Shadows of Lancaster County (33 page)

“But what difference does it make?” I asked. “You’re talking about six, seven, eight generations ago. Who cares?”

“In your brother’s case, I believe he was trying to track down some sort of medical mystery and was hoping to go as far back as possible. The trail ended with Karl Jensen, and Bobby was trying to figure out where it went from there. That’s the post that caught my eye, the one that got me so excited when I realized the implications of what he was asking. I emailed your brother and he phoned me, but he seemed to be more concerned about his paternal lineage search than he did about my story of priceless jewels.”

“That’s because his son is sick,” Reed said, handing the article back to Remy. “That was far more important to him at the time, I’m sure.”

“Yes, I know, with some rare disorder,” Remy replied. “Bobby was trying to figure out if there was any Amish blood in his family tree, as that might help him narrow down what could be wrong with the boy.”

“Do you know what he found out? About the Amish blood, I mean?”

Remy tucked the article back into his briefcase.

“Yes, I do. I thought if I scratched Bobby’s back he would scratch mine, so I helped with his search. As it turned out, two generations of Jensen men were married to Amish women: Karl and his son Jonas. Once Bobby knew that, he no longer cared about the mystery behind Karl’s nonpaternal event with Samuel. But I did. In fact, I think it’s the most exciting thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

I looked at Reed, heartbroken to know that my hunch had been correct. With Amish blood in our family tree, there was a much bigger chance that Isaac had some rare disorder—and that Dr. Updyke had tampered with his genes. Sadly, some of the pieces of this puzzle were falling into place exactly where I didn’t want them to.

“Frankly,” Remy continued, opening his napkin with a flourish and placing it on his lap, “I was a bit miffed when Bobby put me off and said he’d have to deal with the jewels some other time. It was just through sheer luck that I spotted him online today and he connected me with you.”

I bit my lip, feeling suddenly guilty about my deception from this afternoon. Obviously, Remy didn’t even know Bobby was missing. I decided I would tell him before the night was over, but for now I wanted to change gears and learn more about the Beauharnais Rubies.

The waiter arrived with our salads at that moment, and I was glad for the interruption as it gave me a moment to collect my thoughts. Picking up my fork, I realized I was hungry—which made sense, considering I’d had almost nothing to eat all day.

“All right, Remy,” I said after the waiter was gone, “my brother may have been too focused on his son to think about it, but after being attacked twice by people who want these rubies, I need to know exactly what they are and what they have to do with me.”

Ignoring his own salad, Remy sat back with a twinkle in his eye and began to tell us the tale of the Beauharnais Rubies, a story that started with Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 1800s.

Remy began with a simple history lesson, explaining about European royalty in that era and how ties between countries were often strengthened through marriage. Napoleon had no legitimate descendants of his own, Remy said, so when he wanted to align himself with the newly expanded Duchy of Baden, he decided to adopt his wife’s cousin, a charming young woman named Stephanie de Beauharnais, and marry her off to Baden’s hereditary Prince Karl. Karl was the reigning Grand Duke of Baden’s grandson and had become next in line for the throne when his father had died a few years before.

In celebration of Stephanie’s adoption, Napoleon gave his new daughter an elaborate matching set of jewelry known as the Beauharnais Emeralds. Five years later, when he learned that Karl and Stephanie were expecting their first child, Napoleon commissioned a similarly elaborate set of diamonds and rubies called the Beauharnais Rubies. The jewels were meant to celebrate the birth of a new male heir to the Baden throne, so when Stephanie ended up having a girl, Napoleon held on to them. A few years later, when she finally had a boy, Napoleon immediately sent the rubies to her as a congratulatory gift.

Sadly, by the time the jewels made it from Paris to Baden, Stephanie’s newborn baby boy was dead. According to Remy, records indicated that the rubies were received at Baden’s palace on the day of the infant’s funeral and placed directly into the vault. Considering the situation, they were
never worn publicly. Stephanie was later painted wearing them, but Remy said her expression in the portrait was not a happy one.

With only a few exceptions, the Beauharnais Rubies had never been seen since.

As our empty salad plates were taken away and delicious-looking entrees put in their place, Remy continued his tale, filling in some of the details of what we’d already learned. First, he said, the marriage of Karl and Stephanie may have produced children, but it was quite miserable. They seemed to dislike each other from the very beginning, so much so that at one point Napoleon himself had to intervene and help make peace between them.

To complicate matters further, Karl’s grandfather had a second wife, a commoner named Luise, with whom he had had a son named Leopold. At that time, the laws of succession prevented Leopold from succeeding his father as Grand Duke because of his mother’s nonroyal origins. Considering that there weren’t many male heirs in the family, however, Luise had high hopes that eventually those laws would be changed to allow her son to ascend to the throne.

Those hopes had been dashed when Stephanie married into the family. As the royal daughter of Napoleon and a healthy young woman in her childbearing years, there was a good chance that she and Karl would produce plenty of sons, all of them legitimate heirs eligible for the throne who would take precedence over Luise’s son, Leopold. Consequently, Luise hated Stephanie and made her life quite miserable.

