A Rather Charming Invitation (46 page)

And away we went, marching alongside each other, with Jeremy slightly ahead, on account of his big feet. We counted and paced.
Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight . . .
Then we came to a dead halt.

“Here,” Jeremy said finally.

“I’m here,” I said, a few feet back.

“I say,” Rollo observed, huffing and puffing alongside us excitedly, “if this field were the tapestry, surely we are now right where the ‘J.L.’ crest was.”

“Good. So we should dig out a square area between Penny’s spot and mine,” Jeremy said.

“All of it?” David demanded. “Are you quite sure this time?”

“Be quiet and start digging!” Honorine cried.

So Rollo, Jeremy, Charles and David began the Big Dig. Honorine and I kept watch, and told them when they were getting too far afield. The clank of spades and the
Sift-sift
of earth was a tantalizing sound, until we heard a
Thunk!
whenever one of them hit something. This happened a couple of times, and all the digging immediately ceased. But each time, it was only rocks.

“I should think it wouldn’t be buried terribly deep,” Rollo observed.

“Bear in mind, that the ground shifts over time,” Jeremy reminded them. “So it may have sunk lower than its original position.”

On they went.
Shump, shump, shump
. They kept digging. Then Jeremy hit something so hard, it sounded like pay- dirt to all of us. The men dropped their shovels and ran over to him. Honorine and I leaped forward, shining our flashlights into the hole they’d dug.

Jeremy was brushing the loose earth off it, to get a better look. We all peered in, and Honorine and David bumped heads. “There’s something shiny there!” Honorine exclaimed.

“It looks like a box,” David reported. This awakened my research mode.

“Don’t drag it up!” I cried. “If it was made of wood, it might be disintegrating. Dig all around it, loosen the earth, until you can get something flat under it, and lift it like a pancake.”

David looked at Honorine in confusion. “
Qu’est-ce que c’est ‘pancake’?”
he inquired.

“
Une crêpe
,” she said briefly. The men carefully cleared away the ground at all four sides. Then they slid one of the flatter shovels under it, and heave’d and ho’d until they managed to loosen the whole box from the ground beneath it. Finally, they were able to lift the box up, up, up—just like a pastry chef with a wooden paddle hoisting a loaf of bread out of the oven—and deposited the earth-smeared item on a big white cloth that Leonora had thoughtfully provided us.

“Whuf! It’s heavy!” Rollo exclaimed. Everyone turned and looked at me expectantly.

The box was about nine inches by twelve, and eight inches high. Very gingerly, I brushed off the dirt with a soft cloth. As I did, it began to gleam more brightly, and I saw that it was a cedar-and-brass chest with gold-tooled leather. Its outer walls had been painted, and were faded now, but I thought I could make out the gold, silver, violet and green colors of moonwort.

“Oh!” I said with a gasp. “It’s a good, solid box, see, the gilt brass fittings? I bet it has . . .”

I explored it gingerly with my fingers, searching for a special trick lock, which such antique coffers often had. I felt along until I reached a moveable panel at the back of the lock, that, when touched, might release the hidden mechanism.

“Here it is,” I breathed. I tried it, but it wouldn’t give. I peered closer, and realized that dirt had accumulated underneath the latch, preventing it from releasing. David handed me a small screwdriver, which I used to carefully scrape out the dirt. When I tried it again, this time, at my touch, the lock sprung open. Everyone aimed their flashlights at it now, as I lifted the lid. We all peered inside.

Moonlight made the contents gleam and glint and practically wink at us. A heap of golden coins. I reached in carefully, and picked up one, then another, and another. I handed a few of them around, and we all examined the dazzling coins in the palms of our grubby little earth-covered hands. They were heavier and thicker than I’d expected, with a weight that felt serious and good in my fingers.

“There’s Lunaire’s initials and moon crest on the obverse side,” I breathed, pointing. Then I turned it over, so I could see the reverse. The coin curator was right; it was an image of the sun. But it didn’t look exactly like his sketches. It was more dramatic, with fierce eyes; and the fiery rays were not spiky, they were more like curling waves of flames. That face, yes, that was different, too. It was more of a Zeus-like face, just like the sun in the pie-shaped window on Armand’s tapestry. It didn’t resemble Louis XIV, the Sun King. Perhaps this had annoyed the proud king.

