Chapter 2
As soon as he was gone, I shut the door and collapsed into my chair. The book lay at the edge of the desk where I had put it, silently daring me.
If it was a diary, it would probably be a simple substitution cipher. B instead of A, D instead of C, that sort of thing. If so, I would have it translated in a matter of hours.
And if it turned out to be a record of the sort of thing no one would want to become public? If the names of other men were mentioned, who would be vulnerable to blackmail? What would I do then? Could I conceal them in some way, assuming they had nothing to do with Philip’s death? Would there be any way to know?
The door flew open. I jumped violently, knocking my chair back against the wall.
“Whatever is the matter, Whyborne?” Dr. Christine Putnam asked. Although a proponent of rational dress while in the field, as a concession to the museum she wore a severe skirt and sensible shirtwaist, the width of the sleeves far more constrained than fashion dictated. Her dark hair was pinned rather severely back from her face.
“Come in, Christine,” I said, even as she strode into my office and deposited herself in the chair Flaherty had vacated.
“I suppose you think you’ve had a stroke of luck, getting out of work on this damnable gala,” she said, eyeing me narrowly.
I straightened the papers on my desk, careful to remove Philip’s book and tuck it into a drawer with a lock. “Hardly. There are several papyri I wanted to analyze beforehand. Now I’ll have to work extra hours in order to fit it all in.”
“Hmph. Now we’ll both be kept from our work, and for what? Blast the trustees.” Christine ground her teeth together, looking even more ferocious than usual.
“Surely the gala must be something of, er, a vindication,” I suggested tentatively. The trustees had nearly gone mad when Dr. Hart hired a woman to lead the museum’s Egyptian excavations. But, as the director had told Flaherty, he was truly dedicated to hiring “the best,” which meant putting up with all sorts of eccentricities. Including, of course, being female.
Some of the trustees were still unhappy, but Christine’s stunning find of the tomb of the Black Pharaoh Nephren-ka had commanded headlines across the globe. Unlike every other tomb discovered thus far, Nephren-ka’s had remained completely untouched through the millennia. Although the statues of gold and furniture inlaid with precious gemstones had caught the public’s attention, it was the many inscriptions and intact papyri which interested me.
Christine glowered. “I suppose it would be—if I gave a fig what society thought of me in the first place. And if I did that, I would have stayed home and married some awful boy like my mother wanted. Really, Whyborne, would you want to be stuck playing host at an overblown party, or would you want to get back to work?”
“No, of course not. I see what you mean.”
Christine waved a hand. “I understand you were trying to put a good face on it, although why you of all people would bother, I can’t imagine. But the field season in Egypt begins shortly after Christmas. Even if I am able to leave the very morning after this idiotic gala, the season will be half done by the time I arrive. I might as well stay here in Widdershins and write papers, for all the good it will do me.”
“Did you know Mr. Rice’s son was murdered?” I blurted, desperate to change the subject.
She blinked at me. “What the devil? Does this have something to do with the detective?”
“Yes. There’s a book, you see. It could be a diary. I don’t…if it is in cipher, he must not have wanted…I’m not sure what to do.”
For all her bluster, Christine was not entirely insensitive. “Hmm. Have you looked at it yet?”
“I haven’t had the chance, have I?”
Christine laughed at my irritation. “No, no, of course not. Never mind me, Whyborne.” She rose to her feet. “I’m off to do battle with the curators. No doubt they’ll want to exhibit only the most horribly boring pieces of the whole collection. At least they can’t get away without showing the mummy, although I’m sure poor Nephren-ka would be less than pleased to have his earthly remains paraded about like this.”
“Indeed,” I said, glancing at the drawer in which I’d hidden the book. Would Philip have sent the volume to his father, if he knew his secrets were to be paraded about, as Christine put it?
Perhaps. I’d never known him, after all. Never gotten up the courage to speak to him, or to any of the other attractive young men who regularly turned up at museum events. Confident and at ease in their own skins: they might as well have been of a completely different species, like the bright birds I admired through binoculars.
