The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  The car door snapped shut and Bridgette strode over to Ian, who had bent to hear Helen’s request. Hesitantly, Aaron joined them.

  “Of course,” Ian was saying. “But Bridgette will have to be the one to answer your questions, as I’m only stopping home for a moment. I’m eager to hear what you find, of course.” He paused before continuing, apologetic. “The gallery is open to visitors. I know you’ll understand about respecting the atmosphere of the place. Should any moving of furnishings be required, I’d ask that you wait.”

  “Naturally,” Helen said. With a grateful nod, Ian gestured them through the door.

  Bridgette passed Aaron with a quick step. She said something inaudible to the girl at the front table, who sat up straighter in her seat—then disappeared into a doorway. Indicating with a wave that Helen and Aaron were to make themselves at home, Ian followed.

  Inside the large entryway, two women were making a slow circuit of the paintings lining the walls. Glancing at the nearest canvas—an abstraction in shades of red—Helen made a small, disapproving noise, then led Aaron to the staircase, which she began laboriously to climb.

  He didn’t think he could force himself to take the staircase at Helen’s pace. Hanging back to allow her to proceed unrushed, he trained his gaze on the artwork, pretending to take it in.

  From a room to the left of the stairs, voices.

  “All they need is access to the junk rooms and possibly one or two others,” Ian was saying.

  “Yes, and to make a wreck of the day for me, and—”

  Ian’s voice rose. “I can’t discuss this further now. I have to be to my meeting in fifteen minutes.” There was the briefest of pauses, as though Ian’s own words were a surprise to him. “But given how persuasively you argued for putting our resources into hosting the public, rather than prioritizing any real private space in this house, I trust you can manage to be hospitable to my former professor.”

  Bridgette let out a huff of indignation. Then, without warning, she strode out the doorway, stopping short at the sight of Aaron. He forced his expression blank, but there was no denying he’d heard. For an instant, Bridgette teetered before him, as though unsure what role she wanted him to play in her drama. A startling melancholy flitted on her face. Then she swept past Aaron and disappeared through a doorway on the far side of the entry.

  Helen had reached the upper gallery. Aaron followed, climbing the shallow steps as though into a thinner atmosphere, his heart accelerating. A guard of carved angels lined his ascent; he reached here and there to touch their faces.

  The air on the third floor felt cool and sharp. On the balcony to Aaron’s left stood an old man staring at a painting of an enormous tilted apple, and a white-haired woman nodding her head in front of a small brown landscape. Choosing the balcony on the right, Aaron joined Helen near the end of the gallery. “Those will have been her rooms,” she whispered, pointing to a closed door bearing another discreet sign: Private Area. “The other suite is even bigger, and would have belonged to the man of the house.”

  “Wait—you’ve been upstairs?”

  A look of dark amusement crossed her face; but she dismissed the question with a shrug. She led him to the door, opened it, and entered. Glancing back, Aaron saw that the gallery visitors looked unperturbed, as if they assumed Helen and Aaron were part of the staff.

  He followed her and shut the door behind him. Picking their way between boxes to cross the large, bright room, Helen’s cane thudding unevenly, they made their way to a second door and into the bedchamber. Across that room, then, and through a third door into the closet.

  A small, wood-paneled space with a single bright mullioned window in the far wall. Aaron joined Helen there. A tangle of vines shaded the window, but through them he could see, over neighboring rooftops, the slow gray shimmer of the Thames.

  “Help me,” said Helen. And she lowered her cane to the floor, braced herself with surreal slowness against one of the boxes, and began to push.

  He caught her just as she lost balance. Her weight was less than he expected, her body somehow hollow under the padded shoulders of her blazer.

  He helped her to a crate, where she sat beneath the patterned light from the window and wordlessly waved him on. Then he knelt and put his shoulder to the boxes, sliding them easily away from the wall. Two boxes, three, four.

  There, set in the lowest row of panels, was a small round keyhole.

  Helen’s heavy breath came from right behind his ear.

