Bristol House (4 page)

The theological significance of Temple practice was beyond Annie’s brief or her expertise, but the historical and archaeological facts of the acutal structure were relatively simple.

According to the book of Kings, Solomon built the First Temple in the tenth century B.C. There was no documentation of this structure outside biblical sources, but scripture said it stood for four hundred years, until it was destroyed by the Babylonian army, who then took the surviving Israelites into captivity. In 538 B.C. the Jews were released and returned to Jerusalem and began building in the ancient city a second Temple on the site of the first, a man-made hill called the Temple Mount. Eventually the turbulent history of the Holy Land contrived to produce a single site that contained both the remains of this ancient place of Jewish worship—the famous Western wailing wall—and two of the most sacred of Muslim shrines.

The Second Temple, however, predated the pair of mosques by almost five hundred years, and was well documented in sources other than the Bible. It had existed until seventy years after the crucifixion of Christ, when Roman soldiers razed the Temple, forbade its rebuilding, and said no Jew might live in Jerusalem or practice circumcision. Then the conquerors took their Jewish prisoners and the most precious objects of Temple worship to Rome and paraded them in triumph. The period of the modern diaspora had begun.

As far as the Temple went, Annie needed no more background than that for her current assignment. Her focus was on a list of transliterated Hebrew words, none of which she would have recognized a month earlier, though she knew them now.

She ran her cursor down the screen. There were five items:
makhtah, bazekh, kaf, ma’akhelet, mizrak.
A
makhtah
was a pan used to carry burning coals, and a
bazekh
was a smaller pan. The
kaf
was meant to hold incense during a ritual slaughter. The
ma’akhelet
was the knife the priest used to slit the animal’s throat—a sheep or a goat usually, sometimes a calf. The
mizrak
was the basin meant to catch the blood of the offering so it could be sprinkled on the altar.

No such sacrifice had taken place in almost two thousand years.

She’d read about fringe groups of modern Jews who were desperate to rebuild the Temple and resume the ritual sacrifice of sheep and goats and birds. They were following the instructions in Genesis and Deuteronomy and re-creating things like those on Annie’s list, using copper alloys made according to ancient formulae. Annie had no knowledge of whether the artifacts on her list were authentic, only that each was described as being fashioned in bronze (an imprecise term for various combinations of tin and copper), and that though each belonged to a different congregation, all claimed the same provenance. Everyone reported that their treasure had come to them in 1535, as a gift from the Jew of Holborn.

Philip Weinraub himself had put the list in Annie’s hands, and he had no doubts as to the origin of the artifacts. “Just think, Dr. Kendall, of what you are holding.” Weinraub was not a physically imposing man, but when he’d said that, his eyes had seemed to bore into her skull. “
Kaf, ma’akhelet, mizrak . . .
for such things to have existed in 1535, they had to have come from the ancient Temple in Jerusalem.”

However charismatic Weinraub could be, on this point Annie resisted. The task was already Herculean; she couldn’t allow him to make it impossible. “That leaves a fifteen-hundred-year gap in the traceable history, Mr. Weinraub. I don’t think I can expect to find documentation of a provenance that old, not if I had three years rather than three months.”

“No, of course not.” Weinraub had waved away her concern. “I’m sending you to London to look for the man. Find the Jew of Holborn, Dr. Kendall. Tell us who he was, what he did. Do that, and you’ll discover the source of his treasures. I am convinced of it.”

Maybe. But even if she did not get exactly what Weinraub wanted, an investigation based on the Shalom documents should yield enough to write a knock-your-socks-off article for a prestigious professional journal. In the academic world she so desperately longed to reenter, that was the way in. Finding the man was, however, a—

The sound wasn’t particularly loud, only a dull thud she might have missed, except that for every moment since she’d left the back bedroom, part of her had been waiting for just such a signal.

