Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Colum: Thanks for the Lila Dubois book recs.
Franco:
X avier studied Colum as Colum studied the house. Colum’s face spoke more than he did, though he’d been quite loquacious the past few days.
They’d fucked him into talking.
“Does Mary Balcombe have children?” Colum asked in a voice that wobbled a little.
Xavier looked at Annie and raised a brow.
“Yes,” Annie said slowly, touching Colum’s arm as she tipped her face up to him in concern. “You know that. We went over everything we know about her in the two-hour car ride here. Why? What’s wrong?”
Colum made a sound that might have been a whimper.
Xavier studied the house they’d parked in front of, trying to figure out why Colum was acting this way. The white one-story house had a large front garden, the plot edged by tall hedges. Beyond the hedges were fields with black-and-white cows on one side, fat cream-colored sheep on the other.
“An Irish mammy,” Colum muttered. “Jaysus, love and protect us.”
Annie’s gaze sharpened.
“Colum, are we in danger?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Xavier looked over his shoulder to confirm their security detail was still nearby, attempting to blend into the neighborhood, which was hard enough, given their rural location. They were currently pretending to change a flat tire.
Annie’s hand slid toward the small of her back. Did she have a knife there?
“No,” Colum said, running his hand through his hair. “No, sorry, sorry. I’m just being daft. Er…” Colum glanced between Xavier and Annie. “Annie, you go first.”
“Well, chivalry is dead, I see,” she teased, turning and leading them the half dozen steps to the front door.
She raised her hand, but the door jerked open—fast enough that Xavier startled—before Annie could knock.
A small woman with short brown hair, wearing slacks and a tidy sweater with a tissue tucked in her sleeve, stood inside the door. Xavier looked behind her, expecting to see someone else, someone bigger, who could have opened the door with that much controlled force.
Nope, just her.
“Were you to be standing there all day?” She looked over the three of them, then stepped back. “Come on with ye. Inside.”
Xavier looked at Colum, who had a resigned expression stamped on his face.
Annie shot them a nervous glance over her shoulder before stepping inside. The entrance hall was dark and cool, and when Mary closed the door behind them, Xavier resisted the urge to shift closer to Annie.
Mary opened a door on her right, and light spilled in. They followed her into a small formal parlor. The large window had a view of the front garden, trees and shrubs blocking their view of the road. A small round table was draped with cream linen, a floral tea set sitting on a tray in the center. The dark wood chairs looked too delicate, and Xavier gingerly lowered himself onto one as Mary instructed them to hand over their coats.
She deposited those in the hall and then returned for the teapot.
“I was expecting ye a fair bit ago, so this’ll be cold.”
Xavier snuck a glance at his watch. They were ten minutes early for the agreed-upon time but apparently already late.
“Don’t go to any trouble,” Annie said with that sunny smile. “You don’t need to make us?—”
Annie cut off sharply, wincing. Colum must have pinched or kicked her under the table, and Xavier could see why. The small woman seemed to grow ten centimeters as she stared at Annie in outrage.
“You’ll be having a cup.”
It wasn’t a question.
Annie rallied. “A cup of tea would be lovely.”
Mary’s gaze snapped to Colum. “You’re Irish.”
“Aye,” he said warily.
“You’ll be helping me, then. If you’re one of those boys who thinks someone should be putting one in your hand rather than putting on the kettle yourself, you’ll be fair surprised in my house.”
“Normally I’m the one to make the tea,” Colum said as he rose.
Mary nodded in approval. “Good to meet a man with a bit of cop on.” She gestured to the tray with the tea service. Colum gingerly picked it up, following Mary through a different door than the one they’d entered through.
Slowly, Annie and Xavier turned to one another.
“I love her,” Annie breathed. “I want to be her when I grow up.”
Xavier snorted in amusement but didn’t admit that he’d only understood about half of what she’d said. Not that he didn’t know the words, he simply didn’t understand how she’d put them together.
Instead, he tipped his head to a stack of containers—a small black trunk, one wooden lidded box, and then two cardboard boxes heavily reinforced with tape. “Should we peek?”
Annie glanced warily at the door. “You go ahead. I’ll keep watch.”
Xavier snorted again. “I’m not doing it. You do it.”
“Ha, you’re scared of her.”
“I’m smart enough to recognize a powerful woman,” he said with a shrug.
Annie eyed him with displeasure. “You keep saying stuff that makes you hotter.”
Xavier sat forward, reaching for Annie’s thigh under the table.
Only to immediately snatch his hand back as the interior door opened with the same shocking speed as the front door had. Mary preceded Colum into the room.
“—be thinking you wouldn’t find it out here with a culchie,” she said, as she returned to the table.
“I’m not a Dub by birth. My people are from Galway.”