  “Open it,” she said.

  He cast about for a moment, hoping for a tool better suited to the task, but when nothing offered itself he pulled his army knife from his pocket, and unfolded it. “This’ll splinter the wood,” he whispered. “Shouldn’t we ask Bridgette’s permission?”

  “Are you joking?” Helen shot back. “We’ll ask her forgiveness. Ian’s, actually.”

  He jimmied the narrowest blade into the hole, gingerly at first. No luck. It would require force. He could feel Helen watching him. As he worked, small chips spat from the brittle wood. The panel splintered loudly once, then again, a visible crack opening this time; two small spars broke from the surface, one piercing the skin of Aaron’s wrist. But he’d gotten the blade through to some inner mechanism, and he worked it blindly until the hidden catch gave.

  It took a few tries to slide the panel—it kept sticking; the wooden groove it was meant to slide on was either obstructed or warped. Finally the opening was wide enough. Aaron reached blindly into the space.

  His palm swept a dry wooden floor about eighteen inches deep—then his fingers jammed against the cupboard’s back panel. Seated on the floor with his body turned sideways, he plunged shoulder-deep into the narrow opening so as to reach the far corners. Carefully he slid his hand around the space.

  The floor was bare. Had this panel, unlike the other, been discovered and emptied some time during the house’s long history? But wouldn’t there have been a record of the documents’ discovery?

  Not if they’d been found by the 1698 owners. A stranger’s three-centuries-old leavings might be expected to have value, yes—but ten-year-old documents were mere trash.

  He swept the space again, this time climbing the panel’s back wall with his hand. His fingertips found an edge. Pressing himself as deeply into the space as he could, he felt its outlines. His fingers traced a rec­tangle—a thin item laid flush against the far panel, made of some material more resilient than the wood. Leather? He pulled at the upper edge, expecting it to refuse him: the wrong knight attempting to pull the sword from the stone. But it tipped forward easily into his hand.

  He angled it out of the compartment—a slim, stiff leather folio, brown and dry and finely cracked in places. Cradling it carefully, he slumped back against a box, his body quaking as though he’d just run a marathon.

  Helen was at his shoulder. He stood, then settled beside her on a box so their shoulders touched. Laying the folio gently across his knees and hers, he opened it. Inside, forty or more loose sheets of unmatched paper. The handwriting varied, as did the languages. English and Latin, one in French, the next in Dutch. Carefully Aaron turned the sheets. There was some ghosting where one document had lain against another, and one of the letters had halos of rich brown burn-through, but the paper was intact.

  With a wavering hand, Helen took a page of Latin. Slowly she turned it over, adjusted her glasses, and brought it to her eyes. After a moment Aaron laid a hand on hers to steady it. She started at the touch, then nodded. They held the page together as she read, and after a moment he heard her breathe a faint, stunned “Oh.” But before he could ask why, a sound that had registered only on the periphery of his senses cohered into the approaching rap of heels on the floor, and Bridgette was swinging wide the door of the closet.

  In one triumphant glance she took in the army knife lying on the floor, the splintered wall panel, the dark gaping space behind it. Moving between boxes with shocking speed, she seized the folio from their kne
es, whipping the page from between Helen’s fingers with a flick of her wrist.

  “That’s fragile!” Aaron said.

  Ignoring him, she slapped the loose page back into the folio and turned on Helen. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I understand your concern,” said Helen. She spoke in the steady tones of a professor calming an overwrought student—but Aaron felt her knee tremble against his. “Our plan,” continued Helen, “has been to come find you to discuss these documents once we retrieved them. But I’ll confess I don’t move as quickly as I once did. And, naturally, we needed to check the documents so as to be able to tell you whether what we’d found was more seventeenth-century paper, or simply a cache of fifty-year-old Vespa Girl calendars.”

  “That”—Bridgette pointed at the wall—“is destruction of property, do you realize that? That’s in fact a crime.”

