figure of Hercules wearing the lion skin carved into an oval jade. Although I had been around Papy’s objects since I was a baby, I never failed to feel a frisson of wonder when I held something made over a thousand years ago.
I knew what the third box held before I even reached inside. My heart beat faster as I opened the flaps. The smell of musty paper poofed out, and I looked down to see a collection of old books. More like hand-bound manuscripts. And though the most fragile ones were in plastic bags, a few sturdier volumes lay loose between them.
Books from a Roman antiquities collector … now this could be promising. I picked the first one up. It was an old printed book in German, with engravings of Greek and Roman statuary. I placed it carefully on the floor and reached in for a small book with decorative shapes and swirls tooled into the reddish brown leather cover.
It was the size of the illustrated prayer books I had seen in the Louvre, but much thinner, and as I opened it I saw that it was a hand-penned manuscript, written in the gothic handwriting of medieval monks. I remembered reading about illustrated manuscripts. Some monks spent their whole lives copying books and decorating them. Before the printing press, copying was the only way multiple examples of a book could be made.
This wasn’t a masterpiece, like the ones I had seen protected under thick museum glass. It was simple but beautiful, with gold vines and flourishes decorating the edges. The first page was an explosion of leaves and berries, with, at the bottom center, two skulls. Immortal Love, it read in French, and the next page was illustrated with a colorful, naively painted image of a man and a woman in medieval clothing holding hands. And even though the painting was simple, I could tell that the woman was elderly—she was depicted with white hair—and that the man was very young: a teenager.
The image had been painted many centuries ago. Maybe even a millennium. I inspected it carefully, taking in every detail. The woman was old, her posture a little bent. And the man was gleaming with youth and health. I would have thought it was an old lady with her grandson, except for the way they stood hand in hand, their heads slightly inclined toward each other in a gesture of solidarity and affection.
I turned back to the title page. L’amur immortel, I read again, and then saw a subtitle written in spidery letters below. I could hardly make it out; the ink had worn with the centuries, and the old French was difficult to decipher. “A tale … love and tragedy … a bar … and … human …” My heart caught in my throat. Could the word be bardia? There was just enough space for it to be. And a human?
Oh my God, I had found something. My head spun and then cleared abruptly as the gallery’s doorbell buzzed. I got up, a bit wobbly, and raced into the gallery space. A familiar figure stood behind the glass door, tall enough to take up the whole windowpane. He cupped his eyes with his hands so he could see inside. I pressed the door release under the front desk.
“Vincent!” I exclaimed, feeling a twinge of guilt. “How did you know I was here?”
He strode into the gallery, hands in his pockets and an amused look on his face. After giving me a soft kiss, he released me and glanced curiously around the space. “I have my ways,” he said. Doing a Vincent Price voice and raising an eyebrow, he quipped, “I always know where you are.”
“No, really,” I prodded, laughing.
“Well, you see, there’s this thing called a text message,” he said, deadpan. “And I got one from your phone during your lunch break that told me you were gallery-sitting this afternoon.” A hint of a smile curved the corners of his lips.
“Oh, right,” I said, lamely shaking my head. This whole situation with Vincent’s undercover operations was messing with my mind. It was making me paranoid.
“So what are you doing here?” Vincent asked. “This is the first time I’ve seen you in the midst of gainful employ. Not that homework isn’t gainful.”
I was about to open my mouth to tell him the whole thing—to excitedly whip out the book and show it to him—when all of a sudden I hesitated. I didn’t want him to see it