The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  I removed the deed from the book and held it up.

  “Here it is,” I said. “Safe and sound.”

  I would have handed it to Johnny, but he wouldn’t have been able to hold it. Instead, I pressed the folds of the paper open and laid it on the arm of his chair.

  He was overcome with emotion as he gazed at the paper, so overcome that he didn’t say anything. One by one, the siblings turned to me, with questions in their eyes—What was he doing? What was going on? Wasn’t he happy?

  “He’s overjoyed,” I said, and Johnny nodded.

  “Why Wales?” Esther asked him. “There has to be a reason.”

  “There is,” he said.

  “You told some of it to me,” I said to Johnny. “But would you like to tell them?”

  He nodded and began.

  “Your mother, God rest her soul, was born in 1937. Maimie and I, we had a little girl. Born just two months before your mum.”

  “Woolsie!” Esther cried. “You never told us.”

  He shook his head. “We couldn’t … speak of her.”

  “Can you tell us now?” Josie asked gently.

  The ghost nodded. “Her name was Gwennie. Gwendolyn Winifred Grady—Winifred after Maimie’s aunt Una.”

  “Una,” said Tad. “I’ve heard of her. Wasn’t she a cook for Mummy’s family?”

  “She was,” answered the butler. “It was Una who brought Maimie to work for your mother’s parents. I’d been working in the house for almost a year. That’s how we met. A year later, we were married.

  “Anyway, you’ve heard me tell about the war—how your grandparents had Maimie and me take your mother to Brighton, during the evacuation.”

  “And then to South Wales,” Tad continued.

  “Right. See, we had a cottage on the water. A right little snug of a place. Four rooms—kitchen, sitting room, and two bedrooms. We were there for three years.”

  “Three years?” said Esther. “I had no idea it was that long. I thought it was like … a month or two.”

  “No. We stayed until just before the blitz on the Swansea Docks. Your grandfather, of course, was involved in the war effort and couldn’t leave London, but he arranged for our return. I suppose he could do things other people couldn’t, having the grand position and all. But only three of us came home.”

  “What happened?” Josie finally asked.

  “Gwennie … she was swept away by a wave. The girls were playing on the shore. It was a Sunday in June and Maimie had packed us a picnic. If you could call it that; there wasn’t much to be had in those days but what you could grow yourself. That day, I remember, we had brown bread and boiled potatoes and some jot—bacon bits and onion with scraps of wild rabbit.

  “The sky was clouding over, but we didn’t give it a thought. It all happened so fast. Next minute we heard a bit of a rumble and the wind was getting cold, so we were packing up to head home. We think Gwennie had her eye on a bird. There was a flock of little grebes, young ones, all fluffed out on the water, and one of them flapped up and took flight. Gwennie ran right into the water, took a spill, and was pulled down and out by an undertow. Maimie started screaming and we both ran into the water. Neither of us was much of a swimmer, but we went right in after our baby. Thing was, we couldn’t see where she was—she was underwater. It held her there, the undertow did. Maimie ran back to care for your mum while I kept diving under the water, trying to see where Gwennie was. Other people came in, too, five or six men, I recall, and it was one of those men that finally found her. Not twenty-five feet from where I was. But it was—”

  Johnny broke off.

  “Too late,” said Josie sadly.

  The ghost nodded. He paused to collect himself and then went on.

  “We had to leave her there,” he said softly.

  “Gwennie’s buried in Wales,” Tad said softly.

  “She is.”

  “And that’s why you bought a place there?” asked Esther.

  The ghost nodded. “Right near the one your grandfather rented for us. We planned to settle there, Mairead and I, after you kids was up and out.”

  “But she got cancer,” Josie said kindly. “And then you did.”

  “I never could give up the smokes,” he answered. “Nerves, I s’pose. But I had to find that deed. That place is our only connection to Gwennie. It’s near the churchyard where we laid her.”

  “And you own it?” I asked. “The house? Free and clear?”

  “We do. We put everything we had into that place.”

