The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (20 page)

Hamish peeled open the door.

Jo stepped out. Her shoes met hard earth. Somewhere was a faint drip of water. And the temperature had fallen to shuddering point.

There was another scent now on the air—elusive, overlaid with gravedigger’s clay, something vanilla and jasmine. She must be imagining it. She shook her head, deliberate as a dog, to clear her senses.

Peter touched her shoulder again. “Come on.”

She walked between the two men, Hamish a moving mountain backlit by the small flashlight he’d drawn from his pocket. The passage was narrow and low, so that the librarian stooped, and even Jo—a good six inches shorter—felt tamped down and trapped. Peter’s tuneless whistle drifted in the air. They turned a sharp corner, and then another, and came to an abrupt halt before a thick oak door bound with iron.

“Here.” Hamish thrust the flashlight into Jo’s palm and reached for a set of keys. “Train that thing on the lock, would you?”

Jo obeyed.

The librarian fitted an old-fashioned iron key into the door and turned it with both hands.

The heavy oak swung inward. Golden light spilled over the threshold. With it came the scent of midnight flowers, stronger and more cloying than a few moments before.

“Damn,” Peter muttered. “I know that perfume. Margaux’s been and gone, hasn’t she?”

Hamish grunted. “She’s friendly with a young Trinity man. An
Apostle
. He broke all his oaths for her, I’ll be bound.”

“He’s not the first,” Peter said brusquely, and stepped inside.

MARGAUX STRAND’S HEELS CLICKED FURIOUSLY across the paving stones of the King’s College quadrangle. There was a don at King’s she badly wanted to consult named Nadia Fenslow, who’d gone antifeminist and now made a career of celebrating the distinguished males who crowded the English canon in a slavish sort of neo-lit conservatism. Margaux had hoped she might be available, might remember the boozy lunch they had shared during last year’s MLA conference. Nadia of all people would be up to her eyeballs in Apostles, swooning over E. M. Forster in a way that turned Margaux’s stomach, or suggesting that Woolf was but a pale shadow to Lytton Strachey, who’d probably taught Virginia how to spell when she was just a little thing in white muslin. Nadia might have a notion what
Apostles Screed
meant. Only Nadia was in Reykjavik until the start of Hilary term, and the
don who’d borrowed her office had smirked at Margaux as though she were Nadia’s long-lost lesbian lover.

Margaux was seething.

Somewhere a bell tolled three o’clock. She was aware of an insistent curl of hunger in the pit of her stomach, ignored out of long dieting habit. What she wanted was a good glass of Bordeaux and a bit of cheese, possibly some biscuits, with a clever partner to gaze at her over candlelight. She needed somebody who understood her vocabulary and caught her references and knew where to look for the missing half of Woolf’s notebook without demanding to share the limelight. That was the essential difficulty in Margaux’s world at the moment: She had been sharing too much for too long. Other people’s triumphs, for instance. Other people’s credit. She’d contributed modestly to an article chiefly written by someone else, or shored up the course load of those too distinguished to be bothered with students anymore. She’d scrambled for a few crumbs of the Oxford pie to savor all by herself. At this point in her career, Margaux had reached the point she thought of as Lady Macbeth’s Choice: Crush all obstacles in her path to power, or exit stage right, on maternity leave. Having jettisoned Peter, the latter choice was probably out for the nonce. Single motherhood was far too impoverishing.

Peter had looked quite forlorn, poor poppet, she decided fondly—trailing into her rooms with that regrettable American in her corduroy trousers, staring at Margaux with the eyes of a wounded hound, and handing her the means of being feared and envied for the rest of her literary days. Peter was too endearing; a failure in his own right, of course, but endlessly devoted. It was comforting to have a Peter in one’s past. Just as it had been essential to leave him behind.

Margaux lurched suddenly as her stiletto caught between two paving stones. She cursed explosively. Across the
quadrangle, a startled undergraduate turned his head. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen. They were such
children
these days.

She balanced precariously on one foot, wrenched the other out of its granite vise, and swore again as she glimpsed the heel. The expensive leather was torn, the white plastic shoddiness exposed; and with her gift for the interpretation of metaphor she saw immediately that this might be construed as a statement about her life—possibly even about herself. She pushed the thought aside. Better to concentrate on finding that drink.

Limping slightly, she reached the quadrangle gate just as Sotheby’s phoned her.

THE CHAMBER OF THE ARK, AS JO WOULD THINK OF IT EVER afterward, was low-ceilinged and medieval, the sort of room that demanded an ecclesiastical sound track—monk’s chanting or plainsong. The golden light came from an old oil lamp, set in the middle of a round oak table at the center of the room. Electric bulbs were easier on the eyes; but the Apostles, Jo was quickly discovering, were all about atmosphere.

Lining the walls were glass-fronted cabinets with Gothic arches; inside stood rank upon rank of rectangular cases, tooled in leather, and stamped with a date in gold.
1827. 1843. 1896. 1907…

“Did you talk to her?” Peter was saying.

“Margaux? Avoided her like the plague,” Hamish growled. “She wasn’t here long, mind you. Forty minutes, perhaps. Bit peevish as she left. Had words with our porter.”

“Maybe he found something in her bag that didn’t belong to her,” Jo said.

Hamish gave her a wolfish smile. “I’m off. Back in an hour.
Have to lock you in. Don’t panic—nobody will hear you if you scream.” A flicker of amusement crossed his blunt features—the shoe, Jo realized, was now decidedly on the other foot—and then with a salute, he pulled the heavy door closed.

