“Number 10, Albany Crescent,” Trevor and Anita chorused.
“Ah.” Lewis lifted away the ruin of the lid, piece by piece. “I know the neighborhood. Upstairs-downstairs, once, with a full staff of servants. Parlormaids and footmen and undergardeners and, here we are! A packet of letters. Let’s just set these aside for the moment, shall we? This looks like a certificate of discharge from the army; this is a clipping from the London
Times
for—” Lewis tilted his head to look at it. “13 April 1840. And here’s an old-fashioned pen.”
“I thought people wrote with feathers back then,” said Trevor.
“Not by 1840, actually. See this? It’s the sort of wooden pen you could buy cheaply in any stationer’s shop. I think all this belonged to a servant. The stains here? These are your man’s fingerprints, just imagine!” Lewis set it carefully aside. “More newspaper clippings. Something underneath, looks like a book, and . . . a picture . . .”
“Oh,” said Anita, leaning forward to look. “An old photograph! Do you suppose this is him?”
There was a moment’s silence. Trevor and Anita looked up to see Lewis staring fixedly at the old picture. But he lifted his eyes to them, smiled, and in a perfectly normal voice said, “Probably not. This man’s in a naval officer’s uniform. A daguerreotype, too, I should say from about the year 1850. Somebody the servant knew, perhaps.”
“He’s rather odd-looking,” Anita said, frowning at the image. “So stern.”
“Yes, well, naval officers had to be.” Lewis gave a slightly breathless laugh. “But let’s see the book, shall we?” He lifted it out and opened it gingerly. “This’ll be your real treasure, or I miss my guess. Your man must have been the butler at number ten. This is his household accounts book. Not a record of the finances, you understand, sort of a handbook he’d have compiled on how to run that particular
household. Everything from recipes for silver polish to how to cure hiccups in a lady’s maid. Here we go—here’s his name, Robert Richardson, 19 January 1822. Two hundred and four years ago.”
“Is it worth money?” Trevor said.
“The book? Almost certainly. I can put you in touch with at least three or four research libraries who have standing offers out for this sort of thing.” Lewis set the book down.
“How much money are we looking at?” Anita said.
Lewis spread out his hands as though inviting them to guess. “Four thousand pounds? Five? The material has to be verified first. I can get to work on it at once, but it may be a few days before I can give you a real estimate.”
Trevor and Anita looked at each other. Four thousand pounds would enable them to finish installing a modern climate-control system and pay off the union bully for the next month.
“Please go ahead, then,” Trevor said.
While they waited, Lewis opened each of the letters in turn and ran a scanner over them to make a quick electronic record of their number and contents. There were two letters of referenceem from former employers and one from a regimental colonel attesting to the worthiness and reliability of Robert Richardson as a servant and soldier. There were three letters from someone named Edward, of a personal nature. The newspaper clippings were scanned and recorded, the book recorded page by page, the daguerreotype image recorded. The ancient pen and a half stick of sealing wax found at the bottom of the box were also duly noted.
Lewis transferred the scan to a master and opened the keyboard of his desk console. He keyed in a command to copy. A moment later the console ejected a little golden disk.
“And there you are.” Taking it carefully by the edges, Lewis slid it into a plastic case and presented it to Anita. “Your record. Sign here on the tablet and leave your contact site, please. I should have some preliminary results for you by tomorrow afternoon.”
Trevor and Anita left the office walking on air, and drifted away
through the London afternoon into the rest of their lives, which do not figure further in this story.
Lewis sat alone in his office, contemplating the heap of yellowed paper, the blackened fragments of the box, the daguerreotype in its felt-backed case. At last he took up the picture and looked at it directly.
There could be no doubt.
It was an authentic image. The mortal wore the uniform of a naval commander, and from the cut Lewis guessed the image dated from about the year 1845. The young commander’s face was extraordinary. Lewis had seen that face only once before, in his long life, and it was distinctive enough to stand out from any other.
As the mortal woman had remarked, the commander looked very stern, stiffly upright with his cockaded hat under his arm, frowning at the camera. He had high cheekbones and a long nose. His eyes were deepset, colorless silver in the image, perhaps pale blue. His wide mouth looked mobile and businesslike, ready to rap out some sort of nautical order or other. Ordinary features, but in their composition there was some quality that defied description, that fascinated or repelled. His hands were big but beautifully shaped.
