Shadows of Lancaster County

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “You California girls are all alike,” he teased, clicking his tongue. “Some parts of the world still have four seasons, you know.”

  The cozy restaurant was humming with activity. Hovering near the hostess stand was a short, silver-haired gentleman holding a leather satchel, dressed in an elegantly cut suit and wearing a maroon tie. Our eyes met and when I gave him a nod, his face burst into a broad smile.

  Greeting us both with enthusiasm, the man shook our hands, thanked us for coming, and insisted that we call him by his first name. With a nod to the hostess, we were escorted through the main dining room, past a crackling fireplace, and up the stairs to the balcony. There, we were led to a table off by itself that was neatly set for three.

  We sat and engaged in polite small talk until the waiter came to take our order. As Remy tried to decide between roasted halibut with hollandaise and the restaurant’s signature seafood and pasta, Reed held the menu high, over his face, and gave me a wink. Our host was quite a character. Finally, Remy decided on the halibut, Reed ordered the roast pork, and I chose the filet mignon. Once the waiter departed, Remy’s demeanor changed, and suddenly he was all business. He leaned forward, focusing in on me.

  “Now that we’re here, I must ask you the question I have asked every one of your relatives that I’ve been able to track down: Are you in possession of the Beauharnais Rubies, or at the very least do you know where they are?”

  The man stared at me with such rapt expectation that the trauma of the last few days began roiling up within my stomach. I swallowed hard, trying not to feel again the shock of the masked intruder in my bedroom or the horror of my abduction on the campus. Those people had wanted to know the same thing, the only difference being the manner in which they had asked. Suddenly, I viewed the man across from me not as a kindly old scholar but as a similar threat. Reed put a warm hand on my arm, obviously sensing my panic and understanding I was so upset I couldn’t even form a reply.

  “You’re not the first person to ask her that,” Reed said on my behalf. “Anna has been attacked twice in the last three days, first with a gun to her head and then while being held down in the back of a van. Both times, they demanded that she hand over these rubies, whatever they are.”

  “Attacked?” Remy cried in dismay. “Were you hurt?”

  Finding my voice, I said I was okay but that my housemate hadn’t been so lucky. “Look, I don’t even know what the Beauharnais Rubies are. I never even heard of them until the other day. Now people are crawling out of the woodwork trying to take them from me. I came here tonight because I want to know what’s going on.”

  The older man seemed genuinely disturbed. He fidgeted nervously with his silverware, adjusted his tie, and accepted with relief the pot of tea the waiter brought. Dipping the tea bag up and down in the steaming water, Remy finally spoke.

  “I’m afraid these attacks may have been partly my fault,” he said. “Sometimes I get so caught up in the hunt, I forget that not everyone’s interest is quite so…scholarly. In my excitement, I may have said too much on too public a forum.”

  I glanced at Reed as we both waited for Remy to go on, which he did, albeit reluctantly.

  “You see, in researching my latest book I have filled the Internet with queries, assigning tags to all sorts of names and terms. Whenever one of those terms pops up on a website, in an article, or even as a comment or a question to a message board, I get an electronic alert. Several weeks ago, I received a number of alerts for ‘Grand Duchy of Baden,’ which is one of my tags. In taking a closer look, I realized that someone was doing genealogy research and had been asking about that region of Germany in the early 1800s. That someone was Bobby. When I saw his posts, one post in particular, I was so excited that I jumped in with both feet. Eventually, I’m afraid I may have blabbed too much on my blog, putting it out there for all the world to see.”

  “Blabbed how?” Reed demanded. “What did you say?”

  Remy left the tea bag alone and guiltily met our eyes.

  “That Bobby Jensen of Dreiheit, Pennsylvania, might hold the key to a two-hundred-year-old mystery, namely whatever happened to the priceless Beauharnais Rubies, which disappeared from the royal vaults of Baden in 1830 and have never been seen again.”

  I sat back, trying to think of the implications of what Remy had done.

