The Tavernier Stones (20 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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Sarah’s tours of area libraries and bookstores following her meeting with John and David had produced nothing, and she believed coming up with the idea to visit a travel agency was not so dumb. The pear-shaped employee (what
was
his name?) had been so eager to help that she had extracted an offer to track down everything about Idar-Oberstein he could find within the radius of a day’s drive.
The man had spent Friday exploring that radius. Now he fumbled to finish with another customer already seated in front of his terminal. Sarah took a seat and thumbed idly through a brochure. She had worn her Phase I miniskirt Friday and was wearing her Phase II skirt today. Slowly and deliberately, she crossed her legs. She predicted the pear-shaped agent would prematurely ejaculate if she were careless about the way she uncrossed them.
“I’ll mail the ticket to you,” the agent told his customer. He stood up to indicate their business was concluded.
“But—can’t I wait for it to be printed?”
“Sorry. The printer’s not working.”
Both the agent and his customer looked at the printer. Even Sarah squinted at it, then raised an eyebrow; it was wheezing away happily.
“I mean, it’s not working very well. You wouldn’t want to be denied a boarding pass because of an illegible ticket, would you? It’ll be posted first thing in the morning, I promise. Now, if you don’t mind, other customers are waiting. Goodbye!”
As the customer left, shaking his head, the agent licked the tips of his fingers and wetted down the hair over his ears. Then he took a cardboard box out from under his desk and made long, overly confident strides to where Sarah was sitting.
Sarah looked up at him and smiled, radiating all the warmth and admiration she could muster. He appeared as though he intended to propose on the spot. Instead, he said, “Everyone seems to be considering a trip to Germany these days.”
“Did you find anything?”
“I’m happy to say I did. But only because I conducted the search yesterday, just before the Idar-Oberstein story broke. I think if I’d waited until today, nothing would be left.”
He set the box on the floor next to Sarah’s feet. Following a brief moment of paralysis because her legs were so close, he opened the box and removed a stack of books, magazines, and brochures.
“I’ll leave these with you,” he said. “You may examine them at your leisure. If you need any help, I’ll be right over there.”
“When I need you, I’ll call you.”
“I hope so. I mean … you’re welcome. I mean …” He bowed inappropriately and a lock of hair fell down over his face. He grabbed it and pasted it into place, then hurried back to his terminal before committing more buffoonery.
Sarah turned to the materials.
The Prairie State ruby first appeared in the pages of history when Idar-Oberstein native Claus Weinbrenner sold it in Chicago after immigrating there in 1818, the same year Illinois—the Prairie State—became the twenty-first state of the union. The family that bought it named it, held it for several generations, and finally donated it to the Field Museum.
Claus hadn’t known where the stone originally came from, except that his great-great-great-grandmother Hildegard left it to his great-great-grandfather Richard, who passed it down a line of ancestors to his father, who gave it to him. How Hildegard had come into possession of the ruby, Claus couldn’t fathom. Her husband, his great-great-great-grandfather Adalbert, had been a distiller and probably wouldn’t have recognized a precious gemstone if it had popped out of a tiara and struck him on the nose.
Hildegard was beautiful, and generous with her beauty, if the rumors were believable. At any rate, she was beautiful enough—or generous enough—that the famous German portrait artist Bernhard Schäfer had wanted to paint her.
There was another rumor, one Claus never literally believed: his lovely ancestor Hildegard was a practicing witch. It was an unlikely story, but every family had a skeleton tucked here or there, or else made one up to lend color to the family album.
What Claus hadn’t known was that Hildegard Weinbrenner, although married to the reputable Oberstein distiller Adalbert Weinbrenner, was hopping into the sack with the disreputable lapidary Jakob Langenbach—who, researchers now speculated, was the man Johannes Cellarius had picked to recut the lost Tavernier stones.
