The Burning Library, page 9
When Sherston Hall came into view she caught her breath. It was impossibly large and fine. It surely had to be Grade I listed, with its gorgeous neoclassical façade hugged by two beautifully proportioned, symmetrical wings, fronted by a huge terrace with an ornate balustrade. Access to the terrace was up a wide stone staircase.
She parked out front, in a sea of pea gravel. There was doubtless another out-of-sight parking area somewhere, where vehicles wouldn’t spoil the view of or from the house, but she quite enjoyed the comedy of her small, city-dinged Renault against such a grand backdrop. As she began the climb up the wide stone steps to the entrance a man appeared through a small door that was set within the house’s grand double doors.
He was tidily dressed in jeans, a button-down shirt, and a lightweight sport coat. Nice brogues, polished and worn. An affable smile.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a smooth tone of voice that struck just the right note of friendliness and authority to let her know that she was being handled. He was staff, then. She hadn’t been sure. She flashed her badge and told him why she was there.
“I’ll see if Lady Arden is available,” he said, poker-faced. He had Clio wait in the gracious entrance hall, where decorative plasterwork swirled playfully across walls painted a delicate pale gray. The balustrade on the elegant staircase curled with rococo twirls, the floor was marble, and between the flourishes of ornamental plaster huge paintings hung, life-size portraits of bewigged aristocratic women posed against bucolic backgrounds, wearing tight bodices and plumped-up skirts like puffs of silken cloud.
He returned quickly, his soles clip-clipping on the marble flooring, and Clio followed him down a corridor wide and long enough to play cricket in. It was the sort of home where the owners were aristocratic enough that they probably did.
He showed her into a large and gracious drawing room where Lady Arden sat on a wide sofa facing the door. It was upholstered in primrose yellow, and she occupied the middle seat, an aged charcoal whippet curled up beside her, unbothered by Clio’s arrival. A fire crackled in the hearth. There were more oil paintings in here, and a collection of drawings. Side tables offered homes to an ornate chinoiserie vase, bottles of alcohol, and a gathering of silver-framed photographs. It had echoes of the Brutons’ home but was much grander.
Lady Arden was an older woman, in her late sixties, Clio guessed, beautifully preserved, with exceptional bone structure and glacial-blue eyes. She was slender bordering on skinny and wore jeans and a black sweater, her collar a white lace crown that stood up around the base of her neck, like an homage to Tudor royalty, who, to be fair, she could well be related to. A thick strand of pearls hung over her sweater. The matching earrings were large enough to stretch her earlobes. She smelled of something expensive and exuded confidence from every pore.
“Do have a seat,” she said. “It’s lovely to meet you.” The sentiment in her words didn’t carry over to her tone of voice or her expression, where a trace of a smile appeared only fleetingly before her face settled back into looking stony. There were some women, Clio thought, who had the ability to make you wither in their presence. Lady Arden was surely one of them, but Lillian had been, too, and, in her mentor’s honor, Clio was determined that she would not wilt.
“No, thank you. I’m trying to trace a piece of embroidery that Eleanor Bruton had in her possession, and I heard it might have been here?”
“Who?” Lady Arden said.
“Eleanor Bruton. From the Old Vicarage in the village. I was told she was a frequent visitor here when a relative of yours was ill.”
“Oh, yes. She did visit rather tirelessly. A very boring woman, but my sister-in-law had a high tolerance for life’s strugglers.”
Her snobbery, Clio thought, was so uncompromising, it was borderline magnificent.
“The embroidery belonged to my sister-in-law. She was living with us here while she was ill. Bloody brutal cancer. It ravaged her. Took her very quickly. After she died, the embroidery disappeared. I don’t know where it went, and I don’t really care. It had some sentimental value to her, I believe, but it was very tatty and ragged. I didn’t see what the fuss was about.”
With such an embarrassment of extraordinary objects and artworks around her, Clio supposed this made sense.
“Why was Eleanor Bruton suspected?”
“Visitors who aren’t close friends often have sticky fingers.”
“Was Eleanor close to your sister-in-law?”
Lady Arden shrugged. “Not particularly. She was a church busybody. One of those types who gather around the bedsides of the sick and dying to nurture because they haven’t got anything better to do. I shan’t allow it when it’s my time. It’s pure voyeurism, if you ask me.” She shuddered performatively.
“Who noticed the embroidery was missing?”
“That would be my niece. Mostly absent while her mother was dying, quick to arrive when it was time to collect her things, and apparently adept at pushing through probate at record speed. She made a lot of noise about the embroidery because apparently, my sister-in-law had promised to give it to her. She made a tremendous fuss about having had an emotional attachment to it, though you’d have thought we might have seen her more if that were true. Why do you want to know?”
Clio wondered how honest to be. “They have eyes and ears everywhere,” Lillian had said. They were often embedded in powerful families.
“I’m not sure,” she lied. “My superiors don’t tell me everything. I’m just here to ask the questions and I’m very grateful for your time.” She stood. Lady Arden watched her appraisingly, as if skeptical, and Clio felt a ripple of alarm. The man who’d shown her in appeared in the doorway. Had he been listening? Lady Arden nodded at him.
