The Witch of Painted Sorrows

Chapter 6

Getting up my courage, I asked, “Monsieur Duplessi, what is it you are doing here exactly?”

We were once again in the kitchen, eating his croissants and drinking the bitter coffee he’d brewed for us.

“Haven’t you asked your grandmother that?”

I could see he was confused by my question.

“No.”

“And why is that?”

“She is too upset to speak of this house.” It was true: whenever I brought up La Lune, she’d become uncomfortable. I guessed that since she had raised my father here, the memories were bittersweet and too painful.

“But she doesn’t seem upset when she’s here,” he offered with a slightly sly smile, as if he was half teasing, half challenging.

His hair had fallen onto his face, and I found myself wanting to reach out and feel its silkiness. I stared down at my hands as if they belonged to a stranger. I had never given a single thought to touching my husband’s hair.

“Mademoiselle?” Julien was looking at me, waiting for a response.

“Perhaps you don’t understand Grand-mère well enough to judge whether she’s happy or unhappy. Exactly how do you know her?” I asked, finally.

“I’m an architect,” he said, and I noticed that he lifted up his head a little when he said it. “She hired me.”

“So you are renovating the house?”

“Yes. Didn’t she tell you?”

“She did, but what are you doing here every day without any workers?”

“I’m making an inventory. If we are to turn the mansion into a museum, I need to know what items will be displayed and how to show them off and how much room will be needed for the different exhibitions so I can plan accordingly.”

I felt cold. Certainly I had not heard him correctly. A museum? “But she lives here. This is our home.”

He shrugged. “She never revealed her reasons to me. All I know is there’s more than enough here to make for a fine jewel of a museum. There are over thirty pieces of sculpture. Eighty paintings, some that rival anything in the Louvre. An excellent selection of china dating from as early as 1700. Your family’s holdings are a treasure trove of objets d’art going back to the 1600s. It’s astonishing.”

“But she’s going to live here after you’re done, correct?”

“I am so sorry to distress you.” He was looking at me tenderly. “But no, our conversations would suggest not. We’ve discussed using the second-floor bedrooms as galleries devoted to the art of seduction. Your grandmother has collected antique clothes and accessories used in the courtesan’s art, which will fascinate visitors.”

I gripped the edge of the table. Felt the chilly marble on my fingertips. A shiver ran through me. I could not allow this house to be turned into a museum… could not allow strangers to walk through the doors and examine the things that belonged to us… belonged to me.

I pulled myself up and walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway and out into the grand foyer, with its glass-domed ceiling. I then moved into the drawing room, where I stood and gazed around the most excessive and elaborate room in the house.

It was a riot of golds, reds, scarlets, purples, peacock feathers, ferns, palms, and orchids. From the turquoise and lapis tiles around the fireplace to the exotic Indian carpet to the ebony monkeys with ruby eyes holding up gold bananas outfitted with candles, the room was a marvel of opulence, style, and wit. How could she open it up to strangers?

I was unaware that Monsieur Duplessi had followed me until he spoke.

“She says she wants to call it the Museum of the Grand Horizontals. Quite an avant-garde concept, don’t you agree? A flirting museum. Centuries of artwork collected by France’s most revered courtesans.”

The cold I had experienced before intensified. Taking a step away from the sudden draft, I felt cobwebs brush against my face and hands. No, this had been my father’s home, too, and one of the places I could feel close to him. He had eaten breakfast at the kitchen table every morning, munching on hot pastries the cook had just taken out of the oven. I glanced over at the grand staircase. He’d gone sliding down that banister, and been spanked for it-more often, he’d said, than he could count. I knew he’d found hiding places under the piano in the music room, inside a giant brass vase in the smoking room, and under the four-poster bed in Little Red Riding Hood’s chamber-some of the bedrooms in the house were named for fantasy or fairy-tale characters that might incite a gentleman’s imagination. Other bedrooms were designed to evoke a particular exotic time period or place. I had yet to go searching for the little things my father had told me he’d stashed away: marbles, a frog skeleton, broken pottery he’d found digging in the gardens that he was sure dated back to Roman times. If this house was taken apart, it could not become my refuge.

“Are you all right? You look pale. I should not have said anything.” He was standing beside me and had taken my arm as if he was prepared to keep me standing if I became faint.

