Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics (6 page)

Chapter
8.

Phoebe hadn’t really thought ahead. How could she? Why bother? She tried to relax and go with the flow as the helicopter swooped toward the epicenter of
the effete world. Ground zero of interior decoration. As soon as it landed she hopped out of the squirrel and then helped J.J. They ran a safe distance away and then waved enthusiastically as the pilot lifted off again.

Her commute from White Oak, Tennessee was now complete. Phoebe was standing in the most fam
ous backyard in the world. They were in the spectacular gardens to the southwest of the Château of Versailles. Surprise!

Phoebe suspected it caused
the Boss fewer problems if he could send people to GPS coordinates instead of having to reveal any specifics like, “I’d like you to fly west for 4,500 miles and go half way out across the Pacific Ocean to a tiny island and pick up a total stranger, then fly back east, and continue right over the top of your house and for an additional 4,200 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, and go to the most famous castle in the world aside from the one at Disneyland.”

* * *

This mission was conceived when the Boss got a call from the Chief Curator of the Château of Versailles. Renovations that had been planned for decades, but never undertaken on account of the exorbitant cost, had suddenly been funded by a Russian oligarch.

The Boss
was given a warning by the Chief Curator, a friend of
The School for Mysteries,
that if anything special had been stored anywhere on the grounds, stored being a euphemism for hidden, it should be retrieved
forthwith
. There would be only a short time to locate and remove any such items before they might be accidentally destroyed, or found, and make their way into the wrong hands.

Phoebe knew
The School for Mysteries
was not interested in the objects for their material value, they were simply seeking to protect religious artifacts, things with positive spiritual mojo. Any writings that CR,
a.k.a.
Christian Rosenkreutz, might’ve left behind contained major mojo.

Of all the millions of people who’d streamed in and out of the great house,
Versailles had long been famous, or infamous in certain circles, for this one particular guest. He’d visited the château many times over several decades under the alias of the Comte de Saint-Germain.

CR had
come to Versailles to visit an extremely famous person—Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, chief mistress of Louis XV, also called
Reinette
, or the Little Queen. Madame P was a great historical figure for several reasons. She was one of the most famous art patrons of history and an influential person even after health concerns prevented her from being the king’s girlfriend. She remained his closest and dearest friend until the end of her life.

J.J. had a list from contemporaneous letters and memoirs of every place the Comte had been seen.
Phoebe’s task was to scope out these places and see if she got any vibes. Most of the sightings had CR in private meetings with Madame P, so J.J. suggested they begin their quest in the rooms where she had lived.

He
thought they should start in the first set of private apartments given to her by the king. The suite was in the attic of the main block of Versailles, just above the king’s bedroom and study. After they’d searched the attic they planned to move down to the ground floor rooms where she’d lived in after the relationship became platonic.

* * *

It was cold out in the vast gardens. Phoebe stopped and she and J.J. buttoned up the
thigh length sheepskin coats, and donned lined leather gloves, cashmere scarves, and knitted caps.
That helped.

They
walked across the immense lawn and began the climb to the higher ground where the château loomed. They mounted the grand 100-step staircase near the Orangery. As they got closer, the size of the house became more apparent. Phoebe realized you could only understand what you were seeing from the mid-distance. You didn’t want to get too close, because then you couldn’t take in the entire width of the garden facade in one glance, but if you were too far away you lost the scale of the place and didn’t realize how big it actually was.

Phoebe scanned the neatly typed instructions from
Arabella Devilin-Forrest. They were to go to the main reception kiosk and ask for the Chief Curator, Marc d'Orléans-Bourbon. Phoebe wondered if the town of New Orleans had been named for this guy’s family. She thought particularly of the intersection of Bourbon and Orleans streets and then realized that was probably stupid. She loved that city, though. It was one of her very favorite places. She wondered if the person they were about to meet would be as hospitable and charming as the residents of South Louisiana.

They waited in line and when
it was her turn Phoebe asked for Mr. Orleans. The lady in the glass booth gave her a disapproving look. J.J. could hear that Phoebe was getting no response, so he offered a long flowery apology in perfect French and pronounced the name correctly.

“
Ahhh, oui!” the woman said and picked up a phone to summon him.

While they waited Phoebe scanned the
paragraph in Arabella’s instructions explaining who the guy was. She read it aloud to J.J. mangling the pronunciation of nearly every word. “The guy’s full name is: Marc Foulques Thibaut Eudes Jean Marie d'Orléans-Bourbon. His
Titles, Styles and Honours
are: prince d'Orléans, prince d’Bourbon, duc d'Aumale, duc d’Touraine, duc d’Anjou, comte d'Eu, comte d’Paris, comte d’Chambord, Grand Master of the Order of the Holy Spirit, Grand Master of the Order of Saint Michael, and Grand Master of the Order of Saint Louis.”

