Bristol House (33 page)

“Hebrew writing,” Annie said, and went on to the tale of Rabbi Cohen’s visit and what he had deciphered, and how they were trying to figure out the relevance to the Shalom Foundation of the years between the founding of Rome and the erection of the Arch of Titus.

“So that’s all?” Maggie said. “We haven’t talked for an entire forty-eight hours and nothing else happened? What have you been doing with yourselves?”

“There is one more thing,” Geoff said.

“Oh my God. Very well, Geoffrey, tell me.”

He explained about the initials
E.R.
occurring in the pattern of the letter
A
.

“So there’s a connection between the flat and the code,” Maggie said, her voice triumphant. “I knew there had to be.”

“Rabbi Cohen agrees,” Geoff said, “though he doesn’t think we’ve got it all figured out. And I think Stephen Fox’s real name is Étienne Renard. I can’t prove it yet, but I’m right.”

“When will you be able to prove it?” his mother asked.

“Soon. I’ve arranged for someone in Paris to look for corroboration.”

“Your friend the computer technician? Clary?”

Geoff shook his head. “No, he’s gone to Strasbourg. This is simply an ordinary investigating bureau I’ve used before.”

Maggie shrugged her elegant shoulders. “My son and his legions of drones, all busy ferreting out the world’s secrets.”

“Speaking of secrets,” Geoff said, “what’s the story behind the barred gates at the end of Southampton Row? In the middle of the junction between Theobald’s Road and Kingsway.”

“It has a connection with Rabbi Cohen,” Annie said. “He referred to the neighborhood as his old stomping ground.”

“The tunnels,” Maggie said quietly. “I think we’d better talk about something else.”

“C’mon,” Geoff said. “How many state secrets can you still know, Maggie? It’s been more than sixty bloody years.”

Maggie laughed and called for another cup of coffee. “Greek coffee, but my way,” she told the waiter, who smiled and asked what other way he would possibly consider.

“Her way,” Geoff told Annie, “is that they cover the bottom of the cup with half a teaspoon of coffee and top up with hot water. Tell us about the tunnels,” he said, turning back to his mother.

Maggie hesitated, then said, “You have a point. All these years—why not? There is a system of very deep, once-very-secret tunnels below some of the Holborn streets.”

Geoff sat up straighter. “Which Holborn streets?”

“I’m not sure. But I know you could get in from a spur off the Kingsway Tunnel. So during the war you could just take the tram and slip off at the right place in the dark and simply disappear. Poof. Down the rabbit hole, and no one the wiser.”

Annie knew her jaw was dropping. Geoff’s as well. Maggie took no notice of their astonishment. “There’s supposed to be another entrance from the basement of a building on Furnival Street. Possibly a third, but I don’t know where it is.”

Geoff reached for his iPhone. Seconds later he had conjured a Google Earth image of the area and handed the phone to Annie. “Note that a straightish line from Furnival Street to Theobald’s Road runs close to Bristol House,” he said. “Not as close to Orde Hall Street.”

“It is certainly not a straight line,” Maggie said, “and you’re never going to pinpoint the exact location with fancy technology. They started with an abandoned nineteenth-century tube line, so there was no reason to attract attention by breaking ground at street level. Also, the laborers were brought in from somewhere in Eastern Europe. People who didn’t speak English and didn’t know London.”

“My God—Maggie, you’re making this up. It’s right out of a book.”

“Annie darling, I swear, everything I’m telling you is true.”

“Let me guess,” Geoff said. “The secret tunnels turned out to be another incidence of government making a hash of it.”

“Not a bit of it.” Maggie sounded indignant. “The point was that they were beyond the reach of the Blitz, so a number of very dedicated people spent huge amounts of time down there. I know the spy stories and the movies make it seem easy. Take my word, it was not. There was a very long time when we really didn’t think we were going to win. Meanwhile the higher-ups were worried about the troglodytes working underground being overwhelmed by tension, and of course claustrophobia.” She smiled at her son. “You’ll appreciate this. They fixed them up with a five-a-side football pitch.”

