“I told you there was no need to waste time on that.”
With one gloved hand on the railing, she descended the stairs. She was dressed all in black, as appeared to be her custom, and as she left the gloom of the stacks and entered the pool of light in which David was working, several pieces of diamond jewelry sparkled at her throat and ears. The heady scent of her perfume filled the air as she drew out a chair and sat down, crossing her legs, enhanced by a pair of sheer black stockings and sharply pointed heels.
David doubted that the book silo had ever seen anyone quite like her.
“So tell me what you’ve learned.”
For a moment, David could think of almost nothing other than her dark, but oddly forbidding, beauty.
With languid fingers, she turned a page around, glanced at the heading, and said, “Iron-gall extracts?”
“It’s a good way of dating ancient inks,” David said, still trying to recover. “The Egyptians started using ink on papyrus around 2500 B.C., and the Romans used sepia—the black pigment secreted by the cuttlefish.” He was babbling, he knew, but decided to go with it until he’d fully regained his composure. “But by the time of the Renaissance, iron-gall extracts, which were made by mixing bark and tree galls with other ingredients, had pretty much replaced them.” He expounded further on the tests that had been done on the ink and the paper, while Mrs. Van Owen appeared to be listening with half an ear. “There’s an unusually high degree of logwood extract in these tannins, and that will help us to track down other documents Cellini might have written, or sketches he might have made, from the same period. And those, in turn, may provide some clues as to the present-day whereabouts of the Medusa.”
What he didn’t say was that he thought it all was highly unlikely; he still wasn’t convinced that the thing had ever even existed. Cellini was famous for his plans that never came to pass and his designs that never reached fruition. It wasn’t for want of trying, but the man led an eventful life, in a turbulent time, and when he wasn’t running from a pope, he was dodging a king. His commissions were major undertakings—fountains for the gardens at Fontainebleau, or twelve life-sized silver figurines of the gods—but he seldom lived in one place, under one prince’s patronage, long enough to see things through. (Of the twelve figurines, only one—Jupiter—was ever made, and it, like so much of Cellini’s work, had been lost, destroyed, or melted down over the centuries.) It was a miracle that his bronze statue of Perseus slaying the Medusa, which had taken shape over a period of nine years, had ever been completed at all, much less survived to become one of the greatest masterpieces of Western art.
“And where are these other documents you would need to consult?” she asked, though he felt, from her tone of voice, that she was simply leading him along.
“Most of them?” he said. “They’re housed in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence.”
“So?”
He paused, unsure what she was getting at. She leaned back in her chair, falling out of the penumbra of light, but her eyes glowed all the same. “So why are you here,” she elaborated, “and not in Italy?”
The question took him off guard on several scores, chief among them the implication that he was working exclusively for her.
“I have a job, right here,” he fumbled.
“You are officially on sabbatical now.”
David almost laughed. “I’m afraid that only Dr. Armbruster can make that decision.”
“I’ve just spoken to her, and she has.”
David was dumbfounded. And if he was thinking about how his absence might affect his chances of getting the job as Director of Acquisitions, Mrs. Van Owen had anticipated him there, too.
“If you were to succeed at something like this—something that would bring such credit to the institution—I don’t see how she could not reward you with the directorship. She doesn’t see how she could refuse it, either.”
David felt as if his whole world was being turned upside down. Suddenly, he wasn’t working for the Newberry but for this very rich and very strange lady in black, whose money and power seemed to bend everyone’s wills to her own. Now, his very career seemed to depend upon carrying out her orders. He wanted to call Dr. Armbruster’s office and see if any of it was true.
“Go ahead,” Mrs. Van Owen said, guessing his thoughts. “Call her and see. I can wait.”