The Lost Mata Hari Ring Read online

  Cyrano had grown even less social in the last few years, due to heart problems and the death of his wife, to whom he had been extremely devoted. At her death, he had been quoted in the New York Times as stating, “I was desperately in love with Constance, and it is a loss from which I will never fully recover.”

  On January 15th, Trace had used a connection to help her approach Mr. Wallace. Rodney Caldwell was a Broadway producer Trace had dated two years before. Though the relationship hadn’t worked out, she and Rod remained friends.

  Rod had had some dealings with Cyrano and Constance a few years back, when Cyrano contacted him as a possible producer for an opera which Cyrano and Constance had commissioned for the New York City Opera, an organization Constance supported.

  Unfortunately, the opera had not yet come to fruition when the New York City Opera filed for bankruptcy in 2013, and a year later, Constance became seriously ill. The title of the opera was Mata Hari.

  When Trace called Mr. Wallace, he had not been warm or welcoming.

  “I see very few people these days, Ms. Rutland,” he’d said gruffly, “and only those I’ve known for many years. Rodney said you had some questions about my wife’s Mata Hari collection. What is it you want to know?”

  Trace cleared her throat and began the patter she’d prepared. Obviously, she couldn’t tell the man the truth of why she was calling.

  “Mr. Wallace, I'm an actress, and I'm going to be playing Mata Hari in a soon-to-be-produced play. I'm interested in seeing your wife's collection so…”

  Cyrano cut her off. “Why? What good is seeing it going to do you? You can see most of what Constance has online. You can also go online to the Fries Museum in the Netherlands and see most of their exhibition there. As you young people know, the internet brings everything in the world to your laptop or cell phone screen.”

  “Yes, yes, that is true, Mr. Wallace,” Trace responded nervously, “but it’s not quite the same as actually seeing Mata Hari’s personal possessions in front of you. I read somewhere that your wife—who had great interest in Mata Hari—once said that those personal possessions helped to bring Mata Hari to life.”

  Silence. Trace waited, pacing her apartment, the phone cradled between her neck and her shoulder. “Mr. Wallace, I promise I won’t stay long or be any kind of a burden. I would be so grateful.”

  Trace heard him sigh deeply into the phone. It made a little hissing sound.

  “All right, Ms. Rutland. I will have my butler lay the items out for you. You can view them briefly. Please do not—and I stress—do not bring anyone else with you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mr. Wallace. Thank you.”

  On Saturday, January 20th, Trace drove her rented, late model Prius along the Massachusetts Turnpike, turning left onto a two-lane road, driving past fieldstone walls, stately homes and a white church with a rising white spire. She drove on, observing clumps of modern townhouses and condominiums nestled behind majestic firs and pines, feeling the rise of nerves and the familiar acid stomach. She swallowed two Tums as she turned onto Route 23, following her GPS until she was on the other side of Lenox, where Mr. Wallace's house lay, secluded behind a grove of trees.

  She turned left onto a winding asphalt road that rose and fell across rolling fields, still glistening with an inch of early afternoon snow, and craned her neck to see the obscure turn-off just ahead.

  Minutes later, she pulled into the curved gravel driveway and parked in front of a classic and magnificent Colonial Revival Style house. Trace shut off the engine and sat in the stillness for a time, taking in the grand old two-story home, with its symmetrical façade, side porches and sunrooms on both sides. The entrance was centered and accented with a portico and Greek-style Corinthian columns. She was impressed.

  As she studied the side-gabled roof with narrow eaves and the hipped roofs and dormers, Trace recalled her encounter with Dr. Hopkins only the week before. She’d been a nervous wreck ever since.

  Both she and Dr. Hopkins had been shaken that day. He could not entirely believe what had happened, and his startled eyes and pale color revealed a man who had witnessed something both troubling and extraordinary.

  Trace had had to sit on the couch for nearly a half hour, sipping tea and watching dancing patterns of light play across the walls, before she was able to finally stop shaking. For long minutes, she felt as though she wasn’t entirely anchored in her own skin. She’d remembered everything that had happened back in 1917—every scent, every face, every emotion—and it was as real as anything she’d ever experienced in her present life.

