Bristol House (2 page)

She was looking at none of that.

“
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.
”
A monk intoned the words while bent over in profound reverence. “
Sicut erat in principio,
”
he chanted as he stood upright and looked, not at the book in his hands, but at the crucifix on the wall in front of him. “
Et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
”
Bright sun shone through the window at his side, illuminating him in a broad shaft of light. His habit was pure white; everything around him neutral. The only contrast was the ruff of dark hair that circled his shaved head in the ancient cut known as tonsure.

The monk closed the book and swung around to face her. He smiled.

Annie slammed the door.

She turned, instinctively searching for a witness. The short length of hall was empty. She walked to the corner and looked down the long corridor all the way to the drawing room, or living room, or whatever it was to be called. Nothing. No one. The only sound was a radio playing softly, apparently from Bea Walton’s office at the flat’s far end.

Annie turned, walked back to the little bedroom, and pressed her ear against the door. Total silence. She reached for the doorknob.

Double bed, six-drawer chest, desk, two lamps, and assorted books and decorative objects—precisely as promised. Small, but two windows, so nice cross ventilation. The light they afforded was dim. It was late afternoon, cloudy, threatening rain, as it had been when she arrived. No sunlight.

And no monk.

For a fleeting moment, she considered backing out of everything. The job, the apartment. The whole deal.

Absurd. This assignment was—at least for her—the chance of a lifetime. Besides, she didn’t believe in ghosts.

Mrs. Walton took the check. Both women signed the inventory and the rental agreement. The keys to number eight Bristol House changed hands. As of the next day, the flat was Annie’s for three months.

***

The Two Princes Hotel on Gower Street was a stone’s throw from Bristol House on Southampton Row. It boasted charming and tasteful rooms designed to appeal to the sort of tourists who wanted to be close to nearby London University or the British Museum. In New York, looking at the pictures on the hotel’s Web site, Annie had thought the rooms likely to be claustrophobically small, but it hadn’t seemed to matter, since she was only going to be there for two nights. Now, given that her two large bags took up much of the tiny amount of floor space, there was no room to dispel her nervous energy by pacing. She stood instead in the narrow gap between the bed and her luggage, hearing still the ancient Latin words, and her heart seemed to be beating in time to rhythms she’d first heard kneeling beside her father in some monastery he’d taken his family to visit.

Such excursions were a feature of her childhood. John Kendall had been a noted scholar of church history. Maybe that’s why Annie’s academic specialty became late Renaissance England, specifically the vernacular buildings of London in the time of the Tudors. Her doctoral dissertation had been titled
The Effect of Protestant Iconoclasm on Sacred Doorway Decoration in Tudor England, 1537–1559.
It was an investigation of the almost-instant disappearance of crucifixes and pictures of saints and the Virgin Mary from outside private houses after Henry VIII broke with Rome. The examining committee had accepted her work with “special commendation.”

Gloria Patri, et Filio . . .

She remembered pressing her face against the scratchy tweed of her father’s jacket, and the way he always smelled of tobacco. And she was quite sure he was the first person ever to put a pencil in her hand. “Draw something, Annie. Draw whatever you see.”

She unzipped the outside pocket of one of the cases, withdrew a pad of paper and a pencil, and began to sketch. As a historian of architecture rather than a practitioner, Annie didn’t require meticulous draftsman’s skills. Her talent was for quick sketches, workmanlike and accurate. They conveyed the whole picture, mood rather than infinite detail of cornices and lintels. And as so often happened, once she began to draw, she remembered more than she recalled having observed.

In quick, sure strokes, a world took shape on the page—three views of the white-robed monk bathed in sunshine. In the first, he bowed before the crucifix; in the second, she drew what she’d seen after he stood up. His back was to her in both of those. The third sketch was her last sight of him, the most unsettling, the one where he turned to face her and beamed a smile of welcome. The background was the same in all three, a room simple to the point of austerity. A prie-dieu—one of those individual kneelers frequently seen in churches—stood beneath the crucifix. To the monk’s left was a small stool, beside a table holding an open book, as if he’d been studying before he broke off to say his prayers. His cowl, the hood typical of so many monastic habits, was thrown back, and he was bare-headed.

