The Book of Illumination (11 page)

“What would this guy do?” Sylvia asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe he’d put the word out that he’d been contacted by somebody, a person who knew that the manuscript had been stolen and would pay a lot of money to get it. But I’m just guessing. Dec didn’t get into that.”

Suddenly Sylvia’s expression brightened and she half stood up. She was blocked in by the table, though, so she quickly sat back down. A man I took to be Sam was approaching us, and he seemed to have brought a friend.

“Good morning,” Sam said cheerfully.

It was afternoon, but never mind.

“You’re looking lovely, as usual,” he went on, kissing Sylvia on the cheek. “
This,”
he said, emphasizing the word in a way that held a meaning I didn’t understand, “is Julian Rowan.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Pleasure,” he responded.

“Sylvia Cremaldi,” Sylvia said, extending her hand. “And this is my friend Anza O’Malley. She’s … doing some work with me at the Athenaeum.”

The name
Julian Rowan
sounded familiar, but I couldn’t recall from where. He was tall and about my age, with hair the color of wet hay and paws big enough to palm a basketball, and he was wearing a long silk scarf that had fluttered in his wake, like overly feminine aftershave. Sam, on the other hand, brought to mind the kindly, distracted professors who made up my college’s English department, daffy devotees of Milton and Chaucer and bow ties and Scotch.

Julian folded himself into a chair and Sam squeezed in beside Sylvia.

“Julian’s here from London for the fall semester,” Sam explained.

“Teaching at Boston College,” Julian went on.

“And …?”Sam urged, like a parent prompting a child to add “please” to the end of a sentence.

“And collaborating on a book with a professor at Harvard.”

“Wow!” I said. “You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“Indeed,” Julian said. “I thought I’d be exploring the Berkshires and popping off to Martha’s Vineyard—or ‘the Vineyard,’ as they say—but …” He trailed off, shrugging. “Not so far.”

“Julian’s collaborator, Rory Concannon, is an old friend of mine,” Sam offered. “He’s brilliant, but also a little—”

“Crazy?” Julian offered.

“Well, I was going to say eccentric, or unconventional.”

Rory Concannon
, I thought. Another familiar name. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I remember where I’d heard these names? Was I getting early-onset Alzheimer’s?

“No,” Julian said. “He
is
crazy, but in the best possible way.”

It slowly came back to me as we ordered our lunches and chatted about Professor Concannon and Julian’s work. Julian was one of the two people with whom James Wescott, whose letter Sylvia had just received and whom we had apparently missed in Cambridge, had conferred with about what I now thought of as “our” manuscript.

Julian and a Dr. Something-or-Other, a woman whose name I (naturally) couldn’t recall, had agreed with Wescott that there was no such thing as a Book of Kildare. All three believed that the “lost” manuscript was actually the Book of Kells, which had simply been
seen
by Gerald of Wales
in
Kildare and had been safe for centuries in the library at Trinity College, Dublin.

As for Professor Concannon, I suspected I would like him. He couldn’t be that crazy if he was a Harvard professor with a book
contract, though I suppose there are people who would disagree with that. With a name like Concannon, he was probably also Irish, another check mark in my plus column. In her letter to Finny and Sylvia, Paola Moretti had implored them to take the manuscript to Concannon. This all added up to my feeling that he was probably one of the good guys.

I took a sip of Christmas Past and tried to get my head around all of this. Sylvia had read the letters to Sam over the phone. This I knew. Sam happened to know that one of the people mentioned in one of the letters—James Wescott’s—was here in town. Okay, fair enough. But for Julian to be working on a book with someone we had heard of from an entirely different source: For me, this strained probability. More puzzlingly, at least on the subject of
our
manuscript, Julian Rowan and Rory Concannon would radically disagree.

This seemed … too connected somehow. Was it all a coincidence? An act of otherworldly engineering? A week ago, I hadn’t heard of Julian Rowan or Rory Concannon or Sam or Wescott. But it now appeared that they all knew one another. Was it like that phenomenon in which you are introduced to someone you’ve never met before and you then start seeing them every time you turn around?