Neither of them spoke as Hamish’s footsteps shuffled down the dirt passageway. Peter drew his cell phone from his pocket, as if to call Margaux one more time—then thrust it away in disgust. There would be no signal so far underground.

“Where do we start?” Jo asked quietly.

“Nineteen forty-one, I should think.” He crossed to the Gothic cabinets, scanning the volumes as he loosened the knot of his tie. He’d already undone the top buttons of his shirt, and the effect, Jo thought, was of the true Peter emerging from the shadows. All his attention was fixed on the task, but his elegant fingers were so blindly languorous that for an instant, Jo had to close her eyes. When she opened them, he had stuffed the tie in his coat pocket and dropped the coat itself over the back of a chair. He was briskly rolling up his sleeves, determined to get down to work. “Bring the oil lamp,” he said, halting before one of the cabinets.

Jo snatched at it with trembling fingers; the knowledge that Margaux Strand had actually been in the chamber recently enough to leave her scent was infuriating. If they’d been quicker, Jo might have gotten Jock’s notebook back.

“Better take 1940 as well,” Peter said, and drew two leather-tooled cases from the shelves.

“What if Margaux took what we need?”

“She’d never recognize it,” Peter replied. “She’s good enough at literary analysis—
Woolf’s obsession with drowning reflects the independent female’s fear/fascination with orgasm, the unwillingness to submit to the annihilating vortex of the male psyche
, and so on—but terrifically dull when it comes to puzzles. I’ll lay odds she completely missed whatever’s here. Hence the
row with the Wren porter. She’d need to rip up the closest available minion.”

“Unless, of course,” Jo murmured as she stared down at the empty interior of the case labeled 1940, “she just picked off everything available.”

Peter stared at her wordlessly for a second, then lifted the lid of 1941.

“Fucking
Christ!”
he spluttered, and shoved the empty case away.

“SO YOU SEE,” MARCUS SYMONDS-JONES WAS SAYING, “what we chiefly need is your help.”

Margaux kept walking straight down King’s Parade, away from the college and its beastly gate, her mobile pressed to her ear. If Peter’s boss wanted to find him, then Peter
hadn’t
given up and taken his gardener back to London. He might be searching for her and the Woolf manuscript even now. Bloody
hell
, he might even be in Cambridge—Peter was no fool. Margaux’s impulse was to tell Marcus Symonds-Jones to shag off, thank you
very
much, but before she stabbed the End Call button she hesitated. She
did
need help—

“What’s it all about, Marcus? Has Peter been naughty again?”

“So naughty he’s about to be arrested for theft,” the department head retorted tartly, “and you with him. It
was
you that Peter and his client Jo Bellamy consulted in Oxford last night, wasn’t it, Margaux?”

Shit. Shit shit shit
—

“You
do realize,”
Marcus went on, “that the actual owner of that possible Woolf is either the National Trust or the Nicolson family, neither of which is going to take kindly to Peter’s pilfering?”

“It’s not Peter who’s stealing, it’s that American,” Margaux sputtered indignantly. “She may look naïve, but I’ll bet my knickers she’s no innocent, Marcus. You know what Peter is. Always bending arse backwards to be of help—”

“So you
did
see him.”

“What if I did? He’s my ex-husband.”

“Where he is now, Margaux?”

Her stiletto caught again in a paving crack, and Margaux lurched painfully. “I don’t know. That’s the truth.”

“Look—Margaux…”

She remembered this wheedling tone; it was the one Marcus always used when he wanted sex. It meant that he
needed her
. Margaux was suddenly acutely alert. She came to a halt beneath a Tudor window, nursing her ankle, and listened.

“You wouldn’t like Peter to lose his job. Or, heaven forbid, go to jail. Would you, Margaux?”

“I don’t suppose so.”

“What if I told you I had a deep-pockets buyer for the item who might be willing to put everything right? No loss to the Trust, no loss to The Family, no loss to you or us—Provided, of course, the Woolf is genuine?”

Margaux hesitated. “Money isn’t the point, Marcus.
My work
is the point. My reputation—”

“—Will be rubbish, if the tale of this theft ever gets out.”

The wheedling note had vanished. But Margaux’s mind was only half on Marcus’s threats. She was thinking more clearly now.
No more sharing
.

“—As I’m afraid it will, if Peter isn’t found. That’s where you come in, Margaux. Find Peter, won’t you, darling? Before we’re obliged to call in the police?”

“Poor Marcus,” she said, her heart suddenly lifting. “So thick, always. Peter is irrelevant. Why bother with
him
when I’ve got everything you could possibly need?”

“SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?” JO ASKED DISPIRITEDLY.

In a few minutes Hamish would reappear to release them from the Ark. She had spent most of their allotted hour listening to Peter rant about the maddening cheek of his ex-wife, elaborated in a series of piquant episodes that filled all possible gaps in Jo’s knowledge of Margaux. She had said little during Peter’s diatribe, too sick with worry to stem the flow. But their time was up.

“We’ll have to find her,” Peter said. “There’s nothing else for it. Roust out the police, if we must.”

“I should just go back to Kent. Tell Imogen everything. Make a clean breast of it, and get the Trust to help.”

“But if we found Margaux—”

“We’d have to bind and gag her to get our stuff back! I’ve
already lost twenty-four hours, Peter, on a wild-goose chase—and I’m supposed to be
working
here!”

“Look—I know it’s been a difficult day—”

“Make that two.”

“But there
is
one more place in Cambridge we could look.”

Jo stared at him with a mix of frustration and pity. “She’s long gone, Peter. Give it up.”