  “What would you like us to do with it?” I asked.

  You would have thought, given all the years he spent trying to bring about this very moment, that he would have had a plan. But he didn’t.

  “Well, I don’t rightly know,” he said.

  Tad stood up. “Woolsie,” he said, “you will never know what you and Maimie meant to me and my sisters.” Astonishingly, he then had to stop talking. His voice was cracking.

  “That’s right!” said Esther.

  “It is,” cried Josie.

  “Even more than my mother and father,” Tad continued, “you made this place a home. You taught us to count. Maimie made our birthday cakes. You fixed our bikes. Maimie knitted us sweaters. You didn’t tell my father when you caught me smoking—”

  “And you didn’t tell Mummy,” Josie interrupted, “when you caught me climbing up the fire escape at two in the morning.”

  Hmmmm, I thought. You’re braver than I am.

  Johnny smiled. “You were good kids, all of you,” he said. “You were like Maimie’s and my own.”

  “If you leave it in our hands,” Tad said, “we’ll figure out what to do with the place. We’ll think of something good and we’ll do it. Do you trust us?”

  “Sure I do,” said the old ghost.

  “Who’s been paying the taxes?” Tad asked.

  “Oh, I paid them right on time, every year,” answered the ghost.

  Tad glanced awkwardly at me.

  “So they haven’t been paid—recently,” I suggested.

  “No,” admitted Johnny sadly. “Oh, dear God, you don’t suppose …”

  “Don’t you worry about it,” Tad said firmly. “If taxes have to be paid, we’ll pay them. Whatever it takes, we’ll work it out. I promise you.”

  I don’t know exactly when my opinion of Tad had begun to change, but I was beginning to feel sure pretty sure I’d misjudged him. After all, it was Sylvia who had set me up to dislike him so much, and she certainly didn’t know him very well. Maybe she had convinced herself that she was closer to Finny than he was to his own children. Maybe she needed to feel at the center of Finny’s life, and saw his kids as a complication. Maybe she simply wasn’t a good judge of character and disliked anyone who overwhelmed her. In any case, I found myself warming to Tad.

  “I give you my word,” Tad said to the ghost.

  “Me too,” cried Josie.

  “And me,” said Esther. “We all promise!”

  “I’m not sure how we’ll do it,” Tad said. “The deed’s in your name and you’re … gone. I’ll have to talk to someone who knows about Welsh property law.”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” said Johnny. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”

  “I’ll try,” Tad said. “I’ll do everything I can.”

  “God bless you, lad,” said Johnny. “God bless you all.”

  Tad let out a sigh and looked at me. Gradually, so did Josie and Esther.

  “Johnny,” I finally said. “Are you ready now to leave?”

  “I am,” he said.

  “Is there anything else you want to say?”

  “Tell them we loved them all to pieces. Tell them not to work so hard and not to fight with each other and to remember me and Maimie and make us proud: to be good people and kind people and do a good turn when they get the chance.”

  They all dissolved when I repeated his words. I’d be doing them all a favor to get this over wit
h as soon as possible.

  “Anything else you want to say?” I asked. “He’s going to leave now, so it’s your last chance.”

  “I love you!” shouted Josie, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  “I love both of you!” said Esther. “Tell Maimie I love her!”

  Tad alone could utter not a word. He kissed his hand and held it over his heart.

  “All right, Johnny,” I said, “here we go. Look over at that wall. In a minute, you’ll see a white light and a doorway.”

  I closed my eyes and envisioned the light and the opening.

  “I see it!” I heard him cry.

  “Walk toward it,” I said. “And when you’re ready, walk through it.”

  I held the image firmly in my mind as I opened my eyes. Johnny was floating toward the light.

  “Maimie!” I heard him cry. “Gwennie! Oh, my darling baby girl! I’m coming! Daddy’s coming!”

  He approached the glowing door, walked through it, and was gone.

  The fire flared up with a burst of snaps and crackles. The ghost’s departure had disturbed the energy in the room. Esther was now the one crying, and Josie crossed the room to hug her sister. Tad sunk down into a chair.

