farther into the cabin, and one of the armed riders spurred his mount closer to the coach.
“You have business with the marquis?” the man said, more insolently than he would ever have dared in years gone by.
“Official business of the court,” Boehmer said, to put the peasant on his guard.
The man stood on his tiptoes to survey the inside of the carriage, where Boehmer sat with a cashmere rug across his lap and Bassenge was filling his pipe with tobacco. The man nodded, as if this explained the armed riders, and said, “He is expecting you?”
“I don’t see where that’s any of your business,” Boehmer said, in a voice that he tried to make more forceful than he felt.
“The marquis makes it my business. He likes his privacy, and I help him to keep it.”
Bassenge, putting his pipe on the seat, seemed to divine what was going on before his partner did. Taking several francs from his pocket, he leaned toward the window and handed them to the man with the hatchet. “We thank you for your help, citizen.”
The man took the coins, rolled them around in his closed fist, then said, “Take the turn to the left. About three more kilometers. You’ll see the gatehouse.” Glancing up at the darkening sky, he said, “But I’d hurry if I were you.”
Boehmer did not know what precisely the vague threat implied, but he did not care to find out. “If you and your friends can clear the road, we would be grateful.”
“You would?” the man replied, and Bassenge, shaking his head at Boehmer’s slow-wittedness, again handed out a few more francs.
When the carcass had been dragged off the road, and the carriage was again on its way, Bassenge, a tall lean man with a sepulchral voice, chuckled. “To think that you still don’t understand what greases the wheels.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Money, my dear fellow. Money greases the wheels of the world.”
And Boehmer knew he was right. All his life, Boehmer had made it his business to be polite and amiable, open and fair, with everyone he met, and he still found it strange to live in a country where such suspicion and enmity prevailed. Like his partner, Bassenge, he had always been an outsider-a Swiss Jew now living in a French and Christian land-but through his skills and diplomacy, he had procured the office of Crown Jeweller, and he was allowed as many privileges at court as anyone of his background could ever hope to achieve.
As the carriage rattled on, it passed through a tiny town-no more than a tavern, a sawyer’s, and a deserted blacksmith’s shop-then over a millrace, where the wheel stood still in the frozen water, and on again into the deepening woods, which pressed closer to the carriage on both sides. Often, twisted boughs scratched the sides of the carriage, like plaintive bony fingers, and the wheels screeched as they caught in the icy ruts. The Chateau Perdu-the lost castle-was aptly named, he thought. Though he had never been there before-in fact, he knew no one who had-he was aware that it had been built nearly three hundred years before, by a Norman knight fresh from looting the Holy Land. Hidden away in the most remote corner of a vast estate, and perched on a cliff overlooking the Loire, it had been situated like a fortress, not a palace, and over the years, it had acquired an unsavory reputation-with rumors of terrible and sacrilegious deeds being performed there. Eventually, it had fallen into ruin.
And now it was inhabited by the mysterious Italian nobleman, the Marquis di Sant’Angelo.
As the carriage slowed, Boehmer looked out the window again and saw a stone gatehouse, with a lantern burning inside. A lame old man hobbled out, spoke with the rider in front, then unlocked the gates, and the carriage passed through. There was still no sign of the chateau, only a dense thicket of leafless trees all around, their trunks so closely spaced that they seemed to be fighting for their own room to grow. The twilight sky was filled with crows, swooping and cawing overhead like a flock of heralds. At several junctures the snow was so deep the carriage had to slow to a crawl, lest it fall into an unseen hole. More than once Boehmer saw dark shapes moving swiftly through the woods, tracking the humans’ progress with glinting yellow eyes. What, he wondered, could even the wolves find to eat in such a desolate landscape?
The road slowly rose, the trees began to fall away, and here, where the wind had blown the snow away, the wheels of the carriage were able to bite into the hard-packed dirt and gravel. Boehmer was looking out again, and Bassenge, puffing on his pipe said, “See anything yet?”
“Yes… but just.”
At first, it was only a tiny prick of light, burning as if in midair, but as the carriage rolled on, the light turned out to be a torch blazing at the top of a slender black turret, with its distinctively tapered pep-perpot top. The dimensions of the Chateau Perdu gradually took shape in the dusk-a crenellated stone wall, punctuated by five rounded towers, and sitting so high atop the land that anyone approaching it could be seen for at least a kilometer. Even now, Boehmer felt that they were being watched.
The dirt and ice of the road eventually gave way to an evenly laid bed of cobblestones, and the coach clattered toward a drawbridge spanning a wide green moat, also frozen over. The moment its wheels clattered through the postern gate and under the raised portcullis-its sharpened ends pointing down like daggers-the grate dropped again, chains rattling as it fell. The coach and horsemen drew up in a stone courtyard, surrounded on all sides by the gray slate walls and lighted windows of the chateau.
Boehmer straightened his clothes-it had been a long and arduous trip-and said to Bassenge, “Why don’t you do the honors?”
Bassenge tamped out his pipe, and reaching into a secret compartment beneath his seat, removed the walnut casket containing their precious cargo.
A footman from the chateau was opening the door and lowering the steps of their carriage as Boehmer stepped out. Night had fully fallen, as swiftly as a curtain might drop at L’Opera Francaise, and a cold wind was wailing around the courtyard. At the top of a flight of stone stairs, a pair of massive wooden doors, studded with iron rings, stood open, with a beckoning hearth just beyond. With every joint and bone in his body aching from the trip, Boehmer longed to stand before that fire and warm himself.
Other servants scurried out to help unload the coach and take the horses to the stable. The armed riders were led off to the staff quarters, while Boehmer and Bassenge ascended the steps as quickly as safety would allow, and entered the hall. The marquis himself, whom they had sometimes seen at court-more than once on the arm of Marie Antoinette herself-was descending the grand escalier with a pair of wolfhounds on either side. He was dressed, as was his wont, not in court finery, but leather breeches and riding boots. His black eyes sparkled in the firelight, and he appeared as robust as a stone-mason. Boehmer, whose considerable girth made him waddle like a duck, envied him his bearing. Not all noblemen struck such an aristocratic pose, he thought. The king himself made an unfortunate impression.
“I was about to send out a search party,” the marquis said, his French accented only slightly by his native Italian. “The brigands grow bolder every day.”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Boehmer said, clasping his extended hand, “but the roads are icy and we threw a wheel.”
“I’ll have my men make sure of the repairs.”
Bassenge thanked him, and while their bags were taken to their rooms, the marquis ushered his guests through the salle d’armes, where the walls were lined with medieval weaponry, and into the dining hall, its coffered ceiling gleaming gold in the light of a dozen candelabra. Here, they were served a lavish dinner of roasted boar and fresh pike, accompanied by several bottles of the local Sancerre. It was the best wine Boehmer had ever tasted, and he had tasted many.
The marquis himself was a pleasant enough host, but there remained about him an impenetrable air of mystery. His fortune appeared to be great, but no one at court had ever been able to trace his family or guess where the money had come from. Although he had been received at court by the previous king, Louis XV, he had quarreled with the king’s notorious mistress, Madame du Barry-it had had something to do with a portrait-and he’d soon found himself a close ally of the present queen, whose scorn for du Barry was no secret.
Marie Antoinette had come to rely upon this bold Italian’s taste in many things, especially questions regarding the fine arts, architecture, furnishings, and, above all, jewelry. It was in deference to his exquisite eye that the jewelers had made their pilgrimage to the Chateau Perdu. If they could procure a recommendation of the piece they had brought-a recommendation written in the marquis’s own hand-it would go far toward making up
