by Tony Abbott
Sir Felix paced across the brightening window and stopped. “Why do you want to know about such a specific event, if I may ask?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. I expected Sara or Roald to make some kind of polite answer, but Darrell saved it by going in another direction.
“A black car followed us this morning. We think they were spies.”
Sir Felix seemed taken aback for a moment, then he set his pipe on the desk. “A black car, you say? Is that unusual? We do have black cars in London.”
“This one didn’t have any license plates,” Lily added.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, dear. I have heard of that. A mystery. Or perhaps nothing of the sort. Look, I’ll ask one or two of my spy chaps to check it out and get back to you. You know what, better idea. Roald, you and I can talk to them together.” He checked his watch. “What do you say to that?”
“Thank you, Sir Felix,” Roald said, relaxing visibly. “That would help.”
“Splendid,” he said, taking up his pipe again. “I do carry some weight as a knight of the empire. Come, then, let’s do it right away. And the rest of you, well, you’re obviously working on some fascinating little story here, so while Roald and I do some hush-hush work, let me suggest you chat with my best research chap. Simon Tingle has what you might call an eidetic memory. A walking database of the odd facts, he is. He’s down one level, in the lab. I’ll tell him you’re coming. Ask him anything. I like to put my people through their paces! Here is your bag, Becca. I hope you’re feeling better.”
“Yes, thank you. I am.”
“Splendid. Roald, come with me. Ta-ta!”
CHAPTER NINE
Sir Felix showed us to the elevator and took Roald by the elbow and went off with him, reminiscing all the way. We went down one floor to the lab.
We found Simon Tingle in a windowless office, lying nearly supine in a desk chair, his feet up, head back, eyes closed, and mumbling to himself. “Divorced, executed, died, divorced, executed, widowed—”
“The six wives of Henry the Eighth!” Lily exclaimed. “I know about them!”
Simon Tingle jumped up from his chair. “Exactly right! Wait, who are you?” In jumping up, however, he knocked over a cup and saucer, spilling milky tea all over his desk. “Oh dear. Now look what I’ve made myself do! I’m so sorry, so sorry! Simon Tingle here. How can you help me? That is, how can I help you?”
“Excuse us,” Sara said. “Sir Felix invited us to come and see you . . .”
“He said you could help us look up some information,” said Wade.
“Look up! No, no! I never look up,” the man said as he soaked up the spilled tea with the sleeve of his jacket. “Look into, yes. Into. You see, it’s all in here.” He tapped the side of his head several times with a finger dripping with tea. “In here.” He licked his finger. “You see, they call me Mr. Memory, you see.”
Again I didn’t see, but Sara said it was from a movie. “Mr. Memory was a spy who smuggled secrets by committing them to memory.”
The man’s whole round face lit up. “You are correct, madam! The Thirty-Nine Steps. Famous British thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935 and loosely based on the 1915 novel by adventure writer John Buchan. Loosely based, I say”—his voice went down a register—“because the film actually creates the character of Mr. Memory, a fellow not in the original novel, but a clever fabrication.”
“Wow, you’re a walking Wikipedia!” said Lily.
“Pishposh!” he snarled happily. “Far better. I am one hundred percent accurate.” Then his deep blue eyes twinkled with excitement and he rubbed his hands together. “But Sir Felix told you I can answer your questions, and answer them I shall! Begin the inquisition!”
Simon shut his eyes and perched his fingers on his temples, while we told him what we knew about Thomas More. It wasn’t much, but he instantly took over, describing More’s life—and death—in exhaustive detail, ending with, “There is a famous family portrait. It is a copy dating from 1592 of an earlier 1527 painting by the German artist Hans Holbein, which has unfortunately been lost, although the later copy was most certainly rendered from Holbein’s original.”
Wade and I both wrote this down in our notebooks.
“The portrait is a lovely piece of work now at Nostell Priory in West Yorkshire,” Simon continued. “As I cannot open my brain to show you the portrait as it exists up here”—more head tapping—“I will require the use of what is termed a book. Move not.” He twirled on his heels and exited the room. Less than three minutes later, he stormed back in. He opened a huge book on his desk, spilling the rest of his tea—“Oh, Simon!”—and showed us a large portrait.