“I’ll see you out,” he said.
Out front, Clio asked, “What’s your role in the household?”
“I’m Lady Arden’s butler.”
“People still have those?”
“Very much so.”
When she reached the bottom of the steps he said, “Someone else came asking about the embroidery.”
He had her attention. “Who?” she asked.
“An academic from St. Andrews University. A woman. She said she was working on historical bookbindings.”
“Did she speak to Lady Arden?”
“Just to me. Lady Arden wasn’t here at the time.”
“When was this?”
“It was last autumn, almost a year ago. She was quite persistent, to the point where I thought she might become a nuisance, but we never saw her again.”
“What was her name?”
“I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I took a note of it somewhere. It was a foreign name.”
Clio handed him a card. “Could you get in touch if you find it? Let me know?”
“Of course. Is there something special about the embroidery?”
She didn’t have to lie. “I really don’t know.”
But she was beginning to believe there might be.
Olivia
Olivia Macdonald, wife of Judge Henry Macdonald, glanced out the window as she put on her necklace, a gold chain with a pendant in the shape of a spiked wheel.
Outside, she could see the gardener working on the rambling rose at the entrance to the walled garden, pruning its thorny, lashing branches into submission. Henry would want to tour the walled garden when he came home this weekend. It was his pride and joy, and now it would be looking lovely for him, which was good, but Olivia struggled to feel as happy about that as she might usually.
She was having what she called one of her bittersweet days.
Her husband had been with his mistress, Diana Cornish. Bitter thought.
But Diana was unaware that Henry’s wife was a member of the Order of St. Katherine who knew all about the affair. Sweet thought.
Outwitting Diana Cornish was satisfying. As for the affair being a source of pain? As every member of the Order of St. Katherine must, Olivia understood, accepted, and made the best of the realities of her marriage. She well knew that the garden was only Henry’s second-favorite place to be. The first was in Diana’s arms. Men will be men. You did not try to change them; you worked with what you had.
Downstairs, she made tea and toast, which she spread thickly with her homemade marmalade, then sat down at the kitchen table and opened her laptop.
The screen saver was a photograph of their twin boys from a few years ago, when they were still sweet. Now, on the cusp of turning fifteen, they reminded her more of giant slugs, dull, oily creatures who were apparently semi-blind when it came to finding any of their possessions and permanently in great need of food, sleep, and charging cables.
There was work to do, with them, but Olivia wasn’t fazed. This was just a phase. She had a plan to turn them into fine young men, and she had the time to do it, since no member of the Order had a job outside the family once her marriage was established. It wasn’t allowed. That didn’t bother her, either. Ultimately, it was wives and mothers who held all the power in a family, even if the men thought they did.
Multiple folders floated on the home screen of her MacBook, with labels like “Family,” “Volunteering,” “Housekeeping,” and “Holidays.” The app bar glowed with bland software icons, nothing that might attract the attention of her sons (who anyway tended to regard her and her interests as if both were transparent), or even Henry, who was a great deal sharper and more attentive than his offspring but nevertheless content to imagine that Olivia wished to spend most if not all her days in service to him and their family.
She clicked through a few menus to reach the app she kept hidden: encrypted audio software. She opened it, slotted earbuds in, and made a call.
“Hi!” Conchita answered immediately.
“Hi, sweetie,” Olivia said. “Well done.”
“Thank you.”
There were nanny cams hidden throughout Henry and Olivia’s London flat, including the bedroom. Henry had no idea. Olivia visited the property so rarely that he considered it his private space, for all intents and purposes.
Olivia hadn’t watched any of the recordings of her husband making love to Diana Cornish since the first time. Once had been enough. His tenderness had been the most difficult thing to witness. The rest was just biology. Urges. But she’d watched the feed from the hallway camera this morning, and seen Conchita let herself into the flat while Henry and Diana were in the bedroom.
“It was pretty easy,” Conchita said.
Olivia knew this already. The footage had shown Conchita, wearing a cleaning tabard over a hoodie, cheap black leggings, and sneakers, slip inside and make it the work of seconds to pick up Diana’s coat from the chair in the hallway, to remove Diana’s phone from its pocket, and to install an app that would allow them to monitor all Diana’s phone activity. Conchita knew Diana’s passcode because it had been recorded by the cameras before. They had to do this often, because Diana changed her phone frequently, which meant that the information they got from it was only patchy, but it was better than nothing.
“Is it working?” Olivia asked.
“Yes. I’ll send you the report later.”
“Thank you. Can we make it twice daily, please.”
“Is something wrong?” Twice daily was more than normal.
“We weren’t expecting Diana to be in London, and Anya Brown has traveled down, too, which seems very soon after her arrival in St. Andrews. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Are they reacting to the attack on the lab?”
“It’s possible.”
“Doing something with the embroidery?”
She was deeply worried that the Fellowship of the Larks had hired Anya to work for them at the Institute, which everyone knew was a front for their hunt for The Book of Wonder.
