Bristol House (7 page)

“It’s the spitting image of you,” Annie said. “And the haircut is called tonsure. In the early Middle Ages, all Western clerics shaved the center of their heads. By the fifteen hundreds, only monks did it.” Annie moved her hand and revealed the date at the bottom of the sketch. “I drew this a week ago Monday night. I’d never seen you before Jennifer introduced us that Tuesday.”

“I hate sounding like a conceited jackass, but my face is pretty well-known.”

“It is in England. But I arrived here a week ago Sunday. And I haven’t been in London since I spent a few months studying here six years ago. I remember a man called Jeremy somebody who grilled politicians on television, but I had never heard of you.”

“Jeremy Paxman,” Geoff said. “
Newsnight
on the BBC. In fact, I was researching for his show when I stumbled on the Weinraub material. As I said, I didn’t have my own program back then.”

“So I couldn’t have seen you when I was here. And I’m afraid no one knows who you are in America.” She blushed. “I mean at least I don’t. Didn’t.”

He didn’t say any more.

She’d heard someone label TV talking heads “egos with legs.” Based on what she’d read, Geoff Harris was a cut above, cast in an older, more serious mold, but with sharp twenty-first-century teeth. Still, there was no way to know that for sure. If she told him her whole story, by tomorrow she could be a feature in some notorious English tabloid: crop circles and a visiting American seeing British ghosts.

Her instincts said he would not treat her that way.

He was looking directly at her. “Annie,” he said. “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.” His voice contained no judgment, no intimidation. That ease of manner, implying endless patience, was no doubt a technique he’d developed for wheedling information out of politicians. It was effective with her as well.

Annie flipped the pages of the sketchbook and let him see the rest of the drawings. “As I said,” she began, “it started that Monday. When I was checking out the apartment I’m renting while I’m in London . . .”

He listened without comment, occasionally turning the pages of the sketchbook, studying the different views of his doppelgänger.

“The thing is,” she finished up, pointing to the monk in the drawing, “I think I know who the ghost is—or rather was.”

“That’s interesting. Who?”

“I mean I know in a general sort of way. I think he was one of the Carthusian monks from the London Charterhouse. In 1535 Henry VIII began executing anyone who didn’t agree that the king should replace the pope as head of the English church. He started with the Charterhouse monks.”

Geoff raised a single eyebrow. “And according to your theory, one of them is my ancestor?”

“That’s right.”

“Unlikely,” he said.

“But it could be, couldn’t it?”

“Pretty much anything ‘could be.’ But in this case . . . I grew up in a solid working-class neighborhood in Portsmouth, down on the south coast. My dad had a small grocer’s shop that his granddad had started and his dad had run before him. As far as I know, no Harris was religious, much less Catholic. My mother is a German Jew whose family managed to get her to England in ’39 as part of the Kindertransport. Some holy monk from God knows when or where doesn’t sound like part of my lineage, does he?”

“Particularly,” Annie said with resignation, “a monk who may be a figment of the imagination of an overwrought American.”

“There is that,” Geoff agreed, “though I didn’t want to say.”

“I’m not insane, Geoff. And I’m not making this up. Really.” She couldn’t very well strip off her jeans and show him the scrape marks. She settled for the next best thing. “There’s a picture of some of the monks from the London Charterhouse in an out-of-print nineteenth-century book I found online. Can I show you?”

“Have a go,” he said, nodding toward a large rosewood desk positioned in front of a massive bookcase suspended from the ceiling on steel wires so it acted as a room divider. “Let’s see if one of them looks like me.”

There were, Annie noted, no pictures of the dead wife on his desk. Nothing particularly personal, come to that. Only a small stack of books and maps, a notebook, and a PC with a lightning-fast chip. She downloaded the book in seconds, and because she knew exactly what she was looking for, she had the drawing on the screen almost immediately. It was described as three of the monks enduring the first part of their punishment. They were strapped feetfirst to a horse-drawn hurdle, a board flat on the ground, and were being dragged over the cobblestones to their execution. Tudor custom encouraged the watching crowds to pelt such prisoners with every kind of filth.

