The Explorer's Code

by Kitty Pilgrim

  Tom poured two glasses of amontillado sherry and handed them to the ladies. He offered a cut-crystal tumbler of whiskey to Sinclair and then took a seat by the fire. Sinclair let the rich taste of the whiskey warm him on the way down, settling his soul.

  “We need to talk about Bradford,” said Tom.

  “And Sir James Skye Russell,” said Cordelia.

  “Do you think the deed could be here in the house?” asked Sinclair.

  “I think it’s pretty much impossible. I know this may seem like a big house,” Tom said, “but we have inventoried all the historical documents.”

  “And you couldn’t have missed anything?” asked Cordelia.

  “Probably not. The library is extremely rare and we have had it appraised. The curators went over all the books and papers about four years ago. We certainly would have found a deed at that time.”

  “No desks with secret compartments, no hidden rooms or hollow panels?” asked Cordelia.

  “Oh, there are plenty,” assured Tom. “A house this old is filled with hiding places. But I grew up here. I have been over every inch of the place.”

  “Where would you even start in a place this size?” asked Sinclair. “It would take years.”

  “Well,” said Marian with brisk practicality. “We can’t think clearly on empty stomachs. We had better go in to supper.”

  The main dining room was wood-paneled, and to Cordelia it looked at least the size of an indoor tennis court. The enormous dining table could accommodate forty people. As they dined, they all sat at one end, around a circle of candlelight, as if huddled over a campfire.

  By the end of the sumptuous meal, Cordelia was utterly contented. She leaned back in her chair and sipped her coffee. She loved Cliffmere. Tom and Marian were treating her like family, and she had never seen Sinclair so relaxed. He and Tom had spent the afternoon touring the estate. As the two men sat there discussing their day, they could have been father and son; they had similar physiques and the same tall, rangy strength. Marian sat quietly, listening. She looked very lovely in her rose silk blouse and long black moiré satin skirt. Her pearls had the luster of several generations of wear.

  The food had been superb: lamb confit terrine, slow-roasted rack of pork with wild mushroom ragout, and scallion potatoes. The lemon-blackberry tart was light and delicious.

  “How we wish we had known about you all these years,” Marian said warmly, squeezing Cordelia’s hand. “We do consider you family.”

  “That means so much to me,” Cordelia replied, her voice husky with suppressed emotion. “You have no idea how much.”

  Tom looked over at Cordelia and Marian, both of whose eyes swam with tears. He glanced at Sinclair, clearly uncomfortable with the emotional turn of the conversation.

  “Shall we retire to the library?” he asked.

  They left the table and walked into the next room. The library table had been set with a crystal decanter and delicate port glasses. They helped themselves to port, and started a slow amble around the enormous book-lined room. Soaring bookcases stood twenty feet high. About twelve feet up, a brass-railed catwalk gave access to the higher shelves. As they toured the magnificent collection, Tom pointed out his favorite volumes to Sinclair. Marian waited until the men were a few steps ahead before she turned to Cordelia.

  “I do like your young man. Have you known him long?”

  Cordelia flushed. “I’m afraid not. I just met him about two weeks ago.”

  Marian started in surprise. “Oh! I had no idea. I am sorry; I didn’t mean to pry. I assumed you were—”

  “No, it’s no problem. I don’t mind talking about it.”

  “You seem very close,” observed Marian.

  “Yes, things have moved along very quickly,” Cordelia admitted. “We met at an award ceremony in Monaco.”

  “Were you accepting an award?”

  “John’s foundation was giving an award to Elliott Stapleton. In a funny way, I feel like my great-great-grandfather introduced us.”

  “That seems to me to be a very good introduction,” said Marian soothingly.

  “He invited me to lunch the next day, and then after that there was this problem with the deed. He kept helping me. And, of course, I started falling for him. . . .”

  “He seems lovely.”

  “You should have seen him yesterday when they tried to kidnap me. He was incredible.”

