Against the Tide (23 page)

Bane always analyzed his enemy before he did anything. He scrutinized every strength, foible, or weakness, and used it to predict his opponent’s behavior. What did she know about the Professor that might buy her a bit of time before she began translating his manuscript?

And then it came to her. The manuscript was over a thousand years old and the vellum would be fragile and vulnerable. A sweaty palm or a spilled bottle of ink would be a constant danger. Surely a copy must be made. A
working
copy. She could delay the production of a translation by insisting upon making a complete copy of the original text to work from. Depending on how long the manuscript was, it might take her weeks to make a copy of the text.

Fifteen minutes after she awoke, a firm rapping on Lydia’s door preceded the entrance of Mrs. Rokotov, who brought an armload of clothing in with her. “These have been collected for your use,” she said bluntly. “Breakfast will be available in the servants’ kitchen
for another fifteen minutes. After that there will be nothing until lunch. The Professor has requested to meet with you at eight o’clock this morning.”

Mrs. Rokotov deposited the clothing on top of the bureau and left. Lydia wished Jacob was here so she could make a joke about blunt Slavic manners. Jacob always enjoyed a good laugh, but Mrs. Rokotov’s iron face would probably crack if she smiled.

What the clothes lacked in style, they made up for in warmth. The thick flannel underclothes she had on under her dress made the chilly temperature almost bearable. The woolen sweater with leather patches on the elbows looked like a man’s sweater, but Lydia did not mind as she rolled up the sleeves. She wrapped a soft cotton scarf around her neck to protect her skin from the rough scratch of the wool sweater, and Lydia thought it looked rather fetching.

The servant’s kitchen was empty when she arrived, but there were warm eggs and potatoes, which she gratefully devoured. The room seemed remarkably cozy, as it appeared to be one of the few places where a fire was permitted, and it burned cheerily in the brick-encased hearth. An old farmer’s table sat beneath a collection of copper pots and skillets. Lydia’s gaze roamed the room, noting all manner of strange equipment and charming hand-thrown pottery crocks. After finishing her breakfast, she prowled among the tools and implements hanging from the mantel.

She had hoped to loiter here a little longer in order to delay her meeting with the Professor, but he arrived in the kitchen while she still held a pair of crudely forged iron tongs before her. She averted her gaze. “Do you know what these are for?”

“Looks like a pair of medieval torture devices, but I have no idea. Ask Mrs. Rokotov. I expect she would know.” Which was not
exactly the most comforting of thoughts. “Now, let me show you my treasure,” he said with a bright tone.

He guided her through a series of hallways, up two staircases, and down a narrow corridor with a barrel-vaulted ceiling and opened a locked chamber door. As she walked, the temperature got even colder. “This is the Priceless Room. It is where I keep the most prized of my treasures. The books you saw in the library downstairs are old, but not priceless. Everything in here most certainly is.”

It was an enormous, windowless room. All four sides were covered with elaborate steel vaults bolted to the walls. A single table with two plain chairs sat in the center of the otherwise empty floor. It was a curiously barren room, stark like a prison cell, except that the room was flooded with light. When she looked up, Lydia gasped in surprise. “Is that a
window
in the ceiling?”

“A skylight,” the Professor said. “I refuse to permit any flame in the Priceless Room, so there can be no gaslights or lanterns in here. You will need to work by the light from the sky. I won’t permit the manuscript to leave this chamber.”

He walked to one of the vaults that lined the room and produced a small key to open the lock. “All of the vaults are fireproof, of course,” he said as he swung the door open, “but the heat of a flame would be damaging to these most fragile treasures.” Another series of locked drawers was inside the vault. Using a separate batch of keys, he opened a drawer and slid out a velvet-lined box.

“Here it is,” he said, his voice warm with pride. “A ninth-century codex, recording the wisdom of an anonymous first-century writer whose distinctive prose has been found on three other extant fragments. This is the only complete essay in existence. Is it not magnificent?”

When Lydia saw the size of the manuscript, her heart sank in despair. It was tiny! The codex was the size of a deck of cards. It
would take no more than a day or two to make a copy of so small a document.

“Magnificent,” she said weakly. Considering its age, it looked to be in remarkably good condition, with creamy vellum pages and clear black letters of impossibly tiny script. Lydia bent closer. Each letter of text was no larger than a grain of rice. There was no illumination or other illustrations, just a dense block of unfamiliar characters.

Professor Van Bracken gestured to a worktable in the center of the room. Stacked on the table were writing tablets, pencils, several pairs of cotton gloves, and a magnifying glass. “I trust you will find everything necessary to begin your work,” he said.

“I can’t wait to begin,” she said faintly.

He pulled on a pair of cotton gloves before lifting the document out of its case. His face was tense as he transported it from the drawer to the table. Once he had placed the document in the center of the worktable, he drew the chair out and gestured to Lydia.