  “Actually,” he added, even more guiltily, “I may even have implied that Bobby or one of his family members was in possession of these priceless jewels today. I’m sorry, Anna. I realize now how ignorant that was. My blog is about scholarly research, not a how-to guide for criminals. But if strangers are accosting you and demanding the jewels, then I have a feeling they’re simply picking things up where my blog left off. Bobby said he’d never heard of any such jewels, but I’m afraid I didn’t quite believe him at first.”

  “The group that nabbed her tonight swabbed her for DNA,” Reed said. “Why?”

  “Oh my,” Remy replied, shaking his head, “that means you have more than mere treasure hunters on your tail. I’d say they were descendents of the last documented owner of the jewels, trying to prove they have a stronger claim to them, genealogically speaking, than you do. We are talking about the resolution of one of the greatest mysteries of the jewelry world. If the Beauharnais Rubies are found, there’s going to be a mad scramble for ownership rights. The fact that someone is willing to retrieve your DNA forcefully is a bad sign, as it means you probably don’t have a solid claim. These thugs accosteswabbed you because they need to know who they’re dealing with and how your DNA stacks up against theirs.”

  “Accosteswabbed?”

  “Yes, I coined that word in an article I wrote for Vanity Fair. You can’t imagine the radical steps people take in order to trace genealogy these days—from swabbing the cheeks of strangers to plucking hair from corpses.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

  “Sadly, no. Genealogy used to be a pleasant little hobby, like a guessing game or a jigsaw puzzle,” Remy explained. “But once ancestral DNA testing was made available to the masses, the whole nature of things shifted. Some folks get so intent on their search that they push it too far.”

  I let Reed have the paper and sat back, looking at Remy.

  “I know DNA is used in paternity cases, but can it really tell you all that much about your family tree?” I asked, thinking of the ancestral DNA report I had found among Bobby’s email.

  “Oh, my. Yes,” Remy said, explaining that because markers on the Y-chromosome passed through male generations relatively unchanged, it was now possible to confirm through DNA testing all sorts of genetic connections, even distant ones. “For example, once your brother obtained his genetic signature, he used some online databases to compare it with other known male Jensen descendents and construct a family tree. That’s what led him to write the post that caught my eye. You see, those comparisons showed that Bobby was a descendant of a man named Karl Jensen, but not of Karl’s father, Samuel Jensen. That’s what’s known as a ‘nonpaternal event,’ when two men are not biologically related, even though they’re legally considered father and son.”

  “But what difference does it make?” I asked. “You’re talking about six, seven, eight generations ago. Who cares?”

  “In your brother’s case, I believe he was trying to track down some sort of medical mystery and was hoping to go as far back as possible. The trail ended with Karl Jensen, and Bobby was trying to figure out where it went from there. That’s the post that caught my eye, the one that got me so excited when I realized the implications of what he was asking. I emailed your brother and he phoned me, but he seemed to be more concerned about his paternal lineage search than he did about my story of priceless jewels.”

  “That’s because his son is sick,” Reed said, handing the article back to Remy. “That was far more important to him at the time, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, I know, with some rare disorder,” Remy replied. “Bobby was trying to figure out i
f there was any Amish blood in his family tree, as that might help him narrow down what could be wrong with the boy.”

  “Do you know what he found out? About the Amish blood, I mean?”

  Remy tucked the article back into his briefcase.

  “Yes, I do. I thought if I scratched Bobby’s back he would scratch mine, so I helped with his search. As it turned out, two generations of Jensen men were married to Amish women: Karl and his son Jonas. Once Bobby knew that, he no longer cared about the mystery behind Karl’s nonpaternal event with Samuel. But I did. In fact, I think it’s the most exciting thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

  I looked at Reed, heartbroken to know that my hunch had been correct. With Amish blood in our family tree, there was a much bigger chance that Isaac had some rare disorder—and that Dr. Updyke had tampered with his genes. Sadly, some of the pieces of this puzzle were falling into place exactly where I didn’t want them to.