  “I am sure he was magnificent,” said Marian warmly, patting her hand. “Tom told me he seems to be a solid young man.”

  “I’m glad you approve.” Cordelia smiled.

  “And he certainly is good-looking,” Marian added.

  “You know, at first I was a little afraid he was a too good-looking.”

  Marian laughed. “There is no such thing as too good-looking. Besides, you are beautiful yourself, my dear. He might say the same of you.”

  “Thank you,” said Cordelia. “Actually, he has never commented on my looks.”

  “He probably thinks you are tired of compliments, and he wants to impress you in other ways.”

  “I wonder . . .” mused Cordelia.

  “Well, the way he was looking at you during supper tells the whole story,” said Marian. “He is quite in love with you.”

  Cordelia blushed, and tried to recover her composure as they approached Tom and Sinclair.

  “I would love to show you some of our pictures,” Tom was saying to Sinclair. He turned to his wife. “Marian, shall we go into the gallery?”

  They walked through a large archway into the next room. Tom switched on the ceiling lights to reveal a beautiful old wood-paneled picture gallery with twenty-foot ceilings. About two dozen paintings were exhibited along the sides. Some of the canvases were so large they measured the entire height of the room. They walked slowly along the gallery, inspecting the paintings and sipping their port.

  “Here is a Constable,” Tom said, pointing, “and another pastoral by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. But the real centerpiece is this sailing scene of Antwerp Harbor by J. M. W. Turner.”

  Tom then went over to a pair of portraits.

  “Now to the Skye Russells. These are the portraits of the first Lord Andrew Skye Russell and his wife, Mary, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1755.”

  The tall man had a determined chin, and wore an ermine-lined red coat. His wife was pale and aristocratic, her lapdogs cavorting around her brocade skirt.

  Tom proceeded a few more paces.

  “And here is the ancestor that should interest both of you. Sir James Skye Russell, painted by Mr. James McNeill Whistler in 1902.”

  They looked at the full-length portrait of a pale young man dressed in black. He carried a pair of gloves and wore what appeared to be an opera cloak. His face was interesting, sensitive.

  “And this is his wife, Anne,” said Marian.

  She wore a pink frilled day dress, and faced a quarter turn away. Her skirt was embroidered with peonies. Cordelia noticed a softness in her expression.

  “It’s like meeting them! We have been reading about them in the journal all week,” Cordelia exclaimed, looking at the beautiful soft brown eyes of the woman in the portrait.

  They continued down the gallery.

  “Here we have a Venice scene by Luca Carlevaris, painted in 1709. View from Bacino di San Marco.”

  As they walked to the far end, a large painting drew Cordelia’s attention. It was an Arctic landscape. A ship appeared to be moored among the ice floes. The snow was cast with a rosy glow, and in the beautiful light the icebergs loomed in opalescent splendor all around the ship. On the surface the ice had the look of mother-of-pearl, but underneath its color ranged from deep blue to celadon green. It reminded Cordelia of her great-great-grandfather’s description of the Arctic.

  “What a beautiful painting,” she said admiringly.

  “Yes,” said Tom. “It is quite special. These kinds of Arctic landscapes became very popular in Queen Victoria’s day.”

  “I
guess in the tradition of the Victorian explorer,” commented Sinclair.

  “Exactly. In fact, an American painter, Frederic Church, set the fashion for romanticized Arctic landscapes when he exhibited The Icebergs (The North) in 1861. There was so much enthusiasm for these kinds of paintings, many of the polar explorers brought along a photographer and a painter.”

  “Is this painting by Frederic Church?” asked Cordelia.

  “No, it is a little later than that, 1871, but the Frederic Church painting may have been the inspiration for it. This artist was also American. It’s called An Arctic Scene: Among the Icebergs in Melville Bay.”

  “Incredible,” said Sinclair, stepping back to admire it.

  “Who painted it?” asked Cordelia.

  “William Bradford,” said Tom.

  They all froze, staring at the painting.

  “Bradford,” they said simultaneously.

