Semele knew exactly the year that Simza had described in Dinka’s story. The plague had hit Northern Italy in 1629 and wiped out half of Milan’s population by 1630. Somehow Ionna had foretold those events over a thousand years before. It was just too incredible.
Semele closed her computer. She had been in the Beinecke reading room for hours and her eyes needed a rest. The day was winding down and she couldn’t put off calling her mother any longer. She gathered her things and left the building.
The brisk air hit her when she stepped outside. She buttoned her coat and walked over to Blue State Coffee to get an espresso. Depending on how fast she worked, she might be able to translate several more pages before heading to her mother’s. She wanted to find out what happened to Aishe and the cards.
She knew with striking certainty she needed to figure out how to locate them, and quickly, and she realized there was one person she could call: Sebastian Abbes, a card historian in the Netherlands. She had worked with him earlier in the year while dismantling a collection for a Dutch client who had several valuable decks. If anyone knew about Ionna’s deck, he would.
She checked her watch and quickly calculated the time difference. The Netherlands was six hours ahead. It was evening there now, but Sebastian wouldn’t mind. The man was a night owl and crazy to boot.
She fished her cell phone from her purse and saw she had four missed calls and three voice mails from Bren. She stared at the phone with a sinking heart, unable to listen to the messages and call him back—not yet, not when she didn’t know how to say what needed to be said. It felt like swimming upstream. Instead she sent him a text: At Mom’s dealing with some things. Will call you when I get back. She clicked send, feeling like a jerk, but she had to focus.
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.