Stephanie Barron

by The White Garden (v5)

  “A bloody great find, which that woman snatched right out from under our noses, that’s what you’ve got,” Imogen Cantwell snarled. She was leaning toward Marcus now, her breasts swaying in her wool jumper. “She brought it here under false pretenses. I’ve come to get it back. It’s as much as my job is worth if The Family finds out it’s gone.”

  As Marcus stared at her, understanding broke like dawn over his reeling brain. The Family. A stolen book. A notion it was worth something. Imogen was a servant, obviously. But what in the bloody hell was Gray Westlake doing with her? And why had he forced her on Marcus?

  “Mr. Jones,” Gray said—and Marcus felt the familiar fury in his gut at the careless curtailing of his name, he was no mere Jones, no sodding shopkeeper from Wales with a single syllable indistinguishable from all the rest, he had worked hard to come up with Symonds, the perfect hyphenated expression of his aspiration—“it might be easier if I explained. My landscape architect, Jo Bellamy, was at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent this week, where Miss Cantwell is the National Trust Head Gardener.”

  “Ah,” Marcus said.

  “Jo was observing operations in the garden, at Miss Cantwell’s invitation, with a view to replicating certain aspects of Sissinghurst at my Long Island estate.”

  “Jesus,” Imogen interjected. “You’re the one who wants the White Garden? I’d have thought you’d more sense than to buy a fake.”

  Gray Westlake ignored her. “Jo tells me she found a notebook in some sort of shed—”

  “And I led her right to it!” Imogen cried.

  “She thinks it might have been written by Virginia Woolf. She brought it to London yesterday, to be assessed by your department.”

  “—Which she had no authority to do!” Imogen was working herself into a rage. “I never gave her permission! Wanted to read the book overnight, she said. Because of her precious grandfather. And now she’s gone, and the notebook with her—”

  Marcus stabbed at his speakerphone. “Cissy—did a Miss Jo… Bellamy… an American woman…”—he mouthed at Gray Westlake: Young? Old?—“in her mid-thirties, perhaps… approach the department yesterday?”

  “He doesn’t even know his job,” Imogen muttered to Gray. “But you—if Jo’s your architect, you must know where she is, surely?”

  “Marcus?” Cissy purred through the speakerphone. “I sent her to Peter. The rest of the department were in conference.”

  “Peter,” Marcus spat. “Of course. Still taking coffee in some bloody café, is he?”

  “We’ve had a call this morning. Peter’s on sick leave.”

  “Sick my arse!” Marcus shouted at the speakerphone. “Give me his mobile!”

  “I think,” Gray Westlake said as Cissy disconnected to search her database, “you’ll find that Peter is in Oxford.…”

  · · ·

  “IS IT MARGAUX?” JO ASKED.

  “No.” Peter thrust his cell phone in his coat pocket. “Work number. Marcus bloody Jones. I won’t answer.”

  “Seen all you need to, then?” Glenna held out her hand for the mural photograph. “There’s so much in these files. And so little order! The whole collection should be placed somewhere. University of Sussex, perhaps. With the Woolf papers.”

  “But how nice that it’s here. In the house,” Jo said politely. She turned to follow Peter through the doorway when a thought struck her. “Glenna—do you have any photographs of Vanessa Bell? Or anyone else who lived here?”

  “Loads.” The guide pulled open another file cabinet and spilled a sheaf of prints over the oak desk.

  Her beauty, Jo saw, was bone-deep: as much to do with the deeply modeled sockets of the widespread eyes and the subtle squaring of the chin, that in her sister, Virginia, was elongated to the point of caricature. Vanessa had a luminous glory that must have haunted the men who loved her. In the aging photographs beneath Jo’s hands, her liquid gaze held fated depths, her full lips invited touch. There was power, too, in her air of stillness: She might have been an Archangel, something winged and terrible come to rest. Yet her children huddled gladly within her arms.

  “That’s quite an early one of Vanessa with her boys—Julian by her shoulder and Quentin in her lap,” Glenna said. “He passed on just a few years ago.”

  “And Julian?”

  “Killed driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War.”

