ll be considering how the different realms constructed themselves in the popular imagination through stone and space.”
Sarah lit up. “Absolutely. Wouldn’t miss it.”
Lucas smiled. “Me too. I’ve been looking forward to it.”
“Good.” Sinclair’s gaze lingered just a moment longer, pleased. “Then I’ll let you two get back to your plotting. Enjoy your evening.”
As she walked toward the bar, Sarah let out a low whistle. “See? Even when she’s being encouraging, she terrifies me.”
Lucas chuckled, but his chest felt lighter. Maybe she was right. Maybe the slump was just another hurdle. He reached for his glass again, the ice rattling softly, and let himself believe it.
By the time the next round was drained, Sarah was starting to yawn mid-sentence and Lucas’s head was warm with scotch. They lingered a few minutes more, laughing over some half-remembered anecdote from grad school, before deciding they’d earned an early night.
At the pub’s door, Sarah tugged her scarf tight and gave him a quick hug. “Don’t stay buried in manuscripts all weekend, okay?”
“I’ll try,” Lucas said, though they both knew it was a lie.
She smirked and headed toward her apartment, her silhouette swallowed by the street lamps’ amber glow. Lucas turned the opposite way, coat collar flipped up against the bite of evening air.
The streets were quiet, the kind of quiet that made every sound seem sharper — the scrape of his shoes, the hum of a distant car. He let his mind wander, still circling the name he’d underlined in his notes. Châtillon.
Passing the faculty residences of Christ Church, he caught movement at the corner door. A woman emerged, closing it softly behind her.
She was mid-thirties, dark hair swept back, trench coat belted at the waist. The faint scent of cigarette smoke clung to her, threaded with expensive perfume. Her heels clicked crisply on the pavement as she lit another cigarette with practiced ease.
Lucas slowed, glancing just long enough to register that she was striking, polished — but not in a way he associated with academics. Her face was cool, unreadable, her eyes briefly meeting his with a flicker that made his stomach tighten.
He looked away quickly, pretending to adjust his satchel. The thought flitted unbidden through his mind: She doesn’t look like faculty.
Something about her presence chilled him — as if the air around her carried a weight out of step with the sleepy Oxford street. But a moment later he shook his head, scolding himself for overthinking. Too much scotch. Too many manuscripts.
Lucas pushed on toward his apartment, telling himself she was just another professor’s visitor, nothing more.
Behind him, Madeleine de Rohan exhaled smoke into the night, watching until he turned the corner.
Lucas’s apartment was small but tidy, lined with bookshelves and paper-stuffed folders spilling across his desk. He locked the door behind him, kicked off his shoes, and dropped his satchel onto the couch with a sigh.
The rituals came automatically: unbuttoning his shirt, folding it half-heartedly over a chair, brushing his teeth with the lazy rhythm of someone pleasantly tired. The scotch had left a comfortable warmth in his chest, blurring the day’s edges.
When he looked up, his reflection met him in the bathroom mirror. For a moment, he regarded himself with the detached eye he normally reserved for manuscripts.
Lean muscles traced his frame, the kind you earn without trying — running between classes, hauling books, forgetting meals until hunger gnawed. His dark hair, perpetually rumpled, fell into place in a way that was more careless charm than disorder. Behind tortoiseshell glasses, his eyes caught the dim light, sharp despite the drink.
He tilted his head, a faint smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. Not bad, he admitted to himself. For a man who often felt invisible in lecture halls and archives, the reflection was reassuring — a reminder that he was more than a stack of research notes and overdue chapters.
Switching off the bathroom light, he slid beneath the covers, the sheets cool against his skin.
As sleep claimed him, the name rose again, unbidden: de Châtillon.
It lingered like a watermark at the edge of his thoughts, a ghost on parchment, following him down into a dreamless dark.
