Chapter 21
There is a car in the drive at Blackthorn House that night.
It’s red and sleek and expensive and it’s parked with its wheels dead straight, which nobody does, and it has Massachusetts plates.
I pull up behind it in a nine-year-old van with SALT & SAGE on the side and a dent I have never explained to anyone.
I sit there for a second with two quarts of soup on the passenger seat and a very bad feeling.
It’s the twenty-second of December. I have a hundred and forty covers on the twenty-eighth, eleven days until the second of January, and a man on this hill who has spent a day being extremely reasonable about the arrangements for his own disappearance.
I did not need a strange car.
Julian opens the door before I’m out of the van, which is normal, and does not say anything, which is not.
“Whose car?”
“Victoria’s.”
“Who’s Victoria?”
Something happens in his face that I would describe, if pressed, as a man deciding how much of a sentence he has time for.
“Come in from the cold,” he says.
She is standing at the window in the front library with her back to the room. She turns around when I come in, and my first thought, before anything sensible arrives, is oh, she’s beautiful.
Not pretty. Not attractive. Beautiful the way a knife is, with everything unnecessary taken off it.
She is somewhere between thirty-five and immortal, in a charcoal coat she has not taken off, with dark blonde hair pulled back so severely it must have been a decision made in a different century.
Her eyes are pale blue, ice over a lake.
They take in my work coat, my claw clip, the flour on one wrist, and the two plastic containers of soup in about one second and a half.
“Penelope,” says Julian. “This is Victoria Cavendish. Victoria, Penelope Harrington.”
“Penny,” I say.
“Victoria,” she says. “I would apologize for arriving unannounced, but he does not answer the telephone.”
“I answer the telephone.”
“You answered it in 2011,” says Victoria.
I am still standing in the doorway holding two quarts of parsnip soup, and I would like to state for the record that I know exactly what I look like and that on any other day of my life I would not care.
Today I care.
Because she has known him a long time. It’s in how she doesn’t look at him when she speaks to him and how he doesn’t answer some of it.
It’s the way she walked into a house that nobody walks into.
It’s the fact that she is standing in the middle of the loneliest room in Maine with her coat on and she is completely, absolutely at home.
I’ve been sleeping in this house for two weeks.
“Well,” I say. “I’ll put these in the kitchen.”
“Penny—” Julian starts.
“They’re for you,” I tell him, and hear myself start babbling, and cannot stop. “I mean obviously not for you. For the pans. It’s a soup you can put in a pan.”
I hang up my coat and I go to the kitchen. I put two quarts of parsnip soup into a refrigerator that contains nothing else except a jar of my mustard and a lemon I brought up in November for reasons I can no longer reconstruct. Then I stand there with the door open and the cold coming out.
I’m jealous of a woman who has been in the building for six minutes, I think, but I also think, four hundred years.
Because I haven’t done this calculation.
I have deliberately not done it. I’ve had four hundred years handed to me across a kitchen table and I have been tender about it and grieved about it and made jokes about the posture.
Not once have I sat down and thought about what four hundred years of other people looks like.
She is one of them. She is standing in his library and she doesn’t need to be invited.
I close the refrigerator. I fill the kettle, because my hands have to be doing something and because I am my grandmother’s granddaughter. I make a pot of tea for three people, two of whom cannot drink it.
When I come back in with the tray, Victoria Cavendish takes a cup from me and thanks me and holds it.
She holds it cradled in both hands at the level of her chest, tilted at exactly the angle a person tilts a cup they intend to drink, and she hasn’t the slightest intention of drinking it and never will.
I’ve spent eleven weeks watching a man do that exact same thing in my kitchen.
Something in my chest comes down about four inches and lands somewhere much more comfortable, and I sit down in the chair by the fire.
“How long have you known him?” I ask.
“Two hundred and fourteen years.”
“Right.”
“Boston,” she says. “The autumn of 1812. He was pretending to be a shipping agent and doing it badly, and I was pretending to be a widow and doing it extremely well.”
“That’s a long time.”
“It is a long time.”
“And you and he—”
“No,” says Victoria.
“I didn’t ask a question.”
“You’ve been asking it since you came through the door.