“I’ll be fine, thank you.” I looked into his face, and he returned my glance. The moment lasted one beat longer than was appropriate. I looked away first, but even when I did, he didn’t take his hand off my arm, and my skin felt hot where he was touching me.

The freezing air was gone now. The atmosphere around me had returned to normal. In fact, there was the faint odor of violets in the air. How was that possible? It was the dead of winter. Perhaps there was a bowl of potpourri in a corner somewhere, perfuming the room. There was almost gaiety in the atmosphere. As if the house itself was pleased.

But that was impossible. A house didn’t have emotions or personality. I was simply overwrought, as my grandmother had been telling me since I’d arrived in Paris. And for good reason. Losing my father would have been bad enough, but how I lost him-that my husband had ruined my father, had in effect killed him by destroying his ability to salvage his reputation if he turned Benjamin in-was enough to test anyone’s sanity.

“Are you sure you are fine?”

“Yes.” Of course I wasn’t, but I couldn’t share how I felt with someone I barely knew. Fury filled me. How dare my grandmother make a decision like this without me. Maison de la Lune was my birthright. She had inherited it; she had not built it. Not created it. It was not hers to destroy.

My eyes rested on an Ingres painting of a harem of sensual, naked women at a Turkish bath that hung above the fireplace. This one was far more evocative and erotic than the similar painting of the same scene in the Louvre. Heat rose up my neck, and I knew I was blushing. To be examining these with Monsieur Duplessi right beside me was brazen, and yet I didn’t turn away as I would have imagined.

It was one thing for the men who attended my grandmother’s evening salons and visited with her to see these rooms, but to have tourists walking through the house and gaping at our treasures?

All around me the house seemed to be reaching out and asking for help. I had to get to her heart and comfort her, reassure her that I would not allow this to happen.

Suddenly I was sure this emergency was what had brought me back to Paris. After all, I could have taken refuge with my Aunt, my mother’s sister, and her husband, who lived in Chicago and with whom I had spent so much more time. No, of course not. It was not my wild and irrepressible grandmother, who had always flitted in and out of my life on a whiff of L’Etoile’s bespoke fragrance, who had brought me here. It was the house, this living thing, that had called me back so that I might save her.

I began to run. Back out into the grand foyer. Up the sweeping stairs to the second floor. Up to the third floor. Down a long hallway past rooms used by servants. At the end of the hallway was another staircase that led to the attic. The pathway through the stored trunks and furniture seemed to circle in on itself, and I was caught in its coil.

I’d discovered this part of the house when I was fifteen. Remembered coming up here and finding a silk robe in one of the trunks and wearing it downstairs, showing off how I looked, only to have my grandmother fly into a fit of rage. It was the same robe as the women in the portraits wore. A beautiful burnt-orange silk, embroidered with russet and cream flowers and green dragons. My grandmother had ripped it off me. Why had she cared so much that I was wearing it? I couldn’t remember now, but she had lectured me adamantly about never venturing into this antique-filled part of the house after that excursion. There was nothing here but old, useless things, she’d said.

“But what about the door?” I’d asked her.

Her face fell at the mention of it. “The door?”

“There are stone steps leading from the attic to a very old wooden door. Why does it look like that? Where does that door go? What’s behind it?”

Reluctantly she explained that in the fifteenth century a church had stood on this plot of land. At some point it had been torn down except for its bell tower, and the house had been erected abutting the ancient structure. A structure my grandmother insisted was not safe. It was too old, too fragile to hold the weight of a person. It was empty, she said, and absolutely not a place to explore. “The steps are broken, and you could trip. The bell tower is only scaffolding now. If you even tried to walk there, you would fall right through!”

I had never completely believed her. And now, as I walked up that last flight of steps, I thought about how solid the stones felt. Narrow and steep, yes, but sturdy and strong. Three hundred years of bell ringers had tramped up and down them. Could the tower they led to be any less well constructed?

At last I came to the door. It was not even as wide as my outstretched arms, but every inch was carved with the most extraordinary tiny bas-reliefs, each one intricately detailing events similar to etchings I’d seen in my father’s alchemy books. In the center of this whole amalgam of magick and religion was a facsimile of the same bronze hand from the front door downstairs. But here the hand was flat, not three-dimensional, and in its very center was a keyhole.