Good Lord.

Phoebe wondered what someone with such grand and terrifying lineage would look like. In less than ten minutes she found out.

He was about thirty years old, a couple of inches taller than her,
fit, trim, athletic, graceful, and elegant. He had a perfectly-trimmed black stubble to highlight his chiseled cheekbones and light blue eyes.

He was
immaculately turned out in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and dark orange Hermes tie. Phoebe had learned to recognize Hermes silks on her whirlwind tour of rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré with Christophe six months earlier.

Mr. Orleans
was gorgeous. And there was a lively energy and air of mischief about him. Even in exquisitely tailored modern day clothing he gave the impression of being a gentleman pirate. She could picture him wearing a sumptuous doublet and leather boots that came above the knee.

Phoebe was trying to articulate
his look when she realized that what the guy looked like was, basically, a prince. He looked like someone who knew how to ride and use a sword. She tried not to drool. At a minimum, she was too old for him. She was also too poor and too …. Phoebe decided to stop her train of thought before it got any worse.

The prince
held out a hand to her and introduced himself simply as Marc. How humble he was, how charming. And just as Phoebe had imagined, he smiled like a pirate. Phoebe’s worries about the mission suddenly vanished and she realized this job was going to be fun. This guy was definitely Mr. Laissez le Bon Temps Rouler—New Orleans incarnate.

The Prince
led the way toward a private entrance to the château. “Try not to throw yourself on him,” J.J. murmured in Phoebe’s ear.

“
Wha…?” she said, in surprise. How did he know?

“
Oh please,” he whispered. “Your breathing is giving you away. And don’t bother trying to hold your breath now,” he hissed. “It’s too late.”

“Excuse me for being winded after that long climb,” she murmured.

He blew an intentionally audible puff of air in the French version of
liar liar pants on fire
.

* * *

Marc, the pirate price, gave them a VIP guided tour of the main part of the château as they passed through some of the most famous rooms in the world during the long walk to the Pompadour apartments in the attic.

“This is the world’s largest palace,” he said. “It has over 700,000 square feet of interior floor space, 2,300 rooms, 2,153 windows, and 67 staircases.”

It was certainly huge, but it didn’t seem fair to view grand palaces this way. It was like seeing a very old woman who’d been a famous beauty. You knew her current state wasn’t the way she’d always looked, but the best you could do was try to imagine her in her prime. Phoebe knew she was only seeing a stripped, faded, and desiccated husk of what this place had once been.

And some of the areas she was seeing, the behind the scenes places that needed restoration, were even worse. Touring those rooms was like seeing the body of an accident victim before it had been washed and prepared for viewing.

There was no life here, no King, no Little Queen. Madame Pompadour had been the greatest art patron of her age. Many experts believed she was the greatest art patron of
any
age. Now, there was almost nothing left of her renowned wit, charm, beauty, or brilliant good taste.

* * *

Phoebe held her silly American questions as long as she could stand it, which was about fifteen minutes. “Do you mind explaining all your names and titles to me? We don’t have any of that in the U.S.”

“You
are fortunate,” he said. “It is nothing. It means nothing.”

“No really, I’m interested. I never met a prince before.”

“I am not a prince. Not a real one anyway. I am simply the oldest living son in a long line of social climbers.”

Phoebe laughed. He was
such a doll.

She pulled out her crib sheet from
Arabella and said, “It says here you’re the prince of two places, Bourbon and Orleans.”

He nodded. “Technically,
in my genetic heritage I carry the bloodline of two great families who quarreled over France. I am considered a
prince du sang
,” he said.

Phoebe was beginning to understand a little bit of
French, it was all in the cadence and the vowel sounds, like understanding Appalachian speech. She was also a nurse and if there was one thing nurses were familiar with it was
sang.
That meant blood.

She was pretty sure
in the old days a
prince du sang
had to be real careful or he got turned into an ex-prince by being ex-sanguinated. By sword, or more recently by guillotine. The people of France had made quite the bold statement in dealing with their one-percenters when the national wage gap got out of hand. The Revolution decimated the nobility.

Because
her new job involved working with a bunch of French people, Phoebe had been reading up on the famous families and their big houses. She thought that Chantilly, the place they’d flown over, had been owned by the Most Serene House of Condé.

Being serene
sounded like wishful thinking on their part, just like it did for the royal family of Monaco. She thought the Condé line might’ve been started by a Protestant. Good luck with finding any serenity in France as a Protestant back in the old days.

She had trouble
remembering the difference in a Condé and a Conti. She thought both families were big deals, but she didn’t remember why. Unfortunately, life for both families had been hard—really, really hard. She was pretty sure both hereditary lines were now considered
extinguished
, to use the polite euphemism.

