Read The Tavernier Stones Online
Authors: Stephen Parrish
The Tavernier Stones (19 page)
Homes burned, castles fell, and peasants ran into the woods to hide. It was the Thirty Years’ War all over again. Peace in the Palatinate would have to wait eleven more years, when in 1697, Louis XIV had finally quenched his appetite for destruction.
John felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around and came face-to-face with the cage guard. The guard rested his hands on his hips.
“Is Dr. Antonelli coming or not?”
“Perhaps I’d better go look for him.”
“Yes. Perhaps you had better.”
SIXTEEN
DAVID REMOVED A BOOK from the shelf, opened it to a random page near the middle, and held it close to his face, breathing in the wonderful mustiness of age-old ideas. Then he sat down in a cubicle to read.
He did the same with every book he ever examined. He loved the smell.
It was his first visit to the University of Maryland’s McKeldin Library—or anywhere else on the campus, for that matter—in years. The history collection in the McKeldin stacks was as good as any within driving distance of Philadelphia, so he had made the trip despite misgivings about returning to the place where he had ditched his first choice of career.
If a book contained history, David believed, then the book itself was a part of history. An old book was a time capsule. When you opened the front cover, you opened a door to another world—a world accessible through a kind of looking glass made of hard-board and cloth. The author’s voice resonated in the reader’s head with the same words that had resonated in his own as he wrote them. He spoke to the reader from the past. What he had witnessed, experienced, learned, and discovered would live forever.
You only had to turn a page to travel in time.
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was born in Paris in 1605, after his family had moved there from Antwerp to escape religious persecution. His father was a map merchant, his uncle an engraver and printer to the king, and his brother a successful cartographer. This early exposure to maps fueled his dream of visiting the distant lands they portrayed.
Tavernier’s travels began early. At the age of twenty-two, he had already visited much of Europe and could speak several of its languages. Little did he know that his travels would make him the first European to visit the Indian diamond mines and document their recovery methods; that his slow, gentlemanly caravan would be the prize of robbers, his ships the target of pirates. Travel in the seventeenth century was often deadly, and Tavernier became one of the century’s most traveled men.
“If the first education is, as it were, a second birth, I am able to say that I came into the world with a desire to travel. The interviews which many learned men had daily with my father upon geographical matters, which he had the reputation of understanding well, and to which, young as I was, I listened with pleasure, inspired me at an early age with the desire to go to see some of the countries shown to me in the maps, which I could not then tire of gazing at.”
Tavernier’s sixth voyage to India, which included an audience with the Great Mogul, was the one that ensured him a place in the history books. The Great Mogul bought some of the famous traveler’s gemstones. Then, wanting him to stay for the annual birthday celebration, he promised to show him his personal collection. Akil Khan, chief of the jewel treasury, presented the stones in two ornately decorated wooden trays, after first inventorying them no less than three times in Tavernier’s presence. “For the Indians do everything with great circumspection and patience, and when they see any one who acts with precipitation or becomes angry, they gaze at him without saying anything and smile as if he were a madman.”
The principal stone in the collection was the one Tavernier dubbed the Great Mogul diamond, and he was the only westerner ever to lay eyes on it. “The first piece which Akil Khan placed in my hands was the great diamond, which is a round rose, very high at one side. At the basal margin it has a small notch and flaw inside. Its water is beautiful, and it weighs 319½ ratis, which are equal to 280 of our carats—the rati being 7/8th of our carat.”
Akil Khan allowed Tavernier to hold and inspect every stone in the Mogul’s collection, which included another three dozen or so diamonds cut into pears, tables, and roses, ranging from 7 to 55 carats: “All these stones are of first-class water, clean and of good form, and the most beautiful ever found.” The collection also included some ten natural pearls, the largest of which weighed 61 carats, as well as various pieces of jewelry set with rubies, emeralds, amethysts, and topazes.
“These, then, are the jewels of the Great Mogul, which he ordered to be shown to me as a special favour which he has never manifested to any other Frank; and I have held them all in my hand, and examined them with sufficient attention and leisure to be enabled to assure the reader that the description which I have just given is very exact and faithful …”
At the age of sixty-three, Tavernier finally came to the attention of Louis XIV. The king bought much of his remaining stock and made him a noble of the court. Finding himself one of the richest men in Europe, Tavernier purchased the Aubonne Barony in Switzerland, then retired to write
Six Voyages through Europe into Asia
, publishing the work in 1676. The book was a bestseller and was soon translated into English, German, and Italian.
Six Voyages through Europe into Asia
, publishing the work in 1676. The book was a bestseller and was soon translated into English, German, and Italian.
Tavernier’s life wasn’t over. Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, offered the now-seventy-nine-year-old gentleman explorer the job of ambassador to India. By the time Tavernier sold his estate and prepared his affairs for the move, Frederick William’s plans had fallen through. Meanwhile, Tavernier had sent a nephew ahead to Persia with 222,000 francs worth of cargo—and never heard from either again.
Enraged, he launched his mysterious seventh voyage to the Orient via Russia—and disappeared from history.
David’s cubicle was stacked high with books. An afterword in one of them attracted his attention. It grudgingly related and tried to dispel the legend of the lost Tavernier stones.
