I already know that, as well as the tragic circumstances of how it happened—cancer relapse for her dad and grief-stricken suicide for her mom. But I don’t interrupt her.
She carries on, “My parents had lived in Vosier-en-Haut all their lives. It’s a village about thirty minutes’ drive from Annecy. Unbelievably cute.”
So cute I couldn’t leave it! A great mayor, too.
“Dad was a successful contractor,” she continues. “Mom was a librarian and book restorer. She launched the business I’m running now, in fact. All I did was move it to Annecy.”
I nod, inwardly praying that this intro leads where I hope it will.
“About a decade ago,” she says, “Mom received a visit from Hugues Pernoud, an elderly gentleman from Vosier-en-Bas, the next village down the slope from ours. He asked her to restore a nineteenth-century leather-bound manuscript by an anonymous author for him.”
Getting warmer? I hope so!
Charlie takes a few steps in silence before picking up, “The manuscript wasn’t rare or valuable. But its contents were unique.”
“How so?”
“Have you ever heard of Queen Charlotte?”
I furrow my brow. “Er… which one?”
“Not the English one,” Charlie says. “I’m talking about our very own Charlotte of Savoy, who married the heir to the French throne and, when he was crowned King Louis XI, became Queen Charlotte of France.”
“Ah,” I say, wondering how this is related to the Valois-Montevor key.
“She was a devoted wife and mother and a lover of books. She loved them so much she hoarded them in the Château of Amboise on the Loire. That collection later became the basis of the Bibliothèque nationale.”
I still have no clue how this is relevant.
“The reason the content of that manuscript was so special to Mom is that she’d always admired Queen Charlotte. I was named Charlotte after her.”
“Cool.”
“That manuscript is a handwritten copy of an earlier, now lost, book. To borrow a modern term, it’s a fictionalized biography of Queen Charlotte. Most of it matches the known facts about her. Some of it doesn’t.”
“I see.”Will we ever get to the part with the key?
“While restoring the manuscript, Mom read it. She enjoyed it so much that she photographed the pages and printed them out to have a copy for herself.”
“Nice.”
Charlie smiles at my impatience. “We’re getting there, you’ll see! The owner of the manuscript, Hugues Pernoud, died a few years later. That brings us to six years ago. He bequeathed his antique book collection to the public library of Vosier-en-Haut.”
“Why not his own village?”
“Vosier-en-Bas doesn’t have a library,” Charlie explains. “They use ours.”
“Your Mom worked at that library, right?”
“She was its only staffer, which made her the librarian, manager, and conservator all in one,” Charlie says.
“Okaaay…”
“Which brings us to the antique key.”
The relief on my face must be so obvious that she laughs. I laugh with her.
“When Mom unpacked the boxes bequeathed by Monsieur Pernoud,” Charlie says, “the manuscript she’d restored was in there with an attachment bound to it with a length of a butcher’s twine.”