She forced Bren from her mind and called Sebastian. He answered on the second ring. “Madame Cavnow! Please tell me you are in Amsterdam.”
Even in her dismal state, Semele couldn’t help laughing. Sebastian was a terrible flirt and had asked her out on more than one occasion. “No, still in the States. Listen, I need to ask a favor for one of my clients. They’re interested in acquiring an antique tarot deck, fifteenth century or earlier. Have there been any finds?”
“We’ve had some exciting sixteenth-century finds, but not many cards older than that have survived.”
“I was curious…” She hesitated. “Where did tarot cards originate? Was it Egypt?”
Sebastian laughed so heartily, she felt embarrassed. “Semele. Don’t tell me you’ve been reading French Enlightenment manuscripts. No, the Egyptian notion is a complete myth,” he assured her. “A whimsical idea someone dreamed up in a Parisian salon.”
“Oh.” What else could she say? I’m reading an ancient seer’s memoir and I’ll get back to you?
“Playing cards came from the East and exploded on the scene in Europe during the 1400s. Think of them as the video games of the time. People were obsessed. The priests were up in arms.”
Sebastian was always animated whenever he talked about his favorite subject. Semele sipped her coffee while she listened.
“Cards went from being incredibly expensive works of art to being mass-produced on paper. Games usually involved gambling, which is why the church set laws, tried to ban them, burn them. It’s where the idea that cards were evil came from. No one wanted to do anything but play.”
“But where did the tarot come from?” Semele returned to her original question, the one he hadn’t answered. “Who was the first to make them?”
“That, unfortunately, we don’t know. The tarot literally popped out of nowhere in Italy a short time after playing cards arrived.”
Semele tried to clarify. “So tarot came after playing cards, and they were used in a card game?”
“Basically, yes, like bridge. There were also funny little parlor games people played too. Then in the late 1700s, a group of Parisians claimed the tarot was a set of ancient Egyptian divination symbols. That theory was widely publicized by a man named Antoine Court de Gébelin.”
“And who was he?” Semele wrote down the name so she wouldn’t forget. She wondered if he’d show up in Ionna’s story.
“A Protestant pastor who was attempting to prove that there was a universal root for all languages and religions. He believed all cultures were schisms derived from an ancient golden age of humanity.”
“Sounds pretty utopian.”
“Well, his writings were quite popular with both commoners and the king’s court. He wrote a large volume of essays called Le Monde Primitif.”
Semele jotted that down as well. “Then what happened?”
“Within a few years Eteilla, France’s first professional cartomancer, began to publish whole tarot-card-reading systems. Through the years he trained over five hundred card readers. Then Eliphas Levi came along and said the tarot was a system of high magic that gave us a glimpse of the inner workings of the universe. Levi believed the tarot would allow anyone to acquire universal knowledge.”
Semele’s eyebrows rose. That seemed a little far-fetched.
“By the end of the 1800s there was a fortune teller on every street corner. These so-called ‘founders’ of the tarot tradition never said where they got their theories. They claimed it came from intuition.” Sebastian stopped talking. “Does that help?”
“Yes, actually, thank you. Could you let me know if a tarot deck like this surfaces?”
“Believe me, if tarot cards dating back farther than the fifteenth century surface, everyone will know. So when are you coming back to Amsterdam? I’m lonely over here.”
“Sebastian, you’re horrible,” she teased. “Talk to Mikhail.”
After she hung up she thought about what Sebastian had said. She didn’t have any new leads. He hadn’t given her anything to go on, but she still believed Ionna’s cards were out there. She would just have to keep looking.
She grabbed a table and logged into her computer. Since her return from Switzerland she’d forgone her daily routine of checking e-mail and scanning auction news. Usually she would jump online throughout the day to keep abreast of every sale and discovery, every “first found” and “only known” announcement. It felt like checking the pulse of history, but lately she just didn’t care. The more entrenched she became in Ionna’s story, the more it seemed like the world was spinning without her. Still, she needed to review the information on her Beijing trip and also let Mikhail know she’d be out for a few days. She had been procrastinating looking at the new account, but she couldn’t put if off any longer.
With a pained sigh, she opened the file to see what lay in store for her next assignment. At least reading English would be a welcome distraction.
She scanned the client overview. One of China’s top restaurateurs had recently passed away and Semele’s new clients were the heirs. The family owned a string of Hong Kong’s most expensive restaurants—the kind where a simple club sandwich, laced with caviar and Wagyu beef, cost five hundred dollars. The restaurateur had died at the ripe age of ninety-five, and during his long life had built the largest collection of autographed menus from around the world.
He had every menu imaginable: menus signed by countless composers, including Rossini, Puccini, and Strauss, with handwritten musical notations next to their signatures; menus autographed by stars like Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, and Charlie Chaplin, and others like Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and Einstein. He even had a collection of menus signed by various presidents and had several official coronation menus. There would be several thousand for her to sort through.
Semele had to admit that if she weren’t so upset about the theft and losing the Bossard account, the assignment would be fun. She was sure to be seriously wined and dined. The trip would be a once-in-a-lifetime gastronomic adventure, in the name of work, no less. Maybe a thousand-dollar piece of chocolate ganache cake would help her forget Bren, Theo, and the disaster her life had become.
She quickly typed an e-mail to Mikhail, letting him know she had reviewed the file, and gave him her initial thoughts. Then she slid in a line about how they could go over the details on Friday, because she needed to take the next few days off.
The e-mail sounded apologetic enough. What could he do, fire her? She was his best appraiser, a consistent workhorse who hadn’t taken a day off in over a year except to attend her father’s funeral. Mikhail would get over it. She hit send.
Death
Six months ago her mother had called in the middle of the night crying hysterically that he was gone. Her parents had been to a gala at the Beinecke that evening, and Semele could hear the champagne-slur in her mother’s voice.