The author tackled the job responsibly enough, noting that shortly after the alleged robbery near Florence, two men were seized in a drinking establishment and strung up for having had their way with a blacksmith’s daughter. The men were nameless; they had only been described as “the German rogues.” While standing on the gallows, having waited until the last possible moment, they offered information leading to “fabulous fortune” in exchange for their release. The authorities, eager to proceed with the execution, dropped the counterweights in the middle of their pleas.
Fabulous fortune! The quote didn’t prove anything, but it was yet another reason to believe a treasure hunt was justified. David checked the front of the book, an obscure history of India, and noted it had been published in 1911. According to the check-out sticker on the inside back cover, it had not left the library in more than thirty years.
David read with amusement that even to the present, people were sometimes caught on private property in and around Florence, digging for the lost Tavernier stones. They were treasure seekers so frenzied by fortune lust that they wildly misinterpreted the “clues”—or else they hoped random digging would do for them what random birthright had not, and sank their shovels into even the most unlikely places. In one or two instances, a homeowner heard noises coming from his basement and descended the stairs to find a team of treasure seekers digging a hole in the floor.
There was no doubt in David’s mind that Tavernier had begun—and completed—a seventh voyage. The most valuable piece of information he had gained today was that the robbers were from Germany.
Could they have been from the Palatinate? Did Cellarius employ them? Or did Tavernier arrange the robbery himself, to defraud Louis XIV of his investment? Did he become a victim of his own sting?
One fact seemed likely: of all the places in the world where the lost Tavernier stones might await pick and spade, Florence, Italy, was not among them.
Before leaving the McKeldin Library, David stuffed the 1911 book into his pants and returned other relevant materials to the shelves in a way that no follow-on researcher would ever find them. He stepped outside into bright sunlight and paused among the building’s neoclassical columns until his eyes adjusted to the glare. Then he headed across the southwest quad toward Regents Drive.
His pace was slower than that of the students and faculty, who seemed enthusiastic about what they were doing, or at least about where they were going. He sensed the intellectual buzz that pervaded all college campuses: it was faintly audible, well-nigh tangible. He had been absent from the academic life so long he had forgotten the sensation.
He slowed down even more, allowing students and faculty to pass him, until it felt as though he had come to a complete standstill.
SEVENTEEN
WHEN ELEANOR HALL ENTERED the
Chicago Tribune
conference room, she didn’t bother slamming the door behind her. Such a display would have put her junior editors at ease—would have told them everything was normal. Instead, she calmly approached the head of the table and placed a copy of the previous day’s
Louisville Courier Journal
gently on its polished surface.
Chicago Tribune
conference room, she didn’t bother slamming the door behind her. Such a display would have put her junior editors at ease—would have told them everything was normal. Instead, she calmly approached the head of the table and placed a copy of the previous day’s
Louisville Courier Journal
gently on its polished surface.
“Anyone care to make an observation?” she asked. Her tone was tranquil, soothing—designed to rattle and alarm the men sitting before her.
The front-page headline of the paper confronted the men in tall, compact letters: CHICAGO RUBY FITS PUZZLE. The entire front page carried an article about the Prairie State ruby, which the writer claimed was an integral part of the Tavernier treasure hunt.
The source of the Prairie State ruby, according to the writer, was a place called Idar-Oberstein in the German lower Palatinate. The sister cities of Idar and Oberstein were prominent on Cellarius’s last map; they had been the center of a gem mining, cutting, and retail industry for centuries.
“Anyone?” Eleanor Hall prodded.
Justin raised his hand. “Ma’am, I believe I speak for all of us when I—”
“Shut up. If it were Los Angeles or New York, I’d say, okay, we missed one. We screwed up. We’ll have to do better next time. But gentlemen!” The gentlemen stared at their hands. “They came to Chicago and took a story away from us. These … people … from the Land of Cotton ought to be writing about mint juleps, tobacco spitting contests, hound dogs, pickup trucks, the hobo problem, and …” she ran out of breath. “They came to
Chicago
and took a story away from
us
!”
Chicago
and took a story away from
us
!”
She sat down and rubbed her eyes. “This Tavernier thing is the biggest news phenomenon of my career. I want more stories. Better stories. Fill the features section with Tavernier shit. Follow up on every nut who claims to have solved the puzzle. If an expert tells you the treasure is under Buckingham Fountain, print it. If he tells you the Picasso statue in front of the Civic Center is a pointer left by extraterrestrials, print that too.”
A cowbell fastened to the door of the Milk & Honey Travel Agency on East Passyunk Avenue alerted the employees that Sarah Sainte-James had arrived. Not that any such gadget was remotely necessary; Sarah was accustomed to attracting attention without the assistance of an irritating noise.
One of the employees, a pear-shaped man with long strands of hair flattened to the top of his head, smiled the smile of one relieved by a promise unexpectedly kept. Sarah had visited Friday and said she would be back today.
Other books
Ordinary Beauty by Wiess, Laura
Zorro by Isabel Allende
An Unsuitable Duchess by Laurie Benson
The Moon by Night by Lynn Morris, Gilbert Morris
El valle de los leones by Ken Follett
Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton
Demons Are a Girl’s Best Friend by Linda Wisdom
Killer Heat by Brenda Novak
Never Mind the Bullocks by Vanessa Able
Escana by J. R. Karlsson