“Five-a-side is a kind of soccer,” Geoff explained in a quick comment to Annie. “You can play indoors.”

“They also had a restaurant,” Maggie said. “With South Sea Island scenes painted into trompe l’oeil windows. Their own telephone exchange as well. What we used to call ‘all mod cons.’”

“A five-a-side pitch for the spooks,” Geoff said, apparently still fascinated by the notion of spying footballers. “You’re sure?”

“Yes. I remember Simon telling me about it. He worked there for a time before he came to Bletchley.”

“Did he play?”

Maggie shook her head. “I doubt it. Simon was never the athletic type. Not like your father as a young man.”

And having quashed any hint of dubious DNA, Maggie said she was tired and wanted to go home.

Giacomo the Lombard, known also as the Jew of Holborn

From the Waiting Place

In the late morning of a hot summer’s day, I stood beside the kiln forging a small portion of silver into a brooch to take into town to sell. It would make an opportunity to inquire as to the whereabouts of my daughter who, I would say, had allowed an excess of Christian charity to cause her to come into the city and nurse the sick. Doubtless my questions would lead me to a plague woman, who would attest to Rebecca having come down with the fever and died. Then I could mourn my daughter properly as was my duty, and I need tell Master Cromwell only that she was buried in a plague pit and put an end to the matter.

The scheme had been in my mind for some time, but it had become a matter of urgency. There had been no new cases of the fever in a fortnight, and it was rumored the king and his court were making preparations to return to Westminster. Thomas Cromwell would soon be again in London and would likely send immediately for the wench he intended to make the wife of the stinker—if for no other reason than to remind me of who between us held in all things the upper hand.

The heat of the kiln was nearly insufferable beneath the blazing sun, and when I turned from the anvil to wipe the sweat from my brow, I saw what I thought must be a vision from beyond the grave. Rebecca stood before me. I was speechless with astonishment.

“No word of greeting, Father? Are you not joyful to see me?”

“Are you come from the Semayim above the earth or Gehenna below?” I remember that I whispered the words and that my voice was hoarse with fear. Also that Rebecca laughed, but it was not a mirthful sound.

“Neither, I promise. I am alive, though I kissed every corpse I carried to the pit. See how the Creator of the Universe plays with me? I am not permitted even to choose my own death.”

She wore the black shroudlike garment she had put on three weeks before and carried the heavy black cloak with the hem that ends in four points to which bells are attached to warn of the approach of a plague woman. That and her shrewish tongue persuaded me it was the Rebecca I knew who spoke, not a ghost. “You blaspheme.” I spat upon the ground to wash the words from my mouth, though she had spoken them, not I. “And you smell almost as bad as your intended. Go and wash. Then bring me those terrible garments, and I will burn them.”

I was so astonished by her return, I stayed in my place beside the anvil, the smith’s hammer limp in my hand and the sheet of silver before me growing cooler and less malleable by the moment. Ten minutes later she appeared, carrying most of her plague clothes, though not the cloak, and wearing a shift made of undyed homespun. I had seen it many times, it being her ordinary dress, but I noted at once that the garment seemed to fit her more tightly than before she departed on her ghoulish errand. How could it be that she would spend over a month in the filthiest, most disease-ridden corners of London and return fatter than when she left, her cheeks pink with health and her eyes sparkling? It came to me most forcefully how ill prepared I was to understand this creature who defied not just me but, it seemed, the very laws of life. Perhaps, if her mother had lived . . . For my part, I saw no way to save her from the stinker while not dooming us both to the stake. Moreover, I knew that even such a torturous death would come for me only after I had been made to suffer such agonies as would cause me to betray the whereabouts of what remained of the patrimony of my people.

I did not speak my thoughts aloud, only picked up a long iron poker and lifted the latch on the door of the kiln and swung it open. Rebecca tossed the black garments onto the brick floor, and I slammed the door shut. The escaping heat sent us both staggering back, despite that having been prepared to fire silver, not gold, the blaze was not at its most intense. I added more charcoal and pushed open the dampers, encouraging a roaring flame. “They will be ashes in minutes,” I said. “Then we may both forget this madness. All will be as before.”

