Until I Die

side table with gloves and a magnifying glass positioned next to them. I slipped the gloves on and opened one of the books. It was a historical document, with lists of goods and dates next to them—it seemed to be a king’s or lord’s account of tributes paid to him. I turned a couple more pages. More of the same. And neither of the other books had anything of interest.
I stood and thought for a moment. Since Papy dealt only with artifacts, sculpture, and metalwork, when he bought entire estates he often passed the most valuable books and manuscripts to his book dealer friends to sell for him. But during his busy buying seasons, there was often a stash of inventory he hadn’t had time to go through, especially the books and prints he would be handing off. I made my way to his stock closet in the back hallway and turned the handle. Locked.
Papy always carried his keys with him, but maybe he kept spares somewhere in the gallery. I returned to the front desk, dug through a couple of drawers, and found a small key taped to the side of one of them, near the back. Carefully unpeeling it, I returned to the closet and breathed a sigh of relief as it slipped easily into the lock.
Inside stood a stack of four boxes labeled ESTATE, MARQUIS DE CAMPANA . Papy had scribbled the purchase date on the side of the box: a few days ago. Knowing him, he had probably put the estate’s most important pieces up front and stored the miscellaneous items until he had a chance to research them one by one. I pulled a box out of the closet and opened it. Tiny bundles wrapped in cloth … miniature metal god figurines, I saw as I unfolded one. I rewrapped it and quickly replaced it.
The second box was full of tiny plastic zip-lock bags holding bits of ancient jewelry and carved stones—the type that would be set in a ring. Intaglios , I remembered Papy calling them, and picked one up to discover a figure of Hercules wearing the lion skin carved into an oval jade. Although I had been around Papy’s objects since I was a baby, I never failed to feel a frisson of wonder when I held something made over a thousand years ago.
I knew what the third box held before I even reached inside. My heart beat faster as I opened the flaps. The smell of musty paper poofed out, and I looked down to see a collection of old books. More like hand-bound manuscripts. And though the most fragile ones were in plastic bags, a few sturdier volumes lay loose between them.
Books from a Roman antiquities collector … now this could be promising. I picked the first one up. It was an old printed book in German, with engravings of Greek and Roman statuary. I placed it carefully on the floor and reached in for a small book with decorative shapes and swirls tooled into the reddish brown leather cover.
It was the size of the illustrated prayer books I had seen in the Louvre, but much thinner, and as I opened it I saw that it was a hand-penned manuscript, written in the gothic handwriting of medieval monks. I remembered reading about illustrated manuscripts. Some monks spent their whole lives copying books and decorating them. Before the printing press, copying was the only way multiple examples of a book could be made.
This wasn’t a masterpiece, like the ones I had seen protected under thick museum glass. It was simple but beautiful, with gold vines and flourishes decorating the edges. The first page was an explosion of leaves and berries, with, at the bottom center, two skulls. Immortal Love , it read in French, and the next page was illustrated with a colorful, naively painted image of a man and a woman in medieval clothing holding hands. And even though the painting was simple, I could tell that the woman was elderly—she was depicted with white hair—and that the man was very young: a teenager.
The image had been painted many centuries ago. Maybe even a millennium. I inspected it carefully, taking in every detail. The woman was old, her posture a little bent. And the man was gleaming with youth and health. I would have thought it was an old lady with her grandson, except for the way they stood hand in hand, their heads slightly inclined toward each other in a gesture of solidarity and affection.
I turned back to the title page. L’amur immortel , I read again, and then saw a subtitle written in spidery letters below. I could hardly make it out; the ink had worn with the centuries, and the old French was difficult to decipher. “A tale … love and tragedy … a bar