Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics (10 page)

“Okay,” she said. “So the place is apparently very big and extremely sturdy and yet not the kind of place you want to live.” She put the little rental car into gear and headed south.

Chapter
13.

She drove along
narrow well-paved roads at a reasonable clip. An hour later she knew they had to be getting close to the château. Then, gradually, in the distance, she could make out a town. She could see a hazy skyline on the horizon. It was a fairytale jumble of fanciful shapes.
How pretty,
she thought. As she got closer, the charming illusion began to resolve into what it really was.

“Oh. My. God.” Phoebe gasped. She
pressed on the brakes and pulled the car to the side of the road and shoved the gearshift into park. It wasn’t a
town
she was seeing, it was the
roof
, just the chimneys, of a single building.

Obviously, they’d found Chambord. Phoebe
couldn’t cope with what she was seeing and had to sit there for a couple of minutes, looking at the place from half a mile away, trying to calm down from the shock. What was it with these French kings? Megalomania didn’t go far enough to describe it.

She explained the situation to J.J.
She pulled out the guidebook and thumbed through it. “Listen to this, ‘There are lanterns, gables, dormer windows, 800 columns, and 365 chimneys, spires and pinnacles intermingled’ and that’s just on the
roof
!”

It was like Versailles. All the pictur
es in the world couldn’t prepare you for the scale of these places. They were utterly disorienting to Phoebe’s way of thinking. When you saw them, you quailed into a quivering blob of jelly at the implications of anyone with the nerve to envision such a structure and the money to actually
build
it!

If Versailles was transcendent delicacy and refinement, Chambord was
eternal stability and power. Both were well off the charts with regard to labor and expense and artistic talent.

As she drove closer she could see
people riding horses across the stone bridge that spanned the moat. When a man on horseback got close to the walls, it helped make sense of the place. The proportions somehow fitted with a line of men on horseback.

So
this
was how medieval architectural scale was calibrated. A line of men on horseback mattered, a man on foot, even a crowd of them, didn’t register.

Phoebe pulled into the parking lot of a hotel and restaurant
that stood close to the castle. It was a bright sunny day without a cloud in the sky. But it was cold and there was a brisk wind.

They
got out of the car and adjusted their clothing as well as they could to stay warm. The cold wind made tears come out of Phoebe’s eyes. “Yowee,” she said. “Let’s get out of the wind.”

She led
J.J. toward the massive bulk of the château. She could see parts of a high wall that enclosed the castle and the deer park. Unfortunately it stood well away from the castle and wasn’t much help in blocking the wind. A wide moat protected two sides of the château, so they had to walk all the way past the monstrous building and curve around to the back to find an entrance.

They found a gate
in the thick wall that formed a courtyard on the backside of the château. Somehow they’d have to penetrate that wall to get inside and out of the wind. They decided to take the easy way. They bought two tickets.

They passed into the open-
air
cour d’honneur
. It gave scant protection from the biting wind, so with hunched shoulders and bowed heads they continued across the graveled courtyard and on to the château. From the courtyard you could see the layout of the building. Phoebe described it to J.J. as they went toward it.

“We’re in a courtyard with a
castle ahead of us and a wall around the other three sides, maybe thirty feet high. The castle side of the courtyard is taken up with an enormous building about three stories tall, but with the biggest, craziest bunch of chimneys and gables on the roof I’ve ever seen. I doubt there’s anything else like it on earth.

“The living area of the château
is a central square block, a donjon or a keep, with a round tower on each corner. The wall on the fourth side continues on out to two more tall round towers on either side that define the outer boundaries of the courtyard.

“
The main living quarters for the rich people, the keep and the four inner towers, are much taller. I guess they’re over a hundred feet high if you include the astonishing array of chimneys,” Phoebe said. Her teeth were chattering.

They made it into the main part of the
château before being frozen solid. Phoebe led them immediately to a massive fireplace that housed a roaring blaze of logs, each of which would’ve taken two men to carry. It was fabulously atmospheric. She and J.J. were the only people in the huge room. A sign identified it as a guardroom.

It was
beautiful. There was not a stick of furniture in the place, but, just like the tiny garden pavilion, it didn’t need mobile decoration. The proportions of the space, the high ceilings, the triple runs of leaded glass windows, terra cotta floor tiles, and deeply carved stonework were more than sufficient.

The
whole place appeared to be nearly empty. For good reason. The chill from the mass of masonry went bone deep. Phoebe tugged on her hat, tightened her scarf, and pulled her coat around her. She leaned toward J.J. for warmth.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You must be
in shock coming from Hawaii to below freezing temperatures.”

“
I’m fine,” he said, with his teeth clenched. “But let’s keep moving.”