  “That was the most amazing thing I have ever seen,” he said. “I just don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I responded.

  Tad stood up, walked over to where Johnny had been sitting, and fetched the deed from the arm of the chair. He shook his head as his eyes scanned the faded lettering. Finally he looked up.

  “What’ll we do with this?” he asked. “What would be the right thing? The thing he’d want us to do.”

  “I have an idea,” I said.

  “Let’s talk about it,” he answered, smiling.

  I nodded. “Okay. There’s something else I want to discuss with you, too.”

  I’d seen a whole different side of Tad in the past few hours, and I no longer believed that he was just a crass and thuggish opportunist. Esther embarrassed him by telling me, as we sat there watching the embers die down, that since Monday, when Tad learned through me that Johnny was still in the house, Tad had basically been living here, talking to the spirit he couldn’t even see, just keeping the old ghost company though his last days and nights on earth.

  Her brother had also set in motion a plan to try to get the boat back, Esther later confided. He hadn’t really known how much the boat had meant to Josie. He’d also been doing what their father had instructed. Finny had been worried about Josie’s safety. She’d had her psychiatric ups and downs, and her father had been deathly afraid that she would take the boat out by herself one day, while in the throes of one of her manic swings. He’d been terrified that she would drown.

  Anyway, sitting in the quiet living room as the fire burned down, I knew that I could trust them. So I told them everything. The whole story. How their father had left the manuscript in Sylvia’s possession. How she had promised him that she’d keep trying to trace its history and assemble proof of its provenance, and how she’d hid it in a false cover when the books were unexpectedly donated to the Athenaeum. How she’d ultimately tried to safeguard it by taking it home, and how it had been stolen. I told them about the monks, and about Dec, and about what was going to happen this weekend on Nantucket.

  I only avoided one part of the tale, the part that might really hurt them.

  Your father didn’t trust you, was what I kept to myself. I wasn’t even sure, anymore, if this was true. Here, too, Sylvia might have put her own spin on things.

  They were silent for a very long time. It was a lot to absorb, this huge long saga; it would have been a lot to absorb even if we hadn’t already passed an emotional few hours. But if not for the intimacy of these past few hours, we would never have been able to speak heart to heart.

  Tears came to my eyes when Tad finally spoke.

  “How can I help?” he asked softly.

  That was how we found ourselves heading down to Police Headquarters on Berkeley Street, where Tad filed a report on the stolen object and gave Dec the signature he so urgently needed. And Tad’s good deeds didn’t end there.

  Bruno Dollfus looked nothing like I’d expected. I’d been prepared for a giant moose of a guy—distracted, ill-shaven, thoughts fixated on another century; in other words, an outsized version of Sam. But the man who answered my knock on the door of a room at the Charles Hotel was a trim, compact athlete in a gold silk tie and a navy silk suit. Judging by his appearance, I doubted there had been any need for the protection offered by Karl Bryson. I imagined Dollfus whipping off his tailored jacket, crouching with concentration, raising his hands like lethal paddles, and decking the hapless Atlas with a couple of well-placed kicks.

  Sam and Sylvia sat side by side on a sofa upholstered in cranberry brocade. They were beaming. One champagne bottle sat upside down in an ice bucket, and Sam grabbed a second from another silver canister as he flew to his feet. He reached for a champagne flute on the coffee table.

  “Anza!” he cried. “We’ve had an extraordinary evening.”

  That makes four of us, I thought.

  My gaze was drawn to the table off to our left, which someone had covered with a cloth of chocolate-colored velvet. There they were, on the table, eight or ten loose manuscript pages.

  I glanced at Sylvia as Dollfus’s cell phone began to chirp. My heart was racing; I could almost feel the adrenaline coursing through me.

  “Are they …?”I asked.

  She nodded. Then smiled.

  “Good Lord!” I said.

