Jack continued, ‘The stone wasn’t there. I’m sorry.’
‘I told you when we met, Mr Rolands, that if the list of sites didn’t yield results then I’d advise you of plan B.’
‘You didn’t say anything about breaking into a museum.’
‘This is a matter of great urgency to me. As you know, I’d have gone myself if my condition didn’t prevent my flying.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, but—’
‘I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that I only pay the second half of your fee if you deliver.’
‘All the same …’
‘I will be emailing you with further instructions.’
‘And I’ll go in on Saturday, when the place is open, and have a look around. Not before.’
She did not end the call happily, but Jack was unmoved. He is an unflappable sort of person. Which is a fine quality, yet one that makes me inexplicably eager to cause him to flap. Just a little. I have developed a rather perverse streak, I fear; no doubt a consequence of boredom and its miserable twin, frustration. A consequence of knowing Edward, too, for whom ebullience was beauty, and whose ethos was so passionately defended that it was impossible not to be moved.
I was overcome with great agitation after the phone call. As Jack took out his camera and began transferring images onto his computer, I retreated, alone, to the warm corner where the staircase makes its turn, to consider what it all means.
In some ways the cause of my perturbation was clear. The mention of Ada Lovegrove after so long was startling. It brought with it a host of memories; also questions. There was a logic to Ada’s association with the Blue; the timing, however, was a mystery. Why now, more than one hundred years since she spent her brief time in this house?
But there was another layer to my distress, too. Less apparent. More personal. Unrelated to Ada. It stemmed, I realised, from Jack’s refusal to do as Rosalind Wheeler had asked of him. Not for Mrs Wheeler’s sake; my turbulence was caused by the recognition that as far as Jack is concerned, he has finished the task that he was sent here to perform. It is unrelated to the two little girls in the photograph, with whom he has an ongoing interest, and so he intends to leave.
I do not want him to leave.
On the contrary, I want very much for him to stay; to come inside my house. Not on Saturday with all of the others, but by himself, alone.
It is my house, after all, not theirs. More than that, it is my home. I let them use it, grudgingly, because their purpose is a tribute to Edward, who deserved so much better than what he got. But it is mine and I will have my visitors if I wish.
It has been a long time since I’ve had one of my own.
And so I have come back downstairs and into the old caretaker’s accommodation where Jack and I are sitting together now – he in quiet contemplation of his photographs, I in unquiet contemplation of him.
He looks from one image to the next and I watch the minute changes in his features. All is quiet; all is still. I can hear my clock ticking from inside the house, the clock that Edward gave me just before we came here that summer. ‘I will love you for all time,’ he promised, on the evening we decided where to hang it.
There is a door on the wall behind Jack that leads into the kitchen of the house. Within the kitchen is the narrow entrance to the smaller set of stairs that winds up to the first floor. There is a window ledge midway up, just wide enough for a woman to rest. I remember a day in July, the scented air that brushed through the panes to caress my bare neck; Edward’s sleeves pushed halfway up his forearms; the back of his hand grazing my cheek—
Jack has stopped typing. He is sitting very still, as if trying to hear a distant melody. After a moment he returns his attention to his screen.
I remember the way Edward’s eyes searched mine; the way my heart beat fast beneath my breast; the words he whispered in my ear, his warm breath on my skin—
Jack stops again and glances at the door on the wall behind him.
Suddenly, I understand. I move closer.
Come inside, I whisper.
He is frowning slightly now; his elbow is on the table, his chin on his fist. He is staring at the door.
Come inside my house.
He goes to stand right by the door now, resting the palm of one hand flat upon its surface. His expression is perplexed, in the manner of one trying to understand an arithmetical problem that has delivered an unexpected solution.
I am immediately beside him.
Open the door …
But he doesn’t. He is going. He is leaving the room.
I follow, willing him to return, but instead he goes to the old suitcase that holds his clothing, digging about until he produces a small black tool kit. He stands, looking down at the object, jostling it slightly as if to guess its weight. He is weighing up more than the kit, I realise, for finally, with a set of resolution to his jaw, he turns around.
He is coming!
There is an alarm on one side of the door, installed by the Association after it proved difficult to keep a caretaker, which is set like clockwork every Saturday afternoon when the museum closes for the week. I watch avidly as somehow, with a tool extracted from that kit of his, he manages to circumvent it. He then proceeds to pick the lock of the door with so little fuss that I think at once of the Captain, who would have been most impressed. The door pushes open and before I know it, Jack has crossed the threshold.
It is dark inside my house and he has not brought a torch; the only light is of the moon, spilling silver through the windows. He walks across the kitchen and into the hallway, where he stops. He makes a slow, considering turn. And then he starts up the stairs, climbing all the way to the top, the attic, where once again he stands still.
And then he retraces his path and returns to the malt house.
I would have liked for him to stay, to see more. But my mood is tempered by the thoughtful expression on his face as he leaves. I have a feeling, born of long experience, that he will return. People tend to, once I take an interest.
And so, I let him go, and I remain alone in the dark of my house as he bolts the door again from the other side.
I have always found much to admire in a man who knows how to pick a lock. And a woman, for that matter. Blame it on my upbringing: Mrs Mack, who knew a lot about life and even more about business, used to say that wherever one came across a lock, it was wise to assume that there was something on the other side one ought to see. I was never a picker of locks myself, though, not officially. Mrs Mack ran a far more complex enterprise than that and believed that diversification was key; or, as she preferred to put it, in words that might have been etched upon her headstone, there was more than one way to skin a cat.
I was a good thief. As Mrs Mack had foreseen, it was the perfect sleight of hand: people expected dirty street urchins to steal and were on guard should such a child enter the frame. But clean little girls in pretty dresses, with copper ringlets sitting on their shoulders, were above suspicion. My arrival in her house allowed Mrs Mack’s enterprise to push beyond the bounds of Leicester Square, into Mayfair in the west and Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Bloomsbury in the north.
Such expansion had the Captain rubbing his hands together with glee: ‘That’s where all the men of worth are,’ he would say, ‘their pockets overflowing with spoils ripe for the picking.’