“But you moved up there to the city.” She sniffed in disapproval as she poured tea from the tray Colum set down and passed out cups. “It’s the way of it now, our young people leaving. Milk?”
“A drop, please,” Colum said, and Mary poured milk into his tea.
“The same for me, please,” Annie said, when the milk jug tipped her direction.
Xavier tried to shake his head, but Mary pursed her lips. “You’ll be wanting milk, or are you planning not to drink the tea?”
He’d been planning not to drink the tea.
“I don’t normally drink tea.” He shot her his best self-deprecating smile. “But I would hate to miss out on something so lovely.” He gestured to the tea set. “I’ll have it however you recommend.”
Mary’s eyes narrowed at his words, and Xavier realized this was the first time he’d spoken, so the first time she’d heard his accent. He braced for a rude remark.
Instead, she said, “Well you’re a fine thing, aren’t you? Bet you’ve a tongue that would pick a lock.”
Xavier took a minute to process that. “Thank you?”
Mary sniffed, pouring milk into his tea. He was waiting for her to take a seat so they could start the conversation they’d come here for, but Mary left again, patting Colum as she passed, which was apparently a signal as he got up and followed her. They returned with half a dozen plates—Colum’s face as he carried four of them, half balanced on his forearms, was enough to make Xavier rub his lips to hide the smile.
Finally, Mary sat—after serving each of them a few small sandwiches, a slice of grainy brown bread spread with butter, and a fluffy scone already cut in half with a layer of cream and jam in the middle.
Xavier took a bite of the scone and froze.
It was soft and buttery, sweet from the jam, and the cream was silky on his tongue.
Mary Balcombe was a widow. Would she marry him and make him scones? Failing that, would she adopt him?
Annie kicked him under the table. “Fix your face,” she hissed.
“What?” He tried the deceptively simple tomato and cheese sandwich and nearly wept.
“You’re making a sex face.”
Xavier cut his eyes to Mary, who was speaking to Colum in…not English? Xavier didn’t even care.
“Do you think she’ll marry me?” Xavier asked Annie, moaning as he tried the other sandwich, some kind of salmon with fresh herbs.
“Get in line, I’m marrying her. I could learn to do farm chores if I got to eat like this.” Annie jumped, head turning to glare at Colum, who’d clearly kicked her again. “Next time, you sit next to him,” she muttered to Xavier.
Given Colum’s strained posture and the way he was gripping the cup, he wanted out of the one-on-one conversation.
Xavier leaned forward. “Mary, this is the most beautiful scone I’ve ever eaten.”
She looked away from Colum, smiling, though only briefly. “They’re not that difficult to make. Nothing much to it.”
“Then it’s the skilled hands of the baker that deserve the credit.”
Mary sniffed again, a smile tugging her lips. “Well now, enough of that. Tell me, what would you be wanting Florence Balcombe’s things for? Dracula fans?” There was clear disapproval in the final words.
Annie took the lead. “Actually, my client here,” she gestured at Xavier, “is an expert on Oscar Wilde.”
Mary nodded. “Sure they were childhood sweethearts, Florence and Oscar.”
“It’s shocking that more people haven’t asked if Florence was some sort of muse. She was loved by one great writer and married to another, after all,” Annie suggested.
“My husband, God rest him, had a bit of the artist’s soul, he did. He’s the Balcombe by birth, not me, but family stories should be protected.” Mary looked at the stack of boxes. “I tell you, I’m ashamed I am, that my boys don’t want these things. Telling me to keep them in the attic, that there’s no need to be cleaning everything out now. Well, there is a need, and if they refuse to care about their family legacy, talking about how their flats are small and they travel too much for work… Well, then, I’ll be passing these things along to someone who will appreciate them.”
Xavier hid his surprise. The impression they’d had before arriving was of a lonely older woman who was heartbroken she had to part with these family mementos.
Instead, they were getting a pissed-off mom whose children refused to help her clean out the attic, saying, “Fine, if you don’t want it, I’m getting rid of it.”
“And you’re sure your sons won’t someday want to know about their ancestor Florence?” Xavier asked.
“If they do, you can sell it back to them,” Mary declared. “They both work for Google and have more money than sense, now that they’re moved to Dublin. Living by the Grand Canal…” Mary tsked and shook her head.
Colum froze, his expression flat, while his eyes were bright with emotion.
“How much would you like for them?” Annie said. “I know you were turned down by the auction houses, but we do think there’s value there. Colum is our local expert and between the two of us, we’ve come up with what I think is a fair price, but we’re open to negotiation.”
“No cost. It’s enough to be knowing someone cares and appreciates them.” Mary’s mouth twisted. “It’s hard thinking that Florence was so careful to save all these things, and here now she’s barely in the grave?—”
Hadn’t she died in 1937? Xavier caught Colum’s eye, making a subtle face, and the tense expression stamped on Colum’s features relaxed into amusement.
