“I am,” the marquis replied. “Where did you get it?”
He could see a quick calculation going on in Cagliostro’s mind. “It was a gift,” he then said, “from Her Majesty.”
This news astonished the marquis. How had he known nothing of this?
“It was sent to her by His Holiness, Pope Pius VI,” the count continued, plainly having decided that the truth in this instance did more for his status than any lie might have done, “on the birth of her son, Louis-Charles. To protect the mother and child from the evil eye.”
“Il malocchio,” Sant’Angelo said.
“You know our countrymen,” Cagliostro replied. “The queen wore it to a reception for the Pope one night, purely as a courtesy, but had very unpleasant dreams and asked me to dispose of it the next day. But it was so beautifully wrought, I could not bear to do it.”
“How fortunate,” the marquis replied.
“Besides, the queen has no use for such superstitious baubles. She had already found a nearly identical trinket in the royal coffers, but this one had ruby eyes, and she had melted it down to make a silver buckle for her shoe. The rubies became a pair of earrings for a friend.”
That anyone, even a queen of France, would make such use of his handiwork made Sant’Angelo’s blood boil.
And as if Cagliostro knew that he was pricking the count, he languidly raised one hand toward the Princesse de Lamballe and said, “You see? She’s wearing the earrings now.”
Sant’Angelo struggled to betray no emotion. This was the fate, he knew, of so much of his work—to be unwittingly disassembled or pillaged for its precious elements. But to discover that not one, but both, of his amulets should have found their way to the same place—one by way of the Medici, one from the hand of a pope—was astonishing beyond measure. It was as if the two Medusas had been drawn to each other, across space and time, by a force as mysterious as magnetism and unstoppable as the tides. Magic, beyond magic.
He simply thanked God that this one piece had survived.
Raising it on its chain appraisingly, Cagliostro said, “Rumor has it that it’s over two hundred years old—the work of Benvenuto Cellini, in fact.”
“Really?” the marquis replied. He had quite purposefully taken off his identical ring and left it at the Chateau Perdu. He pretended to examine the piece more closely. “I wasn’t aware that he worked in niello.”
“Cellini worked in every form and finish.”
He was right about that, Sant’Angelo thought; he had tried his skills at everything. But had the count unlocked La Medusa’s secret, he wondered? Of course he would have uncovered its mirror … but had he put it to its proper use? Sant’Angelo’s hand itched with the urge simply to snatch the piece free, but he could hardly start a brawl in the queen’s own palace.
“I’m so glad that you two have met,” the queen said, approaching with her Swedish lover Fersen standing close at her side. “I can’t think of two more accomplished men to add to our company tonight.”
“Not three?” Fersen said, leaning in to her, and she laughed, batting at him with her fan.
“Remember,” she confided to the marquis, “how you taught me to properly wield this weapon?”
After some cajoling from de Lamballe and Polignac, Count Cagliostro consented to display some of his powers—acquired, or so he declared, from the ancient adepts in Egypt and Malta, hundreds of years ago. But then he was full of such boasts. Reputedly, he claimed to have restored the library at Alexandria at the behest of his personal friend, Cleopatra, and to have wielded the dagger that killed her consort, Ptolemy. He had been traveling all over Europe for years, raising money and founding lodges to promulgate the lost wisdom of Egyptian Masonry. As far as the marquis could tell, however, the lodges were empty, while the count’s pockets were full.
He obliged the company now with some of the standard conjurations, making images appear in a vase of water (done, the marquis knew, with chemical reactions familiar to any alchemist worth his salt) and silverware move (with lodestones concealed in his cuff links). But the pièce de résistance, for which the count was famous from Warsaw to London, was one of his mesmerism performances. In preparation, he asked that the lamps be dimmed and that everyone arrange their chairs or cushions to face in his direction. Fersen sat at the queen’s feet, along with her other lapdogs.