Chapter Two
Anya
After the interview, I called Mum from Paddington Station as I waited for my train. I hadn’t been able to speak to her yet
that day and I was worried about her. She was in hospital and had been having a rough time of it. People thronged the concourse
as the phone rang. The departures board rippled with changing information.
Finally, Viv answered. After Mum’s first round of chemo, she and I had realized she couldn’t cope alone. I offered to suspend
my studies and come home to take care of her myself, but Mum wouldn’t hear of it. She said she’d find the money from somewhere
to pay for help. I won’t let this fucking cancer compromise your future as well as mine. My mother had a potty mouth but a warm heart and buckets of courage. She hired Viv, who cost a fortune but was worth every
penny.
Viv looked harassed. “Your mum’s not doing great today,” she said, and my heart sank. I heard Mum say, “Don’t tell her that,”
as she took the phone.
“I’m fine,” she said. Was she having trouble holding the phone, or purposely angling it so I couldn’t see her properly?
Sometimes she did that when she was looking rough and she didn’t want me to see.
The screen showed a slice of the ceiling of her ward, then the curtain around her bed.
It wobbled again, and her forehead came into view. “How are you?” she asked.
“I can’t see you, Mum. Can you move the phone?”
The image onscreen wobbled again. Finally, I saw her face. She looked terrible, and I felt the usual grip of panic and the
urge to go to her immediately, even though she’d hate it if I did.
“I had a really great interview today,” I told her.
“Who with this time?”
“St. Andrews.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What about America?”
“I’m just looking at all my options before I make a final decision. St. Andrews contacted me.”
She started to speak. I only caught a few words—“Yale” and “you must” and “don’t”—before she got caught up in a coughing fit
and dropped the phone.
“Are you okay?” I shouted.
Viv’s face appeared on the screen. “Sorry,” she said. “She’s okay but it’s been a rough evening. She’s been drifting in and
out and hallucinating from the morphine. Earlier she thought she could see a mouse in the corner of the room. There was nothing
there, but she was convinced.”
This was the trade-off that we had to manage on Mum’s bad days: pain versus coherence.
“Maybe it would be best to call back tomorrow,” Viv suggested.
I hung up. Before Mum was diagnosed, I didn’t know that illness could feel like such an impossibly sad and heavy weight. The
everyday evils of treatment, the torment of hope, and the crush of disappointment were horrendous. Then there was the huge,
unthinkable fear of losing her completely.
The symbols for death were some of the first I’d learned when I started my studies at uni.
In Western art and literature, it’s the grim reaper, scythe, skull, cloak, and hourglass.
Other cultures associate death with the jackal, the crow, the death’s-head hawk moth, the vulture, and more.
We all know this. They’re some of the most recognizable symbols in the world.
I was adding to them as Mum’s illness progressed, as we met more sick people and their families, other repeat customers on
the oncology ward. I knew that death could also look like a letter from the hospital, the somber expression on a doctor’s
face. Bad blood results. A sinister shadow on a scan. An invitation to talk in a private room.
Those things could also scythe you down with brutal efficiency.
What I didn’t yet know was that the grim reaper can look exactly like someone you know.
When I got back to Oxford, Sid was sitting in my bed, working on his laptop. He looked studious and sweet. There was no one
I’d rather have come back to.
We lived in adjacent Oxford colleges but since we met a year ago, we’d been inseparable. He was my first serious relationship,
the first man I’d fallen hard for. We barely fought, and we laughed a lot. It had been fun, and perfect, and easy so far,
but now, with the future looming, we had hard decisions to make. What to prioritize? Our relationship or our work? We were
both ambitious.
When I’d first mentioned Yale, Sid said, “If you go, you won’t come back.”
I’d wanted to protest that it wasn’t true, but he was probably right. I’d thought of a solution, though: “You could apply
for jobs on the East Coast of the US, too. Why not?”
He shook his head. “For starters, getting a visa won’t be easy. I’d have to get an employer to sponsor me, which would limit
my options. If I want to work on Lucis it’ll be much easier to do here, because I can pick up work whenever I need it if I
get short of funds.”
My friend Ella once asked me, “Do you even have a computer science boyfriend if he doesn’t have a tech start-up dream?
” Lucis was Sid’s dream. He believed it had huge potential.
