by Louis Bayard
No, my memory could stretch back only so far and no more. So I returned to that moment—five minutes ago? fifty?—just before my fall. And I remembered, with a flush of second discovery, just what I’d been standing on when everything gave way.
A box.
A wooden box, its contents not quite visible. Falling just in advance of me, crashing on the same stone floor. Waiting for me in this impenetrable darkness.
And now I was crawling across that floor, windmilling my arms in every direction—and discovering, with each sweep, new wellsprings of pain in my ribs, my knees, my shoulders. The cold soaked through my skin, and before long I was swinging my arms simply to keep my blood flowing … until my left hand landed on something hard and unyielding.
Slowly, I traced its outlines. A corner. Another corner.
And then a lid, splintered into nothingness.
I bent over the opening. Something stirred from the blackness. A metal object, bright enough to peel away some of the shadows.
I closed my hand around it, raised it to my eye, but the darkness was still too thick. My brain, though, was slowly filling with light because it was in this moment that I remembered my climber’s lamp.
Somehow, through all my collisions, it had remained fastened to my head. Somehow, God knows how, it was still shining its fine straight beam into the empty air.
They make these things tough, I thought. Like Seamus.
Unstrapping the lamp now, I directed its beam at the object lying in my palm.
A ring.
Simple and elegant. Gold. With four words inscribed inside, barely legible but immediately resonant: Ex nihilo nihil fit.
The very words from Clarissa’s vision.
With the lamp’s help, I inventoried the rest of the box’s contents. And then at last I turned away. Propped myself against the box and stared straight ahead, deaf to the world—until a strange scratching sound met my ears.
I took it at first for rats. But the sound died abruptly away and then, after another ten or fifteen seconds, mounted a hundredfold. Without warning, the wall in front of me burst open, and a shower of dust and stone rained down as two figures staggered into the room, brandishing LED flashlights that seemed to fill that black space with cones of fire.
The first figure, instantly familiar, was Halldor, still in the Elizabethan officer’s costume he’d sported at the wedding reception. Following close behind: Bernard Styles, in a pink-striped white suit, pointing his umbrella like a saber.
“Mr. Cavendish,” he said.
He looked like one of those gentleman eccentrics of the nineteenth century, stepping from the balloon that has just landed him in the Pyrenees. He seemed genuinely surprised when I started laughing.
“Well, now,” he said, brushing the masonry powder from his sleeve. “I am glad to find you in good spirits, Mr. Cavendish. By my watch, it’s just a hair past three in the morning. You are a man of your word, I congratulate you.”
“And I congratulate you,” I said. “That was some fucking entrance.”
“Halldor, I am happy to say, has absorbed many useful skills in his career, demolition being just one of them.”
“You didn’t think you might demolish me?”
“Do you know it never occurred to us? Were you badly injured?”
“Not by you,” I said, rubbing my ribs. “I took the long way here.”
“Well, never mind, you shall have acres of time for convalescence. Now if you would kindly step away from the box…”
I rose to my feet.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but I believe we spoke of an exchange.”
“Indeed we did.”
He nodded to Halldor, who leaned through the opening in the wall. A second later, Clarissa was walking toward me. Pale and small and nearly illusory.
“Are you…?”
I didn’t finish my question. Or rather I answered it for myself by wrapping my arms around her—with a force that surprised me. And her. Pore to pore we stood, and my relief was so great that I might have stayed many hours like that … had she not pulled away so abruptly and with an air of such blushing regret.
“Well, there we are,” said Bernard Styles, sounding only slightly embarrassed. “All’s well that ends well, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Cavendish? And now at the risk of being rude, I shall have to repeat myself. Kindly step away from the box.”
“On second thought,” came a thundering voice. “Stay right where you are, Henry!”
Silly me, thinking there was no way to top Bernard Styles’s coup de théâtre. But what Alonzo’s entrance lacked in pyrotechnics, it made up for in sheer effrontery. Very nearly comedic, the way he strode through that crater in the wall, belly leading, chest following close behind, declaiming like Sir Donald Wolfit as the LED torches converged on him like spotlights.
“Good evening, everyone. Or perhaps I should say good morning.”
Morning, I thought. Is that what it is?
And that was the final blow to my sense of reality. The idea, I mean, that, a dozen or so feet over our heads, the world was carrying on as before. While, down here, two of the world’s preeminent book collectors were circling each other like Bowery brawlers.
“Alonzo.”
“Bernard.”
The enameled overtones of clubmen. Oddly poignant under the circumstances, for there was Styles, still baptized in pulverized stone and mortar dust, and there was Alonzo, dragging his absurd Tudor raiment after him. Neither of them conscious of any loss in station.
“Henry,” said Alonzo. “May I ask you something?”
“Mm.”
“Why would you cut a deal with such a putz?”
“Because he was going to kill Clarissa.”
“No. He wasn’t.”
“You don’t know—”
“I do know. Clarissa is one of his.”
And, in the very moment he said it, I happened to be looking straight at her. Wondering why she wouldn’t bridge the six feet of space that she’d put between us. Such a short distance, after all, and nothing to fill it but Alonzo’s voice.