“Let me just ask a question,” I said. People looked up from their salads and plates of falafel and couscous.

“How do you guys all know each other? Sam, did you know every person mentioned in those two letters?”

“Oh, no,” Sam said. “I don’t know Susan McCasson, though I
do
know the person she replaced. But James Wescott was at the National Gallery when I worked at the Library of Congress. And, let’s see, I met Rory when he had a Mellon Fellowship at Notre Dame, and he came to the Athenaeum to do research for a couple of weeks.”

“And I had a Mellon three years later,” Julian explained. “My research overlapped with Rory’s, so when I went back to London, we stayed in touch.”

“When he was at Stanford?” Sam asked Julian.

“No, before that.”

“Oh, right, he had that appointment at the Beinecke. I forgot about that. How long was that for?” Sam asked. “Just a year,” Julian responded. “And then he came to Harvard,” Sam said.

“Right.”

They both nodded and smiled. Okay, I got it. The world isn’t exactly overrun with people who are fanatical about rare manuscripts, and when you live in a place like Boston, or Cambridge, many of the roads pass through here. I suppose if you were the tuba player for the Boston Symphony, you might have at least a passing relationship with the tuba players at the Metropolitan Opera and in the New York Philharmonic.

“Did you see James Wescott at the conference?” Sylvia asked.

“He was at the opening dinner at the faculty club,” Sam said. “But he hasn’t been around for a day or two.”

“He mentioned going to Vermont,” I said.

“That’s right,” Sam responded, “he did. He just made the trip as a courtesy to Annabel Barnes, who’s been very good to the British Library. This collection belonged to her late husband, who went to Harvard, which is why it ended up here. But James is keeping an eye on an important benefactor, as he should. They’ve got a capital campaign coming up.”

Over dessert and coffee, we brought Sam and Julian up to date on the robbery of the manuscript, and on Declan’s preliminary investigation. We made it sound as though the entire Boston Police Department was on the case. Which I suppose they actually were, though informally. At least for two more days.

Julian confirmed that he did, in fact, doubt the existence of a so-called Book of Kildare. But there was no question that Sylvia had been in possession of an important text. He was happy to enlist the services of his colleagues at the RFIM to help figure out what it was and what ought to be done with it.

“But first we have to find it,” Sylvia said glumly.

“Yes,” said Julian.

A gloomy silence descended over the table.

“Who even knew that you had it?” Sam asked.

“No one,” Sylvia said glumly.

“Someone must have known,” Sam pressed.

“Or else they just got lucky,” Julian offered. “What else did they take?”

“Nothing.”

“Hmmm,” Julian said, glancing at Sam. “That’s …odd.”

“I’m such an idiot,” Sylvia said, to no one in particular. “I can’t believe I let this happen.”

We all traded glances. Finally Sam spoke.

“Now, now, dear. You made a promise to someone you loved. You were only trying to keep it.”

I did not expect to spend Saturday evening with Julian Rowan. The phone rang at about five, just as I was about to sit down and face the sorry state of my financial empire, which I try to do as infrequently as possible. We always get by, and I know I could borrow money from Dad, or even Joe or Jay, if I had to, but so far I haven’t had to.

Declan and I keep things simple. Henry’s covered on Dec’s health insurance, which is a godsend, and rather than my asking Dec to pay child support, we agreed at the beginning that he would start a college fund for Henry. He puts money into it every
week, saving me eighteen years of that particular anxiety. So far, I’ve been able to handle everything else.

I didn’t recognize the number that came up on my phone.

“Hello?”

“Anza? This is Julian.”

When I didn’t respond immediately, he went on.

“Julian Rowan. We met earlier.”

“Oh, hi, Julian. Sure. How are you?”

“Very well, thanks, and you?”

“Great,” I said.

Either he’d been gearing himself up for the past hour, or British art historians are among the more direct men on the planet.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you happen to be free this evening?”