He was a security researcher, specializing in defenses against malware.
If you met Sid, you wouldn’t immediately have him down as a fighter, but that’s what he was: a warrior on the front line of the arms race to develop tech that could outwit cybercriminals.
I sat on the bed beside him and rested my head on his shoulder. He closed his laptop. “How was it?” He sounded guarded, as
if he was braced for me to say it went badly, especially because I hadn’t messaged him from the train. I wanted to see his
reaction in person.
“It was great. They’ve invited me to visit them in St. Andrews, and I’m going to go.”
He moved so he could see my face. He thought I was kidding. “Really?”
“They want you to come with me. Plus, they’re making me a crazy good offer.”
“How crazy?”
“Fifty grand.”
His eyes popped.
“There’s more. I’ll have research freedom and barely any teaching. She also mentioned a private collection of manuscripts
that’s never been studied before. They’re going to let me work on it. They’re also offering me a rent-free cottage with a
sea view and two bedrooms.”
“Bloody hell, Anya!” he said. Then, cautiously, “What about Yale?”
I didn’t answer the question directly, because in my heart of hearts, I did still want to go to Yale, but I could also see
a way that St. Andrews could work better for me and for Sid. I couldn’t forget Mum in all this, either. She was desperate
for me to go to Yale, but I couldn’t be that far away from her while she was so sick.
“This is obviously hypothetical until they actually make me an offer, but would you consider moving to Scotland with me? Professor Cornish mentioned that they could look into finding you work opportunities at the university, but even if that doesn’t happen you could concentrate on developing Lucis and we could both live off my salary. ”
“Now that is an interesting idea,” he said. I watched him think about it, watched the smile spread across his face.
“Come with me to visit? If it turns out it’s all a fever dream, at least we get a free weekend away by the sea.”
“Yes. Obviously, yes!” he said.
Here’s something I wonder, now that I have the bittersweet benefit of hindsight: If the Institute’s recruitment process hadn’t
worked just the way they planned it, would they have got to me some other way?
I think they would have.
Clio
On the morning after Lillian’s retirement party, Clio arrived early at the British Museum and flashed her badge to bypass
the lines. Visitors were already crowding the ground-floor galleries, streaming toward the Rosetta stone and the Egyptian
mummies. Upstairs, the Medieval Europe gallery was relatively empty.
Clio barely glanced at the famous rotunda or at the exhibits. Her expertise was in modern art: Impressionists, Post-Impressionists,
Surrealists. She’d always found medieval art and artifacts somewhat creepy, and nothing she saw as she walked through the
gallery changed her opinion. A lot of the artifacts and paintings on display were simultaneously familiar and strange, unsettling
versions of modern things, as if humankind hadn’t so much progressed over the past few hundred years as gone a little sideways.
But perhaps she shouldn’t be too cynical. It could be a useful trait at work but a downer outside of it.
She stopped beneath a sign: “The Everly Bequest: Medieval Treasures.” It marked the entrance to a very small room, big enough
for only five or six people to enter at once.
Lillian was already seated on the narrow bench set against the right-hand wall of the gallery, facing the display cabinet, which ran the length of the wall opposite.
An information panel told the story of the van ambush in Russell Square and the recovery of most of the stolen artifacts.
It was entertaining and included copies of old newspaper articles and photographs.
The embroidery, by far the least valuable piece, only got a small mention.
The back and sides of the display cabinet were painted velvety black; the shelves were glass. It was lit from the top, the
lights angled to make the treasures glow, especially the gold.
Lillian indicated that Clio take a seat beside her, and when she did, she saw that she was sitting in front of the embroidery.
It was at eye level. She leaned forward to study it. It had been ripped diagonally, across the bottom. Through glass it was
impossible to look as closely as she wanted, but she was surprised to see that it was quite gorgeous. The linen was fragile,
the frayed edges especially so, and the threads were extremely fine. What she hadn’t been able to see online was how prettily
the metallic ones glinted when light struck them.
She saw better, too, how lovely the intact portrait on the upper left corner was, and the foliage around it, that seemed to
have a letter I within it at the bottom of the roundel that framed the portrait, or perhaps it was a Roman numeral, and she felt it a shame
that the other portrait, on the upper right, had been ripped through, leaving only part of another woman’s head visible. There