by C T Cassana
Shortly after beginning her research, Lisa found an important piece of information. Despite his excellent qualifications, Monsieur Denon had not been accepted as a member of the Egyptian expedition at first because he was considered too old to handle the demands of the mission. It was only through the insistence of Joséphine Bonaparte, Napoleon’s wife and a great friend of Denon’s, that he was finally included in the group of scholars who would take part in the trip.
Lisa stopped for a moment, recalling Louis Costaz’s comment about Vivant Denon in Cairo, which Denon himself would repeat in Paris in very similar terms. Costaz had suggested that Denon had taken the papyrus scroll and the statuette to express his gratitude for the wonders he had seen. And then, on the way into the Tuileries Palace, Vivant himself had told her that with those objects he had wanted to show his gratitude and delight at having been able to take part in the Egyptian adventure. Is that what they were? Were those pieces actually gifts to thank Joséphine for her help in ensuring he was included in the expedition to Egypt?
Lisa was so excited by this discovery that she felt like running out to go share it with her brother. But she didn’t. Instead, she stared for a while at a portrait of Monsieur Denon she’d found in one of her father’s books. Better not to say anything to Charlie for now, and to keep studying in case she found some other important clue, she thought. First she would finish researching the life of Vivant Denon, and then she would focus on Joséphine Bonaparte.
. . .
Robert Newman, the security guard at the Athenaeum Club, reached out to pick up his watch and check the time. He had worked for seven days without a break, thanks to the constant shift changes requested by his co-worker Dennis. And he’d been so utterly exhausted that he’d slept eighteen hours straight, completely wasting his only day off.
Still in a daze, he stumbled out of bed and lurched over to the table to turn on his computer. Then he went to take a shower. Fifteen minutes later, he was sitting in front of the keyboard with a copious breakfast, although the clock on the screen showed that it was seven o’clock in the evening. While polishing off some scrambled eggs and bacon, he connected to the Internet and went to his favorite website. On GhostlyExperience.com he had found people who had experienced situations similar to his own and would be able to understand how he had felt when he’d confronted the ghost. Or at least, that’s what he had hoped, but so far nobody on the website had asked about his experience or made any response to the comments he’d posted. Until that day.
When he read the message from Sleepy Hollow, Robert felt so excited that he almost choked on a piece of toast. He wiped his greasy fingers on the clean shirt he had just put on and began typing an answer to his first follower.
“Hi Sleepy (I hope you don’t mind if I call you that ;). If it really is the same ghost, your poor brother must have had a terrifying experience. I could deal with it thanks to my professional training. Our induction program is very demanding and not just anybody could do it. They teach us how to react in all kinds of situations. I’m sorry for your brother. I guess it was hard for him. I’ll be busy today, but if you come online let me know and if I can I’ll chat a while with you. Regards, Ghostbuster.”
He saved the message and went on eating while he stared at the screen. He couldn’t wait for Sleepy Hollow to answer him.
. . .
Empress Joséphine’s life had been far from easy. Reading her biography, Lisa discovered that this amiable woman who had laughed with Charlie in the Tuileries Palace had been a true survivor in the tumultuous era in which it had been her fate to live.
Born on the isle of Martinique, she arrived in Paris to marry the young aristocrat and army general Alexandre de Beauharnais. The marriage, arranged by the families of the bride and groom, was miserable and plagued with misfortunes. De Beauharnais gave her two children, Eugène and Hortensia, and many financial woes. After their legal separation, she went back to her native Martinique, but a slave uprising forced her to flee the island, with no belongings or money, and return to Paris in the middle of the French Revolution.
While her estranged husband, Alexandre de Beauharnais, assumed important military posts in the new government, Joséphine rushed to the aid of many of her friends in the nobility who had been jailed and were facing the possibility of execution. Her efforts, added to his aristocratic background, created problems for Alexandre, until finally, during the Reign of Terror led by Robespierre, he was jailed for the defeat that lost the French the city of Mainz, which he had been responsible for defending. Weeks later, Joséphine was sent to the same prison as her husband, where the inmates had to endure terrible overcrowding and the looming threat of execution, which by then had become an everyday occurrence.
Five days before Robespierre’s downfall, Alexandre was sent to the guillotine. Joséphine was more fortunate; she was released when the tyrant fell. Now she was legally a widow, although once again, she had to face financial troubles. Luckily, she was very well connected with important figures in the new government, like Barras, who would give her financial assistance and introduce her to her future husband, General Bonaparte. That marriage would turn her into Empress of France in 1804, although in 1810 it would be dissolved with the country’s first legal divorce because she’d been unable to provide her husband with an heir. Joséphine moved to Malmaison, a château she had bought where she collected exotic animals and flowers, paintings, mummies and objects brought back from Napoleon’s travels. She would die there in 1814, at fifty years of age, due to complications arising from a cold. By that time, Napoleon had abdicated and was living in exile on the island of Elba.
Lisa read the biography of Joséphine from cover to cover, amazed by the countless hardships she’d had to overcome. But most extraordinary of all was the fact that just when she had reached the very top of the social scale as Empress of France, her husband had disowned her because she hadn’t been able to give him an heir. It was a fate curiously similar to that of the Great Queen Nefertiti.
