The Tavernier Stones (18 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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“Yes and no,” John said. “Somebody also killed Cellarius. That means we have two suspects.”
“But we don’t know who killed him, and we’re running out of characters for this script. We can’t do research on anonymous ghosts.”
“We have at least one more character: it’s generally acknowledged that Cellarius had an ongoing affair with a woman named Hildegard Weinbrenner, who came from the lower Palatinate—yet another reason to take a hard look at the Palatinate map. What are the odds of a coincidence like that?”
“Cellarius may have drawn a map of the Palatinate simply because it’s where his girlfriend was from.”
“And make up a strange grid? And throw in an irrelevant biblical quote? And fill the border with mystical symbols? And make
only one print
—then destroy the plate? I don’t think so.”
“Do we know anything about Hildegard Weinbrenner, other than she came from the lower Palatinate and rolled in the hay with our boy?”
“She was beautiful,” Sarah said.
John and David looked at her.
“Well, that’s what the newspaper reported. Also, that she lived in a town called Idar-Oberstein.”
“Nice to see you can read,” David muttered, which made Sarah blush.
“What happens now?” John was trying to take the spotlight away.
“We assign duties,” David said. “Mostly what we have are unanswered questions. But it’s important to identify the right questions before leaping irrationally toward the wrong answers. It’s also important to proceed without delay: the pigpen made the papers, and more clues will undoubtedly follow.”
He consulted his notebook. “John, you need to dig up everything you can about Cellarius. I’m convinced he killed Tavernier and took the stones. The more we know about
him
, the closer we get to
them
. I know you’re already an expert of sorts on the subject, but we need more than we’ve presently got. Write a biography if you have to. Also, you need to study the Palatinate map until you figure out what keeps bothering you about it. And, when you have nothing better to do, break that code.”
“And you?”
“I’ve calculated the size and approximate shape of the missing ruby. I’m going to look for it. My instincts tell me that wherever it is, the rest of the lost Tavernier stones are likely to be too. I’m also going to research the genealogy, so to speak, of the Prairie State ruby, and investigate Tavernier and his legend as deeply as you’re going to investigate Cellarius and his map.”
“You’ve been there before,” Sarah reminded him gently.
“I’ll go there again. So, are we all set?”
“What about me?” she asked.
David frowned and scanned his notes. “You seem to have an affinity for Hildegard Weinbrenner. When you’re not gussying yourself up in front of a mirror, see what you can find out about her.”
“Is that all?”
“Trust me, it’s plenty. She’s suspect number two. If you want, you can come with me to College Park.”
“Why College Park?” John asked.
“The University of Maryland. It’s where I went to school.” He put his notebook back into his pocket. “And you?”
“Franklin & Marshall.”
“What’s that, a law firm?”
“No, a college, here in town.”
“Oh.”
After an awkward silence, David said, “Listen, John. Just so there’s no misunderstanding between us later, it would be unproductive to withhold information. I hope you realize that.”
Rather than respond, John looked down at his shoes.
“Now,” David rubbed his hands together. “How about something to eat?”
John stood up. “I have Hamburger Helper,” he said brightly.
David and Sarah glanced at each other.
“Hamburger Helper?” Sarah asked.
“Is there a problem with that?”
“Not at all,” David said, rising to his feet. “Hamburger Helper it is.”
John motioned for Sarah to lead the way into the dining room. Then he followed her, tracing the geometry of her hips with his eyes, watching her skirt sway as she walked. He sensed that David, bringing up the rear, wore the same amused—no, pitying—smile he had worn earlier.
It could not have been the first time David observed another man scrutinize his girlfriend. But his path had probably never before intersected with another man’s in quite such a way. It remained to be seen how well their paths continued to run together, and for how long.
FIFTEEN
 
FRIDAY MORNING JOHN CALLED in sick. It was the first time he had ever done so, sick or well, and his vigorous good health only deepened the guilt.
He returned to Franklin & Marshall, to the glass-and-steel Erwin Raisz Institute of Mapping Sciences. He had no legitimate access to either the manuscripts or the maps, but he had dressed in his Amish clothes, complete with straw hat, and was affecting a German accent. The young woman staffing the entrance to the climate-controlled facility pointed out that his student ID card was no longer valid but couldn’t bring herself to turn him away.
“Just don’t do anything that will get me in trouble, okay?”
“Do not vorry. I vill not.”
He descended to the first underground floor and took a deep breath. It had been almost six years since he viewed any part of the collection. Tentatively pulling open one of the myriad aluminum drawers, he found the oldest map in the Raisz Institute, exactly where he had left it: a highly stylized 1475 illustration of the Holy Land.
He stared at it for a few minutes, as he would any other friend he had not seen in years. Major geographical features—oceans, rivers, mountain ranges—were abstractly depicted and more or less arbitrarily located, rendering the map functionally useless. But to John it was an object of beauty.
Compass roses, winged cherubs, and figures of the wind-blowers adorned the empty spaces on medieval maps and charts, as did heraldic emblems, cartouches, and scrolls. If cartographers were unsure of the content, they could at least offer the consumer a feast for his eyes and some fodder for his imagination.
John removed his straw hat and ran his fingers through his hair. What he needed to examine wasn’t in the aluminum cabinets—or anywhere else on the first two underground floors of the Raisz Institute. It was in the institute’s collection of uncatalogued manuscripts.
The problem was access: they had no reason to grant it to him, and his straw hat and German accent were not likely to be of any help.
The Raisz Institute extended three stories underground; the manuscript room was the back half of the lowest floor. Actually it was a steel cage, more vault than room. The entrance guard glanced at John’s student ID card and failed to notice that it had long since expired. That was because an even greater deficiency distracted him.
