The Medusa Amulet by Robert Masello

Author:Robert Masello
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

All that night, the Marquis di Sant’Angelo paced the floor, waiting for the dawn to break. If he could have wrenched the sun into the sky with his own bare hands, he would have done it.

Boehmer and Bassenge had gone to bed, but he remained in the mirrored salon, sometimes stepping out on its balcony, where the cold wind rippled the sleeves of his shirt and whipped his black hair into a frenzy. The barren branches of the old oaks creaked like hinges, and a pack of wolves, hunting along the banks of the Loire, howled at the moon. The sky was clear, and the stars twinkled as white and bright as the diamonds in the necklace he had been shown a few hours before.

But it wasn’t the necklace that occupied his thoughts. The queen knew it had been made for her nemesis, du Barry, and for that reason alone, even if it were the most beautiful necklace in all the world, she would never buy it.

No, what occupied his thoughts was La Medusa … apparently adorning the greatest charlatan in France—a man who claimed to be three thousand years old. A patent sham, professing to know the wisdom of ancient Egypt.

How in the name of Heaven had he come by it?

And did he know—or had he discovered—its secret?

For over two hundred years, the Marquis di Sant’Angelo—as he had titled himself on the very night he left Florence—had searched for the glass. But ever since the day it had been torn from his neck by the Duke of Castro and handed over to the Pope, it had vanished without a trace. His spies at the Vatican had never been able to discover it, and the marquis had eventually assumed that, like so much of the papal treasure, and so many of his other great works, it had been melted down or dismantled … destroyed by someone who could never have guessed its latent power.

Caterina—his model, his muse, his love—had known. She had discovered it by chance … and to her great misfortune. But as a papal retainer had confided to him years ago—at the tip of Cellini’s dagger—she had died in a shipwreck, fleeing the Duke of Castro’s inquisitors. As proof, the man had shown him the ship’s manifest and passenger lists, left in Cherbourg. She had changed her name, but Cellini recognized well her peculiar and barely legible handwriting. Reports of the ship’s destruction had been widely circulated at the time.

Perhaps the sea had conferred a blessing upon her.

There were times when he wondered if he might not have been better off himself, inhabiting that tomb in the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata. Sleeping there, in silence, until the Second Coming.

But what reason was there to believe that Christ was going to return at all? What reason was there to believe in anything?

A hawk, with a rodent clutched in its talons, settled onto a swaying branch and proceeded to devour its screeching prey.

That was the way of the world, he thought.

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