I was out of breath. I’d run all this way to stand here, in front of this strange door. Why? My grandmother had told me it had been locked since she was a little girl and that no one had ever discovered the key.

“This is astonishing,” Monsieur Duplessi exclaimed as he examined the door. “Where are we?”

I hadn’t even known he’d been following me, but I was glad. It felt right to have him here with me.

I explained what my grandmother had told me about this part of the house. He agreed that it looked sturdy, noting that often these old structures made of stone in the Middle Ages withstood time better than most of our modern buildings would.

“Let’s see what’s here, shall we?” And without waiting for my answer, he reached out and tried the knob.

Of course it didn’t turn.

For no reason that made any sense, for certainly he was stronger than I was, I reached out and tried the handle after he had. The most peculiar thing happened. Without any great effort, without pushing or pulling, the door opened for me.

“But it was locked,” he said incredulously.

Together we stepped into a large circular stone room. In its center was a spiral staircase. Looking up into it was like gazing into a seashell, a perfect nautilus spiral leading up and up and up. At its summit was the bell chamber itself beneath a pitched roof crisscrossed with wooden beams, and hanging from those beams were three large brass bells.

Long ruby-red velvet cords, frayed and faded, dangled from the bells all the way to where we were standing. At the end of each was a hand-sized sandbag covered with iridescent muslin.

Smells assaulted me: dust, mold, years and years of stale air, and something familiar that I couldn’t identify. As I stood there, looking around, taking in the sights and odors, I heard something. Listened harder.

“Do you hear that?” I asked Monsieur Duplessi.

He listened for a moment. “No, what is it?”

I shook my head. How to tell him I thought I heard tears being shed? Tears can’t be heard. They are silent as they slide down a cheek. Except I was, I was, hearing the silken slip of them. I was listening to someone’s broken heart.

But whose? There was no one here but Monsieur Duplessi and me.

As I looked around, trying to pinpoint the sound, I noticed different-sized shapes shrouded in sheets.

Monsieur Duplessi saw them, too, and pulled off one of the coverings. “Look at these,” he said as he revealed a stack of paintings.

“Look at the walls,” I said, pointing. “Beneath all that dust it looks like all the walls are decorated with frescoes.”

“It’s clearly an artist’s studio,” Monsieur Duplessi said as he opened the doors to a cabinet filled with dusty bottles and jars of brushes and a tall stack of wooden palettes.

I walked closer, ran my finger over one bottle and then another, bringing bright red pigment to light in one and verdant emerald in another.

How long since anyone had touched these things?

“Your grandmother isn’t a painter, is she?”

I shook my head.

“Perhaps she was renting it out to an artist?”

“I don’t think anyone has been here in a long, long time. Since before… since before she was born.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I can smell the centuries, can’t you?”

He sniffed the air.

“Your grandmother never even mentioned this part of the maison existed,” Monsieur Duplessi said.

I was listening to him, but at the same time thinking that I had to let fresh air into the studio. It wanted to breathe.

Long iron rods hung against the walls. Approaching one, I began to twist it. The shutters covering the windows that were cut into the stone high in the tower began to open. With a final creak, a whoosh of fresh air poured in.

I opened the next window, and then the next, until all six were open and the room was filled with light and cool air.

Gently I took hold of one of the sandbags, pulled the crimson cord, and held my breath as the first bell let out a lovely peal. I pulled the second cord. Then the last. The sounds were pure and deep but ominous, too. A glorious warning rising up to the heavens. Beautiful and portentous, like snow falling on a dark lake on a moonless night.

I shivered. Something in the room shifted and altered.

I looked at Monsieur Duplessi. “Do you feel that?”

“What?” He didn’t seem surprised by my question. The expression on his face suggested he might have felt what I felt, but first wanted to hear what I thought it was before he acknowledged it.

“As if… someone just flew in…”

“Or maybe flew out. Certain cultures used bells to chase away unwanted spirits and negative energies, especially from a place of worship.”

The bell’s last reverberations surrounded us, embracing us in a final melancholy echo.

“Do you believe in unwanted spirits?” I asked.

He had a faraway look in his eyes. “I don’t believe in spirits, wanted or unwanted, but fascination in the occult and the supernatural has exploded, and we hear about such things all the time. A few years ago more than forty thousand occultists attended a Congrès Spirite et Spiritualiste here in Paris. On the one hand it’s a phenomena. On the other, it’s nothing new. There have been mystics and Freemasons in France since the 1700s, but interest does seem to be greater than ever.”

