Thirty
Peter gazed down at the thick boots; the stiff, formfitting brown breeks; and the odd tan shirt with half sleeves and its owner’s name sewn over the pocket. “Rusty,” he said again.
“I told you, he’s a maintenance man.” Jeanne turned the wheel of the horseless vehicle she called a “car.” “He works with the boiler and pipes. That sort of thing.”
“In that line of work, such a name does not instill much confidence.”
“Look, you’re lucky he’s always had a thing for me. Otherwise you’d be wearing our intern’s spare pair of running shorts and a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt.”
Nothing after “Otherwise” had made the slightest sense, though it sounded as if the clothes he’d been given were better than what he might have had.
He looked at them again. He had always taken great pride in his clothes and frequented the finest tailors in London.
But despite the exquisite workmanship of the seams, everything else on the shirt and breeches seemed utilitarian and plain.
There were no ribbons, no lace, no dash of color, no delicacy of design.
And the sharp, intricate teeth of the device holding his breeks closed were more than a little disconcerting.
But he liked the boots. Sturdy and comfortable, they reminded him of his days as a lad in Westphalia, conquering the Soest hills with his friends.
“How much longer?”
Jeanne gave him a look. “It’s rush hour.”
Peter marveled at the name given the stately pace at which they were proceeding.
He could have covered the same ground on foot in half the time.
Nonetheless he took the opportunity to drink in his fill of the new world.
Peter had known the future would look different.
Everyone in the Afterlife had the sort of general understanding of what existed by hearing reports from the Guild, but it was quite different to see it all laid out in such a frighteningly crowded and tall landscape.
On one side of the river beside which Jeanne drove, the houses were small and close, sitting in row upon row along a rising hill, not unlike Cornhill or Hampstead Heath.
But on the other side, the structures were almost magical—massive silver and glass things rising hundreds of feet in the air.
He spotted a breathtaking building, right out of a storyteller’s imagination, all of shining blue glass, with pointed peaks and battlements around its towers. “Is that a castle?”
Jeanne laughed. “Well, it was designed to look that way. It’s the PPG Building. A glass company.”
The glaziers Peter had known were not so well compensed, though Donovan, the glass merchant he frequented most, had raised his prices sometimes twice a year, so it was not beyond reckoning that by the twenty-first century they would have acquired great wealth.
“What about artists?” he asked. “Where do they live?”
“Depends how well you do. Cam’s lives in a row house in Notting Hill.”
Cam’s artist. His heart sank. Campbell did have an artist fiancé.
Peter had hoped, foolishly, that that part of her deception had been untrue.
His hand went to his emerald ring, and he thought of Ursula.
He didn’t want Ursula to be shamed by Campbell’s book.
Someday, at the end of Ursula’s new life, she would return to the Afterlife, and while he himself had no recollection of the other lives he’d lived on Earth, he had heard of those who did.
His plan was to stop the book, return to 1673, and get Charles to sign that writ. How foolish he’d been not to just hand over Campbell that night. It would have been exactly what the minx deserved.
Oh, Ursula. In whatever life you’ve been reborn, I hope you are happy.
Jeanne maneuvered the car into place in front of a smaller version of the buildings he had admired in the vicinity of the glass castle. There was a sign on the front that read 650 Washington Road.
She towed him toward the door at a run.
“Why are you hurrying?”
“I’m parked illegally.” Through the door they went, and on a wall at the end of the low-ceilinged entry hall, she pressed a button, which promptly lit up.
Peter gestured toward the entrance. “Look. Someone is admiring your carriage.”
She turned and let out a surprisingly vivid oath. “She’s not admiring it. She’s going to write me a ticket.”
The door before them opened. Jeanne pulled him inside the tiny room, inserted a key into a lock at the bottom of a row of numbered buttons, and turned it. Then she jumped off, stopping the door, a sort of sideways portcullis, while the door registered its unhappiness with loud bells.