According to contemporary writers, Hildegard and Langenbach were not only practicing witches, they were each leaders of their respective covens. Langenbach disappeared one day without a trace, but Hildegard was arrested and charged with witchcraft: too many teenage girls were missing, and too many rumors pointed to her as the cause.
The trial brought spectators from as far away as Strasbourg. Hildegard was sentenced to burn at the stake on the grounds that she couldn’t prove her innocence. But she cheated the executioner by drinking a glass of wine, and not just any wine: one from the Château Aliénor d’Aquitaine.
Sarah read carefully, trying to internalize the details, knowing that David would never consider her an equal contributor unless she came up with something. She looked up at the travel agent, who quickly glanced back at his terminal; he had been watching her.
Château Aliénor d’Aquitaine was a Bordeaux from Pauillac. The winery itself now lay in ruins, but remnants were still visible near the bank of the Gironde. The few visitors who looked for it had to look hard: all that remained of the fairytale castle were a sinking tower and a pair of crumbling walls gradually blending into the tall grass.
Not that Château Aliénor d’Aquitaine was in any danger of restoration. As far as the citizens of Pauillac were concerned, if the ruins were to disappear altogether during the next summer squall, it would not be soon enough. The infamous Witches of Pauillac had operated the winery—and had poisoned the wine with wolfsbane.
Wolfsbane was a blue flowering plant containing aconite in its root. Ingesting the root caused, according to one medieval unfortunate who survived it, “Uncontrollable drooling. Nausea such as words cannot describe. Diarrhea worse than the nausea. The feeling of a thousand insects biting the skin. And a truly odd sensation that ice water is flowing through the veins.”
Aconite was a natural alkaloid in the root of the plant. When ingested, it could kill within several hours. However, if the roots were dried and crystalline aconitine were separated, the poison was ten to fifteen times stronger, and death occurred within seconds. Only a few milligrams were necessary. The higher the dose, the more sudden the result.
In the mid-1970s, a Canadian collector who owned a dozen clay amphorae of Château Aliénor d’Aquitaine allowed viticulturists from the University of California, Davis, to test one whose wax seal was damaged. The researchers inserted a needle through a gap in the seal and extracted a sample. From it, they were able to confirm the presence of wolfsbane.
And wine. There was no way of knowing how good it tasted, but at least it was still wine. The result sent prices soaring on the collector market, and the amphora whose poison was confirmed at Davis was repaired and auctioned at Christie’s for $90,000 in the investment frenzy that followed. Later, after things calmed down, an amphora could be had for ten or twenty grand, give or take availability.
Viticulturists at Davis also injected a couple of milliliters of the sample into a mouse, who within seconds went into convulsions and died.
The sample the researchers took was too small to judge color well, but a team of physicists analyzed it by passing beams of light through it and extrapolating. It was a deep brick red gradually turning into soft orange on its way to brown. Probably still drinkable, if not for the poison. Probably exquisite.
The clay amphorae had been turned in Avanos, Turkey, location of one of Pauillac’s sister covens. Their surfaces were hand carved in bas-relief, with the image of one woman helping another place a basket of grapes on her head.
Hildegard Weinbrenner’s coven allegedly celebrated the Black Mass in a suite of caverns beneath an old church. The church—the Felsenkirche, or “Church in the Rock”—was built
into
the side of the rock bluff overlooking Oberstein. Some interesting trivia about the building included the story of the town’s last public hanging, a sentence handed down to a man in 1858 for defacing church property. The execution took place a week after summer solstice, during a drizzle that had gone on for nearly a month. They hanged him rather than burned him because they feared the rain would put out the fire.
The Oberstein coven was all-female. Every Beltane, or mid-spring fertility festival, the witches laid a terrified young girl naked on the altar. After each member of the coven had performed oral sex on the girl, they fed her a cup of wine—Château Aliénor d’Aquitaine. Then they slit her throat and held her head over a cauldron until the flow of blood slowed to a drip.