“Here, you see,” he said, and ran his finger over a group of six men, six women, two dogs, and a monkey inside a house that looked nothing like the Old Barge. “The seated gentleman directly in the center is Sir Thomas More. Position matters in Holbein. His art is full of codes, you see. More’s father is the older gentleman sitting next to him. This is More’s house at Chelsea.”
Thomas was dressed in a heavy black robe with sleeves of crimson, a large gold chain around his neck, while his father was in bright red, trimmed in white. The women were mostly in long black dresses with white bodices, and formal bonnets of black and white with gold trim.
“On the far right is More’s second wife, two of his daughters, his household staff. Holbein couldn’t resist symbols in his portraits, and this image is no exception. Notice the monkey, the lutes, this little brown-and-white dog curled asleep on the floor. Everything means something.”
The lutes. The sleeping dog!
“Is this woman pulling on her glove by any chance Elizabeth?” I asked, pointing to a young woman who stood just to the left of the sleeping dog.
“Right you are!” Simon said with a broad smile. “And this, sitting second from the right, is Margaret—called Meg—Thomas’s favorite. Terrible about More, of course. He lost his head some eight years after this grouping.”
“Might we have a few moments alone with the picture?” Sara asked.
“Why I . . . yes, of course! I do need to brew another cup of tea, don’t I? I surely do!” He laughed and stormed out of the room as he had just stormed into it.
In the quiet I studied the picture, but my heart wasn’t quiet. I felt as if I’d stuck my finger into an electrical socket and current was zapping through me.
“I know these people,” I said, riveted on their faces. “Or younger versions of them. They were at the house in Bucklersbury, but everything is here that Copernicus said. Elizabeth has got a glove half on her right hand. There’s a clock over Thomas’s head. There are a couple of lutes and lots of eyes. It’s all here. Meg remembered everything Copernicus told her.”
“He must have seen the painting later,” said Wade. “Through his microhole.”
“Okay, but what do we do with all this information?” said Darrell. “Are we supposed to connect the words to each daughter?”
“Connect the words?” I said.
“Draw a line,” he said, leaning over the picture. “Meg’s words were eyes and lutes, right? So go from her eyes to the lutes.”
“Yes, and for Elizabeth, go from her glove to the clock,” Lily added. “Maybe they form a letter or a shape.”
Wade nodded slowly. “Good. I like that.”
“Thank you for approving of our idea.” Lily ran her fingertip from Elizabeth’s glove to the clock over Thomas’s head, and another from Margaret’s eyes to the lutes behind Elizabeth, continuing the line until the lines intersected.
“Whoa, a kind of tilted X,” Darrell said. “What does that mean?”
“Not an X,” said Wade, quickly tugging out his star chart. “Not an X. It’s a cross. Look here. Becca, you said that Copernicus told Thomas to keep the ‘two equal arms’ of the amber relic separate. To me, two equal arms form a cross. And look, the tilted angle of the two lines intersecting in the painting is the same angle in the constellation ca
lled Crux. The relic Copernicus gave Thomas is Crux.”
If it seemed easy, it was, but only because for the last few weeks the four of us—and Sara and Roald, too—had been training our minds to solve riddles. To decrypt codes and follow mysteries. Every clue had been left specifically to point to a relic. Not for the Order to find. Not for Galina to steal. But for the Guardians to know about and protect. Riddles and puzzles were necessary to keep the relics hidden—but also to make them findable. Nicolaus had intended that, too.
“Let’s get back to the painting,” said Darrell. “Are we saying that Copernicus told Meg to tell Holbein about the clock and the eye so that he would paint them into his painting for Guardians like us to find?”
A smile was growing on Wade’s face. “I think that’s exactly it. Copernicus traveled back and forth in time. Sir Felix told us about the hole in time. Copernicus described a hole in the sky. Whatever you call it, his astrolabe was able to go through it, and he was able to hide clues in different times.”
