Free Satin Doll by Maggie; Davis

over to keep his head from touching the ceiling. “Ah, they are marvelous, aren’t they? Sarcophagi, eleventh or twelfth century. Tombs of knights of the time of the Crusades.”  
    “Tombs?” For a moment she’d thought they were human bodies. Now she could see they were reclining stone figures. She twisted to look over her shoulder. Chip was leaning up against the wall in the pool of light at the foot of the stairs. For the first time the sight of Chip was reassuring.  
    She followed Alain des Baux under an even lower part of the ceiling. He moved around to the far side of a stone effigy, putting it between them. Sam’s back almost touched the dank walls.  
    “Does this frighten you?” he said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to, please believe me. Europeans are quite used to old places, and I forget Americans are not.” His lips quirked. “Would it make you feel better if I told you that the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center in New York scares the hell out of me?”  
    The stone figure of a knight lay on top of a large sandstone bier as though it were sleeping, hands crossed over its chest. The yellow glow from a bulb strung overhead was the only light.  
    “I’m not afraid.” Actually she was thinking of this in a report back to Jackson Storm headquarters in New York. Item 47, lower level: One crypt with knights in coffins, in reasonably good condition . “Is someone really buried in here?”  
    He leaned his elbows on the Crusader’s chest to look across at her. “Yes, they are real tombs. As a child I was fascinated with this place. I tried to imagine what it was like then, when the monks were here. There were fields and vineyards covering this part of Paris in the Middle Ages. The monks raised sheep. It was all very rural, very pretty. The city itself was a small, muddy town on the Île de la Cité in the middle of the Seine.” He traced a long finger across the effigy before them. “How the knights came to be here is something of a mystery. The tunic identifies them as the order of St. John of Jerusalem. You can see the cross on the shoulder.”  
    The knight between them lay fully stretched out with a long shield covering his body from his chest to his feet, the carved gray stone blackened with mildew. The knight’s hands came together at the top of the shield in an attitude of prayer. A helmet covered his head and a long nosepiece came down between his eyes.  
    “There are two. The other one is over there, in the alcove opposite. They look like brothers.”  
    “Brothers?” Sam was intrigued. “Are you sure?”  
    He shrugged. “No, but they look exactly alike. I used to imagine two brothers, coming back from the Crusades, who stopped here at the monastery and never went on. Perhaps they caught the plague. There was always plague down in the city in those days.”  
    She shivered. The darkness around them was as cold as a real cave. “It’s very interesting.” She was trying to be polite. “Do you have a degree in history?”  
    He laughed. “My God, no. French children learn this in school. It was very boring, too. Look,” he said, pointing to the stones over their heads. “Do you see how low the ceilings are? These were small people by our standards, even the knights. Their armor in museums shows how little some of them were. They suffered a lot of sickness, a lot of war, a not too good diet perhaps, and they died young. It was tragic, those times.” He said, quite seriously, “Do you believe in ghosts?”  
    Sam had been following him, fascinated, up to that point. Now she looked at him skeptically. “Ghosts?”  
    “It’s nothing serious.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Actually, they’re another interesting feature of the house, Nannette and Sylvie will tell you so. Monks in their black habits wander above us, in the halls upstairs in the Maison Louvel. Many people have seen them.”  
    She knew he was putting her on, but he was doing it with