* * *

Phoebe described the layout of the interior to J.J. from what she could see for herself and from the illustrations in the brochure they’d been given with their tickets. The central block was laid out in the shape of a cross, with a stupendous, open spiral stairway in the center. There were large open areas, guardrooms, facing onto the staircase on each level. Each of these big rooms was lit by tall clear leaded windows with functional heavy wooden shutters for the lowest section of the glass.

It didn’t take long to understand why
François didn’t stay in the place much. Living here in the winter would’ve been seriously uncomfortable. The interior, even with fires blazing in each of the great fireplaces, was bitterly cold. Whenever they slowed down Phoebe stood as close as she dared to the flaming wood, but it didn’t help very much.

This was her first lesson in medieval life. A
big fire provided far too much warmth to the front of you, on the level of literal roasting—which was great for cooking but not for hanging out with a good book—while the backside of you froze. You had to spin around continuously, rotisserieing yourself, to make the situation even moderately tolerable.

Chambord
was exquisite in a polar opposite way from Versailles. It was austere, empty, except for the beautifully carved stone mantles and wonderful cream-colored barrel vaulted stone ceilings. The doors and shutters were of sturdy golden oak. Everywhere you looked there were intricate stone carvings of
F
for François I, and salamanders which were his personal emblem.

Phoebe and J.J.
walked around the ground floor of the main block without Phoebe noticing anything pertinent to their task, so they decided to try the upper levels. The great central stairway was extraordinary. It wasn’t simply a beautifully carved spiral staircase made of stone, it was designed as a double helix. It was two entirely separate staircases entwined with each other.

Fran
çois I had persuaded Leonardo da Vinci to come live in France near the end of his life. There were sketches and rumors indicating that Leonardo had participated in designing Chambord. A glance at the staircase convinced Phoebe that Leonardo da Vinci had designed it.

You had to
cimb it before you could experience what he’d achieved by mimicking the structure of DNA. A double helix of stone meant that people going up the stairs couldn’t see the people going down. Phoebe explained the design to J.J. and he was entranced. They could hear some young people chattering in German, but never saw them, so they realized the Germans were nearby, but on the other staircase.

* * *

Phoebe consulted the little brochure she’d been given. Unfortunately the room they were looking for wasn’t marked. Of course it wasn’t. Christian Rosenkreutz wasn’t even thought to be
real
by many people. The man’s identity was buried in mystery and confusion—some unavoidable, some intentional disinformation, the rest of it just bad scholarship, or hopeless stupidity.

“
Shall we continue all the way up to the roof and work our way down, or stop here to look at the second floor?”

“What’
s your gut telling you?”

“He was here,
” said Phoebe, “no doubt about it. He was all over this place. But I’m cold and chilling. The shivering is interfering with my ability to feel the contrail.”

“Can you dowse the
brochure?”

“You mean the piece of paper?”

“Yes, I know some people have that ability. Can you?”

“I can try,” Phoebe
said. She shook herself like a swimmer preparing to mount the diving block. Then she focused on the black and white architectural rendering of the building,
le plan
, as the French called it. Nothing happened.

She held the
schematic in her left hand and ran the tips of her index and middle fingers slowly across the map in a grid. There was nothing in the central block of four towers, what she thought of as the house itself. She scanned it several times and there was nothing. She chalked it up to a lack of ability, but then she got a blip from one of the outlying towers, the one to the north.

She held her
hand over the drawing and decided she was getting a
yes
. She examined the plan more closely, straining to make out any details. This particular tower had a unique feature. It had its own exterior staircase. This seemed odd because there was a staircase fairly close by in the nearest corner of the main block and also the great central staircase just beyond that.

Phoebe wondered why there would be t
hree different staircases so close together, one of which led to the outside of the main protective wall. That would be a major security breach. “I may have found it,” she said. “There’s a place where something feels funny and looks strange. It’s the outer tower on the north corner. I don’t know which floor is giving off the buzz, but we can start on this level and see.”

Chapter
14.

“Salamanders are everywhere!” Phoebe said. She stopped and typed in a search on her phone. “According to the Chambord website there are 400 freakin salamanders carved into the coffered ceilings on this level alone.”

“Doe
s it actually say freakin?”

“No.”

“You know there’s a rumor that pressing one of the
F
s will open the door to a treasure.”

“No, I hadn’t heard that,” s
he said as she paged through the info on the building. She looked at the ceiling above where they stood. “Apparently there are more than 800 salamanders in the whole complex. And judging by the size of this room, most of them are
way
too high off the ground to fool with unless you have some serious scaffolding. So I guess that means there are five hundred years of grubby fingerprints and pry marks on the ones that are reachable with a ladder.”

She read to him
from her smart phone. “Francis’ motto was
Nutrisco et extinguo
which means, ‘I nourish and I extinguish.’ Several sources soften the translation to, ‘I nourish, or strengthen, the good—and extinguish, or destroy, the evil.’ But maybe that was wishful thinking, or his PR guys.

