Bristol House (14 page)

Immediately I saw her, I wanted Rebecca for myself, and I was careful to tell Thomas Cromwell nothing about her. King Henry’s taste for beautiful virgins was well-known. If my master saw the Jew’s daughter, he would surely bring her to the court with an eye to putting her in the king’s bed, thus gaining more favor for himself. So whoever revealed that Rebecca and her father were Jews, it was not me. In truth, I never suspected their perfidy.

My master discovered it nonetheless, though I knew not how. Soon after that Giacomo the Lombard was forced to move from the city of London to Holborn, and set to find the treasure so many believed the once-mighty Knights Templar had hidden thereabouts. The Jew’s wanderings in the countryside soon produced results, and he gave Master Cromwell one exquisite bauble after another, each appearing to have come from ancient Jerusalem. I suspected the smith might be using his skills to create these things, and some Jews’ alchemy to make them look old, but if so, he played a risky game. Why, I wondered, would this Lombard toy with a man who had the power to make him suffer indescribable torment? It seemed to me a certitude that he would not—unless he had discovered the real hoard.

Rebecca once told me her father had let slip the phrase “the pit,” and that she had tried to follow him and failed. I could not risk traipsing about the countryside in the Jew’s shadow, so we had no clue where this mysterious pit might be, but I was sure it existed and—I admit—consumed by curiosity as to where it was and what it might contain.

That night a bright half-moon lit my way from the Charterhouse to the Jew’s cottage, and I arrived swiftly at my destination. Rebecca came to answer my knock, but the Jew her father was right behind her. He had pure white hair and an enormous bushy beard, and from the first both seemed to bristle whenever he looked at me. Indeed, he knew the heat that passed between his daughter and myself.

Before I was sent to play at being a Carthusian, he had one day called me to the back of his workshop. “As of last month, she bleeds,” he said. “So know this, if I catch you near her with a stiff cock, my face will be the last thing you see.” Then he grabbed my head and bent it so close to his anvil, I could feel the heat from the sheet of precious metal he’d been working. “You will be just as blind if I burn out your eyes with a piece of white-hot gold as would be the result with the iron poker they use in the Tower.” He told me he meant to marry his daughter to one of his fellow Lombards as soon as she was fifteen, the marriage age customary among them. “It will be someone rich enough to keep her properly,” he added.

I understood that he planned to wed his only child well enough so in his old age he could rely on her husband’s purse. As a bound servant, I was a poor prospect. If, I thought then, after my time in the Charterhouse the master did as he promised and rewarded me with my freedom and a sizable sum, everything would be different. The Jew’s daughter was for sale. If I was clever, I might be able to buy her.

On the night of which I speak, when—though not summoned by a speckled quail’s egg—I went to his dwelling, the Jew came to the door and shoved his daughter out of the way and spoke to me directly. “What are you doing here? I had no notice you would be coming.”

“I come not on the master’s errand but on that of the monks.”

“They know you come here?”

“Are you mad? Of course they do not know. But they need something I have suggested you could provide, and tomorrow they will send one of the brothers to make the request. I come tonight only to be sure you will agree to do what they ask.”

Then I told how the quarter part of the Venerable Father’s mortal remains was hanging above our door, the bones mostly picked clean by the birds. “The thing is yet in place, but it is suspended only by a scrap of flesh and will fall within a day. The lay brothers keep watch and will catch it, but if we are known to preserve it as a holy relic, we will be accused of disloyalty to the king, and Cromwell’s men will come to arrest us all. I have told the other monks that you will find a hiding place for those precious bones.”

“Me? Am I not as likely to run afoul of the king and his Cromwell as are you and your monks?”

The monks had raised the same objection when I suggested the smith be asked to perform this mercy for us. I had convinced them that I had known Giacomo the Lombard before I entered the Charterhouse, and that he was a man of such great Christian virtue, he would count it a blessing to risk his life for our sakes. I repeated none of this pious nonsense to the Jew. Instead I said, “It is only a small chest. It will easily fit in that place you have found.”