When Stephanie’s second child turned out to be a boy, everyone knew that Luise’s worst fears were coming true. When that newborn boy died several days later, rumors began to circulate that Luise and/or Leopold had been responsible for his death. Though nothing was ever proven, those rumors persisted to this day.

There were other, different rumors about the baby as well, Remy said, including one that claimed that Leopold had switched the healthy infant at birth with the dead or nearly dead infant of some local peasant. Supposedly, this story went, the true heir to the throne had been taken far away and given over to a man—a former palace guard—who was instructed to
kill him. Unable to carry out such a heinous crime against a defenseless child, the man had instead allowed the babe to live, though he eventually imprisoned him in a dungeon.

Those rumors took on an eerie reality sixteen years later.

Pausing to take a few bites of his halibut, Remy asked if we had ever heard of the name Kaspar Hauser. I hadn’t, but Reed vaguely recalled reading something about him in one of his DNA magazines. My curiosity piqued, I ate my filet mignon and listened as Remy continued with his tale. He said that sixteen years after Karl and Stephanie’s newborn son supposedly died, a strange young man appeared one day on the streets of Nuremberg. No one knew who he was or where he had come from, but there was obviously something wrong with him. He could hardly walk, and he only spoke a few intelligible words.

The young man indicated that his name was Kaspar Hauser, and eventually it was deduced that he had spent many years, possibly his entire life, as a prisoner in a small cell with almost no human contact and only a few little wooden toy horses to keep him company. Despite that, he was very intelligent, and experts were able to educate and rehabilitate him to a degree. He seemed to be about sixteen years old, and soon a rumor began to spread that Kaspar Hauser was in fact the offspring of Karl and Stephanie, the son who had supposedly died at birth sixteen years before.

That story grew, and eventually so many people believed that Kaspar Hauser was Karl and Stephanie’s son whom Leopold had spirited away and left to die that he became a worldwide sensation. Soon there was talk of having him restored to his rightful place in the royal family, but before anything official could be done, Kaspar Hauser was assassinated. Even after his death, Stephanie never publicly confirmed or denied whether she thought he was her son or not. She went to her grave years later refusing to comment.

To this day, Remy said, the truth about Kaspar Hauser’s origins were not known. In recent years, two separate DNA tests had been done, but they contradicted each other, one saying he definitely was the son of Karl and Stephanie, the other saying he definitely was not. As no tests were currently being allowed on his remains, the facts were still shrouded in mystery.

While I found the whole story interesting, I wasn’t sure how it tied in
with me or my family tree. I said as much to Remy now, but he simply grinned and told me to be patient.

Having thoroughly studied the entire situation, Remy said he had developed a theory of his own. In his opinion, the newborn boy had indeed been spirited away—but not by Luise or Leopold. Instead, Remy said, he thought that
Stephanie
had done it herself, that upon hearing rumors of her evil in-laws’ intentions to kill her child if it was a male, she had made arrangements to protect him and outsmart her enemies. For years, Remy had been convinced that Stephanie somehow communicated with another pregnant woman and arranged for the exchange of their children after they were born in order to save her son’s life.

His theory sounded pretty far-fetched to me. Certainly, Stephanie’s motivation was understandable, but I found it hard to believe that she would have been able to locate a peasant woman who was also pregnant who also delivered around the same time who also happened to have a boy who also was willing to give her child away and take Stephanie’s in exchange. As far as I was concerned, those were some pretty big leaps of faith, all in a row. Still, for the sake of argument, I went with it for now.

Remy explained that at that time Baden and the Palatinate were heavily populated with the Amish. Because of their radical belief that baptism should take place in adulthood rather than infancy, they had suffered horrendous religious persecution throughout Europe. Though Baden was more tolerant than some countries were, it was still not ideal. The Amish had been immigrating to America in search of true religious freedom for a while, many of them coming to Lancaster County. It was Remy’s opinion that Stephanie de Beauharnais had traded newborn sons with an Amish woman who had then brought the child with her to America where he would be safe, his true identity never revealed.

To prove his theory, Remy had been studying Amish immigration records for years, trying to pinpoint the exact family, the exact child, but without success. When he read Bobby’s post a few weeks ago, however, Remy realized that his search had been hindered by one incorrect assumption, that the Amish family in question had immigrated soon after the boy was born. Instead, Remy now realized, the family didn’t leave Baden for
America until many years later, when the boy was grown and married and would have been about twenty-one.

In retrospect, Remy said, the timing now made perfect sense. The child had been raised in Baden, perhaps with the hope that he might one day safely return to the palace and take his place as the rightful heir. When Kaspar Hauser showed up and everyone began saying he was Karl and Stephanie’s son, Stephanie had kept mum because she knew the real truth. At that point, she may even have been laying plans to straighten things out and introduce her true son to the world. But then, on December 14, 1833, Kaspar Hauser was lured into a park and stabbed; three days later, he died. Once that happened, Remy said, Stephanie probably realized that as long as Luise or Leopold or any of their followers were around, her son would never be safe.

It was Remy’s belief that at that point Stephanie went to her son and his adoptive Amish parents, urged them to leave the country, and gave them the Beauharnais Rubies as a gift. Amish immigration records confirmed that two couples with the last name of Jensen left Europe a few weeks later, on the first day of January 1834.