“Didn’t you ever wonder, Henry? How Styles was able to keep on top of us from the start? How he was able to follow you to D.C. and North Carolina and now here? It’s really astonishing when you think about it. He knew exactly where you were at every moment of every day. Either he had to have the most spectacularly well-engineered crystal ball or—well, I concluded a mole was the likelier prospect.
“At first, I admit, I figured it for being Amory. A dear fellow, yes, but he could be had for the price of French toast. Unfortunately, just as I was preparing to confront him on the subject, he took the rather surprising step of dying. Which means he could never have told Styles we were bound for England. Let alone which wedding we were attending on which evening. That particular intelligence would have had to come from some other source. Would it not, Miss Dale?”
Her face—for I was watching very closely—was utterly bare of expression. It was Alonzo’s that broke into lines of sorrow.
“Oh, my apologies, it’s not Dale at all, is it? Gordon. Clarissa Gordon. Security consultant to Mr. Bernard Styles.
“And what a splendid job you did covering your tracks. Not a single item on Google to link you with your employer, and believe me, I looked. But you couldn’t quite escape being photographed last spring at the Grolier Club banquet. An event I could hardly attend, being already dead, but one I’ve been able to catch up on in my spare time. I only wish I’d seen the picture earlier, as it might have spared my good friend Henry some collateral damage.”
In the next second, his hand had buried itself in the wilted white ruff that, to my great fascination, still encircled my neck. It took him no more than ten seconds to emerge with a square inch of hinged metal, glacier blue in the artificial light.
“GPS, by the looks of it,” he said, cradling it in his palm. “I believe they use the same device to track children.”
Tell him. Every las
t one of my neurons was sending Clarissa the same message. Tell him he’s wrong.
But her eyes were too dead even to avoid my gaze. With no one to contravene him, Alonzo carried on.
“She probably planted it on you this very afternoon, Henry. How else could she and Styles have traced you, after all? They didn’t want to give you the chance to back out. And really, Henry, you should consider it a compliment that they had such faith in your abilities.”
He was trying to be kind, possibly. But if you’d given me a choice of whom to strangle in that room, I might have chosen him.
“Oh, now, don’t look like that, Henry, I’d have told you earlier but I didn’t have any hard evidence. It wasn’t until we got to England that I was able to make more pointed inquiries. And to see the value of playing out this particular game as far as it could go.
“But you’re quite right, Henry, to feel betrayed. I’d feel the same in your shoes. Nevertheless, you must see the upside in all this. Clarissa is no longer yours to protect. She never was. And therefore, these savages have no hold over you now. We are our own theme, Henry. We may do as we will.”
Styles cleared his throat.
“There is the small matter of the law, Alonzo. Please consider that you are a fraud and a thief.”
“And you, Bernard, are a burglar and a terrorist who has just blown a hole through one of England’s great homes. For politeness’ sake, I’ve omitted that you are also a murderer.”
“He didn’t kill anyone,” said Clarissa, her eyes tucking downward.
“Ohhh!” Smiling, Alonzo turned on her. “Is that the illusion you’ve been clutching to your little bosom? That your employer is a good and honorable man? Lily and Amory might take issue on that point.”
“Dear me.” Styles clapped his hands around his jaw. “You can’t truly think me capable of such cold-bloodedness, can you, Alonzo? You certainly can’t prove it. To anybody’s satisfaction but yours.”
“I don’t need to,” Alonzo answered levelly. “The only thing I’m obliged to do is savor the look in your eyes when Henry and I take what is ours.”
A slight edge had appeared in Bernard Styles’s croon.
“Take what is yours? The document belongs to me, it always has.”
“And all the intellectual property pertaining thereto? If I may say so, that is to laugh. Until I came along, you had no clue what you held in your hands.”
Styles smiled thinly. “And you have no clue what you hold in yours.”
“Enough!”
The two collectors turned on me with frankly astonished expressions.
“I wish you could see how ridiculous you both look,” I said. “Arguing over your precious loot. May I suggest, before you say another word, you inspect your spoils?”
* * *
Interestingly, neither of them was in a hurry. Styles may simply have sniffed a trick. Alonzo’s case was more complex. I think he had been picturing this moment so long it had become for him immutable, and reality was the only thing now that could disturb its perfection. And so, at the very brink of fruition, he flinched. And, like his rival, stood mute and frozen on the abbey floor.
It was left to Clarissa to snatch the flashlight from Halldor and snap:
“God’s sake.”
She trained the light on the box, lowered her face to it. Peered inside. Then rose and slowly turned around.
And now, one by one, they came forward: Alonzo, Styles, even Halldor. The same sequence: bending, rising, groping for language.
“I don’t…”
“It’s…”
And for the first and last time in my life, I heard Halldor speak.
“No.”
I couldn’t blame him. He was looking down not at gold but at the remains of a human being. The skull pried open in mocking laughter, the right arm half raised in a salute, which was marred only by the absence of a hand. The hand that had, ten minutes earlier, been caressing my cheek.
“Say hello to Harriot’s treasure,” I declared.
46
“SIT DOWN,” I said. “Let me tell you a story.”