Then, in another series of quick sketches on a separate page, where once more her pencil seemed to know more than she did, Annie caught his features. In profile first, so the shaved top of his head, the tonsure, showed. Another, straight on. Thin face, high chiseled cheekbones, the nose maybe a bit too large. Definitely good-looking, but kept from being too much the pretty boy by a strong chin with a sharp cleft.

She finished the last drawing and flipped through all of them, trying to see what exactly she had created. Pictures of a monk who appeared, then disappeared, in a place that did not look in the least like where she’d seen him.

She shivered. The commonsense explanation, that she’d imagined the entire episode, that her mind manufactured the details in her drawings, was terrifying.

Annie put down the pencil and returned the sketchbook to the suitcase. Four hours later—when according to her internal clock it was eight p.m., though it was one in the morning London time—she got up, dug out the sketchbook, and put the date and time on each drawing.

2

Annie woke at the Two Princes a few minutes before six to bright sun coming in the window and a sense of rising excitement.

For six weeks she had thought of little besides this stay in London, visualized the shining future that would be so much better than the immediate past. She had tasted it, nurtured it, striven for it. But now here, on the brink, her stomach was in knots, and turmoil lurked in the corners of her mind.

There was a shower of sorts, not much pressure but plenty of hot water. She was quick about it. Her hair—red, very curly, chin length—could survive another twenty-four hours without being washed. She’d done almost no unpacking, but she found an emerald-green knit shirt that shook out unwrinkled. Enough, she decided, to take the curse off the black pantsuit she’d been wearing for the past three days.

Downstairs she could smell coffee, though the dining room wasn’t open—not until seven, according to the sign. Half an hour was too long to wait. Annie went outside.

***

There were few pedestrians at this hour, but even without them, Southampton Row was a purposeful sort of place. The traffic, mostly a mix of lumbering red buses and square black taxis, moved steadily in either direction. Annie stood across the road from Bristol House and studied the building, its little piece of the world. Every once in a while a gap gave her a clear view of its unassuming entrance. It was sandwiched between what the British called an off-license, a liquor store, and a shop where a man was arranging newspapers on an outside rack. A large commercial hotel stood a little farther up the road.

After a few minutes she saw a car stop in front of Bristol House. A mini-cab Annie surmised when she saw Mrs. Walton come out of the building dragging a couple of suitcases. The driver stowed the cases in the trunk. Mrs. Walton got in. The car eased into the traffic and sped away.

The flat was all hers now.

***

Mrs. Walton’s scent lingered in the rooms. Freesia by Fragonard, according to a box of dusting powder in the bathroom, left open in the last-minute rush of making an early flight. Annie closed it and carried it to her landlady’s bedroom. She left it on the old-fashioned dressing table—everything looked much as it had the day before, except the ironing board and the suitcases were gone—and closed the door behind her.

Silence. And the long corridor stretched ahead.

Annie took a few steps, then a few more. Past the yellow tulips and the table with the lamp, unlit at this hour, when bright daylight came in the single window. She reached the place where the hall made the left-hand turn, paused long enough to take a deep breath, then went around the corner.

The door to the back bedroom was open. There was nothing to see. Annie walked forward. When she reached the threshold, she stopped and whispered aloud, “
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.
” The response,
Sicut erat in principio,
et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum,
came only in her imagination.

Shaking, she pulled the door shut and fled.

***

Annie was a runner. She exulted in the pounding of her feet on pavement, in sweat that slicked her skin. She loved the way every inch of her felt alive when she was able to lengthen her stride and cover a decent distance. She would have liked to clear her head with a run when she left Bristol House, but she wasn’t dressed for it. Instead she retreated to a café called the Brew Hut, a few doors down the road.

