The Medusa Amulet (34 page)

The professor looked over his shoulder, turned the crank one more time, and said, “Happy to be of assistance, mademoiselle.”

His eyes, David noted, never left Olivia.

Brushing the rock residue from his hands and removing his apron, he offered to escort her—them—to the doors of the museum. All the way, he engaged Olivia in a discussion of her work, where she had studied, how she liked Paris, while David followed along. In the portico, Vernet took her hand, and while assuring her again that he was available for consultation at any time—“Did I mention that I live quite close by?”—David idly surveyed the Board of Governors plaque. Several dozen names were listed, in no particular order, and while most of them meant nothing to him, some were famous from the worlds of French politics and finance.

And one, in gilded letters near the bottom of the last column, nearly bowled him over.

“Excuse me,” he said, brashly interrupting an inquiry into Olivia’s
plans for dinner, “but it appears you have a Monsieur di Sant’Angelo on your board?”

“Yes, what of it?” Vernet replied, miffed at having his pitch cut short. “He has the best eye for gems in all the world. We often consult with him when something especially rare comes to our attention.”

“He lives here?”

“Oh yes—in a grand old house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, on the rue de Longchamp. Number 10. He has a business there, by appointment only.”

Was it possible? David thought, his mind racing. When Cagliostro had written that the Gorgon belonged to Sant’Angelo, did he mean a
person
by that name, and not a place? Was he referring to an ancestor of this very man—perhaps a jeweler in his own day? Had the count left
La Medusa
in his keeping when he fled Paris one step ahead of the mob?

“Has the family lived there long?” David asked.

“Oh, as far back as anyone can remember. Long before the Revolution, that much is certain.”

“And have they always been jewelers?”

“In a manner of speaking. Collectors as much as purveyors. Why do you ask?”

“No reason, just curious,” David said, intervening to free Olivia’s captive hand from Vernet’s grasp. “I can’t thank you enough for all your help, but we do have to go.”

Olivia looked relieved to regain her freedom and allowed David to steer her toward the doors.

“Wait—if you are interested in Cagliostro and his practices,” the professor said, in a last-ditch effort to lure them back again, “you might also like to see Franz Mesmer’s iron rods. We have them in storage!”

“Next time!” David called out, as Olivia waved farewell, and they hurried down the steps of the museum and into the chilly dusk.

Chapter 24

Somewhere in the Sologne Forest, the Marquis di Sant’Angelo grew so impatient with the rate of progress they were making that he stopped the coach and exchanged places with the driver. The coachman was now reclining inside the carriage, while the marquis himself, wrapped in a hooded coat stitched from the fur of the wolves he had hunted on his estate, sat on top, cracking the whip over the heads of his four black horses.

He was determined to arrive at the palace of Versailles in time to see the queen at the evening meal and secure an audience with Count Cagliostro. The accompanying coach, carrying the royal jewelers and their priceless diamond necklace, had long since been left behind.

As the light began to fade from the winter sky, the carriage clattered into the village, which had sprung up solely to accommodate the needs of the ever-expanding royal court. Peasants were scurrying about in the cold, loading wagons with barrels of wine and wheels of cheese. They leapt out of the way as the marquis turned the coach into the broad avenue leading to the palace itself, rolling past the snow-covered parterres and terraces, past the empty orange groves and over the ornamental bridge above the Grand Canal. The palace itself loomed ahead, behind an immense forecourt, like a great white wedding cake of columns and colonnades. Lanterns and candles had
already been lighted in several hundred of its windows in preparation for the night’s festivities.

But then there were festivities every night.

Once, years before, the marquis had spent a good deal of time at court, keeping company with the previous king and his notorious mistress, Madame du Barry. Louis XV had been known for his debaucheries, but the marquis had found him frank and entertaining—and vastly preferable to the present king and his court of sycophants and dandies. The only reason he had spent time at Versailles in recent years was to visit with the queen. Marie Antoinette had touched his heart upon his first sight of her there in 1770.

The dauphine, as she was then known, had just arrived, like a gift-wrapped package from the royal house of Austria—a girl of fourteen with roses in her smooth white cheeks and a fall of fair blond hair. She was as skittish as a fawn, with wide blue eyes and a long, slender neck, and the marquis felt for her plight … a shy child who was comfortable speaking only German, deposited among a throng of jabbering Frenchmen—all of them vying for position and favor with the future Queen of France. Her fifteen-year-old husband-to-be, the dauphin, was a surly, fat sluggard the marquis wouldn’t have trusted to clean his boots.

And now she was the most famous—and in some quarters vilified—woman in all of Europe.

When the marquis pulled in on the reins and brought the horses, foaming at their bits, to a stop, several liveried stable hands raced to open the carriage doors and the coachman stumbled out, pointing to the marquis and trying to straighten out the confusion. Sant’Angelo laughed, stepping down and leaving it to the servants to sort things out. Striding up the wide staircase, he entered the palace itself, which was buzzing like a hive with valets de chambres and ladies’ maids scuttling to and fro, and headed straight for the chambers of the Baron de Breteuil, Minister of the Royal Household.

“I need to see the innkeeper!” the marquis exclaimed, bursting into the room, still in his wolf furs, where the baron was conferring with some elaborately coiffeured men. “I must have my usual quarters!”