Only there was nowhere for the others to sit, really. So they stood, and the only one who sat was me. On the cold hard floor, propped up on that old groaning splintered box.
“Thomas Harriot never married,” I said. “But he did love. A woman named Margaret Crookenshanks.”
Clarissa turned her head toward mine.
“Records indicate she died in September of 1603,” I said. “In St. Helen’s Bishopsgate. Two weeks after her mother. Given the time and locale, we can probably conclude she died from the plague. Somehow, Harriot was able to spirit her body back here. He buried her in a part of Syon House where no one else would find her. A place that had special significance for him—and her, too, possibly. The northwest tower.”
No storyteller could have asked for a more gratifying silence from his audience.
“Well, time passed. Harriot’s grief did not. My guess is that, more than anything else, he found comfort in one idea. That the woman he loved might one day be known. Not to his contemporaries, they wouldn’t have understood. No, he was pinning his hopes on the future.
“Of course, he could have just declared his grief straight out. But it pleased him to do what he did best, and maybe he even thought she would have preferred it that way. To be encoded, refracted through numbers and letters. So that some like-minded souls would know something of what he felt. All he felt.”
A scowl carved itself across Alonzo Wax’s face.
“Oh, for the love of—Harriot didn’t leave us a Book of the Dead, Henry, he left us a map. He couldn’t have been more explicit. Great stores of gold, matchlesse in worthe, / There to bee freede from Virginia’s Earthe.”
“Yeah, funny thing. A good friend of mine just went through the parish registers for 1603. Margaret Crookenshanks is listed, all right. Only her Christian name wasn’t Margaret. The name she was given at baptism was something far less common, something a young girl might have been embarrassed to own up to, given its connotations.”
Clarissa’s lips parted, and the name passed out of her like breath.
“Virginia.”
“What better way,” I asked, “for patriotic parents to honor Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, than by calling their baby daughter Virginia?”
I stood now. Gazed at each pair of eyes in turn.
“Thomas Harriot didn’t bury gold in Syon House. He buried his heart’s treasure. And here…” I nodded down to that half-shattered container. “Here his treasure lies.”
In slow, aching steps, Clarissa advanced. Peered into the box’s cavity and studied those old bones one last time.
And then something sparked in her eye. She reached in and drew out a long cylinder, encased in ancient leather, oxidized to a hunter green.
“Let me see that!” cried Alonzo.
But she wrapped her arms around it as if it had come straight from her womb.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s not treasure. At least not the kind you’re looking for. It’s a perspective trunk. That’s how Harriot was able to see the stars. And the moon.”
“And Venus,” murmured Clarissa, to no one in particular. “The phases of Venus.”
A deep silence fell over us now. Broken at last by Alonzo’s great, sorrowing bark of laughter.
“The old bastard!”
He sank, by inches, to the floor, and another laugh tore from him as he buried his face in his hands.
“So that’s our reward,” he said. “After all this. A goddamned spyglass and a bag of bones.”
He clapped his hands together like gongs.
“Well now,” he said. “There’s no cause to lose faith. We just took a wrong turn, that’s all. We misread the damned thing.”
“Alonzo…”
“Personally, I always thought it was a mistake coming here. Amory and I were making serious headway with the Indian lore. Really, if we hadn’t been diverted, we’d have—no, believe
me, it would have just been a matter of time before—”
“Alonzo!”
I positioned myself about an inch from his nose and waited for him to blink me into view.
“It’s over,” he said.
“Well, yes,” declared Bernard Styles. “And then again, no.”
He inscribed a tiny ellipse around us with his flashlight before settling the beam on Alonzo.
“Your little King Solomon’s Mines nonsense,” he said. “That’s quite finished. And a good thing, too, I’ve always felt there’s nothing more vulgar than a treasure hunt. However, there remains the small matter of my letter.”
He put out his hand like a tray.
“I suggest you return it now, Alonzo, while I’m still in a clement frame of mind. After all, it won’t do you a bit of good now.”
Alonzo said nothing. And, in reply, Bernard Styles’s voice grew only milder.
“Now see here, mon vieux. I’m quite prepared to overlook everything that’s happened. I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but there’s no reason we can’t patch things up once more. You need only give me what is mine.”
“I don’t have it,” said Alonzo.
“Of course you do.”
“I don’t.”
“Alonzo,” said Styles, with a long-suffering air. “You’ve made many questionable errors in judgment, but not even you could be so criminally stupid as to lose the thing. My patience is vast and deep, as you know; it is also finite. Perhaps I should count to ten?”
“You can count to ten million.”
There they stood, the two of them, one in light, one in shadow. And if, in the future, a pair of men hate each other as much as they did in that instant, I hope I’m not alive to see it.
“I can’t tell you how unfortunate this is,” said Bernard Styles.
He made a barely perceptible nod, and everything changed. Like a panther sprung from a briar thicket, Halldor threw himself at Alonzo. Wrapped his long arm around Alonzo’s thick neck and, with the other arm, pulled out a long and cold and pristine blade.
A bare bodkin, I thought, but my gulp of laughter died the moment I saw the pearl of blood well up from Alonzo’s neck.