Bristol House (26 page)

“No,” Annie said. “Looks like he left in 1537, when Henry closed down all the monasteries. Imagine being told you’re not a monk or a nun anymore, and the church no longer requires your prayers.”

“That,” Geoff said, “had nothing to do with religion. It was pure politics. And probably the greatest land grab of all time.”

Annie nodded, looking at the guidebook in Geoff’s hands. “What do they say about the Charterhouse after the monks were thrown out?”

“Probably nothing you don’t know.” He riffled through the pages, reeling off a potted history. “Series of rich blokes owned the place until 1611. When the last one died, his will set up a foundation for eighty male pensioners who had to be either—wait for it—‘gentlemen by descent and in poverty,’ soldiers who ‘had borne arms by sea or land,’ or ‘merchants decayed by piracy or shipwreck.’ It really says decayed. Is that a misprint?”

“Probably not. The old meaning was to have your status lowered.”

“As in ‘fallen on hard times.’”

“Exactly.” The rain was blowing straight at them. Annie shifted the position of the umbrella. “Is this better?”

“It might stave off drowning for a few more minutes. We’re almost at the end, anyway.” He looked down at the now-sodden guidebook. “The Charterhouse School became one of the cornerstones of English snobbery and thereby—”

“It does not say that.”

“No, I’m saying it—cornerstones of snobbery and thereby one of the ways to oppress the worthy working class from places like Portsmouth, who will someday soon rise up and overthrow their cruel masters and—”

“And when they do, you will no longer earn three hundred thousand pounds a year.”

“True. Correction: Charterhouse School became one of the finest institutions in the remarkable experiment in democracy that is modern Britain. Which school buggered off to Surrey in 1907. Thirty-plus years later the London buildings were hammered by the Blitz but are now restored and”—he read—“‘house St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School and Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, as well as function as a home to forty male pensioners, known as Brothers.’ Annie, if we don’t get out of here, I shall have to go across the road and offer my pneumonia-ridden body to medical science.”

“Maybe they’ll let you be a pensioner,” she said, standing up. “Brother Geoffrey. Since your situation will definitely be decayed.”

Dom Justin

From the Waiting Place

Whilst on the other side, we do not understand that yesterday, today, and tomorrow are artificial distinctions, that time has no reality except what we humans assign to it. Neither do we recognize the meaning of place, its shadows and its links, and how what once existed never goes away but is merely layered and intertwined and made to serve what will be and what must be. We are, as has been said, all players in a single drama where, with eyes obscured and dim understanding, we play our parts on one great stage.

I cannot truly break through, but sometimes I draw the woman to me and she comes. Then, though we are so close as to be able to reach out our hands and touch our fingertips, she cannot see and will neither hear nor listen. I am ignorant as to whether this is willful blindness or simply a stop upon her senses, as seems common to those on the other side.

As I have said, her soul is not in my disposition; nor am I privy to her inmost thoughts. Still, I wait and watch and seek a way. If I can enlist her help, much may be prevented, and perhaps the great wrong of my life will in some measure be corrected. But in the way of Eternal Truth—which only now do I understand—we are none of us separate, and what will serve my good will be for the good of many, most particularly her own.

But for now I cannot find a way to reach her, and the danger grows.

•

The rain eased off as they left Charterhouse Square. “Is it too early for a pub lunch?” Annie asked. “That toast doesn’t seem to have lasted very long.”

“My place,” Geoff said, turning them onto St. John’s Lane. “Much better. We can have a hot shower before we eat and—hang on. Have a look at this.”

He was pointing to a small shop wedged between a wine bar and a café. A battered wooden sign read “Game and High-Class Provisions.” Beneath it, in a window no more than a yard wide, was a display of dead birds still in full feather, and trays of speckled eggs. “Quail eggs,” Jeff said.

“Really?” Annie asked. “I realized the other day that I’d never actually seen one.”

A man came to the doorway, lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and conscientiously blew the smoke in the opposite direction; then he held the cigarette in his cupped hand. He was grizzled and gray and wore a striped apron that proclaimed him, if not the owner of the shop, at least an employee. “Are those fresh?” Geoff asked, nodding to the eggs.

“Fresh as daisies. Lady we get them from brought them round this morning.”