  In a country lane in Oxfordshire, the two fat Americans in the rental car were clearly lost. They pulled up to a car parked next to a hedgerow. A bearded young man in a tweed cap was smoking a cigarette, standing next to the car. His companion sat in the driver’s seat.

  “Are ya’ll from around here? Can you tell us where Cliffmere is?” asked Bob.

  Thaddeus looked at the couple with interest.

  “Yes, I believe it’s right there, through the trees,” he said in a credible British accent.

  “Much obliged,” said Bob. “I wanted to check out the farm. I hear Cliff-mere supplies some of the best restaurants in London.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” said Frost, tossing his cigarette and moving toward his car. He glanced down at the couple’s license plate and memorized it. These tourists didn’t seem like a threat, but you never could tell. He was jumping at shadows these days. In his entire career, he had never had a worse feeling about a case.

  Sinclair finally broke the silence in the picture gallery.

  “I hate to suggest the obvious, but shouldn’t we check to see if a deed is taped to the back of the painting?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “This painting was cleaned two years ago. We took it out of the frame. There was nothing attached to it,” he said.

  “If William Bradford was a friend of Sir James’s, maybe they gave the deed to him,” suggested Cordelia.

  “Not possible. William Bradford died in 1892. And the journal was written in 1908. I am not sure they would even have known each other. But in any case, Bradford would not have been around to receive the deed in 1908,” said Tom.

  Cordelia walked over to the red velvet settee in the middle of the room and sat down, staring at the painting.

  “John, remember that description of icebergs we read about in the journal? Look at the color of the ice. This is exactly the scene Elliott was describing. I know we’re on the right track.”

  “What did the journal say about Bradford?” asked Tom.

  “We only came across one passage, and I have it memorized,” said

  Cordelia. “ ‘I will bring it to my partner JSR. As he is leaving for the Middle East, JSR may agree to entrust it to Bradford—is as good a choice as any for safekeeping.’ ”

  They all stared at the painting.

  “ ‘Entrusting it to Bradford is as good a choice as any . . . ,’ “ repeated Sinclair out loud.

  “It has to be this painting! I know he was talking about this scene,” said Cordelia again. “I feel it!”

  Suddenly Tom slapped his knee in excitement. He leapt to his feet.

  “I know where to look!” he exclaimed.

  They stared at him in expectation.

  “Come along to the library.”

  “Would you roll that ladder over here, John?” Tom requested, searching up into the dark regions of the bookshelves.

  “Certainly.”

  Tom explained as he walked along the bookshelves.

  “Bradford wrote a book; really, it was a folio of his photographs of the Arctic that he used as studies for his painting.”

  “Bradford was American, you said. Why is this folio in England?” asked Sinclair, rolling the library stairs over.

  “The mania for all things Arctic was sweeping England, and his paintings and photographs found a richer market in London than they did in New York. Queen Victoria was a patron.”

  “But you say this folio is a book of photos?” said Cordelia.

  “Yes, an enormous leather-bound folio. It was sold as a collector’s item for the personal libraries of Victorian gentlemen and was very much in demand by high society. It was a great conversation piece, for after-dinner entertaining.”

  Tom started climbing the ladder. “Queen Victoria commissioned a painting from him, and he was the toast of London society. Push to the left a bit, would you, John?”

  Sinclair rolled the ladder carefully, with Tom balancing on top.

  “Here it is,” said Tom. Sinclair braced the ladder with his shoulder as Tom lifted the heavy volume off the shelf. It was the size of a very large atlas, bound in black leather.

  “This book is extremely rare. They published fewer than three hundred here in England, and plans for an American version were never completed.”

  Tom used both hands to swing the heavy portfolio around. Afraid he might drop it or lose his balance, he handed it down to Sinclair, then stepped down.

  They examined the impressive volume on the library table. The leather cover was hand-tooled, with a relief of polar bears walking across the Arctic ice. Tom pulled open a drawer in the library table and handed out white cotton gloves.