In the picture the monks were lying faceup, so it should have been possible to enlarge the image, print it, and get a decent look at their features. Geoff’s printer was a floor-model Xerox with all the bells and whistles, but however advanced its enlarging capacities, it produced only a blur.

Geoff brought their coffees to the desk, a mug for her, a small cup of espresso for him. They spent the next forty minutes trying to Photoshop the drawing. “Above my pay grade,” he said finally, “but I know who to ask.”

“Who?”

“Bloke at the studio. Clary Colbert. World’s best techie. If it can be done, he can do it. Is it okay to send him this?”

“Sure. The whole thing’s in the public domain. Though I’d prefer we didn’t tell him why we’re interested.”

Geoff wrote a quick note, then punched a few keys. “Done.”

Maybe, Annie thought, but I’m due for some luck. Maybe it’s just beginning.

6

Annie spent most of the next day at the Jewish Museum. It was a base she had to touch, but she had not expected to find anything there and she was correct. The collection was fine, but it concentrated on the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century waves of immigration and on British Jews of the modern era. It offered nothing about Holborn in 1535, much less any Jews who may have lived there. She could return to focusing on the things that might move her forward.

She spent the bus ride back to the flat adding up what she knew, and what she only surmised. For one thing, she was sure the Scranton map was somehow related to her quest. It wasn’t obvious how, but her gut told her it mattered. Every researcher alive learns never to ignore the all-important gut. So although she wanted to separate the ghostly goings-on at the flat from the quest for the Jew of Holborn, her gut told her not to, and she obeyed it. She also had to admit to a similar instinct about the book she’d found online. The nineteenth-century history of the London Carthusians had a number of illustrations, among them a series of drawings identifying the location of the old Charterhouse.

According to Annie’s calculations, a direct line of sight had run between the monastery and Bristol House. You could stand at the window in her flat’s back bedroom—the window that seemed to have flown open of its own accord—and, presuming no buildings in between, look directly into the world of the Carthusian monks. Never mind that Henry drove them out in 1538, or that Bristol House wasn’t built until 1901. In terms of the phenomena she’d experienced at the flat and nowhere else, that sight line seemed to her to be of major importance. And the persecution of the Charterhouse monks had begun in 1535—the same year her Jew of Holborn was supposed to be distributing his treasures. How coincidental was that likely to be? she asked herself as the bus stopped and started its way through the traffic of modern London.

***

Returning to the apartment after spending hours away had evolved into a set routine, a series of checks. Turn the key. Open the door. Hold her breath while she reached for the remote on the hall table. Holding her breath should not have anything to do with whether the ghost appeared. Still, Annie always drew in that first long gulp of air and did not exhale until she clicked on the radio.

“The Foreign Office has said there is no doubt that the United Nations vote will come in the next few days. As previously announced, Britain will abstain because . . .”

Annie was unaware of the issue, or whether she should approve or disapprove Britain’s abstention. The discussion moved on to a cricket match in Jaipur. She had no idea what that was about either, but it didn’t matter. It was the announcer’s voice that gave her both comfort and courage. Annie waltzed confidently into number eight on a wave of inexplicable talk of overs and declarations and wickets.

She dropped her bag in the drawing room, taking a minute to note that the lilacs she’d bought the day before were already wilting, but all else was as it should be. She walked down the hall to the kitchen with, thank God, no extraordinary incident and stopped to squeeze a lemon into some soda water, add a bit of sugar, then take a sip. Finally, with her heart beating at a furious rate despite the soothing drone of the BBC, she turned and looked down the short leg of hall toward the back bedroom.

The door was closed, which was how she’d left it earlier in the day, and there was nothing to see.

In the dining room her laptop was open—also as she’d left it—but idling in sleep mode. She struck a couple of keys and waited for the screen to light up, then clicked open her mail and ran her eye down the list of senders. Most of what had come in while she was away was advertising. There was, however, an e-mail from Geoff Harris. He’d written one word, “Bollocks,” and attached a picture from the old book. It was the drawing of three Carthusians being dragged on a hurdle to their execution at Tyburn, enlarged so every detail was sharp and clear. None of the monks even slightly resembled either Geoff or the man she’d seen in the back bedroom.