  “Frankly,” Remy continued, opening his napkin with a flourish and placing it on his lap, “I was a bit miffed when Bobby put me off and said he’d have to deal with the jewels some other time. It was just through sheer luck that I spotted him online today and he connected me with you.”

  I bit my lip, feeling suddenly guilty about my deception from this afternoon. Obviously, Remy didn’t even know Bobby was missing. I decided I would tell him before the night was over, but for now I wanted to change gears and learn more about the Beauharnais Rubies.

  The waiter arrived with our salads at that moment, and I was glad for the interruption as it gave me a moment to collect my thoughts. Picking up my fork, I realized I was hungry—which made sense, considering I’d had almost nothing to eat all day.

  “All right, Remy,” I said after the waiter was gone, “my brother may have been too focused on his son to think about it, but after being attacked twice by people who want these rubies, I need to know exactly what they are and what they have to do with me.”

  Ignoring his own salad, Remy sat back with a twinkle in his eye and began to tell us the tale of the Beauharnais Rubies, a story that started with Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 1800s.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Remy began with a simple history lesson, explaining about European royalty in that era and how ties between countries were often strengthened through marriage. Napoleon had no legitimate descendants of his own, Remy said, so when he wanted to align himself with the newly expanded Duchy of Baden, he decided to adopt his wife’s cousin, a charming young woman named Stephanie de Beauharnais, and marry her off to Baden’s hereditary Prince Karl. Karl was the reigning Grand Duke of Baden’s grandson and had become next in line for the throne when his father had died a few years before.

  In celebration of Stephanie’s adoption, Napoleon gave his new daughter an elaborate matching set of jewelry known as the Beauharnais Emeralds. Five years later, when he learned that Karl and Stephanie were expecting their first child, Napoleon commissioned a similarly elaborate set of diamonds and rubies called the Beauharnais Rubies. The jewels were meant to celebrate the birth of a new male heir to the Baden throne, so when Stephanie ended up having a girl, Napoleon held on to them. A few years later, when she finally had a boy, Napoleon immediately sent the rubies to her as a congratulatory gift.

  Sadly, by the time the jewels made it from Paris to Baden, Stephanie’s newborn baby boy was dead. According to Remy, records indicated that the rubies were received at Baden’s palace on the day of the infant’s funeral and placed directly into the vault. Considering the situation, they were never worn publicly. Stephanie was later painted wearing them, but Remy said her expression in the portrait was not a happy one.

  With only a few exceptions, the Beauharnais Rubies had never been seen since.

  As our empty salad plates were taken away and delicious-looking entrees put in their place, Remy continued his tale, filling in some of the details of what we’d already learned. First, he said, the marriage of Karl and Stephanie may have produced children, but it was quite miserable. They seemed to dislike each other from the very beginning, so much so that at one point Napoleon himself had to intervene and help make peace between them.

  To complicate matters further, Karl’s grandfather had a second wife, a commoner named Luise, with whom he had had a son named Leopold. At that time, the laws of succession prevented Leopold from succeeding his father as Grand Duke because of his mother’s nonroyal origins. Considering that there weren’t many male heirs in the family, however, Luise had high hopes that eventually those laws would be changed to allow her son to ascend to the throne.

  Those hopes had been dashed when Stephanie married into the family. As the royal daughter of Napoleon and a healthy young woman in her childbearing years, there was a good chance that she and Karl would produce plenty of sons, all of them legitimate heirs eligible for the throne who would take precedence over Luise’s son, Leopold. Consequently, Luise hated Stephanie and made her life quite miserable.

  When Stephanie’s second child turned out to be a boy, everyone knew that Luise’s worst fears were coming true. When that newborn boy died several days later, rumors began to circulate that Luise and/or Leopold had been responsible for his death. Though nothing was ever proven, those rumors persisted to this day.

  There were other, different rumors about the baby as well, Remy said, including one that claimed that Leopold had switched the healthy infant at birth with the dead or nearly dead infant of some local peasant. Supposedly, this story went, the true heir to the throne had been taken far away and given over to a man—a former palace guard—who was instructed to kill him. Unable to carry out such a heinous crime against a defenseless child, the man had instead allowed the babe to live, though he eventually imprisoned him in a dungeon.

