At the far end of the attic, extension cords had been strung for lights and a typewriter, and three old tables formed a U-shaped desk for a man who sat reading intently, half hidden from their view by tall metal file cabinets in which were stored a hundred years of Breul papers.
He did not look their way.
“Who’s that?” Rick murmured.
“Dr. Shambley.” Pascal put his finger to his lips. “Shh.”
He pointed to the remaining boxes of Christmas decorations, gave half of them to Rick and started back down. Not until they were at the bottom of the attic steps did he speak again. “Dr. Shambley’s new. Mrs. Beardsley doesn’t like him.”
Rick remembered that his grandfather had mentioned a new trustee who was an art historian or something. “Why doesn’t she like him?”
“I don’t know,” answered the young handyman, but his manner was uneasy and Rick wondered if it were only Mrs. Beardsley who didn’t like the new trustee.
On the third floor, they had to edge around the tourists who blocked the hall’s frosted glass doors as flash cameras and video minicams recorded the turn-of-the-century housemaid from the toe of her lace-up boots to the tip of her starched cap.
There was no sign of the day-care group until the two men descended past the final turn on the stairs and saw the children being herded across the wide entry hall like a flock of pigeons. The teacher’s voice echoed off the marble walls as she called, “Now who has to use the bathroom before we put our coats back on?”
“I do! I do!” they all cried and streamed for the cloakrooms on either side of the main entrance.
Mrs. Beardsley wore a determined smile on her face, a smile that became genuine as Pascal Grant set down his load of boxes and said, “We got them all, Mrs. Beardsley.”
“Wonderful, Pascal. Now if you’ll set up the ladder and if Mr. Evans will help you with the lights-though why we can’t have real candles just once, I’ll never understand,” she fretted, half to herself. It was Mrs. Beardsley’s annual regret that the insurance company and the New York City Fire Marshall were both so stuffy about using real candles on the tree.
Helen Aldershott rolled her eyes at the others and continued to untangle the tiny electric candles that would light the tree safely, if anachronistically.
It was a little past one and the docents were beginning to murmur of missed lunches before the last glass angel was fastened to the last bare twig. After one final inspection, Mrs. Beardsley nodded imperiously to Miss Ruffton, who tapped on the director’s door and summoned him to preside at the lighting ceremony.
Every hair was sleekly in place and a festive red tie was knotted beneath his pointed chin as Benjamin Peake emerged from his office, more urbanely than the butler who had once occupied that corner of the mansion. He acknowledged the hours the women had worked to transform the mansion’s formality to a Dickensian festiveness, and he assured them that he spoke on behalf of the trustees when he expressed their appreciation-his, too, of course-for their artistry and dedication.
Benjamin Peake possessed a rolling baritone that filled the marbled hall and floated up the stairwell. Alerted by his formal tones, a small crowd soon gathered around the tree and even spread themselves along the staircase for a better view.
When he was sure of everyone’s attention, the director drew his remarks to a close and smiled graciously at his audience. “A very merry Christmas to you all,” he said and clicked the switch Pascal Grant had rigged.
“Ah!” everyone exclaimed, as the tree blazed forth in all its Victorian glory.
Fourteen senior suburbanites, in from Connecticut for the day and fresh from touring the Theodore Roosevelt birth-place a short walk away, had gathered in the entry hall for a guided tour. Several began taking pictures of each other in front of the Christmas tree.
“Your tree is much prettier than Teddy’s,” one of the women told Mrs. Beardsley.
Pascal Grant paused in the act of carting away the ladder and storage boxes. “Hey, Rick,” he said. “Want to see my window now?”
Rick Evans made a show of looking at his watch. “Sorry, Pascal, but I’d better finish taking pictures of the tree.”
Yet when he saw the open disappointment on the other’s face, he relented. “Tell you what, though. Why don’t I come a little early tomorrow, around four? You can show me then, okay?”
“Okay!” Grant nodded happily.
At the top of the house, Roger Shambley lifted his massive head from a letter which had been misfiled in a cabinet with some of Erich Breul’s business papers.
“Sorgues?” he muttered to himself, remembering that name from a biography he’d once read. “August of 1912? Hmm… now wouldn’t that be something?”
He looked past the circle of bright light in which he sat, out to the dim stretches of attic crammed with boxes and trunks, and wild surmises filled his head.
“Silent, upon a peak in Darien,” he jeered at himself.
And yet-!
In another attic several blocks southeast of the Breul House, a different discovery had just been made.
While renovating their old, but newly purchased, red brick row house in the East Village, Daniel and Gigi DeLucca had found a rusty tin footlocker pushed up under the eaves of the fourth-floor attic behind stacks of National Geographies.
“Old books?” he’d wondered.
“Old clothes,” she’d guessed.
The hasp was rusted tight.
“Blackbeard’s treasure,” they decided and, lustily chanting, “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, Yo-ho! Yo-hol” they had hauled it downstairs and pried it open with a crowbar.
Inside they found an unpleasant musty odor and four little bundles wrapped in stained newspapers.
“Pigeon bones?” she asked as she finished unwrapping the first bundle.
“I don’t think so,” he said and carefully laid the second bundle back in the chest as if afraid it would explode.
It was a tiny mummified figure, entwined in what looked to the man like a shriveled grapevine but which the woman instantly recognized as an umbilical cord.
They left the last two bundles for the police.
Lieutenant Sigrid Harald arrived shortly after an assistant from the medical examiner’s office. “I’m no Dr. Oliver when it comes to bones, ” said Cohen, referring to one of the country’s leading experts on human skeletal remains, “but off the top of my head, I’d say all four are human and all died within hours of their births.”
“When?” asked the tall, gray-eyed lieutenant.
“How the hell do I know?” Cohen answered testily.
They looked at the dates on the yellowed newspapers in which the four pathetic remains had been wrapped. The earliest was March 4, 1935; the latest was April 1, 1947.
“Look there, Lieutenant,” said Detective Jim Lowry.
He showed her a flaking page of newsprint that head-lined the allied invasion of North Africa. Overlaying a map with arrows pointing to Algiers were four faded brown ovals that looked very much like old fingerprints made by bloody adult fingers.
Their Christmas card that year depicted Father Christmas in his long red robes and furred hood as he warmed himself before a roaring fire. Inside was a verse from Sir Walter Scott, one of Mr. Breul’s favorite authors:
Heap on more wood!-the wind is chill:
But let it whistle as it will,
We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.
from Welcome to the Breul House!-An Informal Tour, by Mrs. Hamilton Johnstone III, Senior Docent. (Copyright 1956)