“—and her own people don’t care about it.”
“You’re right,” Annie declared. “That’s discouraging, but Xavier is interested, and Colum and I will help him preserve the items to museum standard.”
Annie finished up the business side of it as they drank second and third cups of tea, and Xavier ate two more scones.
Three hours later, they left with an aluminum-foil-covered pie pan of leftovers and all of Florence Balcombe’s papers.
When he found it, Xavier shot up from his seat, grabbed Annie, bent her back over his arm and kissed her senseless, then snatched Colum out of his chair, pinned him against the wall, and did the same to him.
“You found it?” Annie breathed, as Xavier came up for air.
He tried to step back, but Colum grabbed him, holding him there for a moment before letting him go.
“I found it,” Xavier said, though Colum was tempting him to ignore the discovery.
However, he blinked as if just processing what Annie had said and pushed past him, heading over to the table Xavier had been using as a desk. They’d split up the materials and each retreated to a different area to start working through the items. Xavier had declined to take a box and work through it methodically. Instead, he’d rifled through things, picking out the most likely items.
Annie had ranted for several minutes about that, and though he’d considered bending her over and taking his hand, or a nice thick book, to her ass, he’d decided to dive into reading.
Together, they clustered around Xavier’s table. He pushed through to take a seat, flipping the thin book closed so they could see the front.
Studies of a Sweltan
By Walter Pater
“Oscar was a devotee of Pater,” Xavier said. “But Pater never wrote a book called Studies of a Sweltan . His most famous work was Studies in the History of the Renaissance .”
“Wasn’t Pater an art critic?” Annie said with a raised brow. “I’m shocked you don’t have a rant about art critics.”
Xavier smiled—more like bared his teeth—at her. “That’s not what he’s most known for.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Sweltan,” Colum said, ignoring them. “It means dying.”
That sobered the mood.
“Studies of the dying,” Xavier said softly, his heart aching for a man he’d never known but who meant so much to so many. He opened the book, showing that the inside was handwritten rather than printed. “I only skimmed a few pages, but I think this was written when he lived in Paris, which is where he died.”
“We…did it,” Annie said slowly. “Mission accomplished.” Her voice was sad, though she’d tried to force cheer into the words.
“I’ll call—” Colum started.
“Not yet. Let me read,” Xavier said, because once again, he had a feeling…
Three hours later—after he’d ignored offers of tea, coffee, and water but eaten the piece of toast Annie had shoved between his teeth and drunk the water Colum thrust at him—Xavier sat back.
“This is Wilde’s,” he confirmed. “And it’s the last piece.”
“So we’re done,” Annie said.
“The last piece. Not the final piece.” Xavier raised his brows, looking to Colum.
“Ah shite. We’re missing a middle bit?” Colum slumped back on the couch, where he sat beside Annie.
“Yes. This was written after he’d been released from prison and moved to France. I think it was written in the final months of his life, when he was destitute and dying alone in Paris.” Xavier touched the book softly. “There’s a note from Robbie at the end, saying that Oscar asked him to have it bound and sent to Florence in England after his death.”
Xavier got up to pace.
“But there’s a gap, no, a chasm, between the end of the New York section and this. Possibly the most important section, because I believe he wrote the New York section before his legal troubles in England began. He would have certainly continued to write, to lay everyone’s shame and secrets bare, while his own were being splashed across the papers.”
“We’ve found, at best, three fourths of the book,” Annie said.
“Yes.”
“Feck,” Colum muttered, but there was a smile curling his lips.
Xavier understood, because he didn’t want this to end either.
“Okay, then we’re back to our previous problem.” Annie rose, stretching and then walking over to take Xavier’s seat to start flipping through the slim book herself. “Part one had a clue—multiple clues actually, that led to part two, but there were no clues to part three. We worked the problem from the other end and got the final piece, but where do we go from here?”
“Xavier?” Colum asked. “Where do we go from here?”
“Bram,” he said without hesitation. “Oscar loved them. Florence broke his heart, and it took him longer to forgive her. But I wonder if Bram was his first male lover. While he was being persecuted and eventually prosecuted for homosexuality, would he have gone back to the first man he loved? Maybe the first man he fucked?” Xavier looked at Colum in question.
“I would,” Colum said softly.
Xavier’s heart gave two hard thumps inside his chest.
He’s already in a trinity. He’s married.
“Problem,” Annie declared, breaking the tension of the moment. “Bram Stoker’s papers and books would have been studied, auctioned, and placed in museums. Most of Florence’s things were personal and mundane, which explains why they stayed with her family—undoubtedly their descendants were more focused on Bram’s papers, so Florence’s were shuttled off to her nieces and nephews on the Balcombe side.”
