My heart pounding, I ask, “What was the attachment?”
“A sealed envelope.” She quirks a teasing eyebrow.
“What was in the envelope?”
“A handwritten note and an antique key.”
Finally!I release the breath I was holding. “What did it look like? What did the note say? Where’s the key now?”
“Let me start with your second question,” Charlie replies. “The note said that the key had belonged to Queen Charlotte, as explained in the manuscript. Monsieur Pernoud also wrote in his note that the key was a personal gift for my mother to thank her for the amazing job she’d done restoring the book.”
“Have you seen that key? Do you have it?”
“I saw it once,” Charlie says. “I wandered into Mom’s office when she was inventorying the items in the bequest. She was sitting at her desk, looking at a beautiful old key. She seemed mesmerized by it, completely in love. That’s when she told me she’d found it attached to Queen Charlotte’s story.”
“Can you describe what that key looked like?”
“I wouldn’t be able to give you a very detailed description because I didn’t look at it closely, but I can tell you it was very pretty.”
I reach into my pocket and fumble for my phone. This gives me an opportunity to glance around without drawing attention to myself. I take note of the passersby, assessing their body language, expressions, and whether they seem out of place. They don’t.
Satisfied, I unlock my phone and show Charlie a photo of one of the keys. “Did it look like this?”
“Hmm…” She studies the pic. “Yes and no. It was similar in shape and the color of its patina, but it was a bit bigger. And a lot moreornate. Its artistry was more intricate and elaborate.”
It can still be one of ours.While the four keys recovered by the royals so far are quite alike, they aren’t exact replicas. And I don’t just mean the bit. They all have different ornamental engravings on their bows and shafts.So, yes, that key could be one of ours.
“Where’s it now?” I ask again. “Do you have it?”
She shakes her head.
“I don’t understand. Didn’t your mother keep the key since it was a personal gift?”
“She did. Well, sort of.”
I stare at her, perplexed.
“The year was 1470,” Charlie says, going off on a tangent once again, “Out of Queen Charlotte’s first four children, only one had survived infancy. A girl.”
“Not unheard of before the discovery of penicillin.”
“True, but Charlotte hadn’t had a single pregnancy in four years by then. She was in a dark, lonely place. She believed herself a failure, both as a wife and as a queen since she was unable to produce a viable heir to the French throne.”
“I do empathize, but—”
Charlie flashes her palm. “It was in that dark moment that Queen Charlotte made a vow according to the manuscript.”
She pauses for effect, which gets me thinking…
Did she say 1470? That can’t be right…While we have no records of when the impenetrable vault was built, what we do know is that its nine keys left Mount Evor in the early 1790s after the French Revolution. It was a time of great unrest and uncertainty. The Valois-Montevor royals feared for their lives. To protect the original of our foundational treaty and its addendum, they locked them in the vault and sent the nine keys abroad for safekeeping, until the revolutionary madness blew over. Unfortunately, over the following decades, they lost track of them all.
In other words, if our keys had already existed in 1470, they would still be in Mount Evor. I don’t see how one of them could have belonged to Queen Charlotte.
While I ponder that question, Charlie resumes her tale. “Queen Charlotte had nine keys, inherited from her mother, Anne of Cyprus. It was her most cherished family heirloom.”
Nine keys?Does it mean all our keys had belonged to Queen Charlotte, and to her mother before her? That doesn’t make any sense…
“According to the family tradition, Charlotte was supposed to leave the keys to one of her daughters,” Charlie says. “But she vowed that if she had a boy, and if that boy lived, she’d skip her own offspring and give her keys to her sister’s daughter Jeanne. It was a compromise of sorts. The keys would stay in her blood family, but she was depriving herself and her own descendants of their protection.”
