Chapter 16
Imake it halfway up the hill to Blackthorn House before I realize Mabel’s archival gloves are still in my coat pocket.
I leave them where they are, and stand for a second under the black iron gate.
The same gate Julian has walked through under at least four different names, wearing at least three different coats, while generations of Black Harbor watched him leave and come back and somehow never quite put the pieces together.
I have never in my life shown up somewhere without a basket.
I’ve arrived at funerals with a basket. I have taken muffins to the DMV.
I once brought six jars of chutney to a dentist appointment because I’d made too much and there were people in the waiting room.
And here I am, empty-handed, heart going like a hand mixer on high, because for the first time I don’t have a single dish that could hold what I’ve come to say.
He opens the door before I knock. Of course he does. He heard my car. He probably heard my heart coming up the road.
“Penny.”
His eyes go over me once, and I watch him clock everything—the coat buttoned wrong because I did it in a hurry, the glove-shaped bulge in my pocket, the fact that my face is apparently a whole sentence.
“You’ve been at the Historical Society.”
“You know what I found.”
“I know what the Sturgises kept.” He steps back to let me in. Calm. Courtly. That beautiful still surface I have recently learned does not mean nearly as much as I thought it did. “Which is nearly everything. Come in from the cold.”
I come in.
The house closes warmly around me, smelling of old wood and beeswax and something faintly metallic underneath that I only started noticing once I knew to notice it. Julian takes my coat. He always takes my coat. Four hundred years of changing names, and apparently the manners survive intact.
“Four,” I say.
His hands stop on the shoulders of my coat.
“Blackthorne. Voss. Volkov. Thorne. And then Volkov again, which I’d call lazy if I weren’t so busy being something else.”
He hangs the coat on the hook by the door. Slowly.
“Where did you get those?”
“Mabel. Off the top of her head while she wrote a number on a folder. She didn’t even have to think about it.”
I take out my phone and pull up the customs house photograph.
“And this is you. March of 1938. Nine people on a windy day and eight of them are blurred.”
Julian looks at the screen for a long time. He doesn’t pick it up.
“Yes.”
“That’s it? Yes?”
“You made a statement, and it was correct. I’m not going to insult you by pretending otherwise.”
“Don’t you dare do that.”
His gaze comes back to mine.
“Don’t hand me the exact corner of it I happened to point at.
That’s what you do. I ask a question and you answer that question exactly, and then you stop.
Every answer is true. Every single one. And somehow I walk away thinking I’ve learned something enormous when I’ve actually been given one beautifully arranged bite off an entire plate. ”
Something moves in his face.
“That is unkind.”
“I know.”
I’ve been carrying the irritation around since this afternoon, and it hasn’t improved with travel. But looking at him now, standing in the hall where he has been some version of himself for longer than my country has existed, I can see what I’m doing to him.
I make myself stop.
“I’m not angry that you’re private,” I say, more quietly. “I understand why you’re private. Or I’m starting to. I’m angry about the size of the portions.”
Julian says nothing.
“Monday night you told me you were a vampire. You told me how old you are. You told me about Marguerite and the pans and why half this house looks like everyone stepped out for lunch in 1862 and forgot to come back. And I went home thinking you’d finally given me the whole thing.”
“I gave you more than I have given anyone in a very long time.”
“I know.”
And that’s what takes the rest of the fight out of me. I know. I know what Monday cost him. I know what it meant for a man who has spent centuries saying nothing to sit across from me and say as much as he did. I know because I was there when his voice changed over a copper pan.
I put my phone down on the hall table.
“But I found out this afternoon that I still don’t know enough to ask the right questions.”
Julian looks at me for a long moment.
“I have never had to tell anyone before,” he says. “I don’t know the order it goes in.”
That hits hard enough that I have to look away.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Then don’t put it in order. Give me the basket.”
“The basket?”
“That’s my job. People hand me forty things in a basket and no plan and tell me eighty-four people are coming at six. I sort it out.” I hold out both hands. “Give me the basket.”
For about eleven seconds, Julian Volkov stands in his front hall and looks at me.
Then he says, “Very well.”
He turns towards the library, and I follow him.
There is a door in the library wall. It is papered exactly like the wall, the seam hidden beside a built-in bookcase, and I have walked past it at least four times without registering that it exists.
Julian puts two fingers against the edge and presses. The door opens inward.
“Of course you have a secret room.”
“It’s hardly secret.”
“I have been in this room repeatedly without knowing about it.”
“You didn’t ask about it.”
I point at him.
“This is exactly what we’re working on.”
His mouth moves. I think I almost get a smile.
The room beyond is narrow and windowless, no more than six feet deep, with shelving from floor to ceiling and a single lamp. And it is full of books.
No, that’s the wrong word. It’s full of journals.
Hundreds of them. Vellum, leather, cloth, marbled board, black notebooks, a run of ordinary spiral-bound notebooks that look exactly like something I could buy at the drugstore on Water Street.
They are shelved in perfect order, of course, and not one of them has a title on the spine.
“Julian.”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I stopped counting at some point in the eighteen-forties.”
“You stopped counting them in the eighteen-forties.”
“It seemed vain to continue.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. Then I go closer, but I don’t touch them. He notices that I don’t.
“Go ahead.”
I take down a battered brown volume, its leather soft under my fingers.
When I open it, the handwriting hits me before the date does.
I know that handwriting. I’ve seen it on cream card stock.