“Do you think there’s a tangible reason?”

“I’ve read it’s not unusual for people to become overly superstitious and nervous at the end of a century-perhaps that’s all there is to it. Or perhaps we are experiencing a backlash against positivism, naturalism, and secularism. It’s possible the occult movement has escalated because we are searching for answers that we can’t find through science, reason, and facts. Sometimes I think this preoccupation with the supernatural demonstrates the real tensions wrestling for the soul of France.”

From his expression and the tone in his voice, even I, who didn’t know him well, knew that all this was troubling him.

“Let’s see what is under this dirt.” I picked up a rag and swiped the wall. “Aren’t you supposed to be here inspecting the rooms and making an inventory? This is definitely something that should be included in the museum.”

As I spoke, I felt a burst of chill air blow through the windows. It seemed to reach down, as if it had arms, and press against me, almost as if it were trying to communicate.

“Yes, let’s see what we have,” he said as he grabbed another rag and began helping dust off the murals.

Under the layers of grime brilliant colors appeared, fresh and vibrant as if the fresco had been painted just weeks ago. The painting was High Renaissance, lush, evocative, colorful, and extremely eroticized, even more so than the Ingres, and I was embarrassed to be looking at it with a man I didn’t know.

“It’s the story of a woman… and a man with wings…,” I said.

“It appears to be an illustration of the myth of Psyche and Cupid,” Monsieur Duplessi said in a faraway voice, as if transfixed by the beautiful and strange allegory we were uncovering.

“I think you’re right.”

Cupid had strong limbs, penetrating eyes, and was well endowed. Psyche was voluptuous and sensual. I could almost feel how soft her skin was, how seductive the perfume was that she was wearing.

We made our way around the room, revealing more of the story, until we eventually found the spot where, in a darkened bedroom, the artist had painted the doomed lovers in a deep embrace, coupling.

I was riveted to the lovers’ scene. I’d never known any desire that strong in my life.

“I wonder why the style changes here… and here,” Monsieur Duplessi said, in what I was sure was an effort to distract us, practically strangers, from the intimate nature of the paintings themselves.

We had reached the corner of the room where two tall objects loomed. Covered, it was impossible to guess what they might be. Pulling the sheet off the first, I exposed an easel holding a painting, its back to me. There was a brush on the shelf with dried ruby-red paint on its bristles. I picked it up. Holding it, I knew I’d found what I was looking for. I had no doubt. Here, right here, was the heart of the house.

I pulled off the other covering, revealing a second identical easel. Also with a painting on it, also with its back to the room.

Something occurred to me. I looked down at the tarp that had been protecting the first easel and then the second. There should have been more dust on them. There was dust everywhere else. How could these items have been spared the detritus of the years when everything else in the studio had not?

With trembling hands, I turned the canvas on the second easel around. I was staring at a portrait of a nude woman seated in front of an easel just like this one, in this room. She held a paintbrush. On its tip was ruby paint. Behind her was an untouched, clean canvas. This woman resembled Psyche in the mural, but here she wasn’t playing a part.

This was her, who she was, her very self naked for the viewer to examine.

There was a mixture of expressions on the woman’s face. Pleasure and pain at the same time. I’d certainly read enough about romantic entanglements to understand I was looking at a portrait of passionate longing.

When I’d been fifteen and thought I’d been falling in love with Leon, I had felt a child’s version of this, hadn’t I?

I remembered that last night again… my grandmother finding us, calling me ungrateful and willful as she dragged us apart and pulled Leon out of the servant’s room. I remembered how I had followed, running behind them, crying. And then that one terrible blow that had set off an asthma attack that sent Leon to his knees and finally to his death.

I’d gotten so sick afterward that my parents had been summoned from Morocco. And I remembered, too, listening to my grandmother talking in hushed tones to my father outside my bedroom.

“You have to protect her from love,” my grandmother warned.

I lay in bed, weeping, hiding under the covers, cowering and confused, delirious with fever, hearing the phrase like some verse repeated in a song.

Protect her from love. Protect her from love.

As if love were a disease that would destroy me.