“That could very easily lead to trouble,” said Sara.
“The horror of knowing, right, Bec?” Lily added. “Nicolaus told you that.”
He did tell me that. He also told me that because she lives, there is “the evil.” I didn’t really understand how much horror there would be until later.
After nightfall.
Which, when I checked the clock in Simon’s office, was getting closer every minute. Would there be enough time to solve the riddle? I didn’t know, but I was beginning to understand what Nicolaus meant by the horror of knowing and not being able to warn.
CHAPTER TEN
Simon rushed back in, barely keeping his new cup of tea upright. “Must run,” he said. “Sir Felix needs me pronto. Here’s my number, in case you need anything else.” He scribbled it on a scrap of paper and thrust it in my hand. “Now, pardon my rudeness, but I mustn’t keep the master waiting!”
We said our quick good-byes to him and met Roald in the lobby. He told us he described the BMW on the phone to Sir Felix’s chums in MI5 and seemed convinced that they would soon be able to identify the car.
Even though the university was very close to our safe flat in Chenies Mews, once out on the street we wound our way to it in the usual crazy way.
“Don’t take the highway; take the spy way,” Darrell quipped as we walked a wiggly maze of streets until we found ourselves finally between the walls of our own narrow passage. It was now a little after one o’clock. The roar of London was hushed in Chenies Mews, as if a blanket had been lowered over us.
Lily nudged me. “Safe,” she said.
“Safe,” I repeated, “but I’m so zonked, I’m claiming the first flat space I see. In fact, I’m probably already asleep. No, I am asleep. Listen. Zzzzzz . . .”
She laughed, her first laugh in a while. It was a warm laugh, and it warmed me, too, a little. I think she was relieved that I was acting normal, or at least trying. I guess I no longer seemed like a spy in the house of the dead.
Roald approached the door, then paused, holding his hand up. He looked around and even up over the rooftops behind us. Earlier, Darrell had suggested that if we didn’t see anyone, there could still be drones watching us.
“I think we can all rest now,” Roald said in a fatherly way as he slid the key and a plastic key card into the lock.
Seeing no one, we went in through the door and closed it. Roald keyed in an alarm code, then Sara pushed the lift button to bring us up to the flat, where there was a second door. We entered and reset that alarm, too. What I really liked was that from the street our building looked more like a warehouse, and a slightly run-down one, at that. But inside the flat, it was homey and quietly luxurious.
“Terence and Julian sure know how to live,” Darrell said as he plopped down on a long, overstuffed sofa in the main room. Wade settled across from him. There was a giant flat-screen TV on the wall opposite the large tinted window.
Roald walked through the rooms one after the other. When he returned to the main room, he smiled. “I’ve said this before, but Terence’s flat really is perfect. The neighborhood is as quiet as a village, but it’s right in central London. We have a view of both ends of the street and the alley behind us. We can relax.”
“I’ve already started,” said Darrell. “I had to. My legs told me to. They’re asleep even as we speak.”
Lily frowned at me over the dining room table. “You need sleep, too, missy. Not just your legs, but all of you.”
“Becca, yes,” said Sara, coming over and resting her hands on my shoulders. “You have to take care of yourself, or you’ll be no good for whatever happens next.”
Whatever happens next. After nightfall.
“I know.” I was washed out, limp, sad, trying to slow my thumping pulse, trying to keep the next blackout at bay. “But there’s work to do, too.”
“We’ll keep poring over this stuff,” said Wade, making a show of being all alert and not tired at all. “We’ll wake you for supper.”
“Or if I discover the relic?” said Darrell.
“Either way is good,” I said. “I just want one of the books.” I kept the copy of Selected Writings and left Utopia on the table. “I’ll probably fall asleep before I get anywhere.”
“Before you do, tell us that you got to our room safely,” Lily said. “Use your alarm if you don’t make it.”
“Deal. Good night. Even though it’s afternoon.”
“It’s night somewhere,” said Darrell. “Hong Kong, I think. Or China.”