I used to be the kind of person who felt that if you didn’t have an actual conflict, you were obliged to say yes to anything anyone invited you to do. Nat cured me of that. She pointed out, like a wise and sophisticated aunt, that it was okay to have plans with yourself. To do nothing.

Much to my surprise, though, I realized that, at least tonight, I would prefer Julian’s company to my own. I also liked the fact that he hadn’t prefaced his question with an awkward inquiry about my current romantic status.

“Yes,” I answered, just as directly. “I am.”

Which is how I came to be seated next to him at the Brattle Theatre, watching what turned out to be a painfully unfunny French movie about four friends who share a huge, gorgeous apartment in Paris that they could not possibly afford on their incomes. For example, one of the women was a beautician who did the hair and makeup of dead people for their funerals. There were a lot of bad jokes about making corpses look peaceful. I gave up on the plot, what there was of one, about a third of the
way in, just as they all piled into a teeny Renault to go for Sunday dinner in the country with one of their families. Once movies get to Sunday in the country with a French family, they’re all the same, anyway.

I tried not to be acutely conscious that Julian’s leg, which was far too long for the shallow space in front of our seats, had drifted to the left and was leaning against mine. I doubted he was aware of it, but if I pulled my leg away suddenly, not only would he realize he’d been leaning on me, but he might think I was annoyed about this, which I most certainly was not. But the warmth of his calf kept my mind on one of the other particulars of his nearness: a faint scent of shaving cream, mixed with warm, wet wool. It had been raining when he met me in front of the theater, and though he had an umbrella, his gray heather jacket must have gotten damp.

Since I couldn’t stay focused on the movie and couldn’t stop focusing on our legs touching and Julian smelling, uh, nice, in kind of a farmy way, I tried to put my mind to work on the problem of the ghostly butler, John Grady. Why, I asked myself, did I keep not mentioning him to Sylvia? I could have told her about the lonely old ghost’s appearance right after we left the house on Commonwealth Avenue. I could have mentioned him at any point in the past few days. It would be far easier to gain access to the house with Sylvia’s help than to engineer a way of doing so on my own, but for some reason, I didn’t want her in on it. Even pulling this puzzle to the front of my mind and asking myself the question directly—
Why don’t you want Sylvia to know about your encounter with the ghost of John Grady?
—I was left with little more than,
I don’t know. I just don’t
.

So how was I going to get into the house? I would have to lie, which, fortunately, I happen to be pretty good at. I’m not proud of this, but it’s a useful skill. I had been invited to have Sunday
dinner tomorrow in the North End with Nat and her family, so I would be going into Boston. Maybe I could take the bus to Commonwealth at eleven or twelve and just stroll on down toward the Public Garden. See if it looked as though anyone were home at the Winslow manse, maybe have a ramble down the back alley that ran the length of the block, behind the houses.

I could even ring the bell; if anyone was there on a Sunday morning, it would probably be Mrs. Martin. She’d certainly remember me, and I could tell her that I thought I had lost an earring when I was there with Sylvia. If an earring didn’t turn up after a few minutes of our retracing my footsteps, then we would both conclude that I’d lost the earring somewhere else.

Before leaving, I could ask to use the upstairs bathroom, hoping that John Grady would appear to me as he had earlier in the week. And if it ever got back to Sylvia that I’d stopped by on my own, I’d just explain that I was on my way to a dinner (true) in the neighborhood (sort of true) and on the spur of the moment (not) I had decided to pop in.

My attention was drawn to the image on the screen: an argument was breaking out in the backseat of the Renault, where the funeral-parlor beautician was lighting the next in a continuous chain of cigarettes, much to the annoyance of the roommate squeezed in beside her. From the way they were bickering, you just knew they were going to fall in love by the end of the movie. I was really hoping there wouldn’t be a lot of steamy sex at the country house. There’s nothing more embarrassing than watching sex in a movie with someone you barely know sitting beside you.