  There had been something, Jo remembered with a faint ribbon of unease in her stomach, about Julian in the notebook. The envy the writer felt when she saw even Vanessa’s grief. Vanessa had lost her son—and Virginia, if Virginia indeed was the writer, had envied her for it. As though anguish were as valuable as love.

  Jo sifted through the photographs. Most had stickers on the reverse, with a date and subject noted. Duncan Grant was in many of them. A few showed Clive Bell, with his high forehead and balding pate, his expression of wounded dignity. Quentin grew older under Jo’s fingers. Pictures at Charleston, Jock had said. Tell her pictures at Charleston. The final one was a group photograph: Virginia Woolf the most obvious face among them, a collection of men about her. She was sitting indolently, her long delicate feet extended, in a basket chair on the lawn. Her thin face with its hooked nose and pronounced underbite was suggestive of a horse, where her sister’s had conjured an angel.

  Jo glanced at the back of the picture. Virginia and Apostles, 1933. “Glenna—would it be possible to get a copy of this? And the one of the mural?”

  “What—right off the machine?”

  Jo shrugged. “I know it’s asking a lot.”

  “It’s criminal! One doesn’t do that to old photographs. The light’s bad for them.”

  “One doesn’t store old photographs in file cabinets, either.”

  “Well—” Glenna looked at the scattered images on the surface of the desk. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt. Just this once. Are you two scholars or something?”

  “Yes,” Jo said. Something just about covered the two of them. Gardener and Expert, 2008. Peter was moving restlessly near Charleston’s front door, too polite to remind her he was waiting.

  She took the photocopies Glenna gave her. “Here,” she said, handing the woman a twenty-pound note in return. “A donation. For the Charleston Trust. I wish it were more.”

  The guide placed it carefully in a strongbox as Jo walked away.

  “YOU’LL NEED TO FIND THE M11.” PETER TOSSED HER the map as the Triumph hurtled up the road. “Although it might be wiser to just take the A1 north out of London. The traffic shouldn’t be too bad at this hour—everyone’s at luncheon.”

  “Except us,” Jo observed. “Surely you’ve noticed the lack of food? Isn’t there a Michelin three-star in your back pocket?”

  “With time so short—oughtn’t we to wait until Cambridge?”

  “At which point, we’re talking dinner.”

  “Tea,” he corrected.

  “Tea, then. Drop me in London as you fly by.”

  The Triumph swerved inadvertently as he turned to stare his outrage. “You’re not serious!”

  “I’m tired. I’m hungry. And I’m feeling really guilty. I ditched somebody yesterday who flew thousands of miles for the privilege. I promised I’d be back by tonight.”

  “This being the bloke who tried to get you drunk before lunchtime.”

  “Gray Westlake. Yes. My client.” Jo felt herself flush. “He gave me a glass of wine, okay? That hardly qualifies as—”

  “Sorry. None of my business. I simply can’t—I won’t accept that you’re pulling out of the chase.”

  “The chase? Is that what this is?—A hunt for the Missing Margaux?”

  “Not Margaux,” he retorted. “Never Margaux. I wouldn’t risk the loss of lunch—much less my job—to hare after her. But this… Jo, this thing you’ve stumbled on is worth any amount of senseless driving and future unemployment. Don’t tell me you don’t agree. You want to know the truth more than I do. It’s personal for you.”

  Jock, she thought. But sh
e did not say anything. She was torn between halting the mad dash to Cambridge before it began, demanding that Peter find his ex-wife and restore her notebook, and the desire to plunge further into this inadvertent treasure hunt. There was a whisper of doubt, too, in her heart of hearts: Was she just avoiding London and Gray and the terror of choosing?

  “I saw your face back there,” Peter persisted. “What did you worm out of Glenna?”

  “Photographs. Or copies of them.” She tossed the pictures in Peter’s lap and held the Triumph’s wheel as he looked down. “I know I’m American and we never recognize anything more recent than our own birthdays, but could you please humor me and explain what an Apostle is?”

  “Actually, you’re not supposed to know,” Peter said kindly. “Nobody is.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  He laughed. “The Cambridge Apostles are a Secret Society. Rather like your Skull and Bones in America—a group of hush-hush movers and shakers from a particular university, blood sworn to keep mum about what they do together. Or where. Or for how long.”