  She had asked Dr. Hopkins for an explanation. In a distracted and aloof way, he’d lifted his hands, unable to offer anything other than to say “I’m not the right therapist for this kind of thing, Ms. Rutland. It’s not something I’m comfortable with or understand. I can recommend another therapist, if you wish.”

  Trace wished he’d been more helpful and supportive. After he’d brought her back to full consciousness, he’d withdrawn his attention, and she felt she was left dangling on the precipice of a terrifying experience, having no idea how to proceed.

  For two days, she’d slept and called out for food. She’d gone for walks and ignored friends, emails and texts, even those from her agent. If anything, the regression—or whatever it was—made her feel even more lost and vulnerable. How could it be true? How could she have been Mata Hari in a past life? She knew who the woman was, but not the details.

  Didn’t most people who believed in reincarnation, or past lives, believe they’d been some famous person or the other? Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth or Marilyn Monroe?

  Still, something had happened. She couldn’t deny that she had gone through a kind of doorway into a shocking and chilling experience. She had actually felt herself as that woman, Mata Hari. She saw her hands, felt her sweat, her panic. She smelled the awful stench of that dank and depressing prison, and she felt the heaviness of those clothes she was wearing.

  And what about Mata Hari’s daughter, Nonnie? Trace had felt the overwhelming guilt and the agony of loss Mata Hari had felt over abandoning the girl, and of not being the kind of mother she should have been. Trace had felt all of it, painful, deep and strong.

  Right after her experience, Trace realized that, throughout her life, she’d had dreams in which a young girl swam up from the depths of a deep blue pond and waved to her, calling and beckoning Trace to dive in and join her. Trace found the whole past life thing unnerving, but she recognized now that that girl was Nonnie, presumably her daughter in a past life. Whenever she recalled that lovely face—Nonnie’s face—she longed to reach for her, to touch her, to be with her.

  Trace had also felt the sense of betrayal by her lover, Captain Masloff. Why hadn’t he come to see her in prison? What had the woman done to be so abandoned?

  And how was it that she had spoken French so fluently and so easily? It had been so natural and available, so immediate and effortless on her tongue. Although she’d taken two years of high school French, she’d forgotten most of it.

  By the third day, Trace knew she had to act. She had to find some way to free herself of the angst, doubt and confusion she was feeling. Dr. Hopkins had recommended a woman therapist, but Trace wasn’t ready to go through all that again, at least not yet.

  By Wednesday, she was at her laptop, exploring everything she could find about Mata Hari, reading blogs and articles about the woman and her time. Trace knew something about the First World War because of a play she’d performed in, but what she read now shocked and astounded her. What she’d experienced under hypnosis had, in fact, been true. History had happened just as she had experienced it.

  Trace broke out into a cold sweat, and the shakes started again. Was it possible that she could have been Mata Hari? It was absurd. It was one thing to hear and read about reincarnation, and it was another to actually experience it, front and center.

  But then her nightmares had returned with a force—and the nightmares had play
ed out what she had experienced during her regression. Trace was a mass of nerves, pacing her one-bedroom apartment, desperate for some kind of help.

  Back at her laptop, Trace learned that Constance Wallace had purchased some of Mata Hari’s personal possessions at an auction back in 2010, and something in Trace snapped. An idea struck. She had the sudden, insatiable urge to see those items—to touch them, feel them and put them on. It became a compulsion—an obsession.

  That’s when she’d traced Constance Wallace to Rodney Caldwell, and the Mata Hari Opera.

  Now, Trace emerged from her car, shut the door and started toward the house, her feet crunching along the pink gravel. She mounted the brick stairs under the portico and stood tensely before the large oak door. Her emotions were in turmoil. She was perspiring, despite the quick, cold wind. She lifted the knocker and let it go.

  A few moments later, the door slowly swung open. A pleasant-faced man with short, gray hair and still, dark eyes, wearing a dark suit and blue tie, stood smiling.

