by Kage Baker
But which Englishman?
Who the hell was he?
What was he?
London, 2026
TREVOR AND ANITA sat waiting in the front parlor of the shop in Euston Road. They were uncomfortable. It was a very well known antiquarian bookshop, the kind that did almost no business out of the shopfront but relied principally on private clientele and Web orders. Nevertheless there was not a speck of dust anywhere, and the furniture in the parlor was expensive.
Trevor and Anita were not well off. They were hoping to be; artistic, creative, and talented, they were busily working at several concurrent schemes to make a bundle. One of these schemes was buying and restoring old houses, doing the work themselves to cut overhead, and reselling at handsome profits. Although to date there had been no profits, due to the union fines they had to pay. Then they found the old box.
It was so old, its leather panels were peeling away, and now it was wrapped in a green polyethylene garbage sack. Trevor held it on his lap. A white cardboard carton would have been more elegant, or brown paper. Looking uneasily around at the fifteenth-century Italian manuscripts under glass, Trevor and Anita regretted that they had found nothing better to put the old box in.
After a half hour of raised eyebrows from immaculately groomed persons who came and went through the office, Trevor and Anita were ready to sink through the floor. They had just decided to sneak out with their nasty little bag when a young man descended the stairs from the private offices on the first floor. He looked inquiringly at them.
He too was immaculately groomed, and wore a very expensive suit, though it seemed a little too big for him. He was handsome in a well-bred sort of way, with chiseled features and a resolute chin, rather like a romantic lead from the cinema of a century before. His eyes were the color of twilight.
“Excuse me,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to be my three o’clock provenance case, would you?”
They stared at him, nonplussed.
“Um—you described it on the phone? Old wood-and-leather box found in an attic?” He gestured helpfully. “About this big? Full of possibly Victorian papers?”
“Yes!” The couple rose as one.
“So sorry I kept you waiting,” he said, advancing on them and shaking hands. “Owen Lewis. You must be Trevor and Anita? Is this the box?”
“It is—”
“There was an iron bed frame in the attic room, and I don’t think anybody had moved it in just, well, ages—”
“And this was wedged in underneath, we would never have known it was there if we hadn’t moved the bed, and it took both of us—”
“The lid just fell apart when we prized it off—”
“Gosh, how exciting,” Lewis exclaimed, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s take it up to my office and have a look, shall we?”
He led them up the stairs, and they followed happily, completely set at ease. This was a nice, unintimidating man.
“My, this really has come to pieces, hasn’t it?” said Lewis, when they were all gathered around his desk and he’d gingerly cut away the green bag. “Good idea to have brought it in in plastic. This is what we in the trade call a basket case.”
Trevor and Anita smiled at each other, validated.
“A pity the box fell apart,” Trevor said.
“Don’t feel too badly,” Lewis told him, taking a pair of latex gloves from a drawer and pulling them on with fastidious care. “From the pieces I’d say it’s early Victorian, but rather cheap for its time. Mass-produced. You say it was in the attic? Where’s the house?”
“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.
Houston, 2026
YOU 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.
London
LEWIS 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.
That was quick, Lewis transmitted to him.
“Hey, Lewis, great to see you.” Where did you find that picture? Who is he?
“Joseph, you old rake.” Lewis bounced up the steps and shook hands vigorously. His name was Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. I have a lot to tell you. Did you ever perfect that signal disrupter?