  Those rumors took on an eerie reality sixteen years later.

  Pausing to take a few bites of his halibut, Remy asked if we had ever heard of the name Kaspar Hauser. I hadn’t, but Reed vaguely recalled reading something about him in one of his DNA magazines. My curiosity piqued, I ate my filet mignon and listened as Remy continued with his tale. He said that sixteen years after Karl and Stephanie’s newborn son supposedly died, a strange young man appeared one day on the streets of Nuremberg. No one knew who he was or where he had come from, but there was obviously something wrong with him. He could hardly walk, and he only spoke a few intelligible words.

  The young man indicated that his name was Kaspar Hauser, and eventually it was deduced that he had spent many years, possibly his entire life, as a prisoner in a small cell with almost no human contact and only a few little wooden toy horses to keep him company. Despite that, he was very intelligent, and experts were able to educate and rehabilitate him to a degree. He seemed to be about sixteen years old, and soon a rumor began to spread that Kaspar Hauser was in fact the offspring of Karl and Stephanie, the son who had supposedly died at birth sixteen years before.

  That story grew, and eventually so many people believed that Kaspar Hauser was Karl and Stephanie’s son whom Leopold had spirited away and left to die that he became a worldwide sensation. Soon there was talk of having him restored to his rightful place in the royal family, but before anything official could be done, Kaspar Hauser was assassinated. Even after his death, Stephanie never publicly confirmed or denied whether she thought he was her son or not. She went to her grave years later refusing to comment.

  To this day, Remy said, the truth about Kaspar Hauser’s origins were not known. In recent years, two separate DNA tests had been done, but they contradicted each other, one saying he definitely was the son of Karl and Stephanie, the other saying he definitely was not. As no tests were currently being allowed on his remains, the facts were still shrouded in mystery.

  While I found the whole story interesting, I wasn’t sure how it tied in with me or my family tree. I said as much to Remy now, but he simply grinned and told me to be patient.

  Having thoroughly studied the entire situation, Remy said he had developed a theory of his o
wn. In his opinion, the newborn boy had indeed been spirited away—but not by Luise or Leopold. Instead, Remy said, he thought that Stephanie had done it herself, that upon hearing rumors of her evil in-laws’ intentions to kill her child if it was a male, she had made arrangements to protect him and outsmart her enemies. For years, Remy had been convinced that Stephanie somehow communicated with another pregnant woman and arranged for the exchange of their children after they were born in order to save her son’s life.

  His theory sounded pretty far-fetched to me. Certainly, Stephanie’s motivation was understandable, but I found it hard to believe that she would have been able to locate a peasant woman who was also pregnant who also delivered around the same time who also happened to have a boy who also was willing to give her child away and take Stephanie’s in exchange. As far as I was concerned, those were some pretty big leaps of faith, all in a row. Still, for the sake of argument, I went with it for now.

  Remy explained that at that time Baden and the Palatinate were heavily populated with the Amish. Because of their radical belief that baptism should take place in adulthood rather than infancy, they had suffered horrendous religious persecution throughout Europe. Though Baden was more tolerant than some countries were, it was still not ideal. The Amish had been immigrating to America in search of true religious freedom for a while, many of them coming to Lancaster County. It was Remy’s opinion that Stephanie de Beauharnais had traded newborn sons with an Amish woman who had then brought the child with her to America where he would be safe, his true identity never revealed.

  To prove his theory, Remy had been studying Amish immigration records for years, trying to pinpoint the exact family, the exact child, but without success. When he read Bobby’s post a few weeks ago, however, Remy realized that his search had been hindered by one incorrect assumption, that the Amish family in question had immigrated soon after the boy was born. Instead, Remy now realized, the family didn’t leave Baden for America until many years later, when the boy was grown and married and would have been about twenty-one.