The men were busy doing what men instinctively do . . . counting them.

“Twenty-one, twenty-two . . .” they were chanting.

“Hey, guys!” I cried. “Dontcha think we should get this baby to the château and count ’em up there at our leisure? Anything can happen out here in the middle of this field!”

“She is right,” David said briskly. “Close it and bring it home.”

 

 

I thought I heard a rooster crow, by the time we got back to the château. The sky had gone from charcoal-colored, to milky white, to a violet-blue-grey with streaks of lemonade-pink. Leonora watched in astonishment as the men hurried inside, carrying the chest of gold into the library. They flung back the lid, and began arranging the coins in stacks on the big table, counting as they went.

I stood back, watching my French relatives lay out the Lunaire gold in neat, orderly rows, stopping now and then to exclaim and examine a coin or two closely, as if they could not believe their own eyes. I was suddenly exhausted, and I sat down gratefully in a nice, comfy leather chair.

I realized that I was still clutching one of the coins. Lying there in the palm of my hand, the Lunaire gold seemed to be a repository of its own history, giving off a palpable vibe of mingled valor, risk, vanity, and playfulness. I gazed at the haughty expression on the face on that aristocratic moon, wondering about Jean Lunaire, who had ascended high, higher, higher on the ladder of success, only to have it all go up in sparks and flames . . . and, even worse, invoking the wrath of a king who envied him for having too much ambition—and, perhaps most unforgiveable of all—superior good taste.

Then my thoughts turned to the hardworking Armand, who made such beautiful tapestries, for idle rich people who felt entitled to—well, have their cake and eat it, too—until one day their carelessness brought on the revolution that proved their historic undoing.

But most of all, I found myself contemplating the life of Armand’s daughter, Eleanore. I guess I felt a special kinship with a long-ago bride. She had been waiting for a dowry—and a father—that never arrived. She must have been so baffled and distraught by the strange fate that had befallen her father; and afterwards, she’d spent the rest of her life unknowingly close to the treasure he’d meant her to have.

Oncle Philippe came over now, to sit in the chair beside me. Occasionally he chuckled at the sight of his family happily counting their good luck. Here, at last, was the secret dowry of their ancestor’s . . . only a mere handful of centuries later. I felt that somehow, it had always been destined for Honorine, so I found a rather satisfying symmetry in all this.

“Looks like the circle’s been completed,” I commented. Oncle Philippe’s eyes twinkled. Then I asked, “What became of Eleanore, after she got married?”

He smiled. “I am told that Eleanore was especially bright—she was very good with numbers, and could add up long, three-digit columns in her head, without aid of paper or pen. By all accounts she was an excellent businesswoman, having had the experience, in her girlhood, of working with her father. So, she worked with her husband to build up their company. They had many children, and both Edouard and Eleanore lived to a ripe, old age.”

I gazed at Honorine, her face alight with excitement as she watched the treasure being arranged in stacks, before her very eyes. David now announced the final number of coins. “Five hundred twenty coins,” he proclaimed.

I called out, “I have one more here!” and I rose to go and add it to the stacks, but Oncle Philippe stopped me. He opened his palm, where he was holding four pieces of Lunaire gold that he’d picked up to examine; but, instead of adding them to the final tally, he insisted, over my protests, on adding them to the one that I’d been holding in my hand. Then he pushed my hand closed over them.

“
Alors
,” he said. “
Now
the circle is complete.”

“
F
ar be it from me to tell you what to do with your life,” I said to Jeremy. “But I’d just like to point out that if it weren’t for Aunt Sheila’s horologist, we never would have found the Lunaire gold.”

It had been two weeks since we dug up those gold coins, and now our wedding was only a week away. We’d spent the day sorting out final wedding preparations, and packing up for our honeymoon. In the late afternoon, we managed to steal a little quiet time for just the two of us, drinking glasses of iced tea while sitting on the wrought-iron chairs on the patio, overlooking the sparkling swimming pool.

