The Inheritance

by Simon Tolkien

  “You’re his daughter, aren’t you? I’ve seen you here before.”

  “Yes. Do you know where he’s gone?”

  “They took him to hospital this morning. I was the one who went for the ambulance. He was out on the landing when I was going out to buy my milk, and he called down to me. It gave me quite a shock, I can tell you.”

  “Why did he call down to you? What was wrong with him?” asked Sasha, hanging on to the stair rail for support as the woman’s words sank into her consciousness.

  “Some sort of stroke is what they said. Meant he couldn’t get down the stairs. Strokes do that, you know.”

  “Do what?”

  “Paralyse you all down one side. I reckon that’s what happened to your dad.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Sasha, suddenly angry at the woman’s morbid assumption of the worst. “It might just be something temporary, for all you know.”

  “Well, I know he couldn’t hardly move himself,” said the woman defiantly. “He’s been overdoing it, if you ask me, and that’s what’s brought this on. I’ve heard him every night this week, pacing up and down, and he’s looked awful. But you wouldn’t know, of course. You haven’t been round here for a while, have you?”

  Sasha swallowed hard, refusing to rise to the woman’s spiteful challenge.

  “Which hospital did he go to?” she asked. “Do you know that?”

  “Radcliffe Infirmary. That’s what they said.”

  “Thank you,” said Sasha. “And thank you for calling the ambulance.” But the woman had already closed her door, leaving Sasha alone on the landing in the semidarkness.

  Outside the front door Sasha remembered the codex. But she didn’t go back. She felt clutched by a terrible guilt. The woman was right. She had neglected her father—set him a task that was always going to be beyond his powers, and then left him to it. Alone in a cold attic room with no coal for the fire and no food in the fridge. She’d pretended that her search for the codex and the cross was for his benefit, but that had been a lie, an excuse for neglecting him when he was too old and sick to look after himself. The search was a curse. She’d sacrificed Stephen and now perhaps her father to its demands, and all it had given her in return was an old painted book and a dead man’s list of meaningless numbers.

  All these thoughts and more rushed through Sasha’s mind as she headed across Oxford in the back of a taxi. And then at the hospital she had to sit in a cavernous reception area on the ground floor, crossing and uncrossing her legs for what seemed like hours, before a young Indian doctor appeared as if out of nowhere and told her that, yes, her father was still alive but that he couldn’t offer her what she wanted to hear. He couldn’t offer her any hope at all.

  He said it was something called a hemorrhagic stroke. A blood vessel had burst somewhere in her father’s brain some time during the previous night and now the blood was seeping slowly but surely through the cerebral lobes, shutting her father down little by little, like he was a machine. He was still conscious, but for how much longer the doctor couldn’t say.

  A strange calm descended over Sasha as she followed the doctor down the hospital corridors, turning this way and that until they arrived at a door marked “intensive care.” Perhaps it was a reaction to the roller-coaster of emotions that she had been riding during the previous hour, but now she felt a soft sadness settling down on her like an invisible dust.

  Her father was lying in the hollow of two hospital pillows, connected to a myriad of tubes and machines, and his slow death was being charted on two grey screens positioned on trolleys behind his head. He smiled when he saw his daughter and reached out his right hand for her to hold. His left hand and arm lay stretched out motionless on the white sheet, and Sasha knew without being told that he wouldn’t be moving them anymore.

  “How are you, Dad?” she asked, regretting the inane question as soon as it was out of her mouth.

  “Dying,” he answered succinctly, with a trace of a smile hovering around his pale lips. “Apparently it all started on the right side of my brain, but it’s my left side I can’t move. Mysteries of the organism, Sasha. Incomprehensible to the likes of you and me.”

  “Yes, Dad,” said Sasha, trying her best to return her father’s smile. She’d read somewhere that humour was the language of the brave. Only now did she realise the essential truth of the observation.