Annie jumped up and reached the bend in the corridor in three long strides. She peered down the short length of hallway leading to the back bedroom. The door was still shut. She sprang forward and yanked it open. The sun had disappeared, and she felt a rush of damp, cold air. The window was up, and the curtain waved in the breeze. She was quite certain she’d closed the window, but she couldn’t swear she’d locked it. It slid up very easily, she’d already noted that.

The candlestick lay on the floor by the door, obviously blown off the desk. That must have been the thud she’d heard. The candle had come loose as a result. Annie found it, stuck it back in the holder, and restored the assembly to its previous position. Then she closed the window, and this time she made absolutely sure it was locked.

4

Running, Annie had learned, could supply her with a measure of control when little else did. Nothing would better buttress her resolve to ignore the phenomenon in the back bedroom at Bristol House.

She used Google Maps to work out a basic route that took her northwest along Southampton Row to Russell Square. The distance there and back was less than half a mile, but she could extend the workout to her preferred two miles by adding a zigzag course along the paths that wandered among the square’s extensive gardens. She tested the route a little past dawn the morning after she moved into Bristol House, and it was glorious. The air was fresh and sweet, and once she was in the gardens, she had birdsong as a counterpoint to the muted traffic. Her sense of infinite possibility grew with each step.

Afterward she showered, did her laundry, and got the apartment organized for her stay. On the grounds that the best defense is a good offense, she located the flat’s many radios—blessings on Mrs. Walton, there were four of them—and tuned each one to BBC Radio 4, news and world affairs around the clock. With a bit of programming of the universal remote she’d found in her bedroom, she was able to turn three on simultaneously.

She placed the remote on the hall table nearest the front door. It was of course silly to think she could fend off a ghost with a radio, but it was disquieting to wonder, every time she walked into the flat, if she was alone. Sane English voices saying sensible things as soon as she crossed the threshold couldn’t hurt and might help.

It would take more than disquiet, however, to entirely smother her essential curiosity. After she came back from that first run, Annie walked to where she could see the closed door of the little bedroom, then strode the rest of the distance and opened it. She saw nothing and no one, and the bell, the book, and the candle were exactly as she’d left them. She left the door open this time and headed back to the drawing room—she loved calling it that—gathering up dusty and drooping flowers on her way.

It was still early when she went to the nearby supermarket and stocked up on staples. At the last minute, she added two bunches of fresh tulips to her cart, bright red this time. At home she’d shared a Brooklyn apartment with two people she barely knew and seldom saw. They lived together so they could afford the astronomical rent of any place within commuting distance of Manhattan. The refrigerator was divided into shelves marked with each of their names, and the only other common space was a living room as impersonal as a dentist’s office. She’d loathed those bleak living arrangements almost as much as teaching at the Davis School. She gave up the apartment along with the job.

There were enough red tulips for a third vase, and she found one in a cupboard in the kitchen and carried it into the dining room. She was still arranging the flowers when her cell phone rang. It was Jennifer Franklin. “I’ve thought of something I think you should see. Could you come by?”

Annie said she could.

***

The archivist was prepared for Annie’s visit. She had two pairs of white cotton gloves at the ready. Annie felt a surge of excitement as soon as she saw them—they meant she and Jennifer would be handling something particularly old and rare.

Jennifer unlocked a cupboard at the rear of her basement office and produced what looked like an ordinary cardboard tube, though Annie knew it was not. Like the gloves, the tube was made from specially treated nonacid fibers, one of the tools of the museum trade. What the archivist extracted from this highly specialized storage container was a document some eighteen inches square, a hand-drawn parchment map labeled in the lower right, in the distinctive Tudor script that both women could read without difficulty: “Richard Scranton, By His Own Hand An. Dom. 1535.”

Jennifer spread the map on a large gray cushion, also made of specially treated nonacid, nonlinting fibers, and each woman used a gloved finger to hold down two of the corners. Jennifer let go of one long enough to move the magnification lamp a bit nearer, careful not to allow any part of the brass lamp to come remotely close to touching the cushion, much less the document it supported. “I thought of this map after you left the other day,” she said while adjusting the lamp. “I’ve also been wondering if there would be anything about your Jew of Holborn in the papers associated with the master of the rolls.”