The witches heralded each sacrifice by ringing a church bell. In Oberstein, the sound reached the sleeping townspeople as a muffled ring because the bell was deep inside the mountain. This unnerved the townspeople, since they knew the church to be empty and locked tight, and since every official investigation had failed to discover an access to “secret chambers.” As a result of the experience, bells in Oberstein had not rung for any reason, including Catholic High Mass, since the coven died out in the eighteenth century. The superstition persisted that the sound would invite their return.
One magazine article in Sarah’s stack reproduced the oil portrait of Hildegard by Bernhard Schäfer. The portrait was as beautiful as Hildegard’s reputation suggested it would be; Schäfer had captured the spirit that moved her. She had a lively face with flushed cheeks, feathered hair brushed haphazardly over her forehead in bangs, and a slightly receding chin that made her look vulnerable.
Her loveliness was heart-melting, but much of the appeal came from the lust-for-life expression she wore. If this was a witch, Sarah thought, the books would have to be rewritten.
Schäfer had done justice to the eyes. Highlights on the pupils reflected sunlight spilling through rectangular windows behind the painter’s back. The irises were cobalt blue ringed with dark gray. The corners were slightly moist, suggesting an abundant warmth held in check only by the burden of sitting for a portrait.
Hildegard stared straight at the viewer. Her mouth was slightly parted as though she were ready to speak. One only had to stare long enough into those eyes to hear what she had to say.
As for Sarah, the message went straight to her soul. The lost Tavernier stones represented a voyage of discovery and a leap of faith. And if Hildegard’s eyes were to be trusted, there was safe landfall on the other side.
She felt a presence and looked up. The pear-shaped travel agent was standing above her, his mouth open and gasping to speak:
“I was, um, wondering …”
“If I needed more assistance?”
“Yes. Yes!”
“As a matter of fact, I would love to have more information about this church.” She lifted an open book and pointed to a photograph of the Felsenkirche. “If you could gather the information for me, I would be in your debt—
deeply
in your debt.”
The agent nodded jerkily. “How deeply—I mean, how soon do you need the materials?”
Sarah replied, “As deeply as possible,” then carelessly uncrossed her legs.
The agent doubled over slightly, muttered that he would get right on it, and excused himself to stumble into a back room.
EIGHTEEN
 
JOHN GRAF COULDN’T FIGURE out why he had labeled the Susquehanna River “Yankee Stadium” on a map he made last week. Or how Long Island Sound managed to trade places with Chesapeake Bay.
He glanced up at two newspaper clippings attached to the shelf above his light table. They were before-and-after comparisons of Cellarius, in one view confident, indeed vain, almost smirking; in the other, horribly transfigured by the bog but still wearing what appeared to be a smile. It was the most durable smile in history.
Since his visit to Franklin & Marshall on Friday, John had spent the weekend holed up in his row house, getting more and more obsessed with the search. It was wearing on him, and now even his cartographic productivity was declining. After four days of uninterrupted devotion to fantasy, he was having trouble concentrating on his job for more than a few minutes at a time.
He had confessed earlier to his colleague Annette that he didn’t remember when he last ate a square meal. He also told her he had
never
before broken the Sabbath.
At the regular Monday morning staff meeting, he had suggested they employ cartouches and compass roses once in a while, to lend elegance to their maps. Everyone just looked at him with open mouths and blank expressions.
Johannes Cellarius had arrived, literally, in the flesh, all the way from the seventeenth century. And he was obviously trying to tell John something. But what?
John had always admired Cellarius, but now his memory seemed to be editing itself, insisting Cellarius had been his favorite cartographer, heads and shoulders above the others. But why else would John already have all of Cellarius’s maps? He had other complete sets, too: Mercator, for instance. But hell, everyone had those. Dr. Antonelli didn’t even have the complete Johannes Cellarius. Sure, he’d always been the favorite. There was nothing wrong with John’s memory.

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