Her worry went far deeper than just bitterness that the Fellowship of the Larks had outplayed them over the embroidery. Her fear was that they were closer to finding The Book of Wonder than she knew.
The thought that it could be sold tore a piece from her. It would be devastating to the Order of St. Katherine. The Book of Wonder was an indescribably important text. For the Order it had the status of a lost relic. It was the first link in a centuries-old chain of women working quietly and with dignity to help one another, for the good of society. It represented their ideological soul.
She couldn’t share her thoughts with Conchita. The Order had a strict hierarchy, and you didn’t share information down the ranks.
“I don’t know,” she said.
There was silence on the other end of the line, then Conchita asked, “Do you want me to do something more?”
“No. We’ll watch and wait for now. Thank you. You know how important you are to us, don’t you, Conchita?”
Conchita was an asset; she had a promising future with the Order.
“I don’t dress up as a cleaner for just anybody. Of course I know.”
She would also have to curb that tone if she was going to make a good marriage.
Diana
Diana sat at the desk in her hotel room in London. She was trying, and failing, to thread a needle. When she flubbed it for the fourth time, she swore in frustration.
Reading the article about the body had thrown her. The arson attack had thrown her. The lack of sleep was catching up with her. This was a difficult day, and it had barely started, though thank God for Henry. The hour she’d spent with him had passed far too quickly, but it had been perfect, and it would sustain her.
She tried with the needle one more time, and this time the thread slipped through its eye. She sighed with relief and laid it down on the desk, then unbuttoned her blouse and removed it, reached behind her to unclip her bra, and took that off, too. It had full cups, and she ran her fingers around one of them and examined it under the desk light. It had a thin, soft layer of padding. She took her nail scissors and, holding the bra even closer to the lamp, made some small snips until she’d opened up a few centimeters where the cup met the underwire.
She removed the embroidery from her bag. Wincing because she was afraid it would cause damage, she folded it a few times so that it was smaller than her bra cup. Luckily it wasn’t too bulky. She eased it into the cup, between the padding and the fabric that sat next to her skin, so that it wouldn’t show when she wore it. When she slipped the bra back on she could barely feel it was there. She looked in the mirror, turning this way and that. No one looking at her would ever guess it was in there.
She removed the bra again, picked up the threaded needle and, using tiny stitches in a technique her mother had taught her, she sewed up the gap she’d made as delicately and invisibly as possible. When she finished, she was pleased with what she’d done.
A lot had gone wrong in the last twenty-four hours. Two disasters already, and while Diana wasn’t superstitious, she couldn’t help thinking that bad luck is reputed to come in threes.
Sewing the embroidery into her underwear made her feel better. She was damned if she was going to take any more risks by having it anywhere other than right next to her skin.
She got dressed again. It was time to meet Anya Brown.
God help me, she thought as she left the hotel and stepped out into the city. I need this to go well.
Anya
I’d never woken up in Mayfair before, never drawn back the curtains to catch the sun rising on such valuable real estate, never looked down on so many sleek, expensive vehicles waiting to ferry sleek, expensive people to wherever they went every day. It was a very polished scene, topiary in heavy pots and chessboard-tiled walkways, impeccably groomed dogs and elegant wrought-iron railings.
I sent Sid a photo of the hotel’s sumptuous breakfast buffet. He sent one back of his mug of tea and bowl of cornflakes with a sad-face emoji.
While I was eating, Mum messaged me with another riddle, which made me smile, because it meant she wasn’t feeling too bad. It was a tough one.
Precious gown and wooden throne
Has ancient archetype outgrown.
By larvae of wasp and flock of sheep,
Where golden vine o’er poison creeps,
Six hands four feet make ten,
Among horned lady and horseless men.
I got the third line first. Wasp larvae caused oak galls to form on the trunks of oak trees. These growths were used to make the ink used in many medieval manuscripts. The vellum for a large manuscript often required the slaughter of one or more flocks of sheep or goats. A manuscript gave context to the first line: precious gown and wooden throne. The most expensive color to make was blue, implying this concerned a woman in a blue gown, seated on a wooden throne. I thought immediately of the Virgin Mary, but the second line brought that into question. Mary was a classic archetypal woman, not an evolved one.
The bottom three lines were a test of my memory. Because Mum was contrary, horseless men made me think of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, and I guessed that it meant there were four men in the image and one woman. “Horned” could relate to a hat or headpiece. I thought of those strange medieval hats that women wore. My memory whirred until I smiled. I had it.
The riddle was describing a manuscript illustration of Christine de Pizan, the first professional female author, fourteenth-century defender of women’s rights, and therefore smasher of archetypes. In the picture, she was seated on a wooden throne, teaching four men who looked displeased to be at the intellectual mercy of a woman. Only four feet were visible in the image—well, three and a half, if I was to be precise—and the hands of only three of the people had been painted, including Christine’s, which were, as I remembered, elegantly posed over the manuscript. She’d been an intellectual powerhouse, and here she was, both in a manuscript and teaching from one.