At that he grabbed the front of my habit, pulling me so close, I felt the heat of his breath when he spoke. “I have found nothing. Nothing.”

“The treasures you give the master,” I murmured, “say otherwise.”

The Jew let me go and turned and spat on the floor. “You think they are treasures? Baubles only. Shadows of the real—” At once he sensed he’d gone too far. “Such things as I find and give to Master Cromwell come to my hand during my wanderings in various fields and meadows,” he said firmly. “If such a place as people speak of exists, surely it is inside the walls of that round church and monastery that once belonged to the Templar Knights.”

“Leave that aside,” I said, pretending to believe his protests. “Will you not help us for pity’s sake?”

Finally, I think as much as anything to cause me to go, he said he would look out a secret place in the countryside. “Nothing to do with any treasury once known to the Templars,” he insisted. “But as you say, for pity’s sake.”

As for the other and truer reason for my excursion, that night Giacomo waited until I turned to go, then barred the door after me. I had not even a moment alone with Rebecca.

I returned to the Charterhouse in time to join my brother monks for the midnight prayers, which were the only ones we Carthusians chanted together in the church. Each monk had his hood pulled forward to shade his face, as was our custom, but all knew Dom Hilary was not in his place even after the last toll of the bell echoed in the night. Then, when silence prevailed, we heard his shuffling steps approach.

The saintly old man walked slowly toward the rest of us, then stopped beside me, youngest in vows and so at the very end of the line. For some moments he stood at my shoulder. I did not turn my head and neither did he, but I was sure that somehow Dom Hilary knew of my secret wanderings and intended to denounce me to everyone present for being the imposter I was. I quaked with fear, but after some moments he moved on.

When two hours later we processed back to our cells singing the Salve Regina, the night had became unnaturally warm. Though perhaps it was the heat of my sins that drenched my habit in sweat . . ..

•

11

The envelope had been pushed through the mail flap and lay on the floor just inside the flat. Annie saw it as soon as she opened the door after a run. It was small and square and looked rather like an invitation, or at least something personal. Mrs. Walton had redirected all her bills and correspondence before she left; until now the only mail to arrive had been advertising circulars. Annie could make out her name from where she stood, but before she stooped to pick up the letter, she grabbed the remote and turned on the radios: “. . . the banks remain underfunded despite the many reforms since 2011, but . . .”

Just Dr. Kendall, no first name. The handwriting was spidery—done with a fountain pen, she guessed immediately—and the return address said it had come from a Frau Wolfe who lived in Breisach am Rhine, Deutschland. The paper was lovely, thick and cream colored. It demanded to be opened properly, not ripped apart. She carried it into the dining room, feeling a little tingle of excitement. According to her documents, the Jewish synagogue in Breisach had the
kaf,
the ritual incense burner. Her hand was trembling slightly when she slit the envelope and withdrew a folded note embossed with initials, the sort of stationery she remembered her mother having.
My dear Frau Doktor Kendall, first I must apologize for my poor English . . .
The note went on to say in perfectly correct English that the Hebrew congregation the Frau Doktor had addressed had not existed since 1938, when the Nazis destroyed their synagogue and sent most of the congregants to the gas chambers. Frau Wolfe, whose father had been the last president of the Breisach congregation before he died at Dachau, was now ninety years old and the official custodian of the site, which the government preserved
in memoriam,
though of course she no longer did the physical work. So while she remembered hearing the story of the
kaf
that had been a 1535 gift from the Jew of Holborn, after the war whatever treasures had survived had been sent to Israel. She had not, Frau Wolfe said, thought about them in years. Certainly she had received no correspondence concerning the treasures in recent times.

Annie sat down hard.