  I walked over to the table and caught my breath at the beauty of the pages spread out across it. On the fragile yellow sheaves of parchment were intricate golden letters, green within their borders, and tiny, crosshatched chains that seemed to form the marrow of an oft-repeated paisley pattern. The hand lettering of the text remained crisp and dark. It had survived the centuries well. I felt dazed at the actuality and nearness of these priceless pages, at the warmth and brightness of the room, and at the scent of aftershave in the air, Bruno’s no doubt, something sylvan and astringent, like bark and lemon. I glanced over at Sylvia. Her cheeks were flushed and she looked childlike, sitting beside Sam on the couch with her knees pulled together and her toes turned in.

  Bruno stepped into the adjoining room to have his phone conversation and handed me a glass of champagne. I had a sip. It was icy, and it sent a worrying jolt of pain up one of my back teeth. I sat down in one of the armchairs.

  “It went just the way we hoped,” Sam said.

  “Only better!” Sylvia added.

  “Really? Well, tell me!”

  “You tell her, Sam,” Sylvia said.

  Sam needed little urging. He cleared his throat and leaned forward.

  “I was down in the lobby,” Sam said. “Bryson had me wait down there while he came up here for the meeting. So there I am, sitting in the corner, reading a magazine and minding my own business, when who should come prancing across the room?!”

  Sam was grinning.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Guess!” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Amanda! She walks right into the Noir.”

  “What’s the Noir?” I asked.

  “It’s a bar off the lobby,” answered Sylvia.

  “No!” I said. “So what did you do?”

  “Pulled my chair back into the shadows so she wouldn’t see me, but I could still see her. She sat right down at the bar and ordered a drink. Didn’t move for an hour, hour and a half. Probably had three or four drinks. She kept checking her cell phone over and over.

  “Finally, the elevator doors open and Bryson steps out. He’s got a guy with him, big fat fellow in a navy blue blazer. There’s no love lost between the two of them, you can see that right away. Bryson’s got him by the arm and the cop’s looking around the lobby for me. But I don’t want him to see me! I want to keep my eye on Amanda. Bryson marches the guy out, a
nd I see he’s got him in handcuffs. But Amanda doesn’t see any of this. She’s just sitting there, working on her drink.

  “I race outside, and Bryson’s just putting the guy in the car. I tell him Amanda’s inside, so he comes back into the hotel with me, hauling the guy in the handcuffs.

  “We walk right into the Noir. We walk right up to her. She whips around. She doesn’t seem to get it. She’s looking from me to Bryson, to her pal there, and he’s speechless, he’s just shaking his head, afraid to say anything. So I say, ’Amanda, this is Detective Karl Bryson. He works for the Cambridge Police Department.’

  “‘Detective?’ she says, acting all sweet and innocent. But she knows.

  “I look her straight in the eye and I say, ‘It’s over.’

  “‘Madam,’ says Bryson, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us.’”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  WE CROSSED NANTUCKET Sound on the high-speed ferry. I couldn’t help wondering, as the boat headed out of the harbor toward open sea, past the small cluster of neat and modest cottages referred to grandly as the “Kennedy Compound,” what the old whaling captains would have thought of our zippy little Mustang of a boat. I prefer the slow ferry, the one that makes the trip in a couple of hours. I like standing on the upper deck, watching the coastline of Massachusetts get smaller and smaller as the wake churned up by the boat’s groaning progress foams and swirls, fanning out behind the ferry in a mesmerizing flow.

  Today, though, we had opted for speed: one hour, dock to dock. We were set to meet up with the folks from Interpol, who had taken a room at the Jared Coffin House, an old inn right on the main square in Nantucket proper. Since Interpol didn’t have jurisdiction over the island, they’d had to coordinate their efforts with both the Massachusetts State Police and an art theft task force of the FBI. Based on information Declan had obtained from Scully, the State Police, working with officers on the Nantucket force, believed they had pinpointed the house in which the meeting was set to take place: an Architectural Digest—type home built in the past few years in a secluded area of Madaket, on the western side of the island.