  He couldn’t but admire Helen’s outward calm as she continued speaking. “Our visit here is purely scholarly. If, in our enthusiasm, we’ve misstepped, you have my apology. And I can assure you that Mr. Levy is acting here only upon my direction, and the responsibility for our doings here lies with me.” Helen raised her head to look directly at Bridgette, and the shadows from the mullioned window sectioned the weathered planes of her face. “As you can see,” she said quietly, spreading both hands before her and raising them toward Bridgette, “I require some assistance.”

  For an instant, Bridgette looked mesmerized. But Aaron wrenched his gaze from Helen’s quaking hands to her face. Some safety catch within her had been released. He no longer felt certain of what she would or wouldn’t do.

  Bridgette blinked. “Get out,” she said.

  Slowly, Helen stood. Aaron resisted the urge to help her. He could see that Helen wanted Bridgette to notice her frailty. “I do apologize for disturbing you,” she said. “I’ll certainly pay to repair the panel. And”—casually, as though it were an afterthought—“I’d like to offer to buy that folio of papers from you.”

  “No, thank you,” Bridgette enunciated. “I understand Sotheby’s is paying rather well these days.”

  “Of course. Only, as you know now through exasperating experience, that brings in unnecessary formalities and delays. Perhaps we shan’t need to involve Sotheby’s this time, or the university. I can certainly imagine you’d be out of patience with our prolonged scholarly processes.”

  “I’ll tolerate scholarly processes for ten thousand pounds.”

  Aaron knew he should remain silent, but couldn’t help himself. “Ten thousand for just a few pages? The other collection was one hundred and seventy-three separate documents. This might be forty.”

  But Helen was speaking over him. “I’ll pay you ten thousand.”

  Bridgette laughed aloud. “You mean your department will? But this time I’ve a mind to double the fee. I didn’t much like how your Jonathan Martin treated us last time. He’s a smarmy bastard, that one.”

  Leaning heavily on her cane, Helen raised her head. “All right. Double it. I’ll pay it myself. We’re not going to involve the department this time.”

  Until this moment, he’d assumed Helen was bluffing.

  “You’ll pay me twenty thousand for a few dozen sheets of paper?” Bridgette weighed the folio in her hands. “What is this, original Shakespeare?”

  “Hardly,” said Helen coolly. “But it happens to fit within my area of expertise. I am about to retire, and I’ve no children and no heirs, and so I can do whatever rot I wish with my hard-earned money. And as my parting shot, I would like to publish something about those documents you’re currently holding in your hands. It so happens that I’ve been treated with somewhat less respect by my colleagues than I feel my talents merit, and I would very much like to right that impression.” She leveled a stare at Bridgette. “Given your own experience of Jonathan Martin, I imagine you can understand my wish to go out, as they say, with a bang?”

  Bridgette snorted, but Aaron saw that she’d softened her grip on the folder.

  “I’ll go to get a bank check, then.” Helen started for the door.

  “What, right this minute?”

  Bridgette stood in the only clear path across the closet, blocking Helen’s way. Slowly Helen walked forward, leaning hard on her cane. She didn’t stop until the two women stood mere inches apart. “Yes,” Helen said quietly. “I’m not getting any younger. Are you?”

  Bridgette flinched.

  “There’s a branch of Barclays down the hill,” she said drily. She stepped backward a few paces, and watched Helen make her way out of the room.

  For an instant Bridgette didn’t seem to have registered that she was alone in the room with Aaron. But when she did, he knew he’d catch it for witnessing her knocked off balance. He stood. “Excuse me,” he said.

  She looked at him, suddenly ferocious. “With pleasure.”

  Helen was moving with more speed than he’d thought her capable of. Calling her name, he caught up with her in the outer chamber, and when she didn’t slow he grabbed her bony elbow.

  She turned on him. “This is not the time, Aaron Levy.”

  “Stop,” he said. “Just stop a second. That’s a huge amount of money.”

  “It’s a bargain, for those documents.”