“He b
ecame king at the age of twenty. Apparently he was a real long shot to end up as king. It took the untimely deaths of several intervening heirs. …blah blah. He was over six feet tall, which was nearly a giant at the time. …more blah.

“
He was the first French king to insist on being called
your majesty
. Prior to this, the Holy Roman Emperor was the only person with that title. He reigned for thirty-two years, from 1515 to 1547. Okay, that’s enough knowledge for one day,” she said, terminating her surfing and slipping the phone into her jacket.

They made their way
through a rabbit warren of rooms toward the north corner of the second story, stopping a couple of times to look around and try to understand the layout of the place. Obviously it had been substantially remodeled several times and the alterations had made the layout asymmetrical.

Phoebe was
feeling a lot of vibe, but nothing she could home in on. Then suddenly she got something. “I’m getting a signal,” she murmured. “Something’s near here.”

There was a small sign on a stanchion
with an arrow directing them to the François I apartment. Phoebe decided to try that. They went into a reconstructed formal bedroom. Phoebe felt nothing, but there was a vibe coming through an open door opposite the one they’d entered by. There was light coming in from that direction too, so there must be windows. They’d made it to the outside wall of the north tower.

Phoebe
went toward the light and stepped into the most beautiful room in the world. She’d seen several fabulous places in a couple of days, but this one took the cake. It wasn’t just its physical beauty—it had a glorious vibe. Like many of the other places they’d been, there was literally nothing in it. Unlike the other places, it didn’t feel diminished by time.

It wasn’t
a large room. It was maybe fifteen feet wide by twenty-five feet long. That was
tiny
considering where they were. In addition to the connecting door to the King’s bedroom, there was a carved wooden door on the far end of the room. Carvings of salamanders and the letter
F
were deeply etched in the exquisite barrel vaulted stone ceiling. Clear leaded glass windows lined two walls from the waist up.

Phoebe was awestruck
. This was definitely the place—the place for
what
she had no idea, but holy things had been done here and the residue of it still lay heavy in the air. This might have been CR’s laboratory.

“You’ve found somet
hing,” J.J. said. “What is it?”

“Well, t
here’s nothing in the room, just stone walls and ceiling, terra cotta tile floors, leaded glass along two walls, and a heavy oak door on each end of the space. That’s it.”

She could see the salamanders at closer range in here and she realized some of them were eating
the fire and others were spitting water on the flames to put it out. She was explaining this to J.J. when they heard someone coming.

It was a group of some kind. A docent came in leading a huddled knot of shivering tourists. She spoke in French and J.J. whispered a translation in Phoebe’s ear. “This is the
studiolo
. An office or place of study designed for François I.

“
He was twenty-five years old when the construction of Chambord began. The palace took twenty-eight years to build.” The guide pointed out the windows that faced onto the moat. “François intended to divert the Loire River to run by here, but he never got around to doing it. At the same time Chambord was being built he was remodeling the Louvre in Paris.

“
This room was later converted to an
oratorio
, a private chapel, by Louis XV’s mother-in-law.” The docent opened the door at the far end of the room and shepherded her small flock down what looked like a medieval wheelchair ramp. The entire hall was built on a moderate slant, apparently to connect areas of different heights. Her voice rang from the hall and J.J. continued translating until he could no longer hear her.

“
Leonardo da Vinci may have worked in here. He’d lived nearby in a house on the grounds of Amboise, and he died there in 1519. Leonardo is known to have brought three of his paintings to France when he came—the Mona Lisa, The Virgin and Child with Saint Ann, and Saint John the Baptist, which he finished here.”

When the group was out of sight or hearing range,
J.J. started a slow, careful scan of the room. Stragglers wandered through at intervals, and each time Phoebe and J.J. stopped what they were doing and stood back out of the way, acting like they were reading the brochure, as they waited for the people to move on.

Phoebe
used her phone to read more about the salamanders, apparently they were swallowing good fire and dampening evil fire. Then suddenly J.J. murmured, “Got it.”

He raised
an arm above his head, stood on tiptoe, and ran a hand along the wall. “Up here, there’s a square cache about a foot high by two feet wide by eighteen inches deep. It’s hollow, and there’s something in it.”

“Where?”
Phoebe asked. She was looking and couldn’t see anything obvious.

“I can’t reach it, but it’s
built into the wall directly above my hand.”

“How far above your hand?”

“Not more than four feet.”

“The wall goes up for another couple of feet
of above your hand, then there’s a thick run of stone crown molding, maybe a foot high, and it’s deep. It makes a ledge along the seam where the barrel vault of the ceiling meets the wall. It’s deep enough to be a shelf.”

“Okay,” J.J. said.