  “Ms. Rutland?” he asked, in a soothing baritone voice.

  “Yes,” Trace said, with a smile.

  “I’m Andrew, Mr. Wallace’s butler. Please come in.”

  Andrew stood aside, and Trace entered a white marble foyer with stained glass windows and a gleaming, multi-tiered chandelier.

  “May I take your coat, Ms. Rutland?”

  Trace slipped out of it.

  After Andrew deposited her coat in a side closet, he returned, indicating toward a room to the right. “Mr. Wallace has arranged the collection in the library. This way, please.”

  Andrew ushered her across the entranceway, past a curved sweeping staircase leading to upper rooms, across oriental rugs, to two polished hardwood doors. Andrew slid one door open and nodded for Trace to enter.

  The library was an astonishingly luxurious room, with thick patterned carpets, dark wood floors, and cherry wood floor-to-ceiling bookshelves holding leather-bound books, hardcovers and books with antique bindings. There were two richly carved reading tables with fringed tablecloths and Tiffany lamps. One held a large antique ocean globe. Trace took in the burgundy leather upholstered chairs, a plush leather couch, and a generous fireplace. Tall windows let in a wealth of natural light, a shaft of it alighting on a clawfoot table covered by a cream satin tablecloth, where the Mata Hari collection was clearly displayed. Caught by it, she stared. Trace took in a quick breath to calm her nerves.

  Andrew stood by. “Can I get you anything, Ms. Rutland? Some tea perhaps?”

  Trace couldn’t pull her eyes from the awaiting collection. “No… no, thank you.”

  “I will stand by then, if that is all right, according to Mr. Wallace’s request?”

  Trace turned, distractedly. “Yes, of course. Fine.”

  Andrew stepped back to the entrance doors and stood at ease.

  Trace approached the Mata Hari display haltingly, feeling her pulse in her neck. She swallowed away a lump, and gently placed her purse on a chair nearby. Gathering herself, she advanced, first lifting her eyes to the ornately framed oil painting of Mata Hari that hung on the wall above the collection.

  Trace’s eyes narrowed on the image of the woman, who had billed herself as a Hindu artist, draped in veils—which, during her dance, she artfully released from her body.

  Mata Hari stood tall, in a seductive pose, against a moody, cloudy background, the large Hindu god of Shiva clearly visible. The dancer had luminous olive skin and luscious blue-black hair. She wore an elaborate jeweled headdress that was both dramatic and perhaps a bit ridiculous. A flowing diaphanous gown revealed an exposed stomach, and her rather small breasts were covered with brassiere-styled beads.

  Mata Hari stared back at Trace with dark, flirtatious, smoldering eyes and the hint of a seductive smile. The painter had captured the beguiling spark in her eyes, and Trace could actually feel the desire in them, and the magnetic lure of the sensual dancer.

  Attached to the lower picture frame was a brushed gold nameplate with the quote: I will be celebrated or notorious—Mata Hari.

  Trace had read that Mata Hari helped turn the striptease into an art form that captivated audiences across Europe, and she had finally won over the critics. Trace’s eyes were suddenly drawn to an old newspaper spread out on the table to the immediate left of the collection. There were Post-it arrow markers pointing to quotes. Trace leaned and read a review that a Viennese reporter of Mata Hari’s day had written about the dancer. “Slender and tall with the flexible grace of a wild animal. Her face makes a strange foreign impression.”

  Another smitten newspaper writer described her as being “so feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms.”

  There was a brief biography of Mata Hari in a second newspaper. Trace was captivated.

  Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born on the 7th of August 1876 in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. At age fourteen her mother died and her father, who owned a haberdashery and who invested heavily in oil stocks, went bankrupt. She attended an all girls’ school and, after a still-unclarified sexual episode with a teacher, she was suspended from school. She spoke fluent French, English, Italian, Dutch and German.

  She left school and fell in love with a military captain. In 1895, they married and moved to Indonesia. The marriage was not a successful one. He was an abusive alcoholic, and she had sexual encounters with military officers, whom she desired more than other men. Their son died due to poisoning, and there are still some questions surrounding his death, as well as the near-fatal poisoning of her one-year-old daughter. Her husband blamed his wife for not keeping a better eye on the boy, and when they moved back to the Netherlands, they divorced.

