Twenty minutes later she’d parked her car in Richmond and was walking up a half-sunken stone path, her steps slowing as she caught her first sight of the house. Ian Easton had said over the phone that the building was from the late seventeenth century, yes, but Helen had until this moment thought the claim unlikely—there were few original seventeenth-century houses in this area, most fastidiously preserved and documented down to the last weathered brick.
But there could be no doubt that this house was of that era. Looming in the chill afternoon light, it was so unlike its neighbors it seemed huddled in silent conversation with itself. The ornamented eaves, the inset stone carvings midway up the fa?ade of soft-cornered bricks, even the small rounded stones of the path to its heavy front door—all were unmistakable. This house’s design was an obvious echo of the few remaining seventeenth-century manor houses of the area, though not on their palatial scale. Still, here was a structure clearly built in that same age by someone with considerable wealth and social aspirations. It was easy to see, too, why this building lacked the status and renown of some of its contemporaries. Whatever grandeur it had possessed in the seventeenth century, the house had clearly been brought half to its knees by neglect—and, worse, by bits of slapdash modernization: an incongruous addition to the left of the main entry, more Victorian than English Baroque; a length of degraded aluminum gutter laid amid the slate, presumably to manage a long-ago leak; telephone and power wires blizzarding the house, slicing across the strict lines of the mullioned windows.
She approached the door, her cane slipping on the irregular stones. Her breath was uneven from the unaccustomed exertion—she slowed to calm it. On a narrow window beside the door, a reflection of her own bent figure. As she leaned closer, it rippled as though on the dark surface of a stream: a pale, aging professor in her outdated suit. Tilted to one side, leaning on her cane.
She set one hand, tentatively, on the cool brick beside the window. Like a common housebreaker, then, Helen Watt leaned in. Her breath fogged the glass, but as it cleared she was able to make out the dim atrium, at first faintly but then in greater detail. She drew a sharp breath. Wooden cherubs lined the lintel above an interior doorway. More like them wreathed the top of the great room’s dim hearth. The very same cherubs adorned half the seventeenth-century manors and palaces still extant in Surrey, though the name of the master carver whose calling card they’d been was lost to history.
Straightening, she took the cold iron knocker in her hand. Both—the smooth weighty metal and her thin quaking hand—were impervious to the sunlight that fell profligate over everything: the door, the marble threshold, the sleeves of her wool coat. The knocker’s blows reverberated dully through the thick door and died. And in the silence—the unmistakable silence of an old house—she felt, for just an instant, the old feeling: the impossible ache of standing so close to a piece of history. A feeling like something dropping endlessly inside her—like being in the presence of a long-ago lover who had once known her every inch, but now refused to acknowledge her.
A tall, well-coiffed blond man opened the door. “Professor Watt. We appreciate this more than we can express, truly”—Ian Easton’s strained greeting echoed in the dim cavernous entry as he gestured her inside, but she hardly heard him. Heavy wood carvings, a towering ceiling framed by a balcony that looked down from the house’s third story, rows of boxed artwork resting on the stone floor. The smell of fresh paint.
Ian was talking, his brow furrowed. “I was your student ages ago, naturally you won’t remember me.” He was at least well-mannered enough to spare her the necessity of saying as much. He led her forward into the atrium, slowing his gait to match hers. “I’m so sorry we’ve had to trouble you, surely you have more important things to do with your time.”
She stopped walking. Above her the broad lintel loomed, the carved cherubs arrayed like sentinels.
Ian stopped beside her, though after a respectful pause he continued his explanation. Of course when he’d seen what he thought was Hebrew lettering he’d recalled her expertise in the area. Really, if she could offer some suggestion as to what to do with the papers he’d be tremendously grateful, because—
Even under a thin coating of dust, the cherubs’ smooth faces shone with expressions of childish wisdom.
Ian was speaking, but the house was speaking louder—the house was nearly deafening her. It struck Helen that there was a chance it might matter very much indeed how she got along with her former student.
She forced herself to bring her attention to bear on the casually but carefully dressed man stooping to address her as though still anxious to earn his professor’s approval.
“The thing is,” he was saying, “we’ve already had such a hard time getting permits. At this point, any further delay . . .”
Under Helen’s sudden scrutiny, Ian faltered. Leaving the rest unspoken, he led her toward the grand staircase. She had time to take in an abundance of burnished wood, the heavy banisters and side panels ornamented at every step, and more elaborate carvings ascending the walls where the staircase turned and rose toward the second floor—but Ian led her past the stair, around its base, to a plain paneled area facing away from the entrance.
There, on a small card table beside the window, was a single cracked leather-bound volume. Beside it lay the two pages Ian had told her about over the phone: the first items his electrician had removed from under the staircase upon discovering the documents.
For an instant she allowed herself to stare at the pages, taking in the thick textured paper she dared not touch; then at the counterpoint of two alphabets on the page—the Portuguese lettering that led from left to right, interrupted by scattered Hebrew phrases that ran in the reverse direction.
Slowly she read, and reread.
Ian’s voice, coming from just behind her. “Over there,” he said, and pointed.
She lifted her eyes. There, in a dim corner at the base of the staircase, untouched by the blinding light of the landing’s windows, was a small panel that had been forced open.
Ignoring Ian’s tentative offer of help, Helen approached the opening. Lowering herself slowly to the floor, her cane trembling heavily under her weight, she knelt before it like a penitent.
She stayed that way for a long time, her hands pressed to the cool floor, and a great heaviness nearly overcame her, as though all her years had suddenly taken on physical weight. For a long while she simply stared at the crammed shelves, breathing very quietly. Then finally, knowing she should not, she lifted a quaking hand to remove a single page.
A moment only. The page, astonishingly, rested unharmed on her two outspread palms, like a bird that had agreed, for just this moment, to alight there.
“You’re here!” said a ringing voice. A tall, slim woman clicked across the stone floor.
“My wife, Bridgette,” Ian said.
Helen forced herself to rise and shake the smooth ringed hand Bridgette Easton offered.
They led her from the staircase to a small high-ceilinged room off the house’s drafty entryway, Ian disappearing momentarily and returning with a teapot. They settled across from her at a thick wooden table beneath the room’s three sun-struck windows—each nearly as tall as a man, with ancient uneven glass that turned the shallow walled yard beyond into a bright impressionist landscape, dazzling Helen’s vision.
“Of course,” Ian began, “we want to do the right thing.”
Slowly Helen nodded.
“But we hadn’t counted on this obstacle. Not after all those we’ve already tolerated.”
There was a brief and uncomfortable silence—long enough for Helen to study the Eastons in earnest. Ian and Bridgette. Two heads of blond hair, the wife’s combed and falling in a straight line to her shoulders, the husband’s thinning and fine. Ian and Bridgette Easton: dressed in chic professional attire, thirty-something, faint lines about their still-young mouths and eyes. Blinking at the smells of fresh paint and sawdust, their backs to the doorway through which the dark carved staircase was just barely visible.