“Round from where?” Annie asked.

“Holloway,” he said.

Geoff’s eyebrows rose. “You’re joking.” And to Annie: “That’s right here in Central London, just down the road.”

“No joke,” the man said. “A Mrs. Grindal, she is. Been raising quails in these parts for donkeys. Small birds. Don’t take a lot of space. Pack you up a dozen, shall I?” He tossed the cigarette into the gutter as he spoke and headed back into his shop. Geoff reached for his wallet and followed.

***

They went to his place and took the promised hot shower together. So it was nearly two before they went downstairs. “You are going to make me old before my time,” he said. “Delilah, draining all my strength.”

Annie ran her fingers through his damp hair, springy with short and wiry curls. “Designer stubble, yes, but I don’t think I’d like you with a shaved head. As for draining your strength—that guy I was with was a real tiger. Where did he go?”

“I think he may have run off to the jungle to hunt for food. Lunch next. What do you fancy?”

“Anything as long as it’s not quail eggs,” she said, her throat closing at the thought.

He made grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches, and they wolfed them down at the kitchen counter, the dozen quail eggs meanwhile sitting between them in their cardboard container. A kind of lethal centerpiece, Annie thought. The shell colors ran from creamy white to dark beige, but all were splotched black in various-size dots. “You’re the foodie,” she said halfway through her sandwich. “What do they taste like?”

“Quail eggs?” Geoff shrugged. “Nothing special. It’s the size that’s the draw, I think. Little bitty eggs. Gourmet kitsch. Coffee?”

“I’d rather another of these if you have it.” She waved an empty bottle of Schweppes Bitter Lemon. “So if they’re not specially good, why did you buy them?”

He handed her a soda from the refrigerator. “Can’t say really. It just seemed oddly serendipitous. We go looking for your ghost in Charterhouse Square and don’t find him. Then we come across an entire window devoted to bloody quail eggs.” He set about making espresso for one.

Annie watched his carefully orchestrated barista routine—the beans ground to just the right degree of fineness, tamped carefully into the brass filter, two thin black streams of coffee flowing into a white porcelain cup at a carefully determined rate of speed. Despite all that, as far as she was concerned, the result was undrinkable. “You must be rotting your insides with all that black sludge.”

“Probably. But you’re marinating yours with all that fake lemon.”

“I suppose. Geoff, you think they’re connected somehow, don’t you?”

He looked puzzled, but only for a moment. “Your ghost and the quail eggs. Yes, I suppose that’s what I’ve come to believe. I hadn’t realized.”

“Neither had I,” she agreed. “But I think you’re right. Somehow they are. Or they could be.”

His coffee was ready, and they carried their drinks over to the black leather sofa. Annie grabbed a pencil and a sketchbook on the way. A few days earlier a quantity of both had materialized on a corner of the suspended bookshelves. He’d said he was protecting his supply of paper napkins. “This is the best guesthouse in London,” she said now. “It comes with lemon soda and drawing materials.”

“Along with one or two other amenities.”

“Excellent food,” she deadpanned. “Superior in every way.”

They sat side by side on the sofa. Annie started to draw. In moments she’d produced a sketch of the old Tudor wall they’d been looking at from Charterhouse Square.

“It amazes me,” he said, “how you can do that. That’s exactly what we saw.”

“That’s the problem—there’s nothing new. I hoped there might be.”

“Something you’d only remember with a pencil in your hand?”

“Yes. But it didn’t happen. Geoff, the quail eggs and the ghost—the connection, at least the one in our heads, is Bristol House. That’s why we think of them together. Because the quail egg stories materialized while I’ve been living there.”

“And whether or not he was once at the Charterhouse,” Geoff said, with a nod to her drawing, “just now Bristol House is the ghost’s theater of operation. But don’t forget Weinraub. He’s another connection.”

“Perhaps,” she said cautiously.

Geoff put his coffee on the table in front of them. Annie slid her stockinged feet along the table’s edge, out of range of any kind of domestic disaster, and roughed a sketch of quail eggs in a nest.

