Chapter Two

Their lies lead them astray, lies which their fathers followed.

Amos 2:4

Silas wasn't sure if he was awake or asleep and dreaming, but he felt wonderful. Perhaps he was dead and this was heaven, this blissful restfulness and feeling of total security. He felt so peaceful that he hoped that whatever state he was in, it never changed. If he still had a body, he couldn't feel it, so there had to be no tension whatsoever in any muscle.

Sennett knew she was awake. It was only just on dawn and the light was barely picking out Silas' long, lean form next to her on the bed. He had her pinned down with one heavy arm and leg, as if afraid she would disappear into thin air in the night if he didn't hold her there. She could just make out the scars on his back. She had never seen them before and they were no longer angry and red as when her neighbour, Diggory had treated the wounds. They had faded back to a pale pink but they were still raised from his white skin. Obviously they had either been deep or had been inflicted in the same place over and over, most likely the latter. The scars didn't repulse her but the thought of what he used to do to himself made her feel sick. She deliberately pushed the thought away. Gently she ran her fingers over the cool skin, feeling the raised scars under her fingertips as she did so. She didn't want to wake him but her instinct to caress him even as he slept was almost absent-minded, as though her fingers could smooth away the scars.

She had sensed the hunger in Silas long before she encountered it in the form of sexual desire. Desire was a separate thing anyway, she thought as she lay there. There was a hunger in him for acceptance, for affection, for someone to be interested in him. People who grew up without those things from their parents spent their lives looking for it elsewhere. He had done many terrible things in order to be accepted by Aringarosa and to belong at Opus Dei. Aringarosa had used Silas' thirst for affection against him, making the young man love him and then making him kill for him.

Silas' desire now burnt with a flame as white as his hair (as did her own) but time would mellow that. What would not change was Silas' hunger for acceptance and affection.

Silas decided he wasn't dead because he could feel cool fingers stroking over the skin of his back. It felt delicious, he didn't want to move. Slowly he realized he could also feel a soft body under his arm and leg, and the events of the day before came back in a rush. He was suddenly wide awake. He still didn't want to move because he felt so good but he could feel his face burning with a dreadful blush as he remembered the night before.

It was at that moment Sennett realised he was awake.

"Silas?" Sennett said sleepily, still absently caressing his back.

He was afraid to lift his head and look her in the eye, knowing his face would still be red.

"Hmmm," he mumbled, his face buried in her throat.

"Aren't you going to kiss me good morning?" she asked.

With an inward sigh of relief at this easy and pleasurable way out, he immediately did so.

* * *

Sennett and Silas stayed in Guarda for three weeks and then spent a week in Pontresina.

For some reason he couldn't explain to himself, Silas felt very different after his honeymoon than before. It wasn't just that he was more relaxed. Silas already knew that he would never be the sort of man who would ever be truly relaxed and at ease. He just felt more free within himself, as though a great space had opened up within him. He was no longer constrained by his old way of thinking about his life, as though certain things were closed off to him. He knew for sure that Sennett loved him because no woman would spent so much time with any man simply touching him and talking to him without seeking any distractions unless she loved him. He was still trying to absorb that astounding fact but in trying to absorb it, it was expanding him.

True to form, she never asked anything either. Silas was used to people whose affections were expensive, usually paid for in the blood of others and in absolute obedience. Sennett just seemed to want his time and attention which he was more than happy to provide.

They had discussed where to live but had decided to take the worker's cottage on the farm where Silas had his apprenticeship. To call it a cottage was a bit of an understatement, it was built for a family and there was plenty of room for both of them. Sennett liked the idea of living in a wide open space. Each of the workers' cottages was placed in a separate field so the farm hands could keep an eye on the animals, so there was plenty of privacy.

Silas was happy enough to get back to work and back to his studies although he missed being able to spend as much time with Sennett. Sennett took up her part-time lecturing post at Berne University and found she had more time for her own researches which she enjoyed.

Another couple of months passed in this way. Sennett tried to keep out from under Silas' feet at the farm because she knew farm hands were very busy but she and the other wives were invited to certain things, such as seeing new baby animals soon after they were born. Occasionally Silas would bring a motherless baby home for the night so it could be fed regularly and Sennett would take great delight in giving the lamb or calf its bottle.