Even if Philip was the sort to frequent bathhouses, I didn’t delude myself into thinking he would have had any sympathy for me, had I managed to stammer out an introduction. I was too gawky, too shy, too strange. Most likely he would have laughed in my face.
But he was dead, and I was alive. I could afford him some one-sided sympathy.
Squaring my shoulders, I opened the drawer, took out the book, and began to work.
~ * ~
Whatever else it might be, the book wasn’t simply a diary. On closer examination, it proved to be quite old. The cover was of curiously fine-grained leather whose origins I could not identify, its binding worn and cracked. The paper was heavy cotton, remarkably well-preserved. More than one hand had written it, although it seemed the second writer had been annotating or correcting the first. A quick perusal showed a number of curious drawings and glyphs, some vaguely familiar and some wholly alien.
As for the cipher, it was no simple substitution. It would help to know what language the book was written in, of course, but I could only hope it would be one I recognized, even if not one I could translate. What possible interest a wealthy young man like Rice could have had in a tome dating from the medieval era, if not earlier, I couldn’t even begin to guess.
Still engrossed in possible methods of solving the cipher, I left my office for a late lunch. As I rounded one of the many corridors in the labyrinthine halls, I nearly walked straight into the two men conversing in the hall.
“S-sorry,” I stammered as I stepped to one side.
“Percival! My dear boy, it’s been far too long.”
Startled, I raised my gaze from the floor. The speaker was my godfather, Addison Somerby.
“Uncle Addy?” I asked in bewilderment, using the childish name automatically. It had been some time since I’d seen him last, and I was shocked at how old he looked. His thick hair had gone entirely white, and his shoulders stooped beneath his black coat. He’d dressed only in mourning clothes for over a decade now. Despite his somber attire, a fisherman’s net of wrinkles fanned around his blue eyes and enmeshed his smile.
“You know old Percy, then?” asked Bradley, to whom he’d been speaking.
“Oh yes, yes.” Addison beamed at me. “His father and I went to university together. I’m godfather to all of Niles’s children, but I have to say Percival was always my favorite. Spent half his childhood at my home instead of his own.”
I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the face. “Wh-what are you doing here?” Although Addison donated generously to the museum, unlike my father, I’d never before seen him in its halls.
“Mr. Somerby had some questions about Widdershins history,” Bradley said smugly. “Of course I offered my expertise immediately.”
“An old man’s fancy,” Addison said with a genial smile. “Mr. Osborne was very kind to take time out of his schedule to show me around. I don’t suppose you’ve made a study of the history of Widdershins, Percival?”
Bradley let out a braying laugh. “Not old and dusty enough for Percy, I’d say. He only cares about things if they’ve been dead a thousand years, isn’t that right?”
Acid chewed at my stomach, but I gave him a tight smile. “I suppose.”
“We all have our talents in this world,” Addison said to me with his usual kindliness. “Since fate has given us this chance, do say you’ll dine with me tonight, my boy.”
Clammy sweat broke out on my hands, and my throat threatened to close up. “I’m s-sorry. I have a prior engagement.”
“Ah, well. Another time, then. Mr. Osborne, if you’d kindly show me the map you mentioned earlier?”
I stood in the hall like a fool after they left, my hunger replaced by nausea. I couldn’t imagine sitting through a dinner across from Addison.
What could I possibly say to him? “I’m sorry I killed your only child?”
~ * ~
I walked up the creaking steps to my third-floor apartment late in the evening, still deeply unsettled. The starchy odor of boiling noodles drifted up from the first floor, and the downstairs neighbors argued in their native Czech. I passed another tenant on the landing, a young man I’d once seen working behind the lunch counter at the department store. I didn’t know his name, nor had he ever inquired after mine. It wasn’t that sort of place; people here came and went, and for the most part minded their own business. Not even the landlady who came to collect on the first of each month ever inquired as to the details of my life.
