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The Carpet Cipher

Page 29

by Jane Thornley


  “Are you going to answer it this time?” Peaches asked.

  I pushed the end button. “I think not. When we get back to London tomorrow I’ll have that conversation. Today I’m not ready and right now I have something left to do.” Getting to my feet, I shoved the phone back into my pocket.

  Peaches moved to stand but I waved her back. “Finish your cappuccino, my friend. I’ll just be a minute.”

  I had caught sight of what I needed while passing along the canal a few minutes earlier and now it was time to do the deed.

  The big steel box piled with garbage bags was positioned beside the canal waiting for pickup and, like any malodorous trash heap, worth avoiding. However, I walked straight toward it. If there really was such a thing as an agency for the ancient lost and found, it most certainly needed a virtual dumpster for the letting go part. We all needed one and it didn’t matter where.

  Pulling my mangled carpetbag from under my arm, I silently thanked it for keeping me company through so many adventures. It had been my amulet, my comfort through all my travels, as much a physical bolster as an imaginary friend. Release what no longer serves you applies equally to people or objects. Both can hold you back when you need to move forward. Without a backward glance, I tossed my battered companion of a decade into the dumpster and walked away, strains of Time to Say Goodbye streaming on autorewind in my head.

  I was halfway down the street when my phone buzzed again.

  Pulling it from my pocket, I read Foxy’s text:

  Phoebe, this silence on your part is extremely distressing (angry emoji). We must talk in person. Please come to see me at once when you arrive in London. We have work to do, and do it together we must. Already I have been presented with a lead for our efforts in the ancient lost and found department. This cannot wait.

  Your colleague and, I trust, friend still, Rupert

  I smiled and turned off my phone.

  * * *

  THE END

  Afterword

  Like many works of fiction, this novel names real historical personages without recounting actual historical facts. The painter Domenico di Bartolo was a Sienese painter most noted for his fresco The Marriage of the Foundlings upon which the painting described in this book is based. However, I took license with the details of the painting as well as with the backstory described.

  One thing that is verifiably true, however, is that both Bartolo and the celebrated artist Carlo Crivelli painted detailed carpets into some of their works and it is this point that inspired The Carpet Cipher. Everything else is unapologetically fiction.

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