  “They’ve been very kind, you know,” Andrew Blayne went on after a moment. “One of the doctors explained it all to me when I asked. I’m like a submarine after the water’s come in. The crew are battening down the hatches, but there are no iron walls in my brain, I’m afraid. And blood is thicker than water. Unfortunately.”

  Sasha understood her father’s need for irony to face his situation, but try as she might, she could no longer keep her emotions in check. “I’m so sorry, Dad,” she said through her tears. “I’m just so sorry.”

  “About what?” Andrew Blayne sounded genuinely puzzled.

  “About everything. About leaving you alone. About not looking after you properly all these years.” The words caught in Sasha’s throat, and she turned her head away.

  “It’s not true, Sasha. Do you hear me? You mustn’t blame yourself.” Suddenly there was urgency in Andrew Blayne’s weakened voice, and he squeezed his daughter’s hand, commanding her attention. “You’re everything I could’ve asked for. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

  “I shouldn’t have given you that book,” cried Sasha, refusing to listen to her father. “It’s cursed. It’s all my own bloody fault.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s a beautiful book. One of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. And I’m happy that I lived to see it. I never thought I would. But I did. And that’s down to you, Sasha.”

  The effort to speak obviously cost Blayne a great deal, and he laid his head back on the pillow as soon as he had finished and half closed his eyes.

  “I should go,” said Sasha, uncertain of what to do. “They said you had to rest, and I’m not helping.” But her father kept hold of her hand, and she stayed where she was.

  Neither of them said anything for a little while, and Sasha fought hard to control herself. She hadn’t cried for years, and these tears had been torn from her body, leaving her with a sense of rupture that she couldn’t erase. She didn’t hear her father the first time that he spoke, and he had to squeeze her hand to get her attention.

  “I solved it, Sasha,” he said in a whisper. “It was last night I understood. Just before all this happened. It was so simple. I should have seen it straightaway. But that’s always the way of it, isn’t it? Everything is easy once you have the answer.”

  Sasha’s heart raced. She felt excited and guilty about being excited all at the same time. She remembered how she had stood wavering outside her father’s door less than two hours earlier, uncertain of whether to go back for the codex, before she’d turned away and made for the hospital. And she remembered the years she had spent searching for St. Peter’s cross while she took instructions from the man she hated most in the whole world or sat in cold deserted libraries searching through the lumber rooms of the past, looking for the key that her father now held in the palm of his hand.

  “I don’t know whether to tell you,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen to you if I do. I don’t know what is right.”

  Sasha heard the uncertainty in her father’s voice, but she was tongue-tied, unable to help him make up his mind. Irrationally it seemed to her that demanding to know the secret from her father on his deathbed would be to acknowledge that the codex mattered more to her than he did. And yet telling him to stay silent meant giving up all that she had worked for and dreamt about. Unable to make a choice, she said nothing, leaving it to her father to decide.

  “You’ll carry on searching whatever I do, won’t you, Sasha?” he said sadly. It was almost as if he was talking to himself. “It’s in your blood, just like it’s in mine. Looking backward, searching for secrets in
dusty places. It’s no life for a beautiful young woman.”

  “I don’t care about being beautiful or young or a woman,” said Sasha passionately, and then stopped, biting her tongue. She had no right thinking of herself while her father was dying in front of her eyes.

  “I care about secrets,” she said quietly after a moment. “And about the past. You taught me that. I suppose I believe that dead men sometimes still speak.”

  “Like the monks of Marjean spoke to me last night, you mean,” said Blayne. “Yes, you’re right. In the end that is what matters. The voices of the dead. And the soon-to-be dead,” he added with a weak smile.

  Sasha smiled back at her father through her tears, and for a moment there was a complete understanding between them. Then, when the moment was over, he told her what he knew, pausing to muster his failing strength at the end of almost every short sentence.

  “The codex is unusual,” he said, “and not just because it’s beautiful. In one way it’s almost unique.”

  “In what way?” asked Sasha when her father didn’t go on.