  “I’ve heard of Bonesmen,” Jo said cautiously. She couldn’t exactly quote the Skull & Bones rule book—if one existed—for Peter’s benefit. But they surfaced occasionally in movies. She had a vague idea they were misogynistic and somehow tied to the CIA. Or was it the Mafia? There was something about a coffin.…

  “The Apostles began way back in the Napoleonic period, I believe, as a kind of evangelical Christian movement. Hence the name. Although most people think it’s because there’s rarely more than twelve of them at any one time. Undergraduates, that is. The alumni group is much larger, of course—scattered through all walks of British life.”

  “What do they do?”

  “I think,” Peter answered carefully, “that they talk a lot. The other name for the group is the Cambridge Conversazione Society. The idea is that the Apostles gather in a room somewhere, every Saturday I believe, and somebody reads a paper he’s written. Then the rest discuss it. And take a vote on something that came up in the conversation. They used to eat sardines on toast—one hopes the fare has improved now they’ve started admitting women—and then disband until the next week.”

  “Sounds incredibly dull.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” he agreed. “One sort of expects sex with a Secret Society, or at least one of the Seven Deadlies. But the unifying factor among Apostles has been genius, I think—some of the most extraordinary minds in Britain have been members.”

  “Keynes,” Jo suggested.

  “Keynes. Also Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Rupert Brooke, the godlike poet of World War One. Lytton Strachey—who was a flaming queen and a damn good biographer—E. M. Forster, who wrote A Room with a View and Howards End. And your Virginia’s husband, of course—Leonard Woolf.”

  “So Virginia knew about them.”

  “Of course. She practically lived in their pockets. It’s extraordinary, really—only a handful of people in the past two hundred years were chosen, and there they all are: the heart of Bloomsbury. One wonders whether the Bloomsbury Group would have existed, absent the Apostles.”

  “So you think the whitewashed mural is some kind of clue, pointing us toward Cambridge. What if Vanessa just decided she hated it? Once both Virginia and Keynes—if it is a portrait of Keynes—were dead?”

  Thoughtfully, Peter shook his head. “It’s too weird. I mean, why would Vanessa stick that picture in Keynes’s old bedroom, long after he’d acquired a house of his own in the neighborhood? And think about the atmosphere of the piece. He’s on his knees. It’s like he’s praying for forgiveness. There’s guilt behind it. Don’t you think?”

  “So where in Cambridge do we look?”

  Peter took his time answering this. They were coming into the southern suburbs of London now, skirting around the city on the ring road toward East Anglia. Jo glanced at the map, no longer interested in forcing Peter to drive to the Connaught and drop her there. She at least ought to call Gray. But she had turned off her cell phone to save the battery—her charger was back at the George Hotel in Kent, she hadn’t expected to be gone this long—and a curious languor was sweeping over her. The first sign of starvation, probably.

  What she wanted was to sit in a basket chair like Virginia, skirt pooling around her, dancer’s feet extended. While the Apostles showed off their Genius…

  “Apostles Screed,” Peter muttered. “That phrase meant something to Margaux, obviously. She was studying the back cover of the notebook yesterday right before she kicked us out. And then she skipped her vital departmental dinner, rang somebody up—and set an appointment with the bloke for today. Who would it have been?”

  “A present-day Apostle?”

  “That’s a start. Somebody with access at Cambridge. A professor, perhaps. Christ, it could be anyone! Pity they don’t announce which of their dons is Apostolic, on the university website. We could just go down the list.”

  “Peter,” Jo said, “we shouldn’t bother retracing Margaux’s steps. She won’t take your calls. She’s not going to give up the notebook. And she’s probably already left Cambridge.”

  “Are you declaring defeat, then?”

  “No. I’m suggesting we beat her at her own game.” Jo shifted in her seat so that she faced Peter’s profile. “Margaux’s set her course. We followed ours—to Charleston. We have to assume it’s a race—and get to the finish before she does.”

  He shot her a glance, at once derisive and smug. “This, from the woman who was parting company at London.”

  “You said something back there, at Vanessa’s house—when I referred to Apostles Screed. What were you thinking?”

  “About the Ark,” he said.

  “The what?”