“Go up,” she instructed. “Her place is at the top. When you get there, remove the key and the door will open. I’ll be up as soon as I can.”
The doors closed. For an instant he looked for a way to ascend, then the floor jerked upward and his heart jumped into his throat. He grabbed the narrow railing that ran the circumference of the space.
After a moment that seemed to last a lifetime, the room stopped.
He dove for the key and turned it as the woman had said.
The portcullis slid back, and the space before him had transformed from a tiny room to a high-ceilinged space lit from floor to ceiling with windows.
The sun had set, and the view, past a dining table with high-backed chairs, was of a horizon sparkling with stars.
Two churches sat high on a hill in the distance, and around them dozens and dozens of charming cottages were visible.
He thought of the view from his attic and of the moments he’d shared with Campbell Stratford there.
She’d captured his heart, joined him in his bed, then varnished it all with a veneer of lies.
It had been a cruel punishment for his dormant heart.
The nearly spent flame there had fluttered weakly to life, then been pinched out and destroyed.
But that wasn’t why he was here, he reminded himself.
He had been a fool, but men do foolish things.
The evening had served as a painful reminder that his rightful place was not in his old life, but in a life that had yet to be chosen for him.
He couldn’t rest, however, in any life until he knew that Ursula would be protected.
He took a step. “Miss Stratford?” No answer.
He heard music playing in the distance and wondered where the musicians were.
It was a plaintive song, and a woman began to sing about how hard she’d try to show a man that he was her only dream.
He’d never heard any song that sounded like this.
The voice, haunting and low, sent a chill down his back.
The space was open and light, so different than any home in London. It was opulent but in a spare, unadorned way. The furniture was low, bookcases lined the room, and an asymmetrical fireplace presided at the room’s far end.
He approached the closest bookcase, drawn by an array of portraits—or pictures, as he knew they were called here.
There was one of a mother pinning a ribbon on a cherubic child.
The child was Campbell Stratford. He’d have recognized the red-gold hair anywhere, but the freckles and missing tooth added unexpected charm.
In the next picture she was an adult in a gallery of some sort with other people her own age.
They held pints of ale and were giving the artist exuberant smiles.
The last picture showed her from behind, perched beside a railing with a man’s arm around her, looking at Notre Dame on a sunny summer day.
Peter assessed the man—the position of his hand, the strength of his profile. He wore no wig and his light hair had been shaved very close, and though Peter couldn’t see the man’s eyes well, his affection for Campbell was clear.
This was the last thing he wished to see. He turned, and the work of art on the wall opposite him took his breath away.
It was a woman, half a woman, whose portrait was divided diagonally through the center, like the shield on a coat of arms. Above the dividing line, the woman was represented by an oil painting.
Below the dividing line, clear cubes of varying sizes, holding pieces of fruit and other household objects, represented the rest of her.
Peter stared, amazed. An orange for a breast, a plum for her mons, an ancient lock on the finger of her left hand, and a small metal circle with wavy, folded-in edges emblazoned with the words “Budweiser—King of Beers” for a nipple.
It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, but the artist’s purpose was instantly clear, and he smiled.
The artist’s mark, in the lower right-hand corner, was the outline of a knife and the letters JKET.
Another bell rang, and he jumped. It rang, stopped, rang, stopped. The noise came from a small, multibuttoned object on a hallway table. After the third ring, he heard a click and Campbell Stratford’s distinctive contralto.
“Jeanne? Jeanne? Are you there? Pick up. Oh, Christ, I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
The click sounded again, and the noise stopped. It pained him to be reminded that she’d masked her real voice with an English accent to deceive him.
A book called The Carnegie Museum of Art Collection Highlights sat on the table in front of a couch, and the cover showed a painting of a woman stepping into a tub.
Again he was in awe of the loose technique and the highly unconventional color choice.
According to the credit, the artist was one “Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas.” Despite what Peter’s teachers had impressed upon him, it seemed breaking the rules hadn’t destroyed the art of painting after all.