With the curator walking him through it, Harvath restarted the clock and then replaced the housing. He climbed down the ladder and hung it on the nearby wall.
“I don’t understand it,” said Nichols. “It seemed like the perfect fit.”
Harvath borrowed the architectural detail again and looked at Ferguson. “Maybe this diagram is the clue to what we’re looking for. If Jefferson drew it, he probably drew it for here, right? So what should we do? Go room by room? I know the second and third floors aren’t open to the public. Maybe we should start up there.”
“Or the stone weaver’s cottage,” offered Nichols.
“There wouldn’t be carpentry like this in the stone weaver’s cottage,” said Ferguson as she bit the inside of her cheek in thought. She then pulled the walkie-talkie from her belt, changed its channel, and spoke into it. “John, this is Susan. Do you copy?”
A moment later, a man’s voice came back over the radio. “Go ahead, Susan.”
“Do we have Paul Gilbertson on the docent schedule today?”
“Who’s Paul Gilbertson?” asked Nichols.
Ferguson motioned for him to hold his question.
A moment later, the voice replied, “Yes, we do. He’s leading the architectural study tours.”
“Will you please ask him to meet me up at the main house right now? Tell him it’s urgent.”
CHAPTER 79
Paul Gilbertson was a large, Santalike figure in his early seventies with a full beard and glasses that dangled from a cord around his neck. His hands were rough and his fingers looked like thick pieces of rope. A Leatherman tool hung from a nylon sheath on his belt.
He accepted the architectural schematic from Nichols and put his glasses on. With the tip of his tongue between his teeth, he made sucking sounds as he studied the drawings. After turning the document around in his hands he said, “Even without knowing what all of the coded words mean, this definitely looks like Jefferson’s handiwork. They have Palladio written all over them,” and then he went back to making the noises with his tongue.
Harvath looked at Ferguson. “What’s Palladio?”
“Andrea Palladio was a Renaissance architect. Jefferson was completely self-taught in architecture and referred to Palladio’s four books on the subject as his bible.”
A couple of minutes later, as if being led by the drawings, Gilbertson walked away. The rest of the group quickly followed.
They entered the dining room and watched as Gilbertson scrutinized the woodwork around the doors and windows.
As they did, Harvath discovered a clever revolving serving door. It looked like a regular door, but it didn’t have hinges. Instead, it had a rotating pin, fastened at the top and bottom in the center of the door. Food apparently could be loaded on to shelves affixed to the back of the door and then it would be turned outward to present the food to the dining room without a servant ever having to enter.
As Harvath spun the door back to its original position, Gilbertson shook his head and said, “This isn’t a diagram for door surrounds
“What is it then?” asked Nichols.
The docent moved away from the window and crossed to the wall. “One of these,” he said.
“A fireplace?” replied Harvath.
The man nodded. “I think it’s a design for a mantelpiece.”
Nichols looked at him. “Are you sure?”
“To be completely sure,” he replied, “I’d need a full drawing, not just a sectional. But with a full drawing, almost anybody would be able to tell what they were looking at.”
“Why do you think it’s a mantelpiece?” asked Harvath.
“The diagrams are of very specific pieces that require sophisticated joinery,” replied Gilbertson as he signaled for Harvath to follow him. Walking over to the side of the fireplace, he said, “It reminded me a lot of this mantelpiece.”
“Why?” asked Harvath.
“Watch.”
Harvath looked on as Gilbertson opened one of the mantelpiece’s panels to reveal an ingenious hidden compartment. Inside was a rope and pulley system.
“What is it?” he asked.
Gilbertson smiled. “It’s a dumbwaiter for wine. There’s one on each side of the fireplace. Jefferson designed them himself. Right beneath us is the wine cellar. When more wine was needed, a slave in the cellar would place a bottle in the box and send it up.”
“So you think this set of drawings is for a fireplace dumbwaiter system?”
“It does appear to have an attachment point for a rope and pulley system, similar to this mantelpiece, but with such a limited diagram it’s hard to tell,” said the docent. “If I had to guess, I’d say that what you have there is a sectional view of a mantelpiece that has some secondary purpose.”
“Speaking of which,” said Nichols, “when we came in here, you didn’t go straight over and show us the fireplace. You studied the doors, the windows, and the ceiling first. Why?”
Gilbertson held up the document. “The frieze Jefferson drew here looks just like the one from the Corinthian temple of Antoninus and Faustina in Rome. Susan was right to take you to the entrance hall first. But it’s this smaller design at the bottom of the page that made me think of this room.
“Look at the entablature around the ceiling in here,” he said, pointing up. “Jefferson used rosettes and bucrania or ox skulls.”
Everyone looked up.
Harvath was the first to glance back down at the paper. “But that doesn’t look like the drawing. This has a woman’s face.”
“But what’s next to the face?”
Harvath looked closer. “Vines?”
“Flowers,” said Gilbertson. “It’s the edge of a bucranium. Ox skulls draped with flower garlands were a popular sacrificial motif for Roman altars. They became popular again for adorning Renaissance buildings.”
“Did Jefferson use bucrania anywhere else here at Monticello?”
“He did. In his bedchamber and in the parlor,” replied Gilbertson, “but not with faces. The only place faces appear anywhere similar to this is in the frieze in the Northwest Piazza. It was modeled on a frieze from the Roman baths of Diocletian.”
“May I see that again please?” asked Susan Ferguson.
The docent handed her the page.
Nichols was about to say something when he noticed the intense look on his colleague’s face as she analyzed the document.
“Now there could have been a design like this here at Monticello at one point in time,” stated Gilbertson, “but I don’t know of it. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist, though. You may want to speak with one of the librarians about their collection of Jefferson’s notes and letters. They can be excellent research resources. In fact-”
Ferguson suddenly interrupted him. “No, Paul. You’re right. This motif wasn’t designed for Monticello.”
The docent was surprised by her certitude. “It wasn’t?”
“No, Jefferson designed it for his other plantation, Poplar Forest.”
“How do you know?”
“Several of the entablatures there were also based upon an ancient frieze from Diocletian’s Roman Baths. They had human faces interspersed with three vertical bars, but Jefferson decided to add some whimsy and directed his craftsmen to include ox skulls.”
“And the mantelpieces?” asked Harvath.
“Poplar Forest has fifteen,” offered Ferguson.