Nor did Lisa overlook the significance of the fact that Joséphine had collected mummies and objects brought back from her husband’s campaigns, or that she was faithful and loyal to her friends, who no doubt responded in kind. She was clearly the ideal candidate to have received the second papyrus scroll from her dear, grateful friend Vivant Denon.
Lisa put away the books she’d been reading. Then she went online to look up images of any objects related to the life of the French Empress.
. . .
After reading Ghostbuster’s message, Max checked the visitor counter. Although GhostyExperience.com was not an especially popular forum, there were rather a lot of witnesses connected at that moment. Seventeen, to be exact.
Before he began chatting with the security guard, he contacted Nick Johnson, another hacker on his list of trusted providers. Max liked to distribute his jobs between various “professionals” in the field, so that none of them would have access to all the clues and details he gathered in the course of his investigations.
Max gave Nick his instructions: “Block access to all users except for Ghostbuster and Sleepy Hollow. And stand by for further instructions.”
The hacker replied mere seconds later with the simple message: “You’re alone.”
Max checked the counter and saw that there were only two visitors. He could begin the conversation.
Sleepy Hollow: “Hi, Ghostbuster. You’re right. My brother was very upset and has never been able to get over it. I congratulate you for not suffering the same fate. To do that you’d have to have nerves of steel.”
Ghostbuster: “It’s kind of in my nature not to let things affect me. My partner at work, old Alfred, is still really shaken up. I guess he’s too old to handle this kind of thing.”
Sleepy Hollow: “It’s understandable. What happened that scared him so much?”
Ghostbuster: “The ghost kept disappearing and reappearing all over the room. It even went right through a closed door.”
Sle
epy Hollow: “It went through the door, or disappeared and reappeared on the other side?”
Ghostbuster: “It reappeared on the other side. It was really spooky.”
Sleepy Hollow: “I’ll bet it was. And what was it wearing?”
Ghostbuster: “He had a cape on that covered his whole body.”
Sleepy Hollow: “He?”
Ghostbuster: “And the woman had a gray overcoat on.”
Sleepy Hollow: “So there were two ghosts?”
Ghostbuster: “Yes, the two of them appeared together, hugging each other. It was terrifying.”
Sleepy Hollow: “But only one of them had a cape?”
Ghostbuster: “Yes, only the boy. He was wearing a black cape.”
Max stopped for a moment, taking a deep breath to control his anxiety.
The time traveler was a boy in possession of what was no less than a Palatine Cape!
This explained a lot, and at the same time it made things much more complicated. In the past he had dealt with greedy, stupid and dangerously careless time travelers, who made his mission to seize the cape they’d found both easy and necessary to prevent them from causing a historic catastrophe with unpredictable consequences. But never in his long career had he ever had to eliminate a child whose use of such a powerful cape so ignorantly and irresponsibly made him a veritable time bomb.
Max exhaled and then continued writing.
Sleepy Hollow: “How old was he?”
Ghostbuster: “How do you tell how old a ghost is? From what he told us, he must have been wandering the earth for hundreds of years.”
Sleepy Hollow: “Of course. But how old would you say he looked if he had been a normal child?”
Ghostbuster: “Around eleven. He was really skinny, you know?”
Sleepy Hollow: “And the woman?”
Ghostbuster: “She was a lot older. The boy told us she was his grandmother, and although she was a ghost, she looked kind of worn out, like she didn’t feel well.”
Sleepy Hollow: “I see. And you say he talked to you?”
Ghostbuster: “When I confronted him he turned out to be pretty friendly. He said they were library ghosts, that they stayed in a library until his grandmother had read all the books there. In fact, the old woman had already started reading one.”
Sleepy Hollow: “And what happened then?”
Ghostbuster: “I had to convince him to go find another library. You know, the clientele come first.”
Sleepy Hollow: “Yes, of course. I’ve got to get going, my friend. Maybe we can chat again another time.”
Ghostbuster: “Any time you like.”
Max ended the conversation and sent new instructions to Nick Johnson:
“Erase the dialog and any record of Ghostbuster on the website. Block his system until I advise otherwise, so that he cannot send any more messages.”
He then took a moment to ponder all the information he had gathered. The boy was traveling with someone who appeared to be his grandmother, although none of the people on the “Milford List” fit either her or the child’s description. Nevertheless, he would run a new check. He sent an email to Jeff Carter.
“I need the year of birth of all the people on the Milford List. Regards, John Smith”
He switched off his computer and sat pensively, staring at his reflection in the black screen. His duty was to recover the cape, which inevitably meant eliminating its owner. But he also had to ensure that the existence of the time capes was kept a total secret, and as a member of the Order of the Knights of Time he was under obligation to eliminate anyone outside the Order who had found out about them.
This would no doubt be one of the hardest recovery missions of his life. He only hoped that the foolish boy stopped inviting everyone he knew to time travel with him, as if it were nothing more than an innocent trip to the bowling alley.
. . .