Annie hit reply and typed, “Whatever bollocks means, I agree.”

Moments later her phone rang at the other end of the apartment. She had to dash down the hall to grab it from the bag she’d left in the drawing room. Geoff was on the line. “I want to talk about this. May I come by?”

Annie said he could.

***

“Clary said he had to add pixels to make it this clear, but that he didn’t change any of the parameters. The way he explains it, this is the picture from the book, adjusted to how it would appear if the artist had been working to a larger scale.”

“It looks right,” Annie said. “Exactly like the original, just bigger.”

“But none of these blokes look like me.”

“No,” she admitted. “They do not.” It was indisputably true and made her wonder what exactly he’d wanted to come rushing over to talk about.

They were sitting side by side on Mrs. Walton’s slightly faded blue sofa. The printouts of the enlarged drawings were spread out on the coffee table. Geoff leaned in to look more closely at one of them. She could feel his body heat. “Do you think the artist was drawing from life?” He pointed to the picture of the three men strapped to a hurdle. “The attribution says the original is in the motherhouse in France. Maybe this drawing has nothing to do with the Charterhouse here in London.”

Annie shook her head. “Drawings like this were made on the spot by itinerant artists. They were the newspaper shots of their day. My bet is someone in the crowd sympathized with the monks and got one of the drawings to them. They preserved it and passed it on.”

“They all have beards,” Geoff said. He waved his hand at the assortment of drawings. “None of the other monks do.”

“That also feels accurate,” Annie said. “In 1535 Henry was still cautious. The population mostly supported the monks and the pope. This is a picture of the Carthusian prior, the Venerable Father as they called him, and two of his fellow monks. They were the first victims, and they were imprisoned for months—probably without shaving gear—because no jury would convict them, until Thomas Cromwell said the jurors would die traitors’ deaths unless they did. After that the trials became pro forma and very quick. From the Tower to Tyburn in a few days.” She started to say that was barely enough time to grow designer stubble. Like his. But Geoff’s grim expression put her off.

“‘To be hung by the neck,’” he quoted, “‘cut down whilst yet alive, sliced open and gutted, and cut into four pieces.’”

“That’s what the judge said,” Annie agreed.

“Jesus God Almighty, we were a bloodthirsty lot. And all because Anne Boleyn was hot stuff and Henry wanted a new wife.”

“And there was no such thing as divorce, meaning Henry had to get the pope to annul his marriage to Catherine. The pope wouldn’t do it.”

“So Henry declared himself head of the Church in England.”

“Exactly. The pope became simply the bishop of Rome, and the king made the rules for every Christian in England. The monks wouldn’t swear to that being legit, so they were condemned.”

Geoff was still bent over the picture of the monks on the hurdle. “I have interviewed a fair percentage of the most important people around. I can’t think of one of them who would likely endure that for a principle. Religious or otherwise.”

“You’re a cynic. Besides, these guys were Carthusian monks. They ate nothing but bread and water two days a week, no meat ever, and they wore hair shirts beneath their habits and almost never spoke. Religious principle is what they were about. Are about.”

“You’re joking. They’re still around?”

“Absolutely. Priest-monks—they call them Dom-somebody, not father—who live in solitude, and brothers who do the daily work. I looked them up a couple of days ago.”

“Online? Hair shirts, but also Web sites?”

“Yup. Turns out there are at this moment eighteen charterhouses in a dozen countries. Including one in Vermont and one here in England. Someplace called Parkminster.”

“Holy shit.”

“Well, I don’t think they’d claim . . .”

He laughed. “Parkminster is in Buckinghamshire, in Milton Keynes. There is no place less exotic on God’s green earth.”

“They don’t think of themselves as exotics. Only a minority option.”

“I interviewed a Trappist once. He’d been a Labour backbencher. After he became a monk, he wrote a book of poetry that was sixty-six weeks on the best-seller lists. He was fat and jolly. Didn’t look as if he lived on bread and water. Though he did tell me they ate no meat.”