“True,” Jeremy allowed. “I admit that it can, at times, be useful to have a clock-man about the place. You never know when you’re going to need another chronogram decoded.”

“He’s a nice guy, and you were a pain in the ass,” I reminded. Jeremy smiled ruefully.

“Well?” I said.

“What?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.

“Don’t you think it’s high time that you extended a personal wedding invitation to Guy Ansley?” I demanded. “I sent him an official one, but your mom told me that the poor fellow actually volunteered to stay away from the wedding if his presence would cause a rift between you and your grandmother.”

“Very sporting of him,” Jeremy said, pretending to consider Guy’s sacrificial offer. I lifted my tea spoon menacingly over his knuckles. Jeremy said quietly, “Yes, I’ll give Guy a call.”

“Good,” I said. “And make sure you mean it.”

“You are becoming a bit of a bossy-boots yourself,” Jeremy remarked.

“Humph,” I said. “When you’re done, let me talk to Guy. I’d like to ask him if he’ll transport that lovely clock he gave us back to London, after the wedding. When we return from our honeymoon, I want to walk into the townhouse and see that beauty, right there on the mantel, waiting for us.”

“You won’t walk,” Jeremy said gallantly. “I shall carry you over the threshold.”

He picked up the day’s newspaper from London, which had been lying on the table untouched, as we’d both been too busy to even glance at it. “Wow,” he said, “you don’t have to worry about seeing Parker Drake behind every tree and shrub. Looks like his lucky streak is at an end.”

He held the paper aloft, so that I could see a headline:

“Drake appears to be in serious trouble,” Jeremy said, scanning the article rapidly. “Among other things, he has secret bank accounts in tax-dodging havens,” he reported. “Not so secret anymore. Apparently he’s been moving money all over the world. This is a big deal.” Jeremy looked up and said, “Well, he made one big mistake.”

“Tangling with the firm of Nichols & Laidley?” I suggested.

“True enough,” Jeremy grinned. “But I was referring to his divorce. Tina’s suing him, so he tried to pretend he had less money in his personal holdings, to shaft her on the alimony. That was stupid. He should have given her what she wanted, just to keep her quiet.”

“What did she want?” I asked.

“Among other things, the yacht,” Jeremy said. “She knew where to sock it to him. He cried poverty, as only a billionaire can, and this infuriated her. You know what they say: ‘Hell hath no fury . . .’”

“Like a woman who’s had her favorite necklace bandied about in a card game,” I concluded.

Jeremy looked up, then said thoughtfully, “You know what this means? Drake won’t be able to bid on the Lunaire gold at auction.”

Oncle Philippe was selling some, but not all, of the coins. The experts had already assessed the Lunaire gold to be worth nearly $500,000 per coin . . . and it was expected to go even higher at auction. “It is definitely
not
a good time for Drake to conspicuously throw money around,” Jeremy explained. “So I guess that means the museums and his rival collectors will get the lot.”

“You forgot Rollo,” I reminded him. “I thought it was sweet of Oncle Philippe to let Rollo have one.”

“Yes, it was,” Jeremy chuckled. “It seems right, somehow, that there won’t be just one person hoarding all those coins. You know, I believe that’s what Drake really craved—the glory of being the guy who discovered—and was the sole owner—of the Lunaire gold.”

I thought about Drake and his painstakingly labelled coin collection in his office at the chalet in Geneva. “I actually almost feel sorry for him,” I said, shaking my head.

“I don’t,” Jeremy responded. “That jerk nearly ruined our relations with your relations.”

“Drake spurred us on to find that dowry,” I reminded him. I couldn’t help seeing everything in mythological terms now, where even ogres have a valuable role to play in the hero’s adventure. “You might say it’s thanks to Drake that Philippe doesn’t have to sell off his flower fields,” I pointed out.

“No, it’s thanks to you,” Jeremy said. “And Honorine doesn’t have to get rushed into marriage. She’s got plenty of time to fall in love now.”

“Er, slight new development on that horizon,” I said. Jeremy raised his eyebrows. “It would seem,” I said, “that Honorine is faced with a dilemma. She has two suitors. And both are lawyers. She told me this morning.”

“Two?” Jeremy said, puzzled.