  Mata Hari posed as an exotic Eastern princess, trained in sacred and sexual temple dances, an identity that was well-suited for her exotic beauty and society’s current romantic inclinations. Her erotic dances and her delicate, revealing costumes soon made her celebrated as the most sought-after and most desirable woman in Europe. For nearly ten years, she became the glamorous mistress of many powerful and important men. Mata Hari danced before wild, enthusiastic crowds in Paris, Vienna, Madrid, Berlin, Milan and Rome, inspiring admiration, jealousy, hatred and vicious condemnation.

  Trace was filled with excitement as she looked the collection over. The objects seemed somehow familiar, and they seemed to stare back at her, glowing in the silver afternoon light. There were Chinese marble sculptures, opera glasses, two fur necklets, silver cutlery and some old money, French Francs, one banknote reading Bon de Monnaie Un Franc. There were also several five Franc notes, neatly stacked. An open scrapbook lay to the right of the items and Trace stepped over, carefully leafing through photographs, newspaper clippings, playbills and calling cards from Mata Hari’s years of performing in European capitals.

  But the item that caught her eye—no, seized her eye—was a ring. A remarkable ring—a stunning ring—an emerald sapphire with a glossy gold band. It sparkled and dazzled, and the light danced in it like a constellation of stars.

  Trace was transfixed. Her eyes seized it, heart pounding. A shiver of desire startled her. In a sharp flash of recognition, it seemed only natural to reach for it. It was hers, after all. Yes, it was hers!

  A deep, commanding voice from behind stopped her. She jerked her hand back, pivoting to see a man at the entry doors. Andrew was gone.

  The man spoke in a low, resonating voice. “That ring is a rare, natural green faceted oval sapphire, 6.40 carats. It cost me a fortune, but Constance wanted it. I outbid two museums for it.”

  Trace saw a broad, white-haired man with steel gray eyes and a forceful mouth staring at her, sizing her up, his gaze leveled on her.

  “You must be Ms. Rutland?”

  Trace struggled to shake the mist of old memory from her eyes, but a part of her was still wedged in the past, recalling the ring, remembering the ring. Craving the ring.

  CHAPTER 4
/>   Trace finally brought her full attention back to Cyrano Wallace’s library. She fought for control of herself. “Yes… Yes, I’m Trace Rutland.”

  “I’m Cyrano Wallace, Ms. Rutland. Forgive me. I hope I didn’t startle you.”

  “No… No. I… Not at all. I was just admiring your collection.”

  Cyrano was dressed in dark slacks, a white shirt and a blue blazer, with a red silk handkerchief blooming from his jacket pocket. As he entered the room, he moved with an aura of power and authority, obviously used to being in charge. He approached, extending his big hand, and, as they shook, Trace felt Cyrano’s piercing gaze, full of fire and, surprisingly, warmth.

  “Welcome to my home, Ms. Rutland.”

  “Thank you for allowing me to come.”

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and glanced about. “I hope you’re enjoying the little collection.”

  “Yes, very much. Where did you get the scrapbook? It’s captivating.”

  “I purchased it from a Hollywood producer. I have no idea where he found it. The album, and everything else you see, will be donated to the Fries Museum in the Netherlands when I die. They have a very impressive collection of Mata Hari’s things.”

  Trace turned toward the ring. “And I love the ring,” Trace said.

  “So I see. Well, it is the most remarkable piece of the collection, although I’m also fond of the opera glasses. Constance brought them to the opera a couple of times and showed them off to her envious friends. She loved doing that. She loved the ring, too, but she never did slip it on. I asked her to several times, but she wouldn’t. She always refused.”

  “Why? It’s so beautiful.”

  “I don’t know why. She once said it wasn’t hers to wear. She said it should never be worn by anyone except Mata Hari. I said, ‘Mata Hari is long dead,’ and do you know what she said to me?”