His words finally helped me slam down a barrier between the woman, who was basking in the golden glow of sexual satisfaction, and myself. I glanced in panic at the door, but it remained closed, with no sign of the older woman, the guards or a crazed Russian psychopath. We seemed to be safe for the moment, but there were probably people on the way to kill him even as we lay around recovering.
«Mircea, we have to get out of here! They'll come here first!»
«Cassie, calm yourself. There is no rush. The sybil and her assistants know where this Frenchman will be. As you said, they will be along presently, expecting him to be pleasantly preoccupied and unwary. But we will be waiting for them instead.» He slipped out of bed and walked over to the mirror. He touched Louis-Cesar's cheek softly. «This is a marvel!» He examined his borrowed body in astonishment. He turned towards me as he looked over his shoulder to check out the rear view and my mouth went dry. Louis-Cesar was simply stunning; there was no other word for it. Backlit against the fire, his hair a reddish halo around his face, he might have been a Renaissance angel come to life.
«This is the famous mask, is it?» Mircea picked up a scrap of velvet that had been flung over the mirror and held it up to his eyes. «A piece of history indeed.»
«Are you going to tell me who he was now,» I asked impatiently, «or do I have to guess?»
Mircea laughed and tossed the mask aside. «Not at all,» he commented, unself-consciously perching on the edge of a low chest of drawers near the mirror. I wished he'd put something on. The current situation wasn't doing anything for my mental abilities.
«I will be happy to tell you the tale, if it will amuse you. His father was George Villiers, whom you may know better as the English Duke of Buckingham. He seduced Anne of Austria, Louis XIII's queen, while on a state visit to France. Louis preferred men, you see, a fact that had long left his queen frustrated and childless.» He looked thoughtful for a moment. «So perhaps it was she who seduced Buckingham, hoping for an heir. In any case, she was successful. However, it seems that Louis was not pleased about the idea of having a bastard on the throne, especially not a half-English one. Anne had already named her son after the king, in the attempt, I suppose, to hint that a bastard heir was better than none at all, especially if no one knew about the substitution. The argument failed, and her firstborn was sent into hiding.»
Something was starting to come together for me, some long-forgotten history lesson maybe, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Mircea didn't wait for me to figure it out. «Eventually, the queen had another son, whom most said was sired by her adviser, Cardinal Mazarin. Perhaps she kept quiet about the deception this time, or maybe the king was becoming afraid that he would leave no heir, because the boy came to the throne as Louis XIV. He wasn't happy to have a half-brother who looked a great deal like the Duke of Buckingham. That might call his mother's virtue into question, and cause doubts about his own parentage, and therefore his right to rule.»
«The Man in the Iron Mask!» I finally made the connection. «I read that book as a kid. But that wasn't how it went.»
Mircea shrugged. «Dumas was a writer of fiction. He could say what he liked, and there were many rumors circulating at the time from which to choose. But to make a long story short, King Louis put Louis-Cesar in prison for the rest of his life, holding the threat of harm to his friends over his head to keep him docile. To make the point even clearer, he had him sent on a tour of France's most infamous house of horrors, the leading castle in the medieval witch hunts, Carcassonne. King Louis used it as a place of incarceration for any who disagreed with him, but the torturers and the troops supporting them were all found dead one morning in 1661, causing the greatest fortress of the Middle Ages to be abandoned. It fell into ruins and wasn't restored for two hundred years.»
«But didn't Louis-Cesar say he was here that year, in 1661?» I looked around nervously. That was all I needed, a homicidal maniac or a bunch of fed up townspeople to come busting in with pitchforks, ready to slaughter everybody.
Mircea didn't look overly concerned. «Yes, he was moved around to many prisons through the years, staying in captivity until shortly before his brother died, when the last of the friends he was protecting passed away. Then he took off forever the velvet mask they had made him wear so no one would notice his strong resemblance to a certain narcissistic English duke, who had left portraits of himself all over Europe. He told me once that his jailers only forced him into the iron mask after he was turned, and even then only when he was transported from one prison to the other.» He grinned at me. «It was a precaution, you see, so that he didn't eat anyone en route.»