  “It’s supposed to be a sort of box. Actually, it must be countless numbers of boxes by now. Each week, after the chosen Apostle stands on the hearth rug and delivers his or her paper, a copy is stored in the Ark. The Apostolic Holy-of-Holies.”

  “Is that where Margaux will look first?”

  “It’s the obvious place. But the question is: Where exactly have the Apostles hidden it?”

  Jo frowned. “You mean, you don’t know?”

  “Nobody does,” he said calmly, “who isn’t a member. Margaux can’t know. And so she’ll guess. She’ll look at the fact that most Apostles hailed from certain colleges—King’s and Trinity—and she’ll nose around them.”

  “But, Peter—where do you think the Ark might be?”

  “In the bowels of the Wren. That’s the library at Trinity.”

  “Can we get access?”

  “Possibly.” He downshifted as a massive lorry thrust itself in front of the Triumph. “There’s a fellow I know. Hamish Caruthers. Did him a favor, once. He’s Head Librarian. I suppose he might just be an Apostle himself. I’d never ask, of course.”

  “But why would this guy violate his oath—and show us the Holy-of-Holies?”

  Peter smiled cryptically. “Now that really is a secret. You’ll have to pry it out of Hamish himself.”

  “IT WOULD SEEM,” MARCUS SYMONDS-JONES REMARKED, “that Mr. Llewellyn is out of mobile range at the moment.”

  “Why don’t you tell us about the guy?” Gray Westlake was sitting at his ease in the Bauhaus chair, one tailored leg crossed over the other. Why, then, did Marcus sense the coil of a venomous snake?

  “Oh, Peter’s quite sound,” he murmured. “Or rather, he has been. Until lately. Excellent credentials. Knows his stuff. Magdalen man. Been working Rare Books for a decade at least. Twelve years, perhaps.”

  “Does he usually go AWOL with clients?”

  “Sorry?” Marcus glanced at the Cantwell woman, but Imogen seemed as bewildered by the term as he was.

  “Absent without leave.”

  “Right. Peter has never done a bunk like this in my knowledge of him. But to tell you the truth”—Marcus leaned over his desk with an air of confidentiality—“he hasn’t been the same since the wife left him. Ve
ry hot property, that—legs right up to her neck—”

  Imogen snorted.

  “Trophy wife?” Gray suggested.

  Marcus knew this phrase—trophy wives abounded in Sotheby’s world, spending their husbands’ wealth on furniture and jewelry and priceless works of art—but he shook his head emphatically. “Not at all. Margaux’s something of a sensation on the literary scene. Completely out of Peter’s class, of course. Highly regarded. She’s a Fellow at Magdalen.”

  “Oxford or Cambridge?”

  Point to you, Westlake, Marcus thought. Few Americans knew there were two colleges by the same name, one at each of the top universities. “Oxford. She and Llewellyn met there, as undergraduates.”

  “But Jo called from Oxford yesterday,” Imogen objected. “She was there, with my notebook.”

  “Maybe Llewellyn took her,” Gray added.

  “You’re suggesting he consulted his ex-wife about this pseudo Woolf property?” Marcus managed to sound incredulous.

  “Is that so unlikely?” Gray smiled disarmingly at the frumpy woman beside him. “I talk to my former wives. Usually about money. Does this guy dislike his so much that he’s cut her off?”

  “Quite the reverse, I should have said,” Marcus conceded. “Positively pining. He’s done dick-all in the office, ever since the split—”

  “Mr. Jones,” Imogen broke in, “let us be clear with one another. I care dick-all for the details of Mr. Llewellyn’s private affairs. I care dick-all for Mr. Llewellyn. I simply want my notebook back. It went missing on your watch. I expect you to find it. If you haven’t located your bloody expert—and Jo Bellamy with him—by teatime today, I’m going to the police.”

  She thrust herself upward from Marcus’s precious chair, as if determined to exit without another word, but Gray Westlake stopped her with a raised hand.

  “Miss Cantwell. Going to the police will only get you fired from the National Trust.”

  “I doubt it’ll come to that,” she retorted. “Consider the scandal. American Tourist Steals Priceless Manuscript from National Trust Property, Abetted by Auction House. I reckon Mr. Git-Jones here will go his length to keep that pile of dung from hitting the fan.”