  “Why?”

  She shook her head. “Stay with Bridgette. Don’t let her make any phone calls. Try not to let her look at the documents.”

  “If they’re that valuable, don’t you think the university might buy them for us?”

  She tried to shake her elbow free, but he gripped tighter, and wrapped her forearm under his. An unreasoning panic was rising in him—it was becoming a part of his life, this inability to control anything he cared about. “Where’s that money coming from?” he asked her.

  She spoke as though addressing a half-wit. “My retirement savings.”

  “I hardly think that’s a sound choice,” he said. “You’re going to need that money to live on.”

  She seemed on the verge of laughter. “Don’t think I’m not touched by your protectiveness, Mr. Levy. But do you know whose signature was on that letter in the folio?”

  He shook his head.

  She let out a long breath before saying, weakly, “Spinoza.”

  His grip softened. “Holy shit.”

  “Spinoza might disagree with the holiness part.” An expression of barely contained incredulity had bloomed on her face. “But yes, Aaron. Ester Velasquez got him to answer.” She shook her arm free, and this time he let her. “Stay with Bridgette.”

  He watched her disappear down the staircase.

  Across the gallery, on the wall opposite him, hung a painting of a phallic tower thrusting out of what looked like a field of cotton-candy trees. A young couple stood before it, nodding approval—so eager, Aaron thought, to be shocked. Even as the house around them vibrated with a secret far more radical than any painting on its walls.

  He’d once believed in a plain, patent world, in which whatever was noteworthy cried out proudly for attention. Now he saw how readily the most essential things went unseen.

  He found Bridgette in the bedchamber, shuffling the pages. Seeing him, she snapped the folio shut. “I can’t make out this bloody writing,” she said.

  “The style is called secretary hand,” he offered.

  “I don’t give fuck-all what it’s called, what the hell is in here that’s so important to her?”

  Her vulgarity told him that whatever veneer of polish she’d worn would now be dropped. He saw too that Bridgette was nearing the crest of some long-brewing storm that, he suddenly felt, had little to do with him . . . or with Helen, or even the documents, but rather with whatever private world Bridgette inhabited: a separate universe brushing his, but with the power to rip apart the culmination of all he’d labored for these past months.

  And all that Helen had left.

  He couldn’t have said who deserved those papers Bridgette was holding, except that he knew it wasn’t h
im. But he wanted them for Helen, because she wanted them.

  “Who the fuck is Thomas Farrow?” Bridgette spat.

  How much had she seen?

  He spoke carefully: he’d tell the truth—just not all of it. “Farrow was an out-of-work actor. He wrote letters to philosophers. Mostly he ticked them off.”

  “Letters worth twenty thousand quid?”

  “I have no idea what they’re worth,” he said. “The only way to know is to have them evaluated. But that brings in outsiders. And”—he added honestly—“I don’t think Professor Watt’s offer will stick around if you do that.”

  “Well,” said Bridgette, “as for that, isn’t there someone at the bank whose role is to prevent old bats from taking out all their savings at one grab, because some guru has offered them a séance with their dead Pekingese”—she chuckled—“or maybe because they’re bitter and want to get revenge on people they’ve worked with?”

  He knew better than to respond to Bridgette’s jeering. Instead he formed a smile. “A banker might not dare stand in Helen’s way,” he said. “She can be a bit intimidating, if you hadn’t noticed. I suspect you’re in luck, if the twenty thousand appeals to you. I don’t think anything short of a patrimony law will stop her from buying those documents if you’re willing—and patrimony laws take years to enforce.”

  “I don’t imagine she cares much what happens next year. Frankly, she doesn’t look as though she’s got too many more hours in her.”

  He heard his voice rise. “That’s not true.”

  “You ought to call your Jonathan Martin. He’ll love you forever for helping him snatch these papers from Helen. And so long as they pay me twenty-one thousand or so, I don’t mind waiting a few days. Keeping this just a bit longer isn’t going to cause me any trouble.”