“You need a professor’s sponsorship to enter the cage,” he told John.
“Dr. Antonelli is sponsoring me.” There’s another one for confession, John thought; too many more of these and he’d spend the rest of his life kneeling. All he needed now was for the guard to demand proof of sponsorship.
“Do you have that in writing?” the guard asked.
“He’s on his way here now.”
“Then we’ll wait for him.”
“It may be a while. And besides, he’s expecting me to complete some work before he gets here.”
The guard exhaled loudly, picked up the phone, and asked the college operator for Antonelli’s office. John held his breath.
“There’s no answer at his office,” the guard said.
“I told you, he’s on his way, but he’s running a couple of errands first. We’re researching Amish culture, especially clashes with local townsfolk.”
Their eyes locked for several long seconds.
“Wipe your feet,” the guard said, and opened the cage door.
John went immediately to one of the more than fifteen hundred acid-free archival document boxes and pulled on its plastic handle. He didn’t know what was in the box but wanted to give the impression he did. After a few minutes of pretending to study its contents, he no longer felt the guard’s eyes burning holes in his back and was free to explore the room.
Then he began a systematic search. He knew what he was looking for. He knew it was there, somewhere. What he didn’t know was how quickly he would find it.
In one of the archival boxes, one containing a section labeled “Misc Corresp 17th Cent,” were folders filled with letters written by seventeenth-century cartographers. One of the folders bore the label “J Cellarius.” John removed the delicate sheets of parchment and read them one by one, allowing them to rest gently on the palm of his shaking hand to avoid subjecting them to dimensional strain.
He closed his eyes briefly to catch his bearings; the story behind the letters had begun long before Cellarius wrote them. If their contents were reliable, he had a motive for the murder of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier.
The Thirty Years’ War had ended in 1648. A student in London at the time, Cellarius left for the war-ravaged lands, some said because he killed a fellow student. The push factor must have been powerful, because there were no pull factors drawing him to the Palatinate, where he initially settled.
Perhaps he was seeking opportunity: the war had buried most of Germany’s men. So great was the shortage of men that in 1650, the Congress of Franconia legalized polygamy to replenish the population. No one under sixty could join a monastery. Unmarried women were taxed. Priests were encouraged to forsake one of their vows. The country could not rise out of its ashes until it had spawned a sufficient workforce.
No one knew what Cellarius did during his years in the Palatinate. The late 1650s found him in Amsterdam as an apprentice cartographer, and by 1660 he had published his first independent map, one of the city, showing property boundaries. In 1672, aged thirty-nine, he abruptly moved his studio to Hamburg.
Why? What happened in Amsterdam in 1672?
John glanced up at the cage guard. He was busy arguing with a janitor who was insisting he had to clean inside the cage.
Louis XIV was jealous of Holland’s commercial success. Dutch ships ruled the seas. Dutch trading had made Holland wealthy. Also, Louis wanted the Rhein, and Holland controlled its mouth.
Guarding against French expansionism, Jan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of the Dutch Republic, allied his country with England and Sweden and tried in vain to enlarge his military. France declared war on April 6, 1672. Louis himself led his armies into Holland, where they enjoyed a string of victories before laying siege to Amsterdam and The Hague. De Witt, unwilling to see his cities destroyed, surrendered conditionally. But the terms Louis demanded were too stiff: control of all roads, rivers, and canals, and a conversion of the entire United Provinces to Catholicism.
De Witt refused. Instead, so that neither French nor Dutch would have Holland, he opened the dikes and flooded the land.
Louis and his armies retreated. Back in France, the Sun King was deified by his subjects, although the peasants were reduced to eating roots and acorns, so great was the financial burden of war.
Jan de Witt was hung from a lamppost by his own people.
And here was the golden egg in the archival box, on a sheet of parchment in John’s hand: Cellarius had lost his young Palatinate-born wife, Charmaine, in the flooding, and had vowed to take revenge on Louis XIV.
“Grief attackes you on three levels,” he wrote to a friend in London. “On the first, you are sorry for someone elses loss; you are sorry her life ended and she will not have the opportunitie to witness another sunrise or smell the fragrance of a rose. This grief passes quicklie. On the second level, you are sorry for your own loss, that you will never again take pleasure in her sweete companie. This grief passes after a long time. On the third level, the deepest level, you regret everything you did not do or say, and should have. This grief never passes.”
His opportunity for revenge would not come until seventeen years later. Eventually, he paid the price for it with his own life. He spent those seventeen years in Hamburg, where he dreamed of shifting the world’s cartography capital. His revenge, when it came, was but a flea bite to Louis XIV, and Hamburg never aspired to the grieving man’s dreams.
David Freeman was right: Cellarius had to have masterminded the Tavernier robbery. He had allegedly been corresponding with Tavernier for mapping purposes, and Tavernier had obviously told him of his plans to make a seventh voyage. The correspondence wasn’t in the box, but John could imagine Cellarius’s reply: “Dear Sir, make haste in your preparationes, for my maps hanker for fresh ink (and my heart for justice).” Unable to reach Louis personally, Cellarius tried to punish him by stealing gemstones Tavernier had bought on his behalf.
Sadly, the joke was on Cellarius. In 1688 Louis once again invaded Charmaine’s homeland. In 1689, even while Cellarius anticipated the fruits of his revenge, the king’s armies razed the Palatinate and deprived its citizens of food. Now with the largest military force ever assembled in history—450,000 men, and another 100,000 in the navy—the king melted and donated his personal silverware to help finance war.

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