I’ve held it in my own kitchen with flour on my hands and read it aloud to Lucy.
The date at the top of the page is 1847.
“It’s all you.”
“Yes.”
“Every one of these.”
“Yes.”
I turn a page. Same handwriting. Same long slant. Same capital letters.
“You never changed your handwriting.”
“I tried once.”
I look up.
“In the seventeen hundreds. I thought if I was going to be different men on paper, I should write like different men.” He pauses. “It lasted a season.”
“Why?”
“It felt like lying to the only person who was ever going to read them.”
My throat closes. Julian looks at the journal rather than me.
“You’re the second person to hold one.”
“Who was the first?”
“No one living.”
I put the 1847 volume back exactly where I found it.
“Can I read one?”
He is quiet for a moment.
“Yes. But I would ask you not to read it in front of me.”
“Why?”
“Because I would watch your face, and I have no wish to know that much about my own prose.”
That gets me right under the ribs. “You’re shy about your diary.”
“It’s not a diary. I keep a record.”
“That’s a diary with emotional repression.”
“Which is why I regret permitting you access.”
But there’s no regret in his voice, and he brings me a chair. He genuinely carries an eighteenth-century armchair through the narrow doorway one-handed, sets it down without a sound, and waits while I choose a volume from the early eighteen hundreds.
I read 1809 for almost half an hour. It’s extraordinarily boring.
Weather. Cargo. Prices. Repairs to something called the east quay.
A man named Amos Kell owes Julian four pounds and goes on owing him four pounds for nine pages until an entry that reads, in its entirety: Amos Kell has offered me a goat.
“This is terrible.”
“Yes,” Julian says immediately.
I look up and, despite what he said about not watching me, I find him leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded.
“You knew.”
“I lived it.”
I laugh into a book written more than two hundred years ago. Then, halfway down a page about salt, there is one line. The child at the Rood house is dead of the croup. She was called Mercy. I have written the name so that it will be somewhere.
I stop. I read it again. Then a third time.
“Who was Mercy Rood?”
Julian’s face changes. Not much. Enough.
“Two years and four months. February of 1809. There was a great deal of croup that winter and nothing whatever to be done about any of it.”
“You remember her.”
“I remember all of them.”
I look back down at the page.
Mercy.
One child in one house in one winter two hundred years ago, and Julian wrote her name because somebody had to.
I turn several pages more carefully after that.
The journals aren’t a history of Julian Volkov.
Not really. They’re a history of everyone else.
Weather and births. Ships and marriages.
A roof lost in a storm. A fisherman who didn’t come home.
A woman who made preserves and cheated at cards.
A dog that apparently belonged to no one and slept behind the chandlery for fourteen years.
Julian has written them all down in the same brown ink, one after another, as if the act of remembering them is a debt he owes.
And no one has done it for him. That’s the thought that finishes me. He has kept the names of people who would otherwise be gone. He has carried them through centuries in a hidden room where no one knew to look. And every few decades, he erased his own.
I close the journal.
“Tell me how you do it.”
Julian knows exactly what I mean.
“For most of the time I’ve been here, it was relatively simple. I would stay twenty years. Sometimes thirty. I grew older on paper because paper is accommodating. Eventually I became ill, or developed a desire to travel for my health, and went away.”
“And then?”
“The property passed to a cousin. Occasionally a nephew.”
“Who was you.”
“Always.”
“No funerals.”
“No.” His mouth tightens slightly. “A death requires a body, and a body requires explanations. There was simply a man who went to Lisbon and did not come back, and a lawyer in Boston who was paid to be extremely dull about the details.”
I almost smile.
“Did anyone notice?”
“Occasionally. People notice more than they are given credit for.” Julian glances towards the shelves. “But suspicion fades. Memory becomes uncertain. Eventually the people who remember the previous face are gone.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It was practical.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“No.”
He says it so simply that I put the journal down.
“How long would you stay away?”
“It varied. Twenty years. Thirty. Longer, sometimes.”
“And then you’d come back.”
“Yes.”
“As someone else.”
“Yes.”
I think of the photographs. Volkov. Thorne. Volkov again.
“You could have gone anywhere.”
“I did.”
That stops me.
Julian walks into the little room and takes down one of the oldest volumes, vellum cracked nearly white along the spine.
“Between Blackthorne and Voss, I left. Properly. The first time. I thought it would be simpler.”
“Where did you go?”
“Nova Scotia, that time. Lisbon later. Bristol for eleven years, which I do not recommend.”
“Why?”
“Bristol or leaving?”
“Either.”
“Bristol knows what it did.”
I laugh despite myself, and he looks down at the journal.
“I was comfortable. I was safe. I was also visiting.”
“For how long?”
“Nearly a century, altogether.”
“That’s a hell of a visit.”
“Yes.”
He turns the vellum volume over once in his hands.
“I had believed distance would make grief easier. In some respects, it did. I outran the grief.” His eyes lift to mine. “I also outran being a person.”
I don’t say anything.
“There are only so many times one can introduce oneself in a place where the name means nothing. No one knows what you dislike. No one remembers what you did when you were twenty. No one asks after someone you mentioned ten years ago because they have known you for eleven.” He puts the journal back.
“Eventually I understood that there is a difference between privacy and having no continuity at all.”
“So you came home.”
His eyes come back to me.
“Yes.”
The word is very quiet.
“This is the only place on this earth where I am not a guest.”