Within seconds she had her answer. All the handwriting was identical to the note. Marcelhadwritten to her. Now the question that remained was why.
But there was nothing more she could do here. She needed to discuss the situation with Mikhail when she got home. He would know how to handle the dilemma.
She was about to leave when her eyes settled on the family photographs hanging above the fireplace. They ranged from daguerreotypes taken in the 1800s to pictures that looked quite recent. She didn’t know who all the people were but she could feel the love, the sense of friendship that emanated from them.
In a grand house such as this, her favorite room would be this one, and she was certain it had been Marcel’s too. She felt as if she had gotten to know him through the weeks she’d spent here.
She studied a picture of a much younger Marcel with his wife. Theo stood wedged between their legs, only five or six years old. An older woman, most likely his grandmother, hovered to the side. Semele looked at the other photos of Theo. There was one with his mother that appeared to be the most recent. She knew that Mrs. Bossard had passed away three years ago from breast cancer. In the picture Theo had his arms around her and was laughing. He didn’t look like his current self at all.
Semele couldn’t stop staring at the picture. Something about it made her wistful.
The desire struck her to go visit a few of the other rooms one last time before she left. Her only opportunity to explore the château had been on that first day. There was a small reading library upstairs, where she’d spied several jaw-dropping first editions perched on a bookshelf, including anOrbis Sensualium Pictus,the earliest picture book for children, first published in 1658. She had to know if it was an original.
It would just take a minute. Surely no one would mind—Theo was gone and the housekeeper had already said her good-byes. The only person left was the chef, who was probably in the kitchen drinking wine and watching his favorite Swiss cooking show. But as she ventured up the sweeping staircase, she began to second-guess her nerve—Orbisor noOrbis,she felt like an intruder. Halfway down the hall, she was ready to turn around when she saw that the bedroom door directly across from her was open. What she saw inside made her freeze.
Theo was sitting on a king-size bed in the middle of a room that looked like it had been plucked straight out of a Tudor manor. He was wearing only sweatpants and sitting cross-legged, meditating with his eyes closed and an open hand on each knee.
He looked like Leonardo da Vinci’sVitruvian Mancome to life and reclining in repose. The air around him felt charged.
Semele stood watching him until a glimmer of awareness finally returned to her and she realized how this must look. She was a professional, one of the best in her field, and here she was hovering at her client’s bedroom door like a Peeping Tom.
Tiptoeing backward, she fled through the hall and ran down the stairs, jumping the last two. She dashed back to the gallery and closed the door. “Jesus!” That had been completely ridiculous.
Mortified, she put her hands to her face, still in a panic. If she had been discovered… She tried to calm down but spent two solid minutes pacing the room.
Needing a distraction, she grabbed her laptop and made her way to the kitchen for a visit with the chef and a cappuccino. When he offered her a glass of Petite Arvine from the local vineyard, Semele changed her mind.
The debacle upstairs called for wine.
She perched on a stool at the kitchen island and sipped the golden white. The chef tried to offer her a late lunch, but she declined, too worked up to eat.
She opened her laptop to try to take her mind off Theo. What she really wanted to do was read more of the manuscript, but she didn’t feel comfortable working on the translation in front of anyone. What if Theo came downstairs? Just the thought made her stomach do a somersault.
Instead she logged in to her company’s server, where there was a running news stream of sales happening at various auction houses around the world. She forced herself to focus on the recent highlights.
Sotheby’s had sold twelve items of a collection she was quite familiar with for $14.9 million. One of her associates at the firm, Fritz Wagner, had managed the auction. She made a mental note to send him a bottle of champagne when she got back.
A copy of the Torah had set a record, selling for $3.85 million, and aTitanicletter had sold for $200K. It seemed like all the usual suspects were up for grabs this week. Writings from Abraham Lincoln’s journals—the man wrote more than a million words in his lifetime—and works by Thomas Jefferson and the Beatles too. And it looked like Bonhams had just sold the second of two known copies of the first edition ofThe Wonderful Wizard of Ozfor $100K.
The next listing grabbed her attention.
Sotheby’s had auctioned off an entire private manuscript collection for $2.5 million. The collection was billed as “a representation of the history of the written word in Europe” and contained pieces from Early Antiquity to the Renaissance, including several rare works from the Dark and Medieval Ages in a myriad of languages: Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Old English. The catalog would be an excellent reference. Semele studied the list of all sixty items and started to take notes.
Half an hour later she reached for her wine and realized she had finished it. When the chef asked if she would like another, she slid the glass forward.
As she watched him pour, she noticed he wore a Geiger watch like her father’s. She had been meaning to ask her mother if she could have the watch as a keepsake, only they weren’t speaking to each other now.
With a sigh she sipped the wine and moved on to checking e-mail. There was one from Bren letting her know he had made a reservation at La Grenouille for tomorrow night.
Her eyebrows rose as she read—the place was a landmark, where Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, and Salvador Dalí had all dined by candlelight and roses. Semele and Bren had been to La Grenouille once before on a business dinner with a collector her firm was courting. Over Grand Marnier soufflés Bren had whispered that he’d bring her back for a special occasion. Semele was beginning to wonder just what he had in mind.
Was he planning to turn dinner into something more than an anniversary celebration? An image of him placing a ring-sized box on the table took shape in her mind. Surely he wasn’t going to propose. They weren’t at that stage yet. She brushed the thought aside.
In his e-mail he had attached a funny picture of himself holding a handwritten sign that saidLOST AND LONELY.It made her smile.
They had barely spoken the past three weeks. Whenever she tried to call, she got his voice mail because he was tied up in class. Switzerland was five hours ahead, so most of their conversations ended up happening over e-mail and texts. But Bren understood how consumed she was by her assignments. Out of the twenty days she had been in Switzerland, she’d allowed herself only one day off to play tourist.
Last week she had strolled the gorgeous lakeside walk to Château de Chillon, the famous island castle on the edge of Lake Geneva. The castle looked like it was literally rising from the water; its construction was a marvel of architecture and steeped in a thousand years of history. It had been everything from a Roman stronghold to a royal summerhouse to a prison.