One of the oldest offices in English law, the second-most important judge after the lord chief justice. Annie considered for a moment. “By 1535,” she said, “Cromwell had become Henry’s master of the rolls.” No prize for coming up with his name. Thomas Cromwell loomed large in Tudor London.

“The thing is, all the Cromwell papers are in a separate archive that’s been sequestered during the remodeling. I suppose I could—”

Annie shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I’m told the Cromwell papers have already been examined. Nothing related to the Jew of Holborn showed up.”

“I thought that might be the case. And I don’t believe there’s anything specific here either”—she nodded toward the map—“but it’s a unique piece, and it seems you should see it. It was drawn to identify the king’s opposition.”

Annie was studying the square of parchment on the gray cushion. “I take it these marks”—she indicated a series of triangles superimposed with a cross—“are where this fellow Scranton claims there were people resisting Henry’s claim to the right of primacy?”

“Exactly. The map has twenty-two such symbols, and every one corresponds to the location of someone eventually executed for treason. Because he or she refused to swear it was lawful for Henry, not the pope, to be head of the English Church. Richard Scranton was the double-oh-seven of his day. Licensed to kill.”

“He was also a damned fine draftsman,” Annie said. “Look at the Fleet.” In Scranton’s drawing, the river Fleet was wide and obviously navigable. Later, after the swill of countless generations of Londoners filled it with so much sludge it was reduced to a polluted trickle, it had been built over. These days it traveled from Hampstead Heath to the Thames through a series of underground storm and sewer drains. Now as then, it passed through the section once called Olde Bourne. “The way he’s drawn the river makes you want to stand on the banks and whistle up a boatman. Has anyone superimposed today’s Holborn on this map?”

“Not officially. But we’re just about here.” Jennifer’s hovering finger indicated the left lower corner of the document.

Annie bent closer. “Right between a pig and an ox.”

Richard Scranton, cartographer of death, had scattered little pictures of domestic animals here and there on his map, indicating that the Holborn of his day was mostly farmland, with a few clustered houses hugging the riverbank. A few more were close to the Holborn Bar, the western tollgate in the wall around the square-mile City of London. So this Jew of Holborn might be a needle in a haystack, but the haystack wasn’t all that big.

She kept searching Scranton’s map for something that might point to the man she was looking for, but Annie suspected the document, however fascinating, would be of no use to her. Why should a Jew care if the pope or the king was to be the highest Christian authority in England? But given that it was the consuming issue of the day, anyone could get sucked in. She spotted one of Scranton’s crossed triangles by itself on the upper-right-hand corner of his map, amid what he had clearly indicated as open land dotted with small areas of woods.

Annie felt it first as a tingling, a buzz somewhere in the back of her mind, something important she knew but was forgetting. She pointed to the mark. “Any idea who or what this is?”

“The monastery known as the Charterhouse,” Jennifer said immediately. “First blood, if you will. Henry sent a few of the monks to Tyburn, starting in May 1535. Theirs was the first execution of the primacy debate, though God knows not the last.”

Tyburn meant death by hanging, drawing, and quartering. Not the most awful of Tudor execution methods, but right up there in the roster of—

Annie drew a breath and held it. Of course. The London Charterhouse. Home to Carthusian monks, who as it happened wore white habits and had tonsures—and were up to their ears in the bloody drama of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Henry had set off on what became wholesale butchery with those monks living a ten-minute walk from Bristol House. So perhaps, given that she’d already been forced into admitting that ghosts existed, it was one of the Carthusians she’d seen. Annie exhaled.

“I won’t be here next week,” the archivist was saying as she rerolled the Scranton map. “We’re off to the Canaries for a short break. I get six weeks holiday a year, but I’m not allowed to take it all at once, and this was arranged before I knew you were coming.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Annie said. “I understand perfectly.” Really she did not. It seemed odd for Jennifer not to have mentioned a long-planned vacation in the e-mails they exchanged before Annie arrived in London. She could not, of course, say so.