She tried to think of a gentle way to ask
Marc about this and was stuttering out a question. He read her expression and said, “Let’s just say if things had gone differently, if there had been no Revolution, this would’ve been my room.”

They
were in the King’s formal bedroom. Phoebe looked around at the splendor. How strange to have so many people hanging around in your bedroom that you needed a gilded wooden fence around your mattress to keep rowdy visitors from jumping in bed with you. It must’ve been a rough life in some ways.

The prince saw how Phoebe was looking at him.

“Believe me,” Marc said, looking around at the huge chamber, “I’m content with dusting and inventorying the old pile. Honestly. I wouldn’t want any more responsibility than that.” He fluttered his hands, “It’s too much.”

Phoebe could tell he meant it.

Chapter 9.

They continued upwards toward the attic and
Marc gave information on the rooms and objects they saw along the way. He seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the house. Of course he would, he was the Chief Curator. She looked at him standing near a portrait of a foxhunt.

Noblemen, in so far as Phoebe knew, seemed to spend inordinate amounts of time hunting. Time spent around hunting dogs might be the only thing she had in common with a French prince.
Or any other kind of prince.

Phoebe
had grown up around hunting dogs. Her father loved Coonhounds. Over the years they’d owned Blueticks, Redbones, Treeing Walker, Black and Tan, and various other mixes. Friends and neighbors raised Bloodhounds, Plotts, and English or French Foxhounds. Hounds were a noisy bunch, but not mean or dangerous.

There was a lot of teamwork required to work with hounds effectively. Both the dog and the handler had to be
well-trained. They had to become familiar with each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Sort of like she and J.J. were doing.

There were different kinds of hounds, two of the biggest distinctions being
sight
hounds versus
scent
hounds. Scent hounds were slower and easier to deal with because they weren’t as prone to rocketing off after something they’d caught a glimpse of, and chasing it over the horizon, never to be seen again.

The world of scent hounds was
filled with its own unique jargon, too. For example, there was a term for dogs with exceptional scenting abilities. A hound that could sniff out the faintest of odors was said to have a
cold nose
. A typical hunting dog had a
hot
nose
, which meant it could detect the fresh smells that came from recently used paths. But an extremely good dog could locate even an old trail and follow it.

The phrase for this rare talent
of finding and following a trail that hadn’t been used recently was
striking a cold trail
. Phoebe had her own version of this talent. This was especially surprising since never in her wildest dreams had she ever imagined she would be of any use in tracking anything. She couldn’t even manage to follow the progress of a t-shirt coming from Lands End with a UPS tracking number and a live link.

But that’s precisely what she was being asked to do now—to strike a cold trail.
She’d only recently learned she had peculiar talent for being a cold nose tracker. Like a bloodhound, she was particularly gifted at tracking men.

She had a
bizarre genius for tracking one man in particular, CR, a mysterious personage who’d last been seen over 250 years ago. An extremely narrow and intense affinity for CR, a guy she’d never even heard of before, combined with her romantic obsession with the long dead handsome genius Nikola Tesla, helped explain why Phoebe was an old maid. But since this eccentric skill was the only one she had, she didn’t want to drop the ball on her task of finding whatever the guy might’ve left in a secret stash somewhere.

What were the odds anyone else would hire her for something like that?
Okay, so she was supposed to locate and follow spiritual contrails laid down in the mid-1700s by a man whose exalted nature was mired in a hopeless muddle of myth, legend, misunderstanding, and speculation of the dumbest kind. There were worse jobs.

And even this wacky situation made a kind of sense. The Boss had done exactly what any hunter would do with his dog. He transported her to the last known location of the great man and unleashed her, metaphorically speaking, hoping she’d be able to strike a cold trail from there.

She looked at J.J. What a team they made—a human hound and a blind man who could see through walls. If Phoebe could manage to locate anything, J.J. would be able to pinpoint any secret places inside walls or underneath floors, even caches that had been plastered or bricked over. J.J. also carried a huge reference file of important objects in his expansive memory. That would help, too.

She
hoped it would be enough. She didn’t want to let the Boss down.

* * *

Eventually they made it up to the attic on the third floor. The windows in this part of the palace were round, like portholes about three feet in diameter. They gave a view down onto the Marble Courtyard, the entrance to the oldest part of Louis XIII’s relatively modest hunting lodge before it was upgraded and added onto by Louis XIV, XV, and XVI and became the most fabulous dwelling on the planet.

They
stood in Madame P’s first apartment. “Where should we start?” Phoebe whispered. “Here?”