Xavier deflated a little, though part of him was glad it wouldn’t be this straightforward. It meant more time with them.
“Well that would explain it, wouldn’t it?” Colum said, then shrugged. “Whoever asked about how much a new Wilde book would be worth on the dark web must have that piece, which was with Bram Stoker’s things.”
Annie grabbed her computer. “But the timing… Why now?”
“Maybe one of the Stoker descendants, or a collector who bought Stoker’s books or papers, needs money,” Colum said.
“Maybe they didn’t realize what it was until now. Maybe they just found it because they had a painting reframed and voila, there it was,” Xavier mused.
“Or booped a plaster statue,” Annie said with a cute little growl, still typing.
Xavier began speaking their suppositions aloud. “So we’re thinking that either a Stoker descendent or a Stoker collector has the missing piece. Either they just discovered it, or they need money and decided to sell it.”
“It’s the most likely scenario…” Annie’s voice trailed off and she looked up. “Six months ago, my company hosted an auction of Stoker’s personal art in London. Supposedly the three paintings and two statues were all in his study at the time he was writing Dracula .”
“Who was selling them?”
“A private collector. Anonymous. But I do know who bought them.” Another moment of typing and Annie grimaced. “Ever heard of Dodge?”
Xavier shook his head while Colum shrugged.
Annie grimaced. “He’s a tech-bro. Made his money in crypto currency, has a podcast, and likes to lecture other people about how they live their life and spend their money. He’s also, apparently, an avid Dracula fan. He bought those five pieces for just over two million sterling.”
“He sounds like the kind of gobshite who might have reframed a painting just because he didn’t like the look of the antique frame,” Colum muttered.
“Are there images of the paintings?” Xavier walked over to Annie, bracing a hand on her thigh as he crouched to peer at the images. “This one.” He pointed to the landscape of a rocky beach bordered by timeworn cliffs patchworked with green. In the foreground, a few pieces of splintered wood, fabric clinging to one of them, were half hidden among the rocks.
Annie leaned closer. “It says this is a painting of a beach in Whitby, England, noting that Whitby is where Dracula comes ashore in the book.”
Xavier snorted. “That’s France.” He gestured to the cliffs. “That’s the north coast of France. Oscar lived there with Robbie Ross at one point, before the trials.”
Colum joined them, holding out his phone with the image of a sandy beach with low hills in the distance. “This is what came up when I searched Whitby beaches.”
It looked nothing like the painting.
The cliff-lined beaches of Berneval-le-Grand, which Colum googled next, looked exactly like the painting. Xavier spread his hands in a “see? I told you so” gesture.
Colum leaned in, pointing to the bits of broken wood tangled in the rocks in the corner of the painting. “Is that remnants of a painting?”
Xavier studied it after Annie zoomed in. Two pieces of wood were joined at a right angle, which could have been the corner of a canvas frame.
“And the bit of fabric. Is that a canvas, and does it look a bit like part of a face?” Colum asked slowly.
“An abstract face, maybe,” Annie said.
“Or a distorted one,” Xavier said, realizing what it was Colum had seen. “Distorted because the painting aged while the man did not.”
The three of them looked at one another, and again Xavier felt the clicks as everything fell into place.
“A painting showing a place he was happy, with subtle hints to one of the works Wilde was supposedly most proud of. He hid the manuscript inside and sent it to his first love. Given that this had to be painted after he wrote A Picture of Dorian Gray , the timing lines up with our missing years, and possibly the start of his legal troubles.”
“And Dodge took it out of its frame, found the manuscript, and his first instinct was to attach a price tag. A monetary price tag, not a cultural significance value.” Annie made a face but then whipped around to face Xavier. “If you say one thing about how that’s what I do…”
“I would never say such a thing.” He placed a hand over his heart.
“Thank you.”
“Because you have a knife.”
“And because it’s not true!”
“Come here to me,” Colum muttered, tugging Xavier away from Annie as he laughed. Her outrage was delicious. Her cheeks were pink and it made him want to kiss her.
“I need to call Eric,” Colum said. “We have three pieces and a good suspicion where a fourth piece is.”
“Make sure you tell him who has it,” Annie said, tone grim. “Dodge is a computer guy, so maybe he somehow tracked us online to figure out we were looking for the same thing he was. And…”
“What?” Colum asked when she hesitated.
“Dodge…he has a big audience of idiots who would love to hear he’s learned about some hidden secret society conspiracy.”
“The fool probably thinks it’s fiction,” Xavier added.
Annie grimaced. “Which may be the only thing saving the Masters’ Admiralty from being hunted and exposed by a legion of tech and crypto bros.”