You’ve been asking it very politely, and I would like to give you the afternoon back.
” She turns the cup a quarter inch in her hands.
“I have known Julian Volkov for two hundred and fourteen years. If I’d wanted him, I would have had him by 1830.
There have been at least four occasions on which it would have been the practical arrangement.
I declined all of them, twice in Vienna, which he will not discuss. ”
“There is nothing to discuss,” Julian says from the window.
“There is a great deal to discuss and none of it is flattering.” She looks back at me. “He’s the closest thing I have to family and I find him exhausting. Does that answer it?”
“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”
“You may still dislike me. It’s simply that you should dislike me for the correct reasons.”
And I think, with a small definite click, oh, I’m going to like her, and it’s going to take about a year.
Then she puts the cup down on the table, untouched, and takes a slim leather folder out of her bag, and everything gets worse.
“You’ve seen the website.”
“On the twenty-first.”
“I saw it on the eighteenth. I have a woman in Utrecht who monitors these things for me. Her mother did it before her. Every publication, broadcast, podcast, forum. She sends me paper.” Victoria opens the folder.
“Paper cannot be searched. It is the only advantage I have left, and it costs me nine thousand euros a year.”
The folder has The Veil in it. Episode lists. Articles. Printouts. Notes in a precise hand that probably belongs to the woman in Utrecht.
“So you know Rowan Pierce,” I say.
“I know of Rowan Pierce. Which is worse.”
“Why?”
“Because he isn’t a monster.” Victoria rests her fingers on the folder.
“That’s what makes him a problem. A blackmailer you can pay.
A zealot you can frighten. A cruel man wants something, and once you know what he wants you can negotiate.
Rowan Pierce only wants the truth, and he’s convinced himself—with total sincerity, which is the dangerous part—that the truth is owed. ”
“Owed to who?”
“Everyone. He believes that a truth about the world belongs to everyone in it, and that a person who keeps it to himself is taking something that isn’t theirs to keep.
He’ll be perfectly kind to your face, Penny.
He’ll bring you coffee. He’ll listen when you talk.
And he’ll explain exactly why Julian’s four faces are interesting in front of millions of people and call it shining a light.
” She tilts her head. “He’ll sleep beautifully. ”
“The audience does the rest.”
“The audience does all of it. He doesn’t have to send anyone to Julian’s gate. He only has to be interested out loud.”
The fire pops. Julian hasn’t moved.
Victoria tells me about two people The Veil has identified over the years. One left before the audience arrived and has not returned. The other stayed because there was nothing illegal about what he was, because there were laws protecting him, and because he believed being known was survivable.
It was. Technically.
No one hurt him. No one broke into his house.
No one violated any law that mattered enough to stop what followed.
They simply came. Hundreds of people with phones, questions, cameras, gifts, and demands.
People who knocked at two in the morning because they had driven twelve hours and believed that entitled them to an answer.
People who waited outside restaurants and followed him to the grocery store and posted every place he went.
Eleven months later, he left.
“Where did he go?” I ask.
“Lisbon.”
Nobody says anything to that.
“He lives in one room and rarely goes out,” Victoria says.
“Rowan Pierce did not do that to him. I want to be precise. Pierce isn’t malicious.
He isn’t a bigot and he isn’t a fraud, and when you meet him you will probably like him.
But he believes discovery is inherently good, and he has never learned that finding something does not necessarily give you the right to show it to everyone else. ”
I look over at Julian. He’s standing with his hands behind his back, looking down the bluff at the water, and I have spent eleven weeks learning to read the back of that man’s head.
“You’ve decided,” I say.
“I have made arrangements.”
“That’s not the same as deciding.”
“No,” he says. “It is not.”
“He’ll go,” Victoria says to me, as though he has left the room. “He won’t tell you the date. He’ll tell you he’s thinking about it, and he will be thinking about it, and the thinking will be genuine, and one day you’ll drive up this hill and there will be shutters.”
“Victoria,” Julian says, and I can hear the warning in his voice. She ignores it.
“I have watched you do it four times.”
“Three.”
She arches a manicured brow. “Bristol.”
“Bristol was not the same.”