"You should be a piggie, not a lamb," she would say to it sternly as it sucked down its milk too fast and Silas would almost smile, his pale features losing their usual haunted expression for just a few seconds.

* * *

Later, Sennett told herself that the rural idyll was sure to have been shattered soon enough. They had been too happy for too long. Three months had been their fair share, obviously…

[A Friday in late Spring…]

The Priory of Sion had its tentacles everywhere. Silas had noted that the gathering at Rosslyn Chapel had consisted of at least twenty people but he had suspected at the time that the group was far larger and that the gathering he saw consisted only of the inner circle.

If Silas had been privy to the meeting of the Priory upon Sophie's return to Rosslyn Chapel with Langdon, he would have seen a far larger crowd; perhaps as many as fifty people. Again, this would not have been their full number but only those who lived close by.

In fact, the Priory had representatives in every major European city and at least one on every continent. They came from all walks of life. They were nurses, policemen, clergy, business people, scientists, artists, politicians, journalists, teachers, academics and so on. It was not as well organised as Opus Dei but they managed to keep in touch and keep their activities coordinated.

It was in this way that the extraordinary DNA findings held at the St John Street DNA Laboratory came to light one Friday roughly three months after Sennett and Silas were married.

The scientist who had performed the tests, Kit Ogden, was talking to a colleague about the results and how he believed they should be published and was overheard by one of the administrative staff members, who happened to be a Priory member. She mentioned the conversation to her husband, also a Priory member but also a scientist in another field, who immediately recognised the significance of the overheard conversation.

Together, they planned a way of stealing a copy of the results of the testing. As a staff member, this was not a difficult task and she was able to do so during the day while others in her section were at lunch. She printed out the results from the electronic file, put the print out in her handbag and went out to lunch herself where she met her husband and handed them over.

The woman watched her husband's face as he quickly read the results. She understood the expression before he said a word. The news was bad, very bad. His face had gone white.

"The timeframe and the genetic results are almost 100% accurate for a Mary Magdalene match, so you were right to show me this," he said gruffly. "Of course, unless we ask this Sennett Langlois where she got the sample from, we cannot be sure it really came from Mary's tomb but we do know that a woman by this name was found by a Priory member at the tomb just before this test was ordered. The strange thing is, she knew Langdon and checked out with him, so why was she conducting these tests in secret? I know Langdon knows nothing of these tests," he continued, obviously thinking out loud, his gaze turned inward.

"Are you sure Langdon doesn't know?" the woman asked, her eyes examining her husband's face keenly.

"Langdon is preparing to write an academic book proving that Sophie Neveu is the descendent of Christ. Do you think he wants genetic results that contradict that? It would ruin his grand plans. He knows it would make his career, not to mention a lot of money. Of course," he added in a whisper, "It is all the Priory has dreamed of for so long, being able to prove the truth of the Merovingian line."

He was silent for a long time.

"If these results are for Mary Magdalene and Sophie Neveu's DNA and I think they are, the Priory is finished. We will have to dissolve for real this time, not the sham dissolution of 1967. If these results say what I think they say, we've all been living under a very big delusion for a very long time," he said quietly. There were tears in his eyes.

"There was no Merovingian line, no bloodline of Christ?" his wife said agitatedly, her face creasing into a frown. "It's all been a fake and a fraud? We've all been protecting Sophie and her brother all these years as the heirs of Christ and they are no such thing? Does this mean that Mary Magdalene was never the wife of Christ either? Are you trying to tell me that the Church has been right all this time?" she was almost yelling by this point.

"We won't know anything for sure until we can confirm with this Sennett person that she took the bones from Mary's tomb. I'm almost certain she did but until we know for sure, we shouldn't jump to any conclusions," he said tiredly, trying to pacify his distressed wife. His own heart was broken and he knew the road ahead was going to be almost impossibly difficult to walk. If this was his own wife's reaction, he knew others in the Priory were going to be far worse. He wasn't a man to not face up to the truth, however. It was his desire for the truth that brought him to the Priory. That same desire would mean he would let go when it became obvious that the Priory was not the holder of the truth he had sought.

A/N – If there is one thing I hate, its writing a wedding. I don't like attending them and I like writing them even less. If there's one thing I hate more than writing a wedding, it's writing a honeymoon – talk about voyeuristic. I feel like I'm spying on my own characters. Needless to say, the action part of this story got started pretty early!