Chapter 17
“The difficulty was not in the pieces, but in their arrangement.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on discovering there were heirs whose claims superseded her sons’.
* * *
The streets to the west of the house were the streets Nicholas had assigned himself. He had been working through them in a grid method, fully intent on completing it. Checking each street and alley and shop front in the correct sequence before moving to the next.
Stopping people and asking.
Receiving the brisk, distracted responses of people who had somewhere to be and found him in the way of it. Which was the expected response and which he moved past each time without allowing it to slow him.
He stopped at a bookseller’s. “An older gentleman,” he said. “White-haired. His waistcoat incorrectly buttoned. He may be carrying a book or a Latin text. Have you seen him this afternoon?”
The elderly man behind the counter shook his head with genuine regret, clearly wishing he could be more useful. “I am sorry, sir. I have not. I hope you find him.”
He moved on. The narrow establishment selling pens and papers produced a woman who said no before he had finished the description.
The apothecary said no. The chandler’s said no.
At the passage between two college walls, a porter listened to the description with polite attention and then shook his head.
“Sorry, sir,” the porter said. “Not seen him.”
He thanked each of them and moved on to the next.
Fear coiled and writhed in his gut. Fear for Mr. Metcalfe. Fear for Millie, and what happened to her peace of mind if they did not find her beloved father. The most fear he had ever felt on behalf of someone other than himself.
His leg had been making its position known since approximately Cresswell’s and had escalated its communications steadily throughout the search.
It was the emphatic, relentless persistence of a limb that felt its grievances were not receiving the attention they merited and had decided to make this position increasingly difficult to ignore.
He was leaning on the cane more than he usually leaned on it.
He knew this, but did not stop. Because stopping was not available to him while Mr. Metcalfe was somewhere in these streets in a coat that was probably not warm enough, in a mind that was operating on a map from a different decade.
Or a different city. Millie was frightened and upset, and the leg was going to have to manage its own feelings about the afternoon’s demands because he did not have the capacity to attend to them and the search simultaneously. And the search was the priority.
He was running the Cresswell encounter through his mind in the mechanical way he had of worrying at a problem that had not yet resolved. Returning to it at regular intervals and turning it over to see if its surfaces had changed since he had last examined it.
The too-reasonable explanation. Each sentence exactly the right length and exactly the right weight.
Neither too full nor too brief. The smooth, even tone of answers that had the texture of statements prepared in advance rather than assembled from available materials in the moment of their delivery.
The too-perfect regret, calibrated not from genuine feeling, but from long practice.
Nicholas could not shake the impression that Cresswell was a scoundrel who had been producing calibrated responses for long enough to have achieved exactly the right range through repetition rather than truth.
None of it individually wrong. All of it together too smooth, too even.
The aggregate of a rehearsed statement rather than the slight, natural unevenness of a memory genuinely recalled.
Of lines recited. And Nicholas could feel the thing that was missing without yet being able to bring the full shape of it into the light where he could act on it.
The way Cresswell had answered the door.
He had been thinking about this since he left Oriel College. It kept returning because it was the piece that most wanted to mean something and whose meaning he had not yet properly located.
A man who is genuinely not expecting a caller answers his door with a kind of response that is distinct from the response of a man who has prepared for the visit before the knock arrives.
The slight reorientation of a person moving from the world they were inhabiting to the world that has just presented itself at their threshold.
The brief moment of assessment before the social manner assembles itself over whatever expression was there before it was needed.
Cresswell had produced none of this. He had opened the door with an air that he had already assembled the appropriate response before the door opened.
Nicholas had noticed this without being able to name it at the time and was still circling it now.
Returning to it each time the street opened up enough to give his mind room to think.
And thoughts of Millie moved through the circling thoughts at the most inconvenient intervals. Arriving between one street and the next with unwelcome persistence, declining to stay where he had assigned her and intending to keep presenting herself until she received the attention she was owed.
She no longer looked at him the way she had looked at him in the study the day before yesterday. With the full force of her concentration, as if he were worth her full attention, with a hint of admiration.
The withdrawal was more painful than he had anticipated in the abstract when he had been considering it as a theoretical future cost. He had understood since Merton Street that this was going to hurt.
And he felt it now in the full, embodied way of his injured leg.
It was a heaviness in the region of his heart.
A stabbing sensation of losing something far more important than mere mobility.
His leg offered its editorial view on this development.
He did not acknowledge it and kept moving.
He turned into the next street and stopped at a bakery where a man behind the counter said he had not seen an older gentleman today.
And at a passage between two college walls where yet another porter shook his head with sympathy, who likely shook his head at requests several times a day and had developed a reliable method for it.
Nicholas thanked them and moved on. The afternoon continued its cold, gray business around him without reference to any of it.
The knocker surfaced in his mind with sudden, clarifying completeness.
He stopped walking.
The large circle in aged bronze. The shape inside it that he had registered without examining when he raised it at Cresswell’s door.
Carried at the edge of his attention since Oriel College.
Sitting there at the very periphery of what he could bring in to pay mind to.
Not quite resolving into what it needed to resolve into because the full context had not been available until this moment.
Standing in a quiet Oxford street, with his leg conducting its emphatic inventory and the cold in his face and the iciness of the stones seeping through the soles of his boots.
He had been thinking about it as a lever, as the mechanical handle component of a knocker.
It was not that. He turned it over again in his mind with the attention he had not given it at the time and understood what it actually was.
A sword. With crossguard and handle, pointing downward, intersecting a circle.
The Room of Science at Grimsfell.
He had stood with Lorenzo and Gabriel and the others weeks ago in the library, the hidden door still swung open against the wall after Gabriel had first pressed it.
The sigil there in the carved wooden backing, half-concealed in the Tudor vine-and-leaf work the way it had been concealed for hundreds of years until Henri had seen it for what it was.
A circle. And intersecting it, a sword. Crossguard at the top, blade below.
They had stood in the library with the chamber open before them and discussed the symbol that had opened it and moved on because there had been other more pressing matters requiring their attention and the sigil had not yet found the context it needed to become what it was.
It had found its context now. The arriving certainty of a lock clicking into place.
Not a lever on a knocker. A sword with a crossguard and handle.
Cresswell is a member of the Regis Aeterni?
Not Regis Aeterni.
Dominus!
The sigil of the secret society, forged in aging bronze.
On Cresswell’s door. On the door of the Deputy Keeper of Manuscripts at the Bodleian.
On the door of the man who had been visiting the Metcalfe house once a fortnight since January.
Keeping tabs on Mr. Metcalfe. Watching the decline.
Gauging what remained of his memory and what had gone from it.
On the door of the man who had been in the house today when Mr. Metcalfe disappeared and had left without the note that he said he had come to deliver.
And before his mind had failed him, Mr. Metcalfe had known he was being followed. He had hidden the journal in the Radcliffe Camera and come home afterward with a story about the Dominus that Millie had never been able to piece together. Because he had not been lucid when he came home.
Mr. Metcalfe did not wander. Mr. Metcalfe has been moved.
He did not move faster because his leg was not going to allow it.
But he turned and headed toward the last street where he had seen Millie and Betty, moving with haste, finally understanding the problem and now knowing exactly what to do next.
Oxford went about its evening business around him.
His cane was on the cobbles. And he moved as quickly as he could.