“The document is awaiting your examination.”

Lydia lowered herself into the chair, her eyes scrutinizing the unfamiliar characters of the text. It looked a little bit like Greek, but a lot more like gibberish. She hunched over the text, trying in vain to recognize even a few of the characters from her transliteration tables. Seconds later she heard the rasp of paper as the Professor slid a stack of blank pages before her and put a pencil in her hand.

“Please begin, my dear.” Her gaze flew to his face. Did he really intend to stand over her while she worked? She did not want to tell him of her plan to make a copy until the last possible moment. If he insisted she work from the original document, she would be caught immediately.

She cleared her throat. “You are blocking the light.”

He immediately stepped back. “Of course.” He glanced at the skylight, then at his pocket watch. “It is eight thirty, and I expect you should have usable daylight until five o’clock. Good luck, my dear.”

He closed the door gently, but it sounded like the slamming of a prison door to Lydia.

25

M
aking a copy of the document proved unexpectedly difficult. The document was made of vellum, a type of sheepskin leather that had been pounded to paper-thin fineness. Over the centuries the vellum had stiffened with age, causing distortion among the characters and making it even more difficult to decipher. Ink clumps and faded patches forced Lydia to guess over several characters.

Nevertheless, the painstaking slowness of the task forced her to deliberate over each letter. As the hours passed, she was able to recall snatches of the transliteration table. She could make an educated guess for about one in five words.

As five o’clock approached, she heard the Professor enter the room. “I have been weak with anticipation all day. I can wait no longer to see what you have begun to translate.”

Lydia feigned ignorance. “You expected me to begin translating immediately?” She gave a nervous laugh. “Heavens, I assumed you wanted me to make a copy from the original. It is far too fragile to
stand up to the manhandling it would get if I did all my translating directly from the ancient document.”

Disappointment marred the professor’s face. He moved to stand over her shoulder and inspect the tidy rows Lydia had copied. “The manuscript is so brittle,” she hastened to add. “I would never forgive myself if something this precious were to come to harm while I worked on the translation.”

His voice simmered with frustration, but he agreed with her. “I’m sorry to seem disappointed, but I will look forward to your translations soon.” He nodded to the white cotton gloves she had faithfully worn throughout the day. “I can see you are treating this treasure with the utmost consideration, and I applaud your willingness to take additional steps to secure the safety of my manuscript.”

Lydia threw on her cloak and flew out the door the moment she was liberated from the Priceless Room. After eight hours in the windowless room, the walls seemed to be closing in on her with each passing minute, making it difficult to even draw a proper breath of air. Cold air hit her as she left the mansion, but she needed to escape the claustrophobia that had been strangling her ever since she set foot in the house.

She had not taken a drop of Mrs. Winslow’s today. Perhaps that accounted for her edginess. She quickened her pace as she walked farther from the house and deeper into the trees that stood like silent sentinels in the twilight. She cast her mind back to the day in the Boston Public Library when she read about the symptoms of opium withdrawal. Aside from agitation and sleeplessness, paranoia had been listed as a side effect. Was that the cause of the anxiety that seemed to ratchet tighter inside her with each passing hour?

She cast a glance at the rapidly darkening sky. She was not
supposed to be outside until after sundown, but she would never find traces of those two children if she was confined to a windowless room by day and forbidden to look about the grounds until after sunset. She must take advantage of these few fleeting minutes of remaining light to search for the boys.

If she were a nine-year-old boy, surely the stable would hold the most allure. Hoisting up the hem of her skirts, Lydia headed toward the large building a stone’s throw from the house. The snow was a slushy mess near the stable doors, but it was fresh along the sides of the buildings, and there were plenty of markings. She stooped to get a better view. Almost all of the prints appeared to be from large boots, but a few on the corner looked much smaller. A child-sized boot.

Lydia’s eyes widened. It was the first solid proof she had found that a child was living in this house. She stepped closer to the small boot print, careful not to disturb any of the precious markings with her own footsteps. A line of the prints led into the undisturbed snow on the side of the stables that backed up to the woods. Lydia crept forward, and a smile broke across her face when she noticed two distinct sets of child-sized prints, one a tiny bit larger than the other. Pushing through brambles and overgrown brush, she followed the prints around the side of the stable, eager to see where the boys had gone.

And then she spotted what they had been up to. The footprints led to an overturned barrel sitting directly below the single window on the back of the stable. The window was too high to look through without the aid of the barrel. Lydia scrambled atop the barrel, careful of the ice crusted along its top. On the window were four small handprints and what looked like a couple of noseprints where curious boys had pressed their faces to the glass.