The baron immediately broke away and, shaking Sant’Angelo’s hand, said, “Of course, of course, Monsieur le Marquis, but we weren’t expecting you!” In a lowered voice, he said, “I was under the impression that Messieurs Boehmer and Bassenge had gone to see you at the Chateau Perdu … about a certain matter.”

Breteuil knew everything that everyone was doing, at any given moment.

“And so they have. In fact, they should be here soon.”

“Then you’ve seen the necklace?”

Sant’Angelo shook his head dismissively. “A gaudy piece that the queen would never wear—especially since she knows it was originally made with du Barry in mind.”

Breteuil frowned and nodded, as if this confirmed his own suspicions. “But the jewelers are so persistent,” the baron said.

“In their shoes, I would be, too. They’ve got a fortune tied up in that piece. If they make it back to Versailles tonight, don’t put them up anywhere near me.”

“I understand,” he said. “And I’ll have your own rooms made ready immediately.”

“Good,” the marquis said, clapping him on the back, in part because he genuinely liked the baron, who also had the queen’s best interests at heart, and in part because he knew such conduct was a gross breach of the elaborate court etiquette. At times like this, he missed the last king.

For Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, life at Versailles was a life lived in public. From the moment they awoke in the morning to the moment they retired for the night, they were accompanied, assisted, advised, pampered, coddled, served, and observed. The marquis could not imagine living life as such a spectacle and he did not imagine that the teenage Antoinette had expected it either. Life at the royal Austrian palace of Schönbrunn had been, by comparison, restrained and secluded.

On one of her first duties after her marriage at Versailles—a wildly extravagant affair that drew six thousand of France’s richest and most prominent citizens—she had been ushered into her private chambers (still shadowed by a substantial coterie of her retainers, including the Princesse de Lamballe, who was to become her close confidante), and shown the royal jewels. The marquis, in his informal role as arbiter of all things elegant and artistic, had been admitted to the august group, and he had watched as this slip of a girl, dwarfed in a dress of white brocade with enormous hoops on either side, was maneuvered into a chair for the ceremony.

At Versailles, if Antoinette so much as plucked an eyelash, it was a ceremony.

Two kneeling servants presented a red velvet box, six feet long and half again as high, with several dozen different drawers and compartments, all lined in pale blue silk. The bounty within was unparalleled, and the marquis could not help tallying it all up in his head as the dauphine removed and admired each of the many treasures. There were emerald earrings and pearl collars that had once belonged to Anne of Austria, the Habsburg princess who had married Louis XIII in 1615, a diamond parure, tiaras, brooches, diadems, and a pair of newly made gold bracelets with the initials MA engraved on clasps of blue enamel. The marquis even spotted in the inventory one or two pieces that he remembered from Florence, long ago, when they had adorned Catherine de’Medici before she had decamped to become the Queen of France.

But when the dauphine withdrew a folded fan, studded with diamonds, and tried to flutter it open, the leaves remained stubbornly closed.

The Princesse de Lamballe tried to lend a hand, shaking the fan herself, but her luck was no better.

Sant’Angelo knew why; the Parisian jeweler had consulted him on its design, and the marquis himself had suggested a hidden clasp, perfectly concealed in a circle of white diamonds.

“Erlauben Sie mich,”
the marquis said, leaning close. Allow me.
The dauphine had flushed at his sudden proximity—and several of the courtiers reared back in shock—but when he took up the fan, undid the clasp, then, like a coquette at L’Opera, cocked his elbow and fanned himself with its silk leaves, the dauphine spontaneously laughed—which gave the others permission to laugh, too. Continuing the joke, he said in a raised voice,
“Es ist unertraglich heib hier drinnen, denken Sie nicht?”—
It is insufferably hot in here, don’t you think?—and Antoinette had beamed at him, grateful not only for the levity but for the taste of her native tongue. The marquis had spent many a year in Prussia, and the language was still at his command.

“May I know your name?” she inquired in German. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

“This, madame, is the Marquis di Sant’Angelo,” the Baron de Breteuil hastily inserted himself to answer. “An Italian friend of the court.”

“And a friend, I hope, to you, too,” the marquis replied. Although many of those present could probably follow the gist of the conversation, the fact that it was conducted in German formed a special bond between the two of them. Glancing around at the deeply rouged ladies in attendance, Sant’Angelo had leaned in even closer than before and whispered, “Have you ever seen so many appled cheeks? It looks like an orchard in here.”

Antoinette covered her lips and tried not to laugh. It was the custom at the French court to plaster rouge on the face like primer on a wall, and he guessed that the young girl would not yet have accustomed herself to the gaudy sight of the ripe red cheeks everywhere. Even the market women tried to copy the effect using grape skins.

“But it’s the powder,” she replied, sotto voce, her eyes straying to one of the more monumentally dusted wigs, “that makes me want to sneeze.”

“That’s what the fan is for,” he said, fluttering it again, before showing her where the clasp was hidden and handing it back. He had
had a daughter, Maddalena, in a far-off time and place, and on the last occasion he had seen her she was about this same age.…

But that was another life, and, as he had learned to do over the years, he quickly shut the door on it.

Other gifts were presented, too, and some of these were intended for her attendants, such as a set of porcelain Sèvres for Prince Starhemberg. When the ceremony was over, the dauphine extended her hand again, and reverting to German a final time, said to the marquis, “I hope that we shall be great friends.”