The Cloisters(36)

“Okay,” I said. “Yes.”

The decision, I knew, would save me from another night in my studio, which, over the past couple of weeks, had deteriorated further: clothes piled on the bed, dishes lining the sink, papers everywhere. I didn’t consider myself a slob, but that morning I had stepped on some coffee grounds that had spilled from the filter I’d thrown out the previous night and not even bothered to brush them off the soles of my feet. The similarity to the home I had left behind in Walla Walla had not escaped me, but I chose not to examine the impulse I shared with my mother, to let things spiral when stressed.

The truth was, I had dedicated my kitchen table to books, articles, my laptop, and a deck of tarot cards I picked up from a local bookstore. I read scholarly articles about tarot, or carte da trionfi, as they had been called during the Renaissance. I learned that the earliest extant record of tarot cards came from a 1442 accounting record from the d’Este family in Ferrara, and that Marziano da Tortona, the secretary and astrologer to Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan, had been one of the first to write about the symbolism of the deck. I also discovered that while it was true that tarot had originally been a card game, it had been recorded as a divinatory device in Venice by 1527.

And while few scholars had written about tarot—rarely did historians or art historians bother with the topic—all agreed the early modern period was obsessed with divination and telling the future. Astrologers, of course, were on every payroll in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Marsilio Ficino, astrologer for the influential Medici family, had believed in the wisdom of the planets so thoroughly he had even predicted, at the birth of Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, that he would become pope. He did—Leo X. Moreover, places like Ferrara, where the ruling family was both fabulously rich and darkly fascinated with occult methods that might advance their reign, seemed like the ideal place for tarot cards to be used as a fortune-telling tool. Then there was the tradition of tarot itself—the imagery so distinctive, so unlike any other deck of cards that had come down to us, that it was hard to imagine they had been used for anything outside of the occult. And finally, there was the way the cards felt in my hand when I laid them out—electric, alive.

After I agreed to meet Leo, I left him in the garden and made my way to the library. Ever since the night we had read the cards by candlelight, I’d been surprised to find Rachel sitting at the same table, fully illuminated, surrounded by work papers and research materials, and not in shadow. She seemed to move so seamlessly between the world of the cards and the world of rational research, but for me, I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep the boundaries clear. And as I joined Rachel, we could hear Patrick through the thick door of his office, voice raised but words muffled by the old oak grain.

“It’s Aruna,” said Rachel, not looking up from where she was transcribing notes. “He took the cards up to her and she thinks they’re fake. He was hoping to present them at the Morgan, but that won’t be happening anymore. He’ll be relegated to moderating instead.”

It was hard to believe. I had felt something the night I held them, the night I laid them out, here, on this very table. But wasn’t that how magic worked? Distract the audience with the setting, the atmosphere, the flashy production, so that no one noticed the sleight of hand, the falseness of it all?

We could hear him through the door, a dull roar of anger, disappointment. It was a setback, and Patrick was becoming increasingly intolerant of setbacks.

“What do you think?” I asked her.

Rachel looked up from her work and shrugged.

“They’re beautiful, but they don’t feel right. They’re stiff. Vellum is much more flexible usually. And it’s true that there’s something a little rough about the illustrations. Childish, maybe?”

I nodded. I’d only seen them twice, once at Ketch Antiques and again in the dim light of the library. Rachel, I assumed, had had more opportunity to view them.

“Aruna agreed?”

“She did. I told him, of course. But he didn’t want to hear it coming from me. I think he’ll have to show them to a few more people before he really comes to terms with it.”

“I didn’t think people were in the habit of forging fifteenth-century tarot cards.”

“Personally? I think they’re a seventeenth-century copy. Not a contemporary forgery. A bad attempt to reproduce what the Viscontis were doing in Milan.” Rachel leaned across the table and lowered her voice to a whisper, almost a hiss. “You know what he’s looking for, don’t you? He’s looking for an ur-text. The earliest deck. The most clearly occultist. He’s looking for something we don’t even know exists. Just something he”—she waved her hands—“dreams about.”

“But don’t you think we’ll find evidence of it? At some point?”

“Probably, yes. I wouldn’t do this work if I didn’t think that was possible. But what’s the likelihood it comes through Stephen? Stephen doesn’t sell anything that good. The things that are that good he keeps for himself, or ultimately passes off very quietly to institutions whose acquisitions policies are more lax.”

Rachel was right; the cards were stiff, lacking the supple quality of vellum, and some of the illustrations looked rough. But there was something different about the way the cards felt, something intuitive I wasn’t ready to dismiss.