She looks down then and, like someone roused from a drunken slumber, discovers the blue satin stool in her lap. Her hand traces the length of one leg until it meets an obstruction: a kind of gleaming garter, indissoluble from the stool, or so you might think, until the Baroness's chalk fingers loosen it with a quick f lurry.

Vidocq lays it out on the table, even as I grab a candle from the nearest sconce. There, against the grains of mahogany, lies a hoop of gold, worried and notched, spotted with tarnish.

"Small," I hear myself say. "Too small for a bracelet."

"Too large for a ring," adds Vidocq. "An adult's ring, that is."

He draws it closer to the candle f lame. A smile f lickers across his lips.

"For a baby," he declares, "it might do quite nicely."

And just like that, all the distresses in the ring's surface acquire a meaning.

"A teething ring," I say.

"Worth a fair sum, too," says Vidocq, rolling it across the plain of his palm.

The Baroness's blond brows form high tight arches. "It's pure gold, if that's what you mean. However, its value derives largely from its original owner."

"A baby?" he asks.

"He was a baby then."

"And did you know him?"

"I met him once or twice. I knew his mother slightly."

"She must have been well-off if she could give her son a hunk of gold to chew on."

The Baroness pauses. And when she resumes, a new quality has crept into her tone: a sense of words beneath words.

"She was well-off, as you say. For a time. The ring, though, was a gift from the child's grandmother."

And now an even longer pause-a full half minute-before she breaks it herself by reaching into the drawer of a curio cabinet and extracting a pair of opera glasses, of ancient provenance.

"Here," she says, proffering them to Vidocq. "The grandmother's emblem has been engraved in miniature. You may see for yourself."

The glasses, being too small for his ox-head, give him the look of a harassed chemist as he lowers his face toward the table. For several long seconds, he gazes. A crevasse appears between his brows.

"You should be able to discern a double eagle," says the Baroness. "Quite different from Signore Buonaparte's emblem. Do you recognize it now, Monsieur?"

Closing his fingers round the ring, Vidocq gives a dazed nod.

"You have spent some time there, perhaps?" she asks.

"A few weeks. Fighting with the cuirassiers of Kinski. I got to know their insignias quite well."

"Kinski?" I stammer. "But that's Austria."

"Of course," says the Baroness, sweetly. "We are looking at the heraldic emblem of the Empress Maria Theresa."

"See for yourself," says Vidocq.

I press the opera glasses against the bridge of my nose, and the miniature universe of the ring comes rushing toward me. The two-headed eagle . . . the Teutonic cross . . .

"And the child's name," says the Baroness. "You can just make it out."

Sure enough, a line of letters appears on the ring's inside rim. Some of them are gnawed away, but enough remain to make out what was once there. . . .

LO IS CHA L S.

"Louis-Charles," I whisper, and the words seem to pool on the table beneath me, ref lecting the name back to me. "The dauphin."

From behind me comes the Baroness's voice, edged with irony.

"I believe, after all these years, the word king may now be in order."