Geoff put his hand over hers. “Stop drawing for a minute. Look at me. Weinraub’s dangerous. I care about you, and I have reason to know just how horribly wrong things can go. Physical, irreversible things.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that,” she said, gently disengaging from his grip. “I’ve got a really big investment in believing the past does not determine the future.” She started sketching again. “About Weinraub and Rabin’s assassination—how come you couldn’t nail him?”

“I couldn’t connect the dots. No hard evidence.”

“But now,” she said, “you’ve got more resources, and you can make bigger waves.” It was something she’d thought of on more than one occasion. He was the famous Geoffrey Harris. What was she? Arm candy? Someone not afraid to need him, Maggie said. She would like to be that strong.

“I’ve been thinking exactly that,” he said.

She was startled, then she realized he was referring to his greater resources.

“—over the ground I covered previously,” he was saying. “Find what I missed. I know it’s there.” He drank the last of his coffee and put down the empty cup. “And we know he lied to you about the source of his information.”

“That’s not a hanging offense,” she said. “It’s a long way from planning an assassination.”

“True. But . . . I trust my gut in this sort of thing. There’s something there, and I want to find it.”

“What about your book?” she asked. “Aren’t you on deadline?” She was unsure what she was drawing until it began to materialize on the page. She used the tip of her left pinky to rub in shading.

“I don’t think checking out Weinraub, at least finding out if there’s something worth pursuing, will take more than a week or two. I can spare that. Anyway, I don’t wear out my own shoe leather. I have people on the ground do the research.” He glanced down at the sketchbook. “What’s that?”

She held the drawing at arm’s length, so they could both see it more clearly. Next to the sketch of the Charterhouse facade, off to the side of the nest of quail eggs and to a different and larger scale, she’d drawn a rectangular shape about two inches long. A tube of some sort. She had put a Star of David on what appeared to be a convex front.

“Looks like a mezuzah,” Geoff said.

“Yes, that’s what it is. But I don’t know why I drew it. There’s none among the Jew of Holborn relics and—wait. I’d forgotten, but I do know. Weinraub mentioned a mezuzah before I left New York for London. Then the day I met him at the Connaught, he brought it up again. I was thinking about the houses and the stippled code. The things I wasn’t telling him. So the mezuzah didn’t stay with me. Then there was all the business with the mural and the almond trees. He mentioned a mezuzah again when he was leaving.”

“A particular mezuzah or mezuzahs in general?

“It’s a Hebrew word,” she corrected. “The plural is
mezuzot.
But I think he meant one in particular. He said it would be easy to hide something so small, so it was odd none had come to light.”

“They’re ubiquitous among Jews even now,” Geoff agreed. “Simple to hide in plain sight.”

“Yes, exactly. But I don’t think they have anything to do with ritual sacrifice,
korbanot.
”

“What about your dissertation?” Geoff asked. “Religious symbols on doorways, wasn’t it?”

“My God—you do a better background check than the FBI. It was called
The Effect of Protestant Iconoclasm on Sacred Doorway Decoration in Tudor England, 1537–1559.
How did you dig that up?”

“I had to be thorough.” He looked sheepish. “I really didn’t want you to turn out to be insane.”

“Because you knew you liked me. Or might like me.”

“Not at first. At first I thought you were one of Weinraub’s evil minions. But pretty soon . . . Harris scores again.” He mocked a punch to her jaw. “Tell me why you don’t think there can be a connection between Weinraub’s mezuzahs
—mezuzot—
and your dissertation.”

“Because I wrote entirely about Christians. How the architectural habits of centuries were swept away along with established religious norms.”

“But you called it ‘sacred doorway decoration.’ From Weinraub’s point of view, couldn’t that include your
mezuzot
?”

“Not if he read it. I talked about a statue of the Virgin above the gate, or a crucifix above a door. Even a door knocker shaped like a three-pointed anchor to symbolize the Trinity. All that came to be seen as supporting what was called popery, not Henry’s new regime, so it disappeared virtually overnight. It was, as you pointed out this morning, about politics, not variations of belief. Anyway, no Jew hiding in Tudor England would have put a mezuzah in full view on a doorpost. That’s crazy.”

“Okay, but Weinraub isn’t a scholar. Maybe he never actually read what you wrote. Sacred Doorway Decoration.
Mezuzot
. It could have made perfect sense to him.”