  “We have to put these on so the oils of our skin don’t taint the antique paper,” he explained.

  They put the gloves on while Tom pulled out a long wooden spatula about two feet long.

  “The paper is brittle. We have to turn the pages with this. I will slide it in between the paper, and, Marian and Cordelia, you support the corners when we turn the page.”

  Gingerly the three of them turned the first page.

  The preface was signed “WB 1872.” Page by page, they examined the book, turning the pages gently and exclaiming over the images as each appeared. Several dozen sepia photos were clearly the original studies for scenes Bradford later painted. The text was elaborate and dramatic, very much in the style of Victorian travel writing. Finally they came to the photo that inspired the painting An Arctic Scene: Among the Icebergs in Melville Bay. It was identical to the painting in the gallery.

  “That is your painting!” exclaimed Cordelia.

  Tom didn’t answer. He put down the wooden page-turner and focused on sliding his gloved fingers underneath the cardboard plate. He lifted carefully, and as the old glue gave way it came up with a snap. He then put his fingers under the corners of the loose photo and raised it. There underneath was a small square of folded paper, coffee-colored with age.

  They stood staring at it for a few moments, afraid to touch it.

  “Is that the deed?” asked Cordelia.

  “I don’t know. We should see if we can get this unfolded without destroying it,” said Tom.

  “I have a good bit of experience with old documents,” said Sinclair, “some much older than this. Last year I opened an Egyptian papyrus in Cairo. I am sure I won’t damage it.”

  He could barely suppress the excitement in his voice. He turned to the others. “We need a bright light, a clean surface, in case it crumbles, two pairs of tweezers, and a pane of glass to put over it when we are finished unfolding it,” he explained.

  “I have tweezers for my crewelwork, and we can take a pane of glass out of one of the picture frames on the piano,” said Marian.

  “I’ll go get a bedsheet to cover the library table,” said Tom, “And, John, why don’t you bring that floor lamp over for some extra light.”

  Within minutes they were reassembled.

  “Let’s have a look at this,” Sinclair said quietly as they crowded around him. He removed the square of paper from the folio with the tweeze
rs and bent over it. He was infinitely patient in unfolding the document, giving it his full concentration and not speaking. It didn’t crumble, but the old paper looked very brittle. As he opened it, they could immediately see it wasn’t a legal deed or any kind of official document. There was some writing and a series of numbers. When the paper was fully extended, it read:

  THE CAPTAIN OF THE NAUTILUS HOLDS THE KEY. ELLIOTT STAPLETON 1918

  “It’s some kind of code,” said Tom.

  “Look at the date,” said Sinclair. “It’s 1918—that’s ten years later than the journal entry. I wonder why?”

  “That is curious, isn’t it,” said Marian.

  “Who is the captain of the Nautilus?” asked Sinclair. “Is that the name of the ship in the painting?”

  “No,” said Tom thoughtfully. “The ship in the painting is Bradford’s ship, and it was called the Panther.”

  “It’s not Stapleton’s ship either. Elliott Stapleton went on expedition with Prince Albert on the Princess Alice,” Cordelia added.

  “Wait. I have a historical record of all registered ships in any given year. Maybe we can find the Nautilus there.” Tom rolled the ladder over to the corner of the room and came back with a large ledger. He began looking through the index.

  “I see in 1800 there was a human-powered submarine designed by Robert Fulton, called the Nautilus,” Tom said.

  “The same Robert Fulton of steamship fame?” asked Sinclair.

  “Exactly. It says here he was commissioned by Napoleon in France to build one of the first submarines, named the Nautilus.”

  “Would that submarine have a captain? Unless he means Fulton,” Sinclair said.

  “That would have been too early for this. It was in 1800,” added Tom.

  “The Nautilus was also the name of the first nuclear-powered submarine that went under the North Pole in the 1950s,” Cordelia interjected.

  “But again, not the right historical period for this code,” observed Tom.

  “It has to be some kind of ship, because the paper says there was a captain. . . .” Cordelia trailed off.