I gave a little wave to everyone and left them studying the clues we had so far. The Holbein portrait, which Lily found online, Utopia, what Simon had told us, Wade’s star chart. We were pretty sure the relic was Crux and that its first Guardian had been Thomas More. If we followed that knowledge with the right connections, we could find it. Maybe. If it still existed.
I climbed four steps to the upper level and entered the backmost of the flat’s four bedrooms, the one Lily and I shared.
“Did you make it to your room?” Lily called. “I didn’t hear you beep.”
“Because I made it!”
“Thank you!”
It wasn’t my first time in that bedroom. We’d spent not only the last few days in that flat, but before that, too, when we were waiting to travel to Russia to search for Sara and Serpens. I liked it. A nightstand, two lamps, a bookcase, a desk, twin beds, each piled thickly with blankets and bedspreads that whispered to me to rest . . . to sleep.
And yet . . . I couldn’t sleep. I needed to think. To understand what exactly had happened to me at Greywolf in Russia. Kronos. It’s all because of Kronos.
Before anything, I went to the window, opened it a crack to let air in, then slipped off my shoes and lay on the bed. It was now about one thirty.
I set the book in my lap and looked at the picture on the cover. An engraving of More based on one of Holbein’s many sketches. Thomas’s eyes were riveting, kind but fierce. Closing mine, I conjured him, the imprisoned man, condemned to die a horrible death. I knew his fatherly face, his kind manner, his presence. I imagined him in his cell, tramping slowly back and forth across the stone floor, thinking about his family, about Meg. Then I thought of Roald, and of my father—how tortured they would be if they had to leave their loved ones behind.
Then . . .
. . . I smelled damp stone, and I shivered. I tried to open my eyes but couldn’t. Something heavy rippled over me. My blood froze in my veins. There was a flash of light. Not from the room. It was dark around me. A light, winking in and out.
And I was in the prison cell, gasping for breath.
He was there. The kneeling shape of the man I’d seen in Bucklersbury. His homespun robes had been replaced by a plain brown frock too long for him. He had cinched it around his waist. He rose to his feet, made the sign of the cross, and tramped from one side of his cell to another. It was dark. One candle only. Shadows wavered on the walls.
But I wasn’t alone
with Thomas.
Copernicus moved behind me and watched the man’s sad march from wall to wall. “Rebecca. My time is nearly up. Neither of us is here with Thomas. It is early in the morning, the sixth of July in 1535. He awaits his execution.”
My chest felt as if it were turning to water. I shook, steadied myself. I had enough of my wits about me to remember something. “Where is Helmut Bern? I thought because we both were zapped by Kronos, he had to be here for me to see this. Is he close by now?”
Nicolaus had tears in his eyes. “He is near, released today from the Charterhouse to view his patron’s death. But listen. These names may mean little to you—Yellow Turban, Smyrna, Uskok. Remember them. I caused them, or I may as well have.” All this was whispered quickly, intensely, as if his time was indeed running out. “You must speak of these horrors, or the Order will win.”
I was frozen to the spot, between the poor man soon to die and Nicolaus whispering in my ear words I didn’t understand. Smyrna? Uskok?
“But you couldn’t have caused them. You’re a good man—”
“What they call the horror of Holodomor? I mourn the millions of deaths I made happen! I never went farther forward than that. I stopped there.”
I had to remember the name. Holodomor. “How many journeys did you take?”
“Just the two.” He suddenly sucked in a breath. “Rebecca, my time is nearly done. You will need this! It is from the artist—”
“We know. It’s Holbein. And that the relic is Crux.”
“Then look here.” Nicolaus drew a sheet of paper from inside his cloak. On it was a circle with a swirl of geometric symbols and letters radiating out from its center. It appeared to be part of a code wheel. I tried to take it in, sear every nuance of the image into my memory.
“Holbein’s puzzle will help us find Crux?” I asked.
Before he could answer, he faded away and was gone. And I was gone from him. Thomas vanished, too. So did the stone walls surrounding him. I was in my bedroom at the safe flat. My nose had bled more this time. It took me more than one napkin to stop it, while Nicolaus’s strange words rolled around my mind.