My parents and I left for London once I recovered and spent several weeks seeing the sights and taking tea and visiting museums. Sometimes at night, when I was supposed to be asleep in the adjoining room of the suite, I overheard hushed and worried conversations between my parents.

What were the secrets they talked of?

It was all very vague until a letter arrived from my grandmother that I wasn’t supposed to read, but did.

Love is dangerous for Verlaine women. It leads to heartbreak. It leads to tragedy. We are too passionate, and it is like a poison for us. Don’t let it rule Sandrine’s life or it will ruin her. Teach her to rise above her instincts; marry her off to a man who will not incite or excite her but make her feel safe and calm. She can have a grand life, but it needs be a certain kind of life.

“There are initials here,” Monsieur Duplessi called out.

He had made his way around the room and finished wiping off the mural. It was still fairly dirty, but the whole myth was clear and beautifully rendered.

“ ‘CCLI,’ ” he called out.

I repeated them. Shook my head. “I don’t recognize them, do you? But that could be the date: CCLI is two hundred and fifty one in Roman numerals.”

“I might do some research at the library at the École des Beaux-Arts.”

“Look at what I found.” I pointed to the second easel, then walked around to the first and turned its painting around.

“It’s the same man who’s Cupid in the mural,” I said.

“But he’s a cartoon in the mural scenes compared to this.”

It is one thing to be with a man when you view a painting of a nude woman. We are inured to the female nude, even if she is flirtatious or lascivious as painted by Rubens. Or voluptuous as painted by Renoir. She is still within the norm of what polite society sees as art. But it is quite another to be alone in a medieval tower with a stranger whose eyes seem to see through you while you’re looking at an erotic painting of a nude male.

I couldn’t stop gazing at the canvas. Who was the sitter? Who had captured him so feverishly?

The man was painted with passion that informed every stroke. He was not handsome-his nose appeared broken; a scar ran through his right eyebrow; his lips were too full and almost mean; his eyes were dark and hooded. Mysterious and driven, he was all energy, all excitement: a hungry satyr.

He was not only naked but also slightly erect. He appeared so real that I wouldn’t have been surprised had he stepped out of the canvas and I’d discovered it was one of those tableaus so popular at parties in the States, where hostesses have models pose as great paintings for the guests’ amusement.

I felt heat coming off me in waves and wondered if Monsieur Duplessi sensed it.

“Interesting…” Duplessi mused as he moved closer to the easel and me. So close I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. “The styles of these two portraits are the same. He’s created a dramatic effect using chiaroscuro-those heavy contrasts between dark and light-to achieve three-dimensional volume, hasn’t he?”

He stepped back. Looked at the woman’s portrait. “How do you think they compare?”

I studied one and then the other. “I think he’s more sure of himself painting the woman-bolder perhaps?”

“And there’s a sense of urgency in the woman’s portrait. As though every time the artist worked on it, he’d rush to finish his work for the day so he could bed the model.”

Obviously Monsieur Duplessi was less embarrassed to be standing here with me than I was with him. And also more comfortable talking about what men and women did together than I was. And why shouldn’t he be? I was the granddaughter of one of the most famous courtesans in Paris. Who would guess at how naïve and unsophisticated I was when it came to matters of the heart and the bedroom?

I began describing the male portrait. “This one is painted more adoringly, as if the painter was lingering over each stroke, luxuriating in each curve and contour of the male form. As if she was loath to finish it.”

“Why do you say that?” Monsieur Duplessi asked.

“What?”

“That the painting of the man was done by a woman? I assumed the same painter painted both.” He gestured to the murals. “That one man painted everything here.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

Monsieur Duplessi inspected the portrait of the female.

“There are initials here, the first two that are on the mural. ‘CC.’ ” He walked around to the portrait of the male nude. “You may be onto something. There are initials here, too-the last two in the mural-‘LI.’ ”

I walked over and inspected what he was looking at. Stared at it. The initials had a circle painted around them, and it seemed there was some kind of serpent or dragon’s head on the circle. “Not ‘LI.’ That’s an L. It’s ‘LL.’ ”

“Could be,” he said, peering at it.

I felt his wool jacket sleeve brush against my hand as he came close, and a rush of feeling began to flutter and gather inside me.

So intense and foreign was the experience, for a moment I thought for sure I was going to be unwell. And then I almost laughed as I comprehended that my reaction was anything but illness coming on.