  “Well, you know that generally only the first letter of the chapter headings is decorated in medieval Gospels, but in the Marjean codex it’s different. The beginning letters of certain other paragraphs are embellished as well. I counted how many times it happens. The answer’s twenty-six.”

  “And there are twenty-six numbers on Cade’s list,” cried Sasha. “You count from the start of each paragraph and that gives you the letters. Is that how it works?”

  “Almost, but not quite. Cade encoded his own numbers. But that wasn’t too difficult to break. And then I had the answer without knowing how I’d got there, which wasn’t good for my vanity.” Andrew Blayne laughed, which brought on a coughing fit. His face was momentarily twisted by a spasm of violent pain, but he fought it down and carried on where he had left off. “In the end I made the connection by thinking about the codex itself. The Gospel of St. Luke. One of the books of the New Testament. And without Revelation, but counting all the letters of St. Paul, there are twenty-six books in the New Testament. And the number of letters in each book is how far you go from each decorated initial. It’s as simple as that.”

  “So what do the letters say? What is the message?” asked Sasha, unable to contain her impatience any longer.

  But her father didn’t answer her question. “I’m so tired, Sasha,” he said after a moment. “I have to sleep a little. Just a little. And then we can talk some more.” His voice was faint and seemed to come from far away. He closed his eyes, and in the silence Sasha noticed the shallowness of his breathing. There was a tremor too in his right cheek. The lines on the screens behind her father’s head rose and fell as before, but she couldn’t remember if they were higher or flatter now than when she had first come in.

  “Isn’t there anything you can do?” she asked, turning to the young doctor who had appeared in the doorway on the other side of the bed.

  “We can do quite a lot to stop the pain. But not the bleeding, I’m afraid. I can’t tell you how long it will take. An hour, a day. It’s better if he rests. There’s a room down the hall where you can get a cup of coffee, and one of the nurses will call you when he wakes up.”

  Sasha got up and looked down at her father. She felt suddenly uncertain about whether she should kiss him. Would it disturb the flow of electronic signals running from his body to the machines behind his bed? She glanced over at the doctor, and it was as if he could read her mind.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”

  Sasha gently brushed away two stray locks of her father’s straggly white hair and thought back on his life. It had promised so much, only to descend into sickness and poverty once John Cade had intervened. The professor’s cold, cruel face flashed across Sasha’s consciousness, and she involuntarily clenched her fists. Given the chance, she’d have murdered him herself all over again at that moment. But instead she willed herself to forget Cade and the codex and to remember her father instead. He had loved her all her life. Even when they were separated through so much of her childhood, Sasha had never doubted him. And now he was going to leave her forever. A terrible premonition of her own future loneliness swept over Sasha and she turned away, groping a path toward the door through the mist of her returning tears.

  In the little room at the end of the hall, she was too tired to get coffee. She just sat down on a chair in the corner, closed her eyes, and within less than a minute was asleep. She dreamt that Cade and Ritter were alive again. They knew who she was and everything she had done. She was walking in Oxford, and they were following her down this lane and that through the warren of narrow cobbled streets behind the Cornmarket. Their footsteps echoed off the thick stone walls, and she could feel them gaining on her all the time. She looked up at the overcast sky and gargoyles with ghastly faces grinned down at her from the rooves of churches and colleges. Breathless, she turned into the run-down courtyard where her father lived and ran up the stairs to his attic room. She took them two at a time, but it was no use. Cade and Ritter were right behind her now. She could almost feel their hands on her clothes, on the ravaged, burnt skin under her shirt. She opened the door and the air was cold as ice, forcing her to a standstill. There was an old crackly record of The Threepenny Opera playing on the gramophone. “Well, the shark has pretty teeth, dear,” sang a German voice singing English. And over on the bed in the corner alcove, her father was stretched out, dressed in a shiny black suit and tie. His patent leather shoes looked strange lying on the starched white bed sheet, and it took Sasha a moment before she noticed the silver half-crown pieces placed over his eyes. She bent down to take them away, but a voice behind her, the sergeant’s voice, told her to leave the coins alone. Andrew Blayne belonged to them now. He wasn’t her father anymore.