And if the plaster Roman column against the backdrop was any measure of scale, he had been an extremely tall young man.
Lewis sighed and closed his eyes.
He saw in the darkness, for a moment, the commander’s face; then the sketch he had seen thirty years earlier, the arrogant stranger staring down from horseback. The two faces were identical. They faded, to be replaced by a woman’s face.
Her
face, pale with unhappiness, looking paler in the darkness at the back of the booth. Where had they been? The old El Galleon at New World One, to be sure, in a secluded booth suitable for lovers . . .
Mendoza had lifted her glass and gazed into it a moment without drinking.
“Nicholas was the tallest mortal I ever saw,” she said. “I had no idea they came that tall. He couldn’t walk through any doorway without having to duck. And I had to tilt my head back to look into
his face, and—and such a remarkable face he had.” She closed her eyes, red from crying. “Even looking sullen like that. How he disapproved of me! Little Spanish Papist girl, he thought. Daughter of Eve, source of all sin. I’d say we’re Lilith’s children, though, wouldn’t you . . .?”
She opened her eyes long enough to take a sip of her drink, and closed them again, the better to focus on her memory. “Big Roman nose, broken once. High cheekbones, wide mouth, quite a sensual mouth too, as I found out . . .”
Mendoza opened her eyes again and stared at Lewis, with that black intensity that connected like a physical blow. “I’m not giving you any idea of what Nicholas looked like, am I? He must sound absurd to you, homely as a mule. I tell you, though, no god was ever more beautiful.”
“I can’t see the man,” Lewis admitted, “but I can see the man’s soul, I think. You’re describing what your heart saw when you looked at him.”
She nodded in emphatic agreement, her face flushed. “His soul, yes, it was the animating spirit in his eyes that was so . . . I couldn’t stop looking at them. Winter-sky eyes paler for colorless lashes, kind of small, actually, way up there peering out from their caves . . . But when Nicholas regarded you with those eyes . . .”
Her breath caught, and she looked so young, with the scarlet color draining away and leaving her pale as ashes again. Lewis caught his breath too, but the moment had gone; the young girl had retreated, and there was the austere old woman, the widow pulling her shawl closer against the cold.
She shook her head and picked up her drink again. “You see? All these years later, and I still go to pieces. Is God a cruel bastard or what, to make love so painful?”
He reached out and took her hand. “And mortal love is the hardest,” he said.
She laughed harshly, tilting her glass to peer at the last of her margarita. “Oh, look, we’re out,” she said. “Shall we order another
round? ‘Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples; for I am sick of love . . .’ ” And she crumpled into herself in such an agony of grief that Lewis hurried to her side and put an arm around her. She wept in desperate silence as he held her.
Lewis opened his eyes now and looked at the old picture.
It was the Englishman Mendoza had run away with in 1863. What had been the name Lewis glimpsed in the arrest report? Bell-Something? And yet Nicholas Harpole too must have looked very much like this, Mendoza’s Nicholas who had been burned for his faith in 1555. Lewis was seeing, suddenly, the extraordinary quality she’d tried so hard to describe. His heart lurched. He wasn’t sure what to make of this.
He sat up in his chair and put the daguerreotype and the other contents of the old box in a neat white carton. Drawing off his gloves, he set the carton aside, went to his bookcase, and withdrew a slender volume. It was not what you’d expect to find in an antiquarian’s case; it had been printed only a half century before, and big bouncy letters on its cheaply lithographed cover announced that it was the
Chocoholic’s Almanac
, containing all sorts of interesting lore and legends to delight lovers of
Theobroma cacao
.
He sat down at his desk with it and drew out a manila shipping envelope, addressing it in neat script. Then he keyed in an order to his printer, which hummed and promptly provided him with a copy of the image on the daguerreotype. He scribbled something across the bottom and slipped it into the
Chocoholic’s Almanac;
wrote a brief note and enclosed that too, and sealed up the book in the envelope. That done, he arose, slipped on his coat, took his package across the landing to the office’s postal franking machine, which scanned, weighed, and inked it with the necessary bar code.