“You are right,” he said. “CC and LL. Two painters sharing this studio… when? How long ago? This is a marvelous find. It could even be an important find.” His excitement was palpable and infectious.

“There’s a lesser-known Renaissance painter named Cherubino Cellini. I saw his work in the Louvre one day when I visited with my grandmother. It was a very dramatic painting of Judith beheading Holofernes, and I remember commenting on it. The model he’d used for Judith had oddly reminded me of my grandmother. She didn’t think it was much of a compliment.”

I turned to inspect the wall art. “Now that I think about it, this style matches the painting in the museum. And both use mythological themes. It was quite fashionable at the time, especially in Italy.”

“You’re well versed in art history,” Monsieur Duplessi said.

“My father collects”-I corrected myself-“collected art and gave me the unofficial job of curating for him. Some of the happiest times I’ve had were visiting galleries with him and buying art. Supposedly an ancestor of mine was-” I broke off. Of course. How could I not have put it all together?

“Listen, I know who LL is… I’m certain of it. One of my ancestors was a woman named Lunette Lumière. La Lune. This was her house.”

“Was she a painter?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know… She was a well-known courtesan, and there was a legend that she was the lover of a famous painter.”

“Surely these both could have been painted by the same man, and he put her initials on his self-portrait and his initials on hers. But that doesn’t really make sense. One painting is CC alone. The other is LL alone. Only the mural has both initials. Maybe they both painted the mural, and this is a portrait of La Lune painted by Cellini, and this is a portrait of Cellini painted by La Lune?”

“Let’s look at the rest of them.” I began to unstack the paintings that were against the far wall. One after another after another, I turned them face out. Each was of either him or her. All nudes or only slightly draped. Those of the woman were all signed “CC.” Those of the man, all signed “LL.”

The heat in the room seemed to grow more intense and oppressive as more and more of the erotic studies were exposed. We organized them with all the paintings of him leaning against one wall… staring at all those of her leaning against the other wall.

I looked from the portraits to Monsieur Duplessi. As he intently studied the artwork, I imagined him turning, walking to me, undressing me, and lying down with me on the daybed.

I glanced over at it now-not meaning to, but involuntarily staring at its silk coverlet and overstuffed pillows. Strangely there was no visible dust there either. Had it blown off when we opened the windows?

Then a sense of unreality came over me.

I was seeing myself there with Monsieur Duplessi, our bodies as naked as those of the man and the woman in the paintings on the easels. Our bodies intertwined. My hair fanned out on the pillow. His fingers gripping my shoulder.

Suddenly, I was embarrassed to look at the architect for fear he would see what was on my face, in my eyes. I did not understand what was happening. I had been married for almost four years and had never imagined an erotic scene, not even in my dreams.

But Monsieur Duplessi was not looking at me. Not paying any attention to me at all, in fact. He was bent over the paintings, intently examining one after the other. And then suddenly, he did turn. Quickly. And caught me looking at him. Our eyes locked for a moment.

No, this was unfair. My mind was mocking me. My body wasn’t capable of enjoying the idea of lovemaking.

I flew out of the room, down the steps. Going dangerously fast on the narrow, slippery risers. Behind me Monsieur Duplessi’s footfalls followed.

“Sandrine! Stop! What is it?” His voice echoed, and it sounded as if he was calling out in this moment and in moments past.

I didn’t notice that I had gone from being Mademoiselle Verlaine to Sandrine. I just ran and ran, trying to escape my shame. But he was faster and caught up to me just as I tripped down two steps and was heading toward a nasty spill.

He grabbed me and pulled me back, kept me from falling.

I was out of breath, panting.

We were both covered in dust, rivulets of perspiration dripping down our faces. What a fright I must have looked!

“What are you doing? Are you mad? You can’t take these stairs so fast! You could kill yourself! What were you running away from?”

I shook my head. Even if I had wanted to explain, I was too out of breath to talk.

“I wanted to show you the most extraordinary thing,” he panted.

“What?” I asked, forgetting myself for the moment.

“The paintings all are dated.”

“Yes, I noticed the dates… They were mostly 1606 and 1607.”

“But there were some that were later, Sandrine. Some were dated the mid-1700s. Some even in the early and mid-1800s.”

“There were?”

“Yes. But what was even stranger is there’s one dated this year, and there are two dated in the future.”