Lisa had to admit that the Internet was really an incredible resource. She understood her father’s reservations about it, and why he wanted to protect them from the misdeeds of people who exploited the anonymity it offered. And she knew that she herself had made a terrible mistake with her own misuse of the technology not so long ago. However, the World Wide Web also had a positive, almost magical side. A simple computer and an ADSL connection were all you needed to visit museums all around the world, to see the cultural and artistic heritage of different countries, or to read all kinds of historical documents... It was all there, at the click of a button. You only needed an abundance of time and patience to find what you were looking for.
In two afternoons of intensive research, Lisa had strolled through the rooms of the Château de Malmaison, viewing Joséphine’s personal belongings, portraits of her and her family, and even her grave. This woman, born nearly two hundred fifty years ago, began to appeal to her and to seem even closer to her than when she had seen her in the flesh in the Tuileries Palace.
Most of the information on her was set out in full detail on a website dedicated exclusively to the French Empress, featuring pictures of her furniture, dresses and jewelry, along with indications of the places where they were displayed.
Lisa perused a series of images, enlarging them to see them in detail, when something caught her attention. It was a watch with a lid that bore a pastoral image of the Nile and three pyramids in the background. The timepiece was joined to a gold chain, at the end of which was a cross with a shape that was quite peculiar, but that looked strangely familiar to her. The crossbar was short but very high and it had a large sphere at its base. Inside the sphere was a small portrait of Joséphine, from which ran three more chains, each one leading to a small cross identical to the first, but each made of a different material: one of red coral, the second of jet and the third of lapis lazuli. This object looked like a kind of good-luck charm, and for some reason it reminded her of something, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.
Then she realized.
The elements represented on this piece of jewelry were a cross, a woman, a river and three more crosses – the hieroglyphic representation of the name that supposedly referred to Nefertiti on the papyrus scroll.
Lisa felt a sudden rush of blood to her head. She turned quickly to the messy pile of papers next to her and began searching through them until she found the picture of the papyrus scroll that Miss Rotherwick had given them. She checked the symbols that Miss Rotherwick had highlighted with a phosphorescent marker to help them identify the scroll. A cross, a woman, a river, three crosses with a sphere at the bottom and another woman.
Joséphine’s watch was missing the representation of the second woman, but perhaps that detail wasn’t important. Lisa turned back to the computer screen and noticed that there was another image of the same piece of jewelry that she hadn’t yet opened. She grabbed the mouse and clicked on it, and a picture of the back of the watch was displayed. Lisa held her breath. On the back of the portrait of Joséphine was another portrait, this one of a female saint. “It’s still a woman,” thought Lisa, closing the image and clicking on the link to read the description of the timepiece.
“The Empress’ watch, made of 18-carat gold with three small crosses made of red coral, jet and lapis lazuli. The cover shows an idealized scene of the Nile River. The base of the largest cross, also made of 18-carat gold, contains a portrait of Josephine on the front and of Saint Helena on the back.”
Lisa saved the link in the “Favorites” folder, and sat down on the leather couch to take a break. She wasn’t sure what she had just found, or whether it was proof that Joséphine had received the papyrus scroll and had been inspired by Nefertiti’s code name to design the piece of jewelry. It was rather a complicated theory, but it had a certain logic to it.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t go to either of the two people who could have helped her clear up the mystery. Joséphine Bonaparte had died on May 29, 1814, four years before the first date they would be able to travel back in time; and Helen Rotherwick, her guide and adv
isor, had died on March 18, 2014.
If this watch really was a clue, she would have to work it out herself.
. . .
Charlie wandered into the library several times, and even went to the bookshelves on a couple of occasions to get a book. Whenever he did, Lisa greeted him politely and even offered to help him get down books from the top shelves, but she made no allusion to his abandoning their mission, nor did she ask him for help to complete it.
His sister’s newfound scrupulous respect for his feelings was beginning to annoy him. But when he saw the glimmer in her eye, he knew that she had found something, and although Miss Rotherwick’s death was still weighing on his heart he had no desire to miss out on it.
“We’re not being insensitive, are we?” he asked as he sat down on the couch beside her. “If we go on with our lives like nothing happened, wouldn’t it seem like we didn’t care?”
Lisa understood at once.
“I know I feel really bad about what’s happened,” she said softly, “and that you feel even worse about it. But I’m not going to give into the sadness, Charlie. I’m not going to let everything fall apart. Helen fought to the end for the exhibition, because for her it was really important. Don’t you see?”
“Yes, but I can’t help feeling that we’re betraying her,” replied the boy.
“Not if what you’re trying to do is to make her dream come true,” suggested Lisa. “I think she would approve. For her, this exhibition and this discovery were really important; otherwise, she wouldn’t have helped us, right?”
Charlie fell silent for a moment, as if that way he could be at peace with himself, and then finally asked the question that had been nagging at him.
“You’ve found something, haven’t you?”
“I’m not sure,” replied Lisa. “I’ve found a watch that belonged to Joséphine that has the same symbols as the name they use for Nefertiti on the scroll. It’s like the design of the watch was based on them.”
“Are you kidding?” asked Charlie. “But how would Joséphine have ended up with the scroll?”