Maria’s flat is in Shakespeare Tower, part of the Barbican Centre in the City of London. Despite asking three people where the building is, I still spend forty-five minutes wandering around the Barbican before I find it. The delay makes me anxious; it pushes my desire to see her into frenetic anticipation. Only when I’m gliding upwards in the elevator to her flat do I release my tight grip on my handbag and take a few deep breaths.
“You have the perfect time,” she says, as she pulls open her cream-white door and ushers me in. The opaque grey sky still streams bright light through her floor-to-ceiling windows. I blink a few times, let Maria slip off my black puffy jacket. “I just finished my phone meeting with the museum director.”
“Working on a Saturday?” I say.
“Yes, it is how it must be. My term here, it is only for a little while more, so things are very tight now.” She hangs my coat in a tiny closet near the door and strides back to the kitchen. “But work is over for today,” she smiles. “Tea? Or—” she looks at her watch, “four is not too early for a cocktail, yes?”
I want to skip the niceties and ask her about the article. But I find myself capitulating. “Whatever you want,” I say. “So, you are leaving London soon, then?”
“Not so very soon, but in the not-very-distant future.” She disappears into a little pantry, and I hear her rummaging around.
“So, like, two weeks, a month?” I walk into the kitchen and lean against the counter.
She pops back out, holding a jar of olives. “It is hard to say. But do not worry. I think I will be here, at the least, for one more month. Maybe a little longer. As long as they need me. Go, sit on the sofa. I will be there in a minute.”
I walk towards the sitting area, pausing by one of the windows to look at the grey patchwork of tall concrete buildings, cobblestoned streets, the dull bulk of the Barbican. Cars jerk forward, then stop suddenly for lights, the occasional pedestrian. I think of my life here without Maria. No one leaking my random comments to tabloids, dropping into my boyfriend’s studio, no one trying to get me to risk my job for their whims. No one sending me a four-hundred-year-old psychopath’s journals. When she leaves, it will just be me and hopefully my job, and Henry and our basement flat.
I notice several letters and printouts of emails scattered on the coffee table. I scan some of the subject lines:
Re: Báthory ms.; Working on last part; An agreement?
I hear sounds of activity from the kitchen. Has she really got a publisher for the diaries? I’m about to pick up a letter and read it through when Maria swooshes into the living room.
“Here.” She puts a martini with olives in front of me and has a short crystal glass filled with transparent liquid and a lime twist for herself. She sits beside me on the sofa. “This is the girls’ cocktail hour—very fun!” She raises her glass and I do the same; we clink and sip. “So, Dani. You were not upset by that silly tabloid, I hope?”
That silly tabloid.
Does she have to treat it so flippantly?
“Actually, it has caused me a lot of problems at work. And it’s quite upsetting to think Edward used a private conversation for personal gain.”
“Edward? Oh no, Dani, you must not blame him. It was my fault entirely.”
“How? And why would you talk about me like that to a tabloid? Do you know that I could get moved to another section of Stowmoor, not be allowed to work with Foster anymore?”
“You are serious? This institution, it is so difficult. Can you not explain to them it was a mix-up? Shall I call them, will that help?”
“No, no, that’s not going to help.” Maria on the phone with Sloane would be a disaster. “You haven’t explained how this happened.”
“That. Yes, I will explain. You see, it was not Edward at all.” I wait for her to continue. She takes a sip of her drink.
“You’ve already said that. Maria, tell me how this happened.”
“Dani, you sound so stressed. Yes, all right. It was after we saw you and Henry at the Tate. Edward and I, we had plans to meet at a pub with some of the people he works with. On our way over, we were talking about the day with the two of you. He mentioned your conversation. He thinks you are so brave, Dani, and so accomplished, to be at Stowmoor.”
I pretend to ignore the compliment. “If it was just the two of you talking, how did it get into the
Daily Press
?”
“You see, it was accidental. We met his reporter friends at the pub. Mostly, the group, they were writers from the arts section. We had some drinks, someone called his friend, and then another friend, and soon there was a whole group of people.”
“Okay, so there was a bunch of people, and...?”