No monk today, where there had been one the day before, might well mean she had imagined the whole business. No, call it by its name. It might mean she’d been hallucinating.
You’re a drunk, Annie my girl
.
You’re strong and beautiful, and you’ve run yourself clean, but you’ll always be a drunk.
The voice in her head was not her own but that of Sidney O’Toole, her AA buddy, the guy who had taken her under his wing at the second meeting she’d attended, and one way or another had stayed by her side ever since.

But Annie had not hallucinated when she stopped drinking. Not everyone does. So why now, after four years of strict sobriety?

Perhaps she had a brain tumor. Or worse, perhaps she was losing her mind.

After she had walked through hell and somehow, stripped naked though she was, come out the other side. Now. Madness.

A clock on the wall said it was ten to nine. Work, she had long since learned, is the great, sometimes the only, salvation. Time to begin. First stop: the Tudor London Documents Collection, which, as luck would have it, was at this moment at the British Museum.

***

London institutions did not post staff résumés or pictures on their Web sites. Since her appearance had been left to Annie’s imagination, she had decided the archivist she’d corresponded with before coming to England was old and slightly stooped and wore her gray hair in a bun. But Mrs. Franklin, who ten minutes after they met insisted on being called Jennifer, was tall, blond, and gorgeous. From the vantage point of five-two, with the freckles that went with her red hair, and around the same age—Annie would be thirty-three in a few months—it would have been easy to feel inadequate in Jennifer’s shadow. Except the archivist was also friendly and helpful. She stayed with Annie for something close to three hours, patiently pulling ancient papers out of floor-to-ceiling chests of wide, shallow drawers and discussing such mysteries of sixteenth-century Holborn as whether Crooked Bone Alley might have run between Red Lion and Great Ormond streets.

Annie began to feel guilty. “You’re being enormously helpful, but I think I shouldn’t be keeping you so long.”

“Not to worry,” Jennifer said, “I’m delighted. I don’t get many chances to talk about exciting stuff like this these days. Everyone here turns up their noses at anything that didn’t happen before Caesar conquered Gaul.”

Jennifer was actually on the staff of the London Archives, but parts of the documents and maps section of that institution was currently closed for remodeling. It was sheer good fortune that the specific collection that interested Annie, along with its archivist, was being housed temporarily in a basement room of the British Museum, a four-minute walk from Bristol House.

“Given the name,” Jennifer said, “I take it this Shalom Foundation is Jewish. Israelis?”

“No. American Jews interested in the European Diaspora. Particularly the Ashkenazim of northern Europe in the fifteen hundreds. Someone known as the Jew of Holborn.”

The archivist raised a well-shaped eyebrow. “I’m sorry, that’s highly unlikely. If you’d asked, I would have told you that no one would be publicly identified as a Jew in Tudor times.”

Annie was startled by the other woman’s assumption she didn’t know that English Jews were massacred in the twelfth century and officially expelled in the thirteenth. “Unlikely, not impossible,” she said. “A few Jewish merchants found their way back into London over the years.”

“I suppose,” Jennifer agreed. “But using that name, announcing himself as it were—I think you’ve got your work cut out for you. I’ve never seen an official reference to any Jews in Holborn in Tudor times.”

“Nor have I,” Annie admitted. Then, carefully considering her words: “But there is some material that’s recently come to light.”

It was impossible to miss the way Jennifer’s eyes narrowed. “Truly? New material from the Tudor period? How fascinating. I’ve seen nothing in any of the journals.”

“Nothing’s been published yet,” Annie said.

The archivist turned away, busying herself with putting some of the books they’d been consulting back on the shelves. “I take it you’re planning to fill that void.” Her voice betrayed nothing of the calculation that had momentarily shown in her face. When she turned back, she was smiling. What Annie took to be unguarded professional jealousy no longer showed. “How about lunch? There’s a quite good restaurant here in the museum. Too good, perhaps. We may not be able to get a table. But there’s a café as backup. Unless you’d prefer the more casual option to begin with.”

Annie glanced at her watch. Two o’clock. Already past checkout time at the Two Princes. If she hurried, maybe she could get them to bend the rule. She put her hand in her pocket and fingered the key to number eight Bristol House.