Lewis ran lightly down the stairs and out through the lobby to the street, leaving his package in the office’s outgoing parcels bin. The parcel courier’s van was already pulling up as Lewis rounded the corner and walked away down Tottenham Court Road.
Y
OU GOT A PACKAGE
, boss,” said Musicologist Donal, peering at it as he returned to the breakfast nook.
“Have you been sending off for more of those bondage fetish disks again?” asked Muriel innocently, looking up from her coffee. She was an Anthropologist.
“Ha ha,” said Joseph, scowling at her. He accepted the package and peered at the label. “One of these days I’m going to find out which one of you did that, and then—”
He was interrupted by the Art Preservationist, who came thundering down the stairs, pulling on his coat. “My alarm didn’t go off. Why didn’t anybody wake me?”
They gaped at him in surprise as he buttoned his coat.
“We didn’t know you were on that tight a schedule, Andrei,” Muriel said.
“My car’s in the shop, and I’ve got to be in Corpus Christi by noon,” he said, grabbing a brioche from the basket on the table. “The hurricane’s scheduled to hit on the twenty-seventh, you know. I don’t have much time, and there’s even less if I have to take goddam public transit on this job.”
“Okay, okay,” sighed Joseph, getting up and tucking the unopened package into his briefcase. “I’ll drive you. It’s not as though
I had anything important to do today. Just kiss Governor Gleason’s ass until he agrees to veto that land appropriation bill. But I can do that any time, right? I’m under no pressure, not old Joseph.”
“I appreciate this,” Andrei said, dancing in impatience by the door. “I’ll even mail the governor’s office for you in the car while you drive. Tell him you’re calling in sick or something.”
“Let’s go,” Joseph said, following him out the door and down the hall.
“Have a nice day,” Donal called after them.
Outside the apartment building it was already uncomfortably warm, and Andrei had shed his coat by the time they got into Joseph’s black Saturn Avocet. However, the temperature fell rapidly over the next two hours, and he was bundled up again by the time Joseph dropped him off on the outskirts of town.
“Will you need a ride back tonight?” Joseph leaned out the window.
“No. I’m probably staying a few days this time. I’ll call HQ later and let you know, okay?” Andrei shouted, turning up his coat collar.
“Okay,” said Joseph.
“Bye.” Andrei waved, and sprinted off to get out of the wind.
Joseph circled back to the highway. Before he had gone very far, however, hail began dropping out of the sky. He cursed and pulled off to the side of the road to wait out the cloudburst. Other motorists were doing the same.
He sighed and switched off the engine. His gaze fell on his briefcase; carefully he took out the package and opened it.
There was a note and a book:
The Chocoholic’s Almanac
. He nodded gamely, setting the book aside. He read the note.
Hello there, old man! Came across this in an estate sale and was reminded of the days when we used to paint the City cocoa-powder brown. You might find it instructive. Can you get Ghirardelli’s in the Lone Star State?
I’m in the other City now. Come across for a weekend, and we can discuss old times over a cup of Cadbury’s, ha ha. Vale, Lewis.
Grinning, Joseph picked up the little book and opened it. He came upon the printout of the naval officer tucked inside, and his grin froze on his face. The officer regarded him severely. Under the picture Lewis had written, in a waggish scrawl:
NO THEOBROMOS PERMITTED IN THE DORMITORY.
Joseph drew a long breath through clenched teeth, eyes fixed on the picture. The hail was coming down harder now, big stones hitting the Avocet’s shell and putting a thousand little spiderweb fractures in its just-waxed finish, but Joseph barely noticed. When the storm passed, his was the first car to leave the side of the road, lurching out and fishtailing slightly as he sped away through the slush. He might have maintained better control of the car if he’d kept both hands on the wheel, but he was busily making a flight reservation on the dash console as he drove.
L
EWIS SPOTTED HIM
from the end of the street, a businessman in a rumpled if costly suit, waiting on the front step like a patient dog. Joseph rose to his feet, grinning as Lewis approached, but there was a certain flinty quality in his eyes.