I’d bought a loaf of bread at the corner bakery, and now balanced it on top of an armful of books while I unlocked the door to my apartment. I’d decided to spend the evening refreshing my memory on various cryptographic methods, and to that end had removed a number of texts from beneath the forbidding gaze of the museum librarians.
Putting the books on the rickety table in my living room, I stepped into the small kitchen and set the stove to heating. The warmth from the radiator didn’t reach into the kitchen; I crowded closer to the stove, shivering as I opened a tin of beans.
As I emptied the beans into a pot, the sudden, overwhelming conviction I was being watched swept over me.
I spun around, almost knocking over the pot. But there was nothing, of course: just the empty apartment with its dingy brown walls, the night pressing against the kitchen window.
Just my imagination. I turned back to the stove and set the pot on to heat.
A soft sound came from the direction of the window, as of leather scraping across brick, accompanied by a sort of gelatinous gurgle.
I put my back to the counter and stared fixedly at the window. There was no access to my third-floor apartment from the outside. It must be a bat.
Bats weren’t active in late November.
An owl, then. The Draakenwood must be full of the creatures. No doubt the light from my window had disoriented the poor thing.
The wet gurgle came again. Prickles ran over my skin, the hair on my neck standing up in ancient, unreasoning fear. That sound had come from no owl.
I slid open the cutlery drawer with shaking hands, removing the largest blade I owned. Clutching the knife to me, I took one step toward the window, then another.
The kitchen was small; a third step carried me to the window. I steeled myself—then quickly flipped the latch and hurled the window violently open.
Cold air flooded in, accompanied by a charnel stench. Keeping my knife at the ready, I cautiously eased my head out and looked about.
The night was silent and still, except for a cab rattling down the street, the horse’s hooves echoing against the brick buildings. No owl flew away from a perch outside my window, nor was there any other movement nearby. Even the strange odor lessened by the second, blown away by the winter wind.
Vexed, I shut the window and redid the latch. I was too old to jump at shadows and imagined noises. It had probably been nothing more sinister than someone’s wash blowing in the breeze.
Even so, I drew the curtains tight before returning to my pot of beans.
~ * ~
The rest of the evening was uneventful. No more odd noises intruded, and I was able to immerse myself in the puzzle before me. I ate my dinner of bread and beans in my chair, hunched over my books and making notes on a cheap pad of paper.
I did not look in the direction of the window.
When I was too tired to work anymore, I went into my cold bedroom, slipping a hot water bottle between the covers before changing quickly into my nightshirt. I opened the topmost drawer of the dresser, intending to secure the book there.
The drawer was empty save for a single object. The photograph was as simple as its silver frame: the portrait of a youth on the cusp of manhood, his fair hair neat, his smile confident, his eyes twinkling with vitality. Leander Somerby: Addison’s only child and my dearest friend, dead now these last ten years at the tender age of seventeen.
I picked up the photo and ran my fingers over the cold glass covering Leander’s face. Addison didn’t blame me, hadn’t blamed me even when his son’s body was pulled from the water. None of the rescuers who had dragged us from the lake, or the doctors who had nursed me through the bout of pneumonia after, or even my father who found fault in my very existence, had blamed me.
They were all wrong. If I had only been better, stronger, I would have found some way to stop Leander from going down to the lake in the first place. I might have roused the entire household if that was what it took, rather than sneak out the servants’ door with him. If I had stopped at the boathouse, convinced him it was madness to go out in the middle of the night in a storm, he would yet live.
I hadn’t, though, because I didn’t want him to think less of me. I’d wanted him to love me as I loved him.
I returned the photo to the drawer and shut it, putting the book on top of the dresser instead. Addison had no reason to return to the museum any time soon. I’d translate the book; its contents would prove innocuous, discharging my duty and getting the detective out of my life. Even though there was nothing untoward for Flaherty to discover, no matter how closely he looked into my activities, I couldn’t help but feel those green eyes had seen more this morning than I intended.
I didn’t want to be looked at. I wanted to be left alone, in my little apartment and my lonely bed, which remained cold even after I’d crawled beneath the covers.