The Book of Illumination (36 page)

Once again, I decided not to tell Sylvia.

Fortunately, I had even bigger news with which to change the subject.

“Declan thinks he’s found the book!” I announced abruptly. “He called me late last night.”

“Oh, my God!”

“I don’t have any details,” I lied, “but if all goes well, he thinks we’ll get it back over the weekend.”

“That’s so fantastic! Oh my God! I can’t believe it. That’s so great.”

“As for the plates,” I said, “there’s really no point in my being there. You’re the only one who can identify them.”

“But what’ll I do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe … pretend to be Dollfus’s partner. Do a really close inspection.”

“And then what?”

“Well, confront ‘Windsor Atlas’!”

“Me? I’m not going to confront him! What if he has a gun?”

“He won’t have a gun. Look, let me get Henry to school and I’ll meet you at the bindery. We can call Dec together and figure this out.”

There was silence on the other end. Then Sylvia said meekly, “I don’t know about this.”

“I’ll see you soon,” I said.

By three o’clock, it was all arranged. Declan was working until midnight, so he couldn’t freelance at the Charles, but he put in a call to a cop friend in Cambridge, a detective named Karl Bryson. To Sylvia’s relief, Bryson took it from there. Dollfus was instructed to reserve a suite at the Charles, one with two bedrooms and a living room.

When ‘Atlas’ arrived at the hotel suite, Bryson would be waiting in one of the bedrooms. When Dollfus answered the door, he’d introduce Sylvia as his colleague and business partner, and after some book chitchat, and maybe a drink, they’d turn their attention to the plates. Once Sylvia was satisfied that the plates were from our book, she would begin to cough and excuse herself to go into the bedroom—for a cough drop or a glass of water. Once she was safely inside the bedroom, Bryson would step out into the living room and Sylvia would lock herself in. Dollfus would duck into the second bedroom and lock himself in.

Bryson would then show his badge, identify himself as a Cambridge
detective, threaten the seller with immediate arrest, and take possession of the stolen plates.

“What if he won’t turn them over?” Sylvia had asked.

Declan had laughed. Bryson was big, Declan said. Actually, what he said was, “Bastard’s built like a brick shithouse.” And besides, if there was any trouble, well, Bryson would be carrying.

“But I thought you couldn’t arrest somebody if there wasn’t a report,” Sylvia said.

“Who told you that?” asked Dec.

“Me,” I admitted. It was more like a guilty little peep.

“Brilliant,” he muttered.

“Is this legal?” Sylvia asked.

There was a slight pause before Dec responded.

“Legal enough,” he said.

“H
E’S ALREADY HERE,”
I said quietly.

They couldn’t see him, of course. We were sitting in the living room of Finny’s house: Tad, Esther, Josie, and I. The space felt forlorn—dismantled and strangely hollow—but in a gesture I would never have predicted, Tad had proposed that we light a fire in the fireplace. As Esther and I had assembled chairs, and Josie had made a good faith, though futile, effort to reassemble parts of the boat model she had smashed in her fury, Tad had gone down to the basement and returned with an armful of wood.

All this time, Johnny was right there with us, his expression eager yet somehow subdued. It was not until the fire was crackling merrily and we had each settled into a chair that the nervous chatter gradually subsided.

“So,” Tad finally said. “How do we do this?”

I turned to Johnny. “Why don’t you sit down?” I suggested, motioning to the chair nearest the fire, which we had placed there for him.

“Woolsie!” said Esther, spinning around, trying to glimpse the shadow she would never be able to see. “Woolsie? Where are you?”

That’s when I said, “He’s already here. He’s sitting right there in that chair.”

“We miss you!” Josie cried, glancing in the direction of the chair. “You and Maimie! We all miss you so much! You were like … it was never the same after you …”She was already crying. Her words were coming out in little hiccups. She couldn’t bring herself to utter the word
died
.

Tad had grown very pale.

“Tell her it’s all right,” Johnny said. “Tell her I miss them, too.”

I relayed his message and Josie dissolved into little sobs.

“Josie,” Tad said. “Get ahold of yourself.” Esther stood up and went over to her sister. She sat on the arm of Josie’s armchair, but the fragile antique couldn’t bear her weight. It pulled right away from the body of the chair and Esther barely saved herself from landing on her somewhat ample bottom.

Johnny made a wry crack and I relayed it:

“You always
were
after more pudding. See where it got you?”

“I was not!” said Esther, stifling a grin as she inspected the damage to the chair. “Tell him it was only the butterscotch I loved! And only if Maimie had cream!”

The ghost of the butler was smiling now, and he seemed like a much younger man—or rather, the ghost of a much younger man. I had a sudden vision of what this house must have been like when the wallpaper was fresh and the draperies were bright and sturdy, when the adults now sitting before the fire were half their present size and were sliding down banisters, dressing up the dog, and begging for seconds of Maimie’s desserts.

Half an hour passed easily as first Esther, then Josie, then Tad slipped into the triangular rhythms of our conversation: they gradually began to address “Woolsie” directly, then he would respond and I would repeat his words to them. They seemed, this evening, like different people. Tad was shy and reserved, Esther
dealt with her feelings by making a lot of jokes, which were usually pretty lame, and Josie—well, Josie was basically an emotional mess, though tonight she wasn’t smashing boat models or picture glass. She just cried a lot.