  Sasha woke with a start. The doctor was gently shaking her shoulder, trying to get her attention.

  “A bad dream?” he asked, smiling.

  “Yes. It doesn’t matter. How’s my father?”

  “He’s slipping away, I’m afraid, and so I thought I should wake you. I’ve had to give him more painkilling drugs, and that makes it less likely that he’ll regain consciousness. But I don’t know. He might.”

  “Mysteries of the organism,” said Sasha.

  “Mysteries of what?”

  “I’m sorry. It was just something funny he said when we were talking in there before. How long have I been asleep?” she asked, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “An hour. Maybe a little more.”

  Sasha followed the doctor into her father’s room. Immediately she could see that he was worse, much worse. His breathing was very laboured now, and she sat holding his hand until the end came less than twenty minutes later.

  Just before he died, he opened his eyes and looked at her. She was sure he knew who she was, and it seemed like he was trying to say something, but the words would not come. He gave up, and she leant over and kissed him on each sunken cheek.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for being my father.”

  She didn’t know whether he had heard her or not, and a minute later the lines on the screens flattened out, and she knew that he was gone.

  And that was the end of it. She sat by her father’s corpse for another fifteen minutes and then got up to go. But at the end of the corridor, the doctor called her back.

  “You’re forgetting something,” he said. “Your father brought a bag with him. The ambulance men packed it for him before he came here. There’s what looks like a valuable book inside it. I don’t think you should leave it here.”

  Sasha mumbled her thanks. The doctor deserved better for his kindness, but for now she was too preoccupied to talk, and he seemed to understand. Was this what her father had been trying to say at the end when the words would not come? she asked herself as she went down the hospital stairs. That the codex was in his bag, or was he telling her to leave the book alone? She would never
know. He had chosen to tell her the book’s secret, and knowing what it meant would be their last connection.

  She was too impatient to wait until she got home. It was nearly midnight, and the big reception area of the hospital was half-empty. She sat down beside a tank of somnolent tropical fish and opened the codex on her knee. There was no sign of Cade’s list, but she didn’t look for it. It wouldn’t be right to use a crib, and besides her father had said that Cade had encoded his own numbers. It was easier to spell out the Latin names: The four evangelists and then the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of St. Paul to the Corinthians and the Thessalonians and to Timothy. As the letters slowly emerged, Sasha wrote them down one by one. After nine books she had the first two words: “Crux Petri,” “The cross of Peter.” A shiver ran down her back.

  Slowly and methodically she carried on, reading the old monk’s code under the hospital’s strip lighting, oblivious to the murmuring voices of the sick men and women around her. A few minutes later, and she had the message complete. “Crux Petri in manibus Petri est,” it read. “The cross of Peter is in the hands of Peter.” What could it possibly mean? Who was the second Peter, and where were his hands?

  Leaving the last decorated initial behind, Sasha read the last page of the Gospel of St. Luke to herself. Jesus led them out as far as Bethany and blessed them, and while he blessed them, he parted from them and ascended into heaven. “Ascendit in caelum.” She turned the page, and there was Cade’s list of numbers tucked into the back of the book, and at the bottom in her father’s handwriting was a list of his own under the heading, “Abbots of Marjean.” There were four names and four sets of dates: Marcus 1278–1300. Stephanus Pisano 1300–05. Bartholomeus 1306–21. Simeon 1321–27. The last name was twice underlined. Simon, abbot of Marjean. Was he the second Peter of the coded message? Peter after all was Christ’s name for the apostle Simon. He called him petrus, or stone, because Simon was the rock on whom Christ chose to build his church—the same Simon Peter who betrayed Christ three times before the cock crowed on the day of the crucifixion.