“Because I’m not the only one looking for Queen Charlotte’s key,” I say. “Please, have a seat.”
I’ve now been authorized to share some redacted information with Charlie. I tell her about the race between a prominent Monegasque family and a Swiss billionaire named Kurt Ozzi to get to the key first. When she asks if it’s a game between them, I inform her that it isn’t. Both sides need it to achieve a very real, consequential goal.
She cocks her head. “Whose side are you on?”
“I work for the Monegasque family.”
“What happens if the Swiss guy, Ozzi, beats you to that key?”
“The family stands to lose everything.” I pause before adding. “I, too, might lose a lot.”
She sits back, digesting that information. “How can a key have such far-reaching consequences? It may have a rich history, but it’s just a key.”
While I’m choosing my words, an idea thins her eyes.
“What does it open?” she asks me.
Clever girl!“Together with eight other keys it opens a small vault, which contains a legal document that could save the family I work for,” I say. “If Kurt Ozzi can keep them from retrieving it by January 1, he wins.”
“Can’t they just blow up the door?”
I shake my head. “The vault is too small. The blast may destroy or irreparably damage the documents inside. The family won’t risk it unless it’s December 31, they don’t have the nine keys, and there’s nothing left to lose.”
“Nine keys?” Her eyes widen. “Just like in Hugues Pernoud’s manuscript! It’s the only biography of Queen Charlotte that talks about a set of nine keys that she inherited from her mother and gave to her niece!”
“That’s the part that doesn’t add up.”
“What do you mean?”
“We know that our keys were made for our vault, probably in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.” I pull an iPad from my jacket’s inner pocket and set it on the table. “It’s unclear how the keys could’ve belonged to Queen Charlotte and to Anne of Cyprus before her in the fifteenth century.”
Charlie opens her tote bag and takes out her printed copy of the manuscript. “So, you’re saying that what Monsieur Pernoud and my mother believed to be Queen Charlotte’s key is, in fact, one of your employers’ keys, made after Queen Charlotte’s death?”
“Yes.” I open the scanned manuscript on my tablet.
She places a notepad and a pencil next to her printed copy. “What do you want me to focus on while we read through it?”
“Places,” I say. “The Castle of the Dukes of Savoy wasn’t the home your mother was referring to. Nor were the other places explicitly associated with Queen Charlotte. We need to figure out if this manuscript holds another clue.”
“Got it!”
We begin to read, Charlie on paper and me on the iPad. It’s an arduous job. We make notes as we read, but that isn’t what slows us down most. The handwriting is too curliewurly. The language isn’t easy, either—full of old words and turns of phrase that makes us stop and look them up.
When we’re done, it’s almost seven o’clock in the evening. We stretch our legs by walking around the room. Then we sit down again to compare notes.
I glance at my first annotation. “Did you know that Queen Charlotte of France was a Lusignan on her mother’s side?”
“A prominent Crusader family,” Charlie says.
“More than that!” I open the Internet page I’d bookmarked and read, “The House of Lusignan was a royal house originating from a place of the same name in the region of Poitou. The branch that remained in France became the counts of La Marche and Angoulême. Other branches ended up ruling the Crusader Kingdoms of Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Armenia.”
She checks her own notes. “I bookmarked a passage where the author talks about a guy named Raymondin. This enterprising young man was the one who founded the House of Lusignan, together with his extraordinary wife, fairy-slash-mermaid Mélusine.”
“I bookmarked that, too!”
We each open the passage. She reads it aloud:
The beautiful water nymph Mélusine married Raymondin on the condition he’d never seek her out Saturdays when she bathed. For years, he kept his promise. Mélusine bore him many sons and one daughter. Raymondin became the first Lusignan lord.