“I think not, Father.”

I sighed at the recurring defiance in her tone. “Have you learned nothing?”

“I have learned a great deal. It is you who are ignorant.”

I still had the poker in my hand, and I raised it as if to strike her. Rebecca stepped back out of my range, but she was not afraid. Indeed, she laughed that hollow laugh a second time. “You are a man,” she said, “so you do not see what to a woman’s eyes is immediately apparent. Look at me, Father.” Her voice rose when she spoke, and she cupped her hands under her breasts and lifted them and thrust them toward me as if she were a whore soliciting custom. “Look at my swollen teats. Do they not remind you of how my mother’s breasts looked after you had planted your seed in her belly and made me?”

For the second time that day, I was startled speechless. I dropped my arm and stood numb with terror.

“See,” she said, drawing the skirt of her dress tight behind her and flaunting her curved hips and rounded stomach, “do you not think the babe already makes its presence known?”

Her boastful tone told me she thought she could punish me without condemning us both to the Smithfield fires, but I knew better and my blood ran cold. “His?” I asked. “Are you telling me the cursed monk’s bastard is in your belly?”

“His,” she agreed, as coolly as if she did not know she brought news that signed our death warrants.

She did not ask how it was that I guessed the father of the child, and I wondered if she knew I had watched them the night he lay between her legs in the copse beside the river, but I set the thought aside in favor of others more urgent. I was swiftly making a plan to save us, but before I could speak of it, I heard a stranger’s voice. “Goldsmith,” a woman called. “I have come to give you a commission.”

Rebecca and I turned to the sound and saw the wife of Juryman the silk merchant in the clearing in front of our house. She sat on a donkey, and beside her stood an oafish servant carrying the drawing materials she took everywhere. The woman fancied herself an artist, though all who saw what came from her brush knew that to be a joke worthy of the best jester in the kingdom. “You made me this ring three years past,” she said, holding up her hand. “I would have another just like it for my daughter who is to be married.”

The Juryman woman spoke to me but looked at Rebecca, as did her servant, and his toothless grin told me all I needed to know. We had been overheard.

“Indeed, mistress.” My voice betrayed none of the fear I felt. “It would give me honor.”

Rebecca hurried away, and Mistress Juryman and I spent a quarter of an hour discussing the nature of the commission she proposed. (The ring was to be exactly as the one I had made for her before, but at the same time entirely different. Such being the usual manner of all rich customers of my experience.) In the end she gave me some coins that represented half the agreed price and rode away.

It had been in my mind to tell Rebecca we must go at once to Drury Lane in the town and find the woman known to make a drink that would force her to expel the child from her body. Now it was too late for such a remedy to save us. Mistress Clare Juryman, for all her foolish pretensions to artistry, was the wife of an important man in London. Like others of his station, he gathered information and used it to his advantage. His wife was sure to be his helpmeet in this regard.

Whether the silk merchant knew I was associated with Master Cromwell, or that Master Cromwell might find interesting what Juryman’s wife had overheard, did not matter. If Rebecca was to marry the stinker, they must do so in a Christian church. The banns would of necessity be posted, and being as the odiferous Timothy Faircross was connected to the court, all the city would take note of them. Juryman would swiftly know whose favor he might curry by sharing knowledge of a bastard child in the belly of the bride-to-be.

I went inside. Rebecca sat beside the cold fire, not having bestirred herself to poke the embers into enough life to allow her to cook me a meal. Her body was bent forward in such a way as to make it apparent she was thinking the same grim thoughts that tormented me.

I grabbed the hair of her head and forced her to look me in the face. “Whore,” I said. “Jezebel. Do you see now what you have brought us to?” Once more her mother’s voice echoed in my mind and I fancied she was pleading on the girl’s behalf. I ignored such thoughts and sent my fist crashing to her mouth, and though her lip immediately poured blood, it gave me no relief and no satisfaction. I let her go and dropped Mistress Juryman’s coins on the floor in front of her, for they seemed to me tainted with such evil as to be things of terrible foreboding.