What had they been looking at? Lydia braced a hand against the rough planking and leaned forward. Through the cloudy window,
she could barely make out the outline of horses and some stacks of hay. As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom, she could see a partially finished game of checkers resting on a rickety table. Most boys played checkers, but so could fully grown men. Then her eyes widened in delight when she saw a little red ball and a handful of jacks strewn across a blanket in the corner.

The game of jacks was firmly in the domain of children. This was where the boys sometimes came to play.

Suddenly, a blur of black fur leapt from the shadows of the stables and angry barking filled the air. Two snarling dogs came barreling down the middle of the stable, straight toward her. She reared back and fell off the barrel, collapsing into a mass of scratchy brambles that cushioned her fall. The dogs clawed and scratched on the opposite side of the stable wall. She prayed they had no way to get out or she’d be torn to pieces here on the spot.

Lydia raced to the front of the stable, pushing through the underbrush and shaking with every nerve in her body. The dogs were still sending up the alarm. A beam of light shone across the snow, and Lydia whirled about to see Mrs. Rokotov standing in the doorway of the mansion. The woman’s steely eyes inspected her, noting the snow and withered leaves clinging to her cloak.

“What are you doing?” Mrs. Rokotov demanded.

Lydia raised her chin a notch. “I’m taking a walk,” she said, proud of the even tone of her voice. “The Professor told me I have free use of the grounds.”

Mrs. Rokotov’s eyes narrowed. “
After
sunset.” The woman’s accusatory glare traveled to the stables, where the trapped dogs were still making a racket. “What have you done to stir up Mars and Juno? They do not bark unless someone is prowling where they should not be.” Mrs. Rokotov kept her eyes locked on Lydia as she glided down the front steps and moved toward her. “You
have broken the rules, and it is my responsibility to ensure order in this household. You are to report to your room immediately and remain there until told otherwise.”

Lydia would never find those boys if she was treated like a prisoner. She took a step closer to Mrs. Rokotov. “I am here at Professor Van Bracken’s insistence, and from the moment he met me, he has treated me like an honored colleague.” Not precisely true, but she needed to be persuasive. “The most important thing in the Professor’s world is his rare book collection. That ancient Greek manuscript is more important to him than rules or barking dogs. I am one of the few people on the planet who can translate that document, and I will not allow you to treat me like a misbehaving servant. If you do, I will leave this house immediately and it will be up to you to locate another person who has the ability to translate a rare ninth-century Greek dialect.”

The steel quickly drained from the woman’s eyes, to be replaced with . . . fear? “You must not leave,” Mrs. Rokotov said as she took a step back. “The Professor has very specific needs in relation to his manuscripts. Pardon my manner. I was merely concerned that the sun had not entirely set. I have no qualms about you walking the grounds at this time.”

Lydia was still strung too tight to subject herself to the confinement of her room. “Fine,” Lydia said, then walked away from the mansion, the barking dogs, and the unsettling gaze of the Professor’s most loyal servant.

As she approached the front gate, a young man stepped from the guardhouse. “You must be the new translator,” he said with a smile. The man’s face was wide and open, and he had a gap between his front teeth.

“Yes, my name is Lydia,” she said as she walked up to greet him. “I’ve been cooped up inside all day and need a walk.”

“I’m Lars Hansen. I heard a ruckus up at the house with the dogs. Did they give you any trouble?”

“Other than giving me a heart attack? Not a bit.”

Lars smiled. “Well then. You will need to meet the dogs and let them get a good sniff. We let them out every evening to patrol the grounds, so if you want to enjoy a walk at night, it is best to get friendly with them.” Lars motioned for Lydia to follow as he walked back to the stable. The moment they drew near the building, the ferocious growling and snapping began again. Lars must have noticed Lydia cringing, because he put his arm around her shoulders as he opened the door.

“Don’t be afraid. They won’t hurt you if they see you are my friend.” Every instinct in her body urged her to flee as two huge black dogs came into view, their aggression barely leashed as Lars commanded them to stay put. He kept his arm around her shoulders. “Friend,” Lars said to the dogs. “Lydia is a friend.”

It took a while, but the dogs began to calm. “You can pet them, if you like,” Lars said.

Lydia would have rather stuck her hand into a vat of acid, but she needed these dogs to be on her side. She braced herself and extended her fingers, letting the two dogs get a sniff and nudge at her skirt. If the wagging of their tails was any indication, she seemed to have passed the test. Lars shooed the dogs away to begin their nightly duty roaming the grounds, and Lydia walked back to the front guardhouse with Lars.

The iron fence loomed before her, a tangible symbol of her entrapment. Despite the spacious grounds, the horrible wrought-iron bars gave her a fresh round of claustrophobia. She wanted to fling the gates wide open and run into the night. And if she was
ever going to meet Bane, it would need to be on the other side of those gates where the guard dogs could not go.

She glanced at Lars. “Those bars look narrow enough for me to slip through,” she said. “I want to go for a bit of a walk outside them.”