Felix and the Prince (Forever Wilde 2)

I owed Doc and Grandpa everything for their encouragement, their financial contributions, and most of all their encouragement of my studies and my visit to Gadleigh. Their solid support had led to my standing in front of a crowd of curators, preservation experts, students, and professors in the Louvre in Paris. It was beyond my wildest dreams.

Once the sponsor had introduced me, I took the podium in front of a packed room and began my presentation.

“Thank you so much for having me. As Madame LaPièce mentioned, my mentor and friend, Ruth Lawson, was so sorry to miss being here. I’m sure she would have loved going on and on about her beloved William Morris. But since she is not here, I shall, instead, go on and on about my beloved subject: Etienne DesMarais.”

The crowd chuckled softly, and I saw several people smiling in anticipation.

“I have spent extensive time researching the mysterious and exquisite glass found in the castle on the remote island of Gadleigh. As any scholar of stained glass can tell you, Gadleigh is like Disney World for glass enthusiasts. Or the Louvre for da Vinci enthusiasts.”

More chuckles.

“I was lucky enough to spend the holidays at Gadleigh Castle and studied under the current Gadleigh glass master, Calum Grier. Not only did I learn what their current program entails, but I also saw the historic glass of the unnamed artist from the 1500s.”

I took a moment to look around the room, wondering how many people knew much about stained glass.

“As many of you know, the extensive works of the unknown artist were originally credited to a glass artisan who was popular during that era, Gian Antonio da Lodi. But in the early 1970s, a scholar found evidence that da Lodi had never been to Gadleigh. That discovery prompted further testing, which determined the glass was made almost sixty years after da Lodi’s death.”

After a pause to give myself a mini pep talk, I continued.

“It is my theory that the reason the credit was given to da Lodi in the first place was to hide the identity of the real glass master of Gadleigh. Through my research, I’ve discovered that there was an unknown glass master in residence during the time all of the glass was created. It was the reign of Liorland’s King Gabriel IV, and the artisan was a man by the name of Etienne DesMarais.

“There is no official record of Etienne visiting Gadleigh despite his being one of King Gabriel’s inner circle. But I found evidence in the journal kept by another glassmaker in nearby Nice who specifically mentions a man named Etienne DesMarais escalating his glassmaking talents to the point of regional fame. Upon further research, I began to see implications that the king and DesMarais were in a secret relationship.”

I paused to test the audience’s reaction. It wasn’t every day an academic made accusations of homosexuality about a royal personage in front of a renowned group of art history buffs. When I’d mentioned my theory to Lio, I’d been terrified of offending him. But that had been stupid. Lio himself was gay, so learning one of his ancestors was gay hadn’t been a huge shock. He’d found it fascinating instead. And sad.

We’d discussed at length how awful it must have been for the king and DesMarais to have to hide their relationship, but after knowing the story, anyone with eyes could see the love that had been put into every glass installment around Gadleigh.

“When I visited the castle, I was struck by how extensive the glass installations were. There are details as major as the main rosette window in the royal chapel and as minor as the handle of a garden water pump that have been lovingly crafted from stained glass made with sand collected on Gadleigh’s own beaches.

“It is the work of a lifetime. The work of love and dedication to a place that meant everything to the artisan. While I was there, I attempted to count each individual work of handmade glass around Gadleigh Castle. I stopped counting after eight hundred. This wasn’t a visiting artist. It wasn’t a world-renowned maker or a neophyte attempting to learn the ropes. It was a focused, dedicated master, honing his art in the process of expressing a lifetime’s worth of love in the place of his heart.”

I stopped to take a sip of water to wash away the lump in my throat as I thought about Etienne and Gabriel hiding away at Gadleigh in order to find each other away from real life. The similarity to mine and Lio’s situation was excruciating. The fact that in five hundred years, nothing had fucking changed.

“So one of the greatest glass masters of all time was never named. He never came forward and claimed his due—never received recognition for his amazing life’s work at Gadleigh. Instead, he went down in history as a courtesan, a hanger-on to one of Monaco’s brightest kings during the time of the late renaissance and England’s King Henry VII.”