"Twice," Grace blubbered. "He dumped me twice."
Morgan stared at me for a minute. "Okay," she said. "I propositioned him that night. I wanted to get back at my husband for screwing Courtney. A little tit for tat as it were. He turned me down, even when I wrote a generous check to the museum. It was unbearably humiliating for me, so I made up the story. Surely, though, you did not bring us up here to freeze our butts off while you individually chastise us for lies that are essentially face-saving and harmless."
"No, I brought you up here to tell you the story of two exceptional women over a century apart. One of them was named Selena B. Morison. She was a Scotswoman from Edinburgh who decided for some reason, very possibly because of a man she had fallen in love with, to travel to what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire, to Budapest, to wait for someone, again most likely this man, and to carry out some scientific research. She was self-taught in this area, but obviously exceptionally talented.
"While she waited for what I believe to be her lover—she referred to him only as T—she occupied her time in scientific pursuits. She traveled to the Biikk Mountains, explored caves, and in at least one, conducted what we would call an archaeological dig. She was talented, but also perhaps extraordinarily lucky, because she came upon a grave site containing a body adorned with thousands of shells, along with a beautiful mammoth-ivory carving."
I glanced in Karoly's direction. Conflicting emotions— surprise, puzzlement, confusion—passed in succession across his face. "She was, by her own admittance, an amateur, so, conceding she could not do the research necessary, she packed up her account of the work, along with her exceptional drawings of the site, and the skull, and sent them to the Bramley Museum in London for further study. The chief curator of the Bramley at that time was a man by the name of Cyril James Piper."
"You're kidding," Frank said. Karoly just stood there, hanging on my every word.
"I told you there was something the matter with those diaries," Diana said. "But are you saying the Venus is a fake?"
"Oh, get off that, Diana," Morgan said. "Just shut up."
"Piper took the materials Selena had sent to him, and gave a presentation to a group of anthropologists at a pub near Piccadilly in which he seemed to imply that it was he who had found the skull. The conclusion one is forced to make, on careful reading of the minutes of that meeting, is that he presented the drawings and the detailed explanation of the dig, as his own. Whether or nor his fellow members of the Calvaria Club—I'll ask you to remember that name— were complicit in this deception, I do not know. They must have known their colleague had not spent a lot of time in Hungary in the recent past. But this was an old boys' club of the worst sort. Do you know what they used as a gavel at those little get-togethers? A real skull, from a real person. If they knew, they never said."
"That's the story of women everywhere," Grace said, bitterly.
"Not only did Cyril Piper not acknowledge Selena Morison's primary role in the discovery of both the grave and what we've come to know as the Magyar Venus," I continued, "he actively tried to discredit her. I found among his papers in the Bramley archives a letter he sent to colleagues who were considering hiring her, referring to her as difficult to deal with, unstable, and perhaps quite mad. In order to make sure she didn't come to work there, to find out about his deception and expose him to ridicule, he maligned her to his peers. You perhaps missed this letter, Karoly, in your research there. You also perhaps overlooked the fact that Piper is listed in meeting minutes several times when you had placed him in Hungary."
Karoly didn't say a word. I suppose he was quietly watching his career go down the drain.
"In any event, we don't know if T, the person she was waiting for, ever arrived, although it is highly improbable, and she seems to have reached that conclusion herself, nor do we know whether or not she found out about Piper's treachery. We do know that on April 29, 1901, she died, as a result of either falling, or jumping, off a cliff near Lil-lafured." I didn't bother mentioning that the name of the cliff was Molnar.
"Well, Karoly!" Diana said. "A little casual in our research, were we? Perhaps Thalia Lajeunesse will tell all."
"You're a little casual with the truth yourself, Diana," I said. "As I have recently discovered, if you look at something closely, without any hidden beliefs or prejudices, the truth usually comes shining through. In that regard, I have had another look at those files of yours, and I believe you were embezzling funds from the Cottingham, using Karoly's expense claims to do it, were you not?" Diana paled, visibly. "Isn't that right, Karoly?" I said, turning to him. He nodded. "You were trying to get back into the Cottingham that night to remove the evidence, Diana. I really wish you hadn't used my car to do it. What did you do? Shove me into the backseat and then go back and take a run at the window because your key didn't work in the door, anymore? You must have been drunker than I was. As for that claptrap about Karoly being responsible for your not getting tenure, I for one, would be interested some time in what the truth there might be. I suspect you just didn't cut it."
"But she got her PhD and everything," Cybil said. "Didn't you, Diana?"
Diana shook her head. "No," she said.
"Forget tenure!" Frank said. "I want to know what you're saying here. That Karoly was wrong? Surely all this means is that the diaries were misattributed, but the Venus is the genuine article."
"The Venus may very well be genuine. As a matter of fact, I'm almost certain it is. But you miss the point."
"I think I'm missing the point, too," Cybil said. "This all sounds so unbelievable."
"It's completely unbelievable," Frank said. "Lara must be mad."
"So now it's Lara that's being dissed, is it?" Morgan said. "I'd be careful where you go with this, Frank. I smell a lawsuit in the air. What a sad, sad woman that Selena Morison must have been. I mean, forget the Venus!"
"Very sad," I said. "Fast forward a hundred years or so, to another sad woman. Because of a terrible and tragic accident, this woman became trapped in: her own home. Her illness was very specific. She couldn't go out, fearful as she was that something terrible would happen if she did. She lost her children to her ex-husband, her job, her life." They all stood there, rooted to the ground, and silent at last. Karoly, unlike the others, wasn't looking at me. Instead he was staring outward toward the river, the bridges, Margit Island, to take comfort from it, perhaps.
"But she didn't give up entirely. She decided that she would spend her time finishing her master's thesis, something she could do from home, thanks to the wonder that is the Internet. This thesis, as it turns out, was on Victorian travelers, and through that she happened on the name of Cyril James Piper and his discovery of ancient Homo sapiens in the Biikk Mountains of what is now Hungary. She regularly corresponded with a woman by the name of Hilary Edmonds, a librarian at the Bramley. I know that because I met Hilary while I was there, and because I phoned her last night to ask her one very simple question, a question that came to me as I thought about Selena's Morison's betrayal. Did the name Anna Belmont mean anything to her? As it turned out, it did. Hilary had regularly assisted Anna, who had told her she was a shut-in, with copies of documents in the Bramley archives. From her tiny bedroom office in Toronto, Anna was able to write her thesis on the group of anthropologists that called themselves the Calvaria Club. You will recall, Frank and Cybil, that we found that name on a slip of paper caught in her desk.
"Karoly was wrong, yes, for more than one reason. He incorrectly named the discoverer of the Magyar Venus, and of the diaries. What really bothers me, though, is that he, you too, Frank, failed to credit Anna. She gave you her thesis, didn't she? That's why you visited her. She wanted your help to find a publisher. You took it, and you showed it to Karoly. Maybe you were just asking him his opinion as to the quality of the scholarship, whether it was worth publishing or not. I expect that as-soon as he saw it, he remembered the diaries that he had happened upon in Budapest. Without Anna, Karoly would never had made the connection. As with Selena Morison, those who had benefitted unjustly from her work chose to malign her, calling her dishonest, mentally unbalanced, if not downright mad. We do know that, unlike Selena, Anna knew of the betrayal, and that she confronted those responsible.