“We were there for some time. There were many drinks.”
She shakes her head. “And one man, he was not interesting at all, I do not know why I bothered speaking to him, he was asking Edward about his reviews, about the little mention he made of the Báthory artist’s opening. Edward did not so much like the show, but this man, he wanted to know all about it. He said he had heard many stories about Foster, that he was going to be paroled, that he had help from others.”
“Paroled? I don’t think so.”
“Well, exactly, Dani. This man was so stupid. So I said, to get rid of him, ‘I have a good friend, Dani, she works at Stowmoor. She says if Foster has other people, they would be very dangerous. So I am sure if they exist, they would have done something terrible, been caught already.’ You see, he was an idiot.”
“Right. But then somehow this exchange morphed into a quote from me in a story?”
“Oh, Edward says that this newspaper, they will print anything. All their stories are ‘if this, maybe that.’ They twist anything, but say nothing. I am sorry I mentioned your first name. He must have looked you up, googled you and then—poof!”
“Poof?”
“Exactly. At Stowmoor, they cannot understand that?”
For the first time since Sloane and Abbas lectured me on Thursday, I smile. I imagine Maria sitting down with them, getting them to understand that—
poof!
—it was all a complete misunderstanding, and that the
Daily Press
reporter, the real villain in this story, is an idiot.
“No,” I laugh, “I don’t think they can.”
“Ridiculous! Ah, Dani,” she says, “your smile, so beautiful. It is nice to see you laugh. Henry, he told me you are on an edge lately?”
I stop laughing. “Yeah, he mentioned you came by his studio.”
“Yes, I had a meeting with a client at Aquarium. It ended early, and Henry’s studio, it was close by. You were at work, or we would have called you.”
“And he told you he thinks I’m on edge?”
“Do not be angry with him, Dani, for telling me. I think he is worried, that is all.”
After his behaviour earlier this week, I don’t think
worried
is the right word. I pick one of the papers off the coffee table. “What’s this all about? You have a book coming out?”
“Ah, that!” She jumps up and crosses the room to her desk. “I will show you something, it will cheer you.” She comes back with a sleeve of photos and sets it on the table. “You see? The diary!”
The photos. There are three. One is of the worn cover of an old leather-bound volume; one of a tattered page with a few lines of handwriting in strong black ink. I can’t decipher it, but one word looks like
Báthory.
And the third photo is of a page full of the same black-inked script. “Is this her writing? What does it say?”
“Here, I will explain. She leans close and points at the first picture. “She was, of course, nobility, so she had access to, could afford to have, a codex journal, the pages bound together. The cover, it is vellum, very delicate. And here,” she points to the lines on the first page, “is her name, and here,” she points to the last photo, “is the first page of the diary.”
I stare at the photos. I don’t know anything about rare books, but this one looks very old. And it does look like the word
Báthory
is written on the first page. Maybe this is all for real.
“As I said, I will go back, do more documentation, once I have finished the draft of the manuscript. You see,” she points to the papers on the coffee table, “already, a publisher is interested.” She leans back into her chair and crosses her legs.
“So, it will appear with an academic press? Small print run?”
She uncrosses her legs, sets down her drink. “Dani,” she says, in a tone that is slightly admonishing, slightly amused, “you have been inside Stowmoor too long! No, no. I want a large publisher, a commercial press. Translation, distribution in multiple countries. With Foster in the news again, the time is now. People will want to, they will need to, read Báthory.”
“Commercial?”
“Of course. A powerful woman, killing all those girls. For beauty. And Foster killing for her, four hundred years later. People want to know.”
I put my glass, now empty, down on the table. Maria scoops it up and takes it into the kitchen. “So,” she calls, “I am still looking for someone—someone who can sign their name ‘doctor,’ you know, the public, they like that—someone to write an afterword on Foster, on the resonation of Báthory’s appeal in contemporary time.” In a minute she comes back with fresh drinks. “I was going to ask if perhaps you could recommend one of your colleagues to me, but after this little silliness with the tabloid, they sound maybe too rigid.”
