Somewhere in the Sologne Forest, the Marquis di Sant’Angelo grew so impatient with the rate of progress they were making that he stopped the coach and exchanged places with the driver. The coachman was now reclining inside the carriage, while the marquis himself, wrapped in a hooded coat stitched from the fur of the wolves he had hunted on his estate, sat on top, cracking the whip over the heads of his four black horses.
He was determined to arrive at the palace of Versailles in time to see the queen at the evening meal and secure an audience with Count Cagliostro. The accompanying coach, carrying the royal jewelers and their priceless diamond necklace, had long since been left behind.
As the light began to fade from the winter sky, the carriage clattered into the village, which had sprung up solely to accommodate the needs of the ever-expanding royal court. Peasants were scurrying about in the cold, loading wagons with barrels of wine and wheels of cheese. They leapt out of the way as the marquis turned the coach into the broad avenue leading to the palace itself, rolling past the snow-covered parterres and terraces, past the empty orange groves and over the ornamental bridge above the Grand Canal. The palace itself loomed ahead, behind an immense forecourt, like a great white wedding cake of columns and colonnades. Lanterns and candles had already been lighted in several hundred of its windows in preparation for the night’s festivities.
But then there were festivities every night.
Once, years before, the marquis had spent a good deal of time at court, keeping company with the previous king and his notorious mistress, Madame du Barry. Louis XV had been known for his debaucheries, but the marquis had found him frank and entertaining—and vastly preferable to the present king and his court of sycophants and dandies. The only reason he had spent time at Versailles in recent years was to visit with the queen. Marie Antoinette had touched his heart upon his first sight of her there in 1770.
The dauphine, as she was then known, had just arrived, like a gift-wrapped package from the royal house of Austria—a girl of fourteen with roses in her smooth white cheeks and a fall of fair blond hair. She was as skittish as a fawn, with wide blue eyes and a long, slender neck, and the marquis felt for her plight … a shy child who was comfortable speaking only German, deposited among a throng of jabbering Frenchmen—all of them vying for position and favor with the future Queen of France. Her fifteen-year-old husband-to-be, the dauphin, was a surly, fat sluggard the marquis wouldn’t have trusted to clean his boots.
And now she was the most famous—and in some quarters vilified—woman in all of Europe.
When the marquis pulled in on the reins and brought the horses, foaming at their bits, to a stop, several liveried stable hands raced to open the carriage doors and the coachman stumbled out, pointing to the marquis and trying to straighten out the confusion. Sant’Angelo laughed, stepping down and leaving it to the servants to sort things out. Striding up the wide staircase, he entered the palace itself, which was buzzing like a hive with valets de chambres and ladies’ maids scuttling to and fro, and headed straight for the chambers of the Baron de Breteuil, Minister of the Royal Household.
“I need to see the innkeeper!” the marquis exclaimed, bursting into the room, still in his wolf furs, where the baron was conferring with some elaborately coiffeured men. “I must have my usual quarters!”
The baron immediately broke away and, shaking Sant’Angelo’s hand, said, “Of course, of course, Monsieur le Marquis, but we weren’t expecting you!” In a lowered voice, he said, “I was under the impression that Messieurs Boehmer and Bassenge had gone to see you at the Chateau Perdu … about a certain matter.”
Breteuil knew everything that everyone was doing, at any given moment.
“And so they have. In fact, they should be here soon.”
“Then you’ve seen the necklace?”
Sant’Angelo shook his head dismissively. “A gaudy piece that the queen would never wear—especially since she knows it was originally made with du Barry in mind.”
Breteuil frowned and nodded, as if this confirmed his own suspicions. “But the jewelers are so persistent,” the baron said.
“In their shoes, I would be, too. They’ve got a fortune tied up in that piece. If they make it back to Versailles tonight, don’t put them up anywhere near me.”
“I understand,” he said. “And I’ll have your own rooms made ready immediately.”
“Good,” the marquis said, clapping him on the back, in part because he genuinely liked the baron, who also had the queen’s best interests at heart, and in part because he knew such conduct was a gross breach of the elaborate court etiquette. At times like this, he missed the last king.