“Help me,” said Helen. And she lowered her cane to the floor, braced herself with surreal slowness against one of the boxes, and began to push.
He caught her just as she lost balance. Her weight was less than he expected, her body somehow hollow under the padded shoulders of her blazer.
He helped her to a crate, where she sat beneath the patterned light from the window and wordlessly waved him on. Then he knelt and put his shoulder to the boxes, sliding them easily away from the wall. Two boxes, three, four.
There, set in the lowest row of panels, was a small round keyhole.
Helen’s heavy breath came from right behind his ear.
“Open it,” she said.
He cast about for a moment, hoping for a tool better suited to the task, but when nothing offered itself he pulled his army knife from his pocket, and unfolded it. “This’ll splinter the wood,” he whispered. “Shouldn’t we ask Bridgette’s permission?”
“Are you joking?” Helen shot back. “We’ll ask her forgiveness. Ian’s, actually.”
He jimmied the narrowest blade into the hole, gingerly at first. No luck. It would require force. He could feel Helen watching him. As he worked, small chips spat from the brittle wood. The panel splintered loudly once, then again, a visible crack opening this time; two small spars broke from the surface, one piercing the skin of Aaron’s wrist. But he’d gotten the blade through to some inner mechanism, and he worked it blindly until the hidden catch gave.
It took a few tries to slide the panel—it kept sticking; the wooden groove it was meant to slide on was either obstructed or warped. Finally the opening was wide enough. Aaron reached blindly into the space.
His palm swept a dry wooden floor about eighteen inches deep—then his fingers jammed against the cupboard’s back panel. Seated on the floor with his body turned sideways, he plunged shoulder-deep into the narrow opening so as to reach the far corners. Carefully he slid his hand around the space.
The floor was bare. Had this panel, unlike the other, been discovered and emptied some time during the house’s long history? But wouldn’t there have been a record of the documents’ discovery?
Not if they’d been found by the 1698 owners. A stranger’s three-centuries-old leavings might be expected to have value, yes—but ten-year-old documents were mere trash.
He swept the space again, this time climbing the panel’s back wall with his hand. His fingertips found an edge. Pressing himself as deeply into the space as he could, he felt its outlines. His fingers traced a rec-tangle—a thin item laid flush against the far panel, made of some material more resilient than the wood. Leather? He pulled at the upper edge, expecting it to refuse him: the wrong knight attempting to pull the sword from the stone. But it tipped forward easily into his hand.
He angled it out of the compartment—a slim, stiff leather folio, brown and dry and finely cracked in places. Cradling it carefully, he slumped back against a box, his body quaking as though he’d just run a marathon.
Helen was at his shoulder. He stood, then settled beside her on a box so their shoulders touched. Laying the folio gently across his knees and hers, he opened it. Inside, forty or more loose sheets of unmatched paper. The handwriting varied, as did the languages. English and Latin, one in French, the next in Dutch. Carefully Aaron turned the sheets. There was some ghosting where one document had lain against another, and one of the letters had halos of rich brown burn-through, but the paper was intact.
With a wavering hand, Helen took a page of Latin. Slowly she turned it over, adjusted her glasses, and brought it to her eyes. After a moment Aaron laid a hand on hers to steady it. She started at the touch, then nodded. They held the page together as she read, and after a moment he heard her breathe a faint, stunned “Oh.” But before he could ask why, a sound that had registered only on the periphery of his senses cohered into the approaching rap of heels on the floor, and Bridgette was swinging wide the door of the closet.
In one triumphant glance she took in the army knife lying on the floor, the splintered wall panel, the dark gaping space behind it. Moving between boxes with shocking speed, she seized the folio from their knees, whipping the page from between Helen’s fingers with a flick of her wrist.
“That’s fragile!” Aaron said.
Ignoring him, she slapped the loose page back into the folio and turned on Helen. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I understand your concern,” said Helen. She spoke in the steady tones of a professor calming an overwrought student—but Aaron felt her knee tremble against his. “Our plan,” continued Helen, “has been to come find you to discuss these documents once we retrieved them. But I’ll confess I don’t move as quickly as I once did. And, naturally, we needed to check the documents so as to be able to tell you whether what we’d found was more seventeenth-century paper, or simply a cache of fifty-year-old Vespa Girl calendars.”
“That”—Bridgette pointed at the wall—“is destruction of property, do you realize that? That’s in fact a crime.”
He couldn’t but admire Helen’s outward calm as she continued speaking. “Our visit here is purely scholarly. If, in our enthusiasm, we’ve misstepped, you have my apology. And I can assure you that Mr. Levy is acting here only upon my direction, and the responsibility for our doings here lies with me.” Helen raised her head to look directly at Bridgette, and the shadows from the mullioned window sectioned the weathered planes of her face. “As you can see,” she said quietly, spreading both hands before her and raising them toward Bridgette, “I require some assistance.”
For an instant, Bridgette looked mesmerized. But Aaron wrenched his gaze from Helen’s quaking hands to her face. Some safety catch within her had been released. He no longer felt certain of what she would or wouldn’t do.
Bridgette blinked. “Get out,” she said.
Slowly, Helen stood. Aaron resisted the urge to help her. He could see that Helen wanted Bridgette to notice her frailty. “I do apologize for disturbing you,” she said. “I’ll certainly pay to repair the panel. And”—casually, as though it were an afterthought—“I’d like to offer to buy that folio of papers from you.”
“No, thank you,” Bridgette enunciated. “I understand Sotheby’s is paying rather well these days.”
“Of course. Only, as you know now through exasperating experience, that brings in unnecessary formalities and delays. Perhaps we shan’t need to involve Sotheby’s this time, or the university. I can certainly imagine you’d be out of patience with our prolonged scholarly processes.”
“I’ll tolerate scholarly processes for ten thousand pounds.”
Aaron knew he should remain silent, but couldn’t help himself. “Ten thousand for just a few pages? The other collection was one hundred and seventy-three separate documents. This might be forty.”
But Helen was speaking over him. “I’ll pay you ten thousand.”
Bridgette laughed aloud. “You mean your department will? But this time I’ve a mind to double the fee. I didn’t much like how your Jonathan Martin treated us last time. He’s a smarmy bastard, that one.”
Leaning heavily on her cane, Helen raised her head. “All right. Double it. I’ll pay it myself. We’re not going to involve the department this time.”
Until this moment, he’d assumed Helen was bluffing.