“No, I don’t have any colleagues to recommend.” She’ll ask me. She won’t leave me out of this. “They wouldn’t be interested in writing for anything that is not an academic publication. Really, they’re much too stuffy.”
“Well, I am not looking for stuffy.”
“No. And it might be complicated, legally, to talk about a case, even speculatively, that they’re currently working on.”
“But surely there is someone who does not care only about academia and clinical practice and their stodgy reputation? Someone a little tired of all the dry little rules? Someone who is excited by the diaries?”
She turns her glass in her hands while she talks. The lime rind floats among the ice cubes. I wait for her to say more. The cubes clink against the glass.
“Maria,” I say, “I could possibly consider...maybe there is a way I could be involved.”
She sets her drink on the side table, puts her hands on the arms of her plush white chair and leans back. “Dani, really?” She smiles. “It could work. And this tabloid business, perhaps it is a silver lining? Now you are connected in the media to Foster. We can present you to the public as an expert.”
“Wait,” I say. “I’m already in enough trouble about being quoted as an ‘expert’ in regard to Foster. And I don’t see how being quoted in a tabloid helps to make me an expert. We’d have to be very careful...I couldn’t talk about anything conclusively.”
“The general public,” she makes a sweeping motion, “does not care about
conclusively.
They want professional speculation, some sort of explanation, a legitimization of Báthory’s state. That she was at the extreme edge, insane. They do not need the technical terms, the
conclusively.
An educated discussion of the diaries, of obsession, of the cultural meanings around Foster’s crime, that is what this project needs.”
“You think this book will be a success?”
“Of course. Notorious women are always popular. And everything I do is a success.” She stands up. “Dani, if you want to achieve anything, you must learn to make your own successes. This work at Stowmoor, you do not shine when you speak of it. These people you work with, they sound terrible, controlling, drab people. Leave them, make your own name.”
“It’s not that easy, Maria. I don’t have the hours to become certified yet. If I quit at Stowmoor, I’ll—”
“Dani, listen to yourself!” She sits close beside me on the sofa. “This institution, this certification, all these rules that other people created, you let them run your life. You are better than these rules.”
I think of giving up my fellowship, leaving the clinical interviews, the endless reports, the academic articles, walking out of the aging hulk of the Victorian asylum, walking past the weathered angel out front and not looking back. I feel Maria’s breath on my cheek. She’s the angel, blue eyes bright against pale skin, more luminous than Stowmoor’s guardian statue ever was.
“Now, I shall give you all the information, so you can consider things properly.” She tears a strip of paper off a notebook, grabs a pen and writes something down. She slides the paper across the table, in front of me. “It is so gauche to speak of money with friends, but for business...this is, approximately, what I would pay for your fee.”
I pick up the paper. “Are you serious?”
“Completely. And do not forget, there are things to be gained, greater than money. There will be the promotions, the media. The right media,” she says. “You will make contacts. This is an opportunity, you can make of it what you want. A new career? To be a public figure? This is a door.”
This is a door.
“It would be complicated, to leave Stowmoor. I would need some time, but maybe...”
“There is no maybe. This is your chance. You are in a position now, one that you could never be in again. I have found the diaries. We are in the same city, have found each other again. You know Foster, and he is in the papers, many stories about him, this possible cabal or whatever they called it...people will be interested in what you have to say. Do you not want the spotlight?”
“Maria. I just need some time to—”
The phone rings. She jumps up, looks at the number on the display. “Dani, so sorry, I must take this.” She answers and speaks quickly in Hungarian. Then she sets the receiver down beside the phone.
“This call, it will take me a while.” I’m about to tell her I don’t mind, that I’ll wait, when she reaches into the hall closet and hands me my jacket. “Danica. We can work together, accomplish much together.” She opens the door. “I will call you soon.”
She hung up her coat, kicked off her white and silver python-skin boots and set them next to the small table by the door. Then her daily ritual: she stood in her bedroom before the Countess’s portrait and curtsied. It still leaned against the wall beside her closet, near the bed. It would be in her flat only a few more days; she would miss coming home to it, miss the Countess’s face staring at her while she slept.