“This room is as good as any,” J.J. said, smiling, commiserating with her.
They spoke in vague terms so as not to alert the Prince to their particular skills. They figured he knew something was up, since he knew
Le Seigneur
and had been the one to notify him of the impending renovations, but there was no reason to give him any details.

They slowly made their way through the interconnecting attic rooms that made up
the original apartment. J.J. stopped at one point and touched a door built into the paneling.

“That i
s the lift,” Marc said. “It was called a
flying chair
. It is a private chairlift from the King’s apartment, which is directly beneath us on the floor below. It is a bit like a dumbwaiter. It was built so they could visit each other in privacy without needing to take the public stairs. It is thought to be the first elevator in the world.”

“Does it still work?” J.J. asked.

“I believe so, but I do not know when it was last used. It would not be safe to try to ride it.”

J.J. felt along the panel until it sprang open. There was a tiny room
with a padded bench. Phoebe described the interior to him. A rope ran down through the center of the car from a circular opening in the ceiling to a matching opening in the floor.

“It i
s fitted with counterweights and pulleys so a lady could easily travel without needing much physical strength,” Marc added.

J.J. turned toward Phoebe and asked, “Anything?”

She stood in the doorway and tried to sense any vibes, but there were none of the sort she was looking for. “No, nothing,” she said.

J.J.
closed the panel gently. “May we visit the apartments she occupied when she left here, the ones on the ground floor?”

“Of course,”
Marc said. “Unfortunately, they have been extensively remodeled, to the point that I am afraid there is nothing of left of her there.”

Marc
took them down two flights of stairs to the ground floor and to the apartments Madame Pompadour occupied after a new mistress was moved into the attic apartments.

There was no residu
e of anything in any of the rooms aside from sadness. Jean Poisson had died here of tuberculosis at the age of forty-two. Her body had been removed from the palace immediately, according to custom. The King was not allowed to reside in the same place as a dead body. Records from the time indicated that it was raining on the day of her death and that the King cried as he watched her body being taken away to the sprawling Capuchin Convent in Place Vendome for interment, as she had requested in her will.

Marc
was right. Neither Phoebe nor J.J. could detect anything of interest.

“What now?” J.J. asked Phoebe.

* * *

“I’d like to tour the grounds,” said Phoebe.

“The
y are quite extensive,” warned Marc. “There are more than 200 acres of gardens and the entire estate encompasses over 2,000 acres.”

“
Oh!” Phoebe said. “Well then, we’ll leave you to your work.” They thanked Marc, he gallantly helped Phoebe with her coat, they said their goodbyes, and left the Prince standing just outside the palace that employed him.

* * *

J.J. and Phoebe headed northwest. The helicopter had dropped them off on the south side of the grand axis that bisected the enormous grounds and they’d walked along it on the way to the palace. Now they decided to check out the opposite side.

Phoebe kept taking looks back over her shoulder as they got farther and farther away from the
château. It really was something. It was a singular experience. The main building was much larger than she’d ever imagined and far more majestic.

It made her feel small, not just in her body,
but in every way. She realized that even in her wildest dreams, she could never have imagined it. It was
too much
in every way. Just seeing the garden facade made you want to kneel, or cower.

“What’s wrong?” J.J. asked
, softly. “Is someone following us?”

“No, I’m just looking at the house. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen or even dreamed of. It exists in its own
separate universe. It’s amazing and terrifying at the same time.”

“It was meant to be,” he said.

They continued down a long pea gravel walkway between tall clipped hedges and a row of marble statues and urns set on pedestals. “I’m just a hick and in a place like this my rube-ness highlighted even more,” Phoebe said, laughing.

“Not at all,” J.J. said. “Being here with you like this
helps me understand something
Le Seigneur
told me years ago. My family is French, obviously. He said that really good psychics could see if a person had had a past incarnation as a Frenchman. He said it was a unique trait of the French—that they are the only ethnic group on earth for whom this is the case. Their souls retain a tincture of Frenchness even in subsequent lives. And this tincture is visible to people who can clearly discern auras.”

“
Frenchness?” Phoebe asked.

“I think it’s what you’
re feeling from the château. It’s that quality of pride that the French believe is deserved, which has been earned by the careful refinement of aesthetic judgment over many generations, but it is also what is so irksome to non-French people. It’s what reactive people perceive as arrogance and vanity. They feel insulted by it. They aren’t sensitive to the nuance. They don’t recognize the cultural basis of the
aesthete
.”

“T
hat’s interesting,” said Phoebe. “A place like this creates cognitive dissonance. It’s a massive display of size and power and yet at the same time it’s the ultimate in delicate refinement. It’s transgender or androgyny in architecture.”

“A cross-dressing castle?” J.J. suggested.

“
Exactement
,” said Phoebe.