I noticed as we chatted that they related to Johnny as polite children do to adults. There seemed to be a line they wouldn’t cross, confining their questions and reminiscences to episodes remembered from their own childhoods: the time Esther and Josie decided to paint the fourth-floor bathroom purple; the time Tad cut the hair off Josie’s Chatty Cathy doll. It happens this way sometimes. If a person was a child when the earthbound spirit left their lives, they feel like a child when he or she returns. They can’t or don’t want to make the adjustment for the years that have passed, and I can understand why. I think I would feel the same way if I ever met the ghost of my mother. I would long to be her child again, though I am myself now a mother and her equal in age.

“We found the deed,” I finally said, hoping to move the evening forward. “And you were right, it
was
in the book.”

Tad got up, crossed the room, and reached into a leather bag he had laid on a table. He retrieved the book, brought it over to us, and handed it to me expectantly.

I removed the deed from the book and held it up.

“Here it is,” I said. “Safe and sound.”

I would have handed it to Johnny, but he wouldn’t have been able to hold it. Instead, I pressed the folds of the paper open and laid it on the arm of his chair.

He was overcome with emotion as he gazed at the paper, so overcome that he didn’t say anything. One by one, the siblings turned to me, with questions in their eyes—What was he doing? What was going on? Wasn’t he happy?

“He’s overjoyed,” I said, and Johnny nodded.

“Why Wales?” Esther asked him. “There has to be a reason.”

“There is,” he said.

“You told some of it to me,” I said to Johnny. “But would you like to tell them?”

He nodded and began.

“Your mother, God rest her soul, was born in
1937.
Maimie and I, we had a little girl. Born just two months before your mum.”

“Woolsie!” Esther cried. “You never told us.”

He shook his head. “We couldn’t … speak of her.”

“Can you tell us now?” Josie asked gently.

The ghost nodded. “Her name was Gwennie. Gwendolyn Winifred Grady—Winifred after Maimie’s aunt Una.”

“Una,” said Tad. “I’ve heard of her. Wasn’t she a cook for Mummy’s family?”

“She was,” answered the butler. “It was Una who brought Maimie to work for your mother’s parents. I’d been working in the house for almost a year. That’s how we met. A year later, we were married.

“Anyway, you’ve heard me tell about the war—how your grandparents had Maimie and me take your mother to Brighton, during the evacuation.”

“And then to South Wales,” Tad continued.

“Right. See, we had a cottage on the water. A right little snug of a place. Four rooms—kitchen, sitting room, and two bedrooms. We were there for three years.”

“Three years?” said Esther. “I had no idea it was that long. I thought it was like … a month or two.”

“No. We stayed until just before the blitz on the Swansea Docks. Your grandfather, of course, was involved in the war effort and couldn’t leave London, but he arranged for our return. I suppose he could do things other people couldn’t, having the grand position and all. But only three of us came home.”

“What happened?” Josie finally asked.

“Gwennie … she was swept away by a wave. The girls were playing on the shore. It was a Sunday in June and Maimie had packed us a picnic. If you could call it that; there wasn’t much to be had in those days but what you could grow yourself. That day, I remember, we had brown bread and boiled potatoes and some jot—bacon bits and onion with scraps of wild rabbit.

“The sky was clouding over, but we didn’t give it a thought. It all happened so fast. Next minute we heard a bit of a rumble and the wind was getting cold, so we were packing up to head home. We think Gwennie had her eye on a bird. There was a flock of little grebes, young ones, all fluffed out on the water, and one of them flapped up and took flight. Gwennie ran right into the water, took a spill, and was pulled down and out by an undertow. Maimie started screaming and we both ran into the water. Neither of us was much of a swimmer, but we went right in after our baby. Thing was, we couldn’t see where she was—she was underwater. It held her there, the undertow did. Maimie ran back to care for your mum while I kept diving under the water, trying to see where Gwennie was. Other people came in, too, five or six men, I recall, and it was one of those men that finally found her. Not twenty-five feet from where I was. But it was—”

Johnny broke off.

“Too late,” said Josie sadly.

The ghost nodded. He paused to collect himself and then went on.

“We had to leave her there,” he said softly.

“Gwennie’s buried in Wales,” Tad said softly.

“She is.”

“And that’s why you bought a place there?” asked Esther.

The ghost nodded. “Right near the one your grandfather rented for us. We planned to settle there, Mairead and I, after you kids was up and out.”

“But she got cancer,” Josie said kindly. “And then you did.”

“I never could give up the smokes,” he answered. “Nerves, I s’pose. But I had to find that deed. That place is our only connection to Gwennie. It’s near the churchyard where we laid her.”

“And you own it?” I asked. “The house? Free and clear?”

“We do. We put everything we had into that place.”

“What would you like us to do with it?” I asked.

You would have thought, given all the years he spent trying to bring about this very moment, that he would have had a plan. But he didn’t.

“Well, I don’t rightly know,” he said.

Tad stood up. “Woolsie,” he said, “you will never know what you and Maimie meant to me and my sisters.” Astonishingly, he then had to stop talking. His voice was cracking.

“That’s right!” said Esther.

“It is,” cried Josie.

“Even more than my mother and father,” Tad continued, “you made this place a home. You taught us to count. Maimie made our birthday cakes. You fixed our bikes. Maimie knitted us sweaters. You didn’t tell my father when you caught me smoking—”

“And you didn’t tell Mummy,” Josie interrupted, “when you caught me climbing up the fire escape at two in the morning.”