She had written to the three congregations for which she’d found postal addresses, asking in each case if there was more information to be had, if perhaps the recent inquiry from the Shalom Foundation hadn’t posed all the possible questions. She had known it was a long shot, particularly since she had to write in English, but she’d been thinking of her father’s dictum to leave no stone unturned. He was obviously correct, but what had she uncovered? If she believed Frau Wolfe’s letter, Weinraub’s foundation had not within the last few months written to Breisach asking about ancient treasures that had survived the Nazis. If they had, they would have learned that the
kaf,
which indeed the congregation once had and which was reputed to be a 1535 gift from the Jew of Holborn, had been sent to Israel after the war.

So Frau Wolfe’s note called into question how Weinraub learned about the
kaf;
it didn’t contradict the essential facts. But it made no sense for Philip Weinraub to lie to Annie about how he got his information. On the other hand, a ninety-year-old woman might easily be mistaken. She would, Annie decided, wait and see what responses she got from Offenburg and Metz before coming to any conclusions.

About then the alarm on her cell phone went off, alerting her to the fact that she had an hour and a half to shower and dress and get to South London.

***

Annie had applied for an appointment to visit the Bastianich Archive, a private collection in a house in totally ordinary Clapham, before she left New York. The archive was available only to scholars and only one day each month. After writing a letter sent in triplicate—the Bastianich did not deal in e-mail—and filling out numerous forms, Dr. Kendall had been granted access at 2:45 on this particular May afternoon.

The collection represented the world’s most complete assembly of architectural drawings of buildings influenced by a Germanic tribe called the Langobards who invaded northern Italy in 568 and eventually controlled territory that included Mantua and Milan and Venice and Verona. Their kingdom was called Lombardy and the inhabitants were known as Lombards, the Latinized form of their original name. By the early 1500s, when the Lombards were providing cover for a handful of illicit London Jews, they were the most successful seagoing traders of their time, and their cities were poetry in stone, wonders of soaring beauty and grace.

The man who let Annie into the redbrick house adjacent to Clapham Common looked at least as old as the things he guarded. He was stooped and walked with a shuffle, and his glasses were so thick, they made his eyes look like a bug’s. “In here,” he said, opening a door to a large room lined with shelves and bookcases and chests. The only other furniture was one long table and three straight-backed chairs, one of which was drawn up in front of a large square of soft, midnight-blue, nonacid velvet and a pair of white cotton archivist’s gloves. “I took the liberty of assembling the same sort of material you were looking at six years ago.”

That trip had been Annie’s reward to herself the first time she got sober, something to beef up her résumé so maybe she could get started again in her profession. But a month spent penny-pinching in London hadn’t led to any kind of steady work, and she hadn’t stayed sober until two more years went by and she found AA and then, with Sidney’s help, a job. None of which could possibly be known to the keeper of the Bastianich Archive. “I’m astonished you remember me,” Annie said.

Bug-eyes smiled and went to a shelf on the other side of the room, returning with a black cardboard portfolio tied with frayed cotton ribbon. “Remembering is my job,” he said. “Besides, I don’t see many Americans.”

“Thank you for doing all this preparation, Mr. Clemenza.” For her part, if it weren’t for the recent correspondence, she’d not have been able to produce his name.

“My job,” he said again, putting the portfolio to the right of the place he’d made for her. “The plans of the four London churches that show Lombard architectural influence are in here. You were looking at them last time. But as I recall, you said it was vernacular buildings that were your primary interest.”

“That’s right. Vernacular buildings of Tudor London. Doorways particularly.”

The bug eyes lit up with pleasure. “That’s what I thought I remembered, but I wasn’t absolutely sure.” He scurried off to another corner of the room and began busily opening first one drawer and then another. “In here I believe . . . yes! Here they are. The archive has only recently acquired these drawings, Dr. Kendall. They appeared in someone’s attic, and we bought them at auction. I’m afraid we have no satisfactory provenance prior to the early part of the twentieth century.” He looked grim enough to be announcing the advance of the plague. “But these small treasures have a safe home here.” He laid a thin folder to the left of the square of velvet.