Heart to Heart: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective Read Online Free PDF Page A

be over a hundred
years old."
    "Yeah?"
    "Yeah. Or else the state of California has a
hell of a good case."
    I said, "What is their case?"
    "They are taking the position that the owner
of record has died intestate and without natural heirs."
    I said, "Now wait a minute."
    "Therefore the property passes legally to
the state. We have got to produce Mr. de Medici, alive and fully
documented as the owner of record, within ten days from
today."
    “ Ten days, eh.”
    "Frankly, I have been wondering if it is
possible to do that. I am beginning to wonder even, if my own
father is not somehow involved in some conspiracy to...look here,
Ford, I have a right to the facts in this case. Valentinius refuses
to come forward. Instead he advances you as his proxy. So you must
know what is going on here."
    I said, "I haven't the
foggiest, pal. How hard have you tried to find this
guy?"
    "I have spent the past year exhausting every
avenue. I even traced the family line back to Renaissance Italy. I
have found only one record of birth for a Valentinius de
    Medici, and not a single record of death.
Yet the name keeps—"
    "Back to when?"
    "What?"
    "What is the date of that record of
birth?"
    "The year is 1690, in Italy."
    I sighed, lit another cigarette, reminded my
disturbed lawyer, "You said a hundred years old. Sounds more like
three hundred years old to me. Is there a problem with that?"
    He said, "It's no time for jokes. Of course
I have a problem with that."
    So did I. Because I was beginning to get a
glimmer of why I had been "invited" to Pointe House. I told the
lawyer, "Not joking. I meant, if I could produce this three-
hundred-year-old man for the court's inspection, would that help
your case?"
    "I hope to hell you're joking," Sloane
said.
    But I was not.
    Like the man said, it was no time for jokes.
I understood the ten-day crisis now.
    And I was just wondering exactly what I was
supposed to pull off within ten days.
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Five: A Possible Impossibility
     
    There is a story that is told and
persistently repeated in the literature of the period, concerning a
mysterious and influential figure with intimate access to the
royal courts of Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, who charmed and astounded the nobility of the Continent
for more than one hundred years, and perhaps directly influenced
the actual history of the period.
    The man was the almost
legendary Comte de St. Germain, believed to be the son of Prince
Franz-Leopold Ra- goczy and heir to the throne of the principality
of Siebenburgen (Transylvania). The principality was swallowed by
the Austrain Empire in the late seventeenth century and St.
Germain, as a boy of seven, was thought to have been spirited away
and raised under the personal protection of the last Grand Duke of
Tuscany, the Duc de Medici. This region of Italy, which includes
Florence, Pisa, and Siena, became the greatest center of
Renaissance culture under the Medici family, who ruled Tuscany for
three hundred years, provided the church with three popes, and
became linked by marriage to the royal families of Europe. The
Medicis are regarded as perhaps the most prominent patrons of the
arts in European history.
    It is possible that St.
Germain was a Medici, but his direct lineage—if this biography is
accurate—was to the throne at Transylvania. It is possible also
that the legend which arose around the man was the direct
inspiration for the 1897 Gothic novel, Dracula, by Irish writer
Bram Stoker, in which a Transylvanian count has achieved
immortality via vampirism.
    I have found no suggestion that St. Germain
was ever regarded as a vampire or werewolf, but he was clearly held
in awe by all who were exposed to him. Apparently he traveled all
over Europe, to Africa, India, and China, and spent several years
at the court of the shah of Persia. He was a familiar figure in the
lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI, Madame de Pompadour and Marie
Antoinette of France; of Peter m and