“Okay, what?” Phoebe asked. “How do we get up there? And how to we get into it? It’s solid rock.”

“It’s r
ock, but it’s not solid. There must be a door of some kind or some other way to open the wall.”

“I can’t see
all of the place you’re talking about from here, because it’s hidden behind by the crown molding, but it looks like nothing more than the same old salamanders and
F
s.”

J.J. remained silent. He had to rely on Phoebe for this part of the job.

“I could try to step up on the window ledge on the opposite side of the room and tell you what I see. But if they caught us, we’d probably go to jail.”

“
I can get you a lot closer than that.”

“
How?”

“Y
ou can stand on my shoulders.”

“
Ah, okay…. How will I get up there?”

“We can do it however you want. I’m strong, I work out with free weights
. A lot.”

He faced her, standing with his back
against the wall. There were no handholds anywhere.

Phoebe sighed and thought,
Oh pu-leeze. A spinster acrobat pushing sixty?
But she swallowed, and said, “If you can crouch down a little so I can step up onto a thigh, and make a stirrup about chest high with your hands, I can try to climb up onto your shoulders and then I
might
be able to see over the crown molding into the crevice.”

“How much do you weigh?” he asked.

“What difference does it make? You got anybody else willing to play circus with you? Plus, that information is strictly
need to know
,” she said, mocking his earlier rebuffs to her curiosity, “I want to tell you, I really do, but it would be dangerous for you to have that information.”

He snorted, crouched down slightly,
then slapped the top of one of his thighs to indicate where she should step first. Then he interlaced his fingers for her to step up into next.

“You better not drop me. Everything in this room
is made of rock. If I fall, I’ll die.”

She took a deep breath and
moved close to him. She reached up and took hold of his shoulders. He hadn’t lied, his shoulders were muscular. She put her left foot atop his thigh and her right foot into his cupped hands. He lifted her so she could step up with her left foot onto his shoulder.

He was rock steady, but she was no
gymnast. She started to wobble and since there was nothing else to take hold of, she grabbed a handful of his hair to steady herself. She heard him suppress a scream.

This was one of tho
se awkward moments in life when he would’ve preferred to howl and curse but considering where they were and what they were doing, he didn’t dare. Phoebe wanted to let go of his hair, too, but she couldn’t or she’d fall backwards and land on her head.

She managed to regain her balance and whispered, “Sorry.” Then she got both feet up onto his shoulders
and stood.

“I can’t quite reach it,” she
whispered. “I need another few inches.”

J.J. stood up straighter and raised up on his toes
but she still wasn’t able to reach above the crown molding. “Hold perfectly still,” he warned in a whisper, then he took hold of her heels and hoisted her another six inches. Phoebe gasped.

“Don’t worry,
” he said. “I used to be a college cheerleader. I can hold women up over my head for hours on end.”

“Really?”

“No, they wouldn’t even let me try out, because of my eyes. It was crushing. I was a natural—I’d have been the only guy on the squad who couldn’t see up the girl’s dresses.”

Phoebe
struggled not to laugh. But he was right, that last little bit of height was enough. Now she could see the area he’d indicated. She reached into the crease between the crown molding and the wall and thought she could detect loose joints around one of the salamander coffers. It had a slightly different color mortar.

“The stones are
mortared in and I can see one place where the mortar looks suspicious. What do I do now? I need some kind of tool to gouge it out.”

J.J. didn’t have time to answer.
More people were coming. He carefully lowered her feet back to his shoulders and gave her ankles a gentle squeeze she took to mean
hurry up
.

Getting down was going to be extremely awkward and scary
and possibly involve more hair pulling. She wondered if she should jump like a cheerleader, or what. She wished they’d discussed this earlier, because now there was no time to work out the details. She froze, standing atop his shoulders, not sure what to do.

He tilted his head back and whisper
ed, “Slide down the front of me. I’ll catch you.”

It was terrifying to ho
p away from him into mid-air, but he broke her fall by grabbing her in a bear hug before her feet could hit the ground. If she hadn’t been so nervous, it would’ve been romantic. Actually it was still romantic. He was extremely strong. She felt feminine. There hadn’t been enough times in her life that she’d felt that way.

Phoebe wasn’t small. She was tall and
strong. But he was still able to hold her in his arms and keep her off the ground. It was exhilarating and strange at the same time. They were face to face, but he couldn’t see her. He held her like that for a couple of seconds, then let her slide the last few inches until she was standing on her own.

When the tourists burst into the room it looked like they were interrupting a
romantic interlude, but that was fine with Phoebe. Whatever worked. The visitors eventually moved on.

“We need a ladder
,” Phoebe said, “and obviously we can’t do this with people coming in and out all the time.”

“We can
come back tonight and do it.”

“But it’ll be
dark
then!”

He turned
his face toward her and smiled.