“Good, then,” I went on, as if he’d said nothing. “When you return, we’ll get this place in shape, so when the Guv comes back everything will be back to normal. I’ll help.”
“All right,” he said.
“I’ll watch the house for a while. Frankly, I could use some time alone.”
“But you haven’t eaten dinner,” he protested. “And I must heat the boiler in the bathhouse.”
“Believe it or not, Mac,” I told him, “I was able to feed myself before I met you and I might even heat a boiler without blowing up the garden.”
“I changed the sheets. Someone slept in your bed and moved your books around.”
“I hope he left a better-educated man than when he arrived, but I doubt it. Anyway, hop it. Get something to eat.”
“There are so many things to do, now that they’ve gone.”
“None of which need to be done tonight,” I told him.
He nodded and went into his butler pantry, returning a minute later with his homburg hat and a long coat. “If you’re sure, then.”
“I’m sure. See you tomorrow.”
After he was gone, I took off my jacket and rolled up my sleeves. In spite of what I told him, there was work to be done. In the back of the larder I found some tinned foie gras. Harm was in the kitchen watching me work, so I took down two saucers and some digestive biscuits, and between us, we finished the tin. Afterward, he rolled on his back and slept on the flagstones, waking up from time to time to inspect my progress.
When I was done I thought I deserved a cool bath in the bathhouse. On my way through the garden I stopped and listened to the sounds of night in Barker’s potted Eden. Water gurgled, crickets chirped, and somewhere I heard a bullfrog adding a bass note to the melody. It was my first moment of peace since that dreaded telephone call a week earlier.
A half hour later, I returned to the house and went up to my room. Throwing on my nightshirt I climbed between the sheets of my bed. My own bed. It felt so good to be home. It occurred to me that there was a price for my freedom, and the Guv had paid it. He slept rough so I could be in my own bed. He went without, so that I could eat. He lived with a price on his head so I could go free. I was a grown man and shouldn’t let someone else pay my debts. It was time to start earning my keep.
I awoke to the sound of Mac moving about in my room the next morning. I pulled the pillow over my eyes just before he threw the curtains open and bathed the chamber in light from the east-facing window. Everything was getting back to normal if he and I had already begun torturing one another.
I put down the pillow slowly and looked at Barker’s factotum. Mac had seen a barber yesterday and had purchased a new yarmulke with silver stitching. He wore a new collar and cuffs as well, and though he was still rail thin, he didn’t look as ill as he had when I first walked in the door.
“Is Etienne here?” I asked, hoping against hope.
“I’m afraid not,” Mac said. “I’ll bring up some hot water so you may shave.”
“You really needn’t bother.”
“I’ll bring up,” he repeated slowly, “some water so you may shave.”
“Thank you, Mac.”
“Not at all, sir.”
I was twenty-two and still entranced with the process of shaving. The beaver brush and silver mug, the straight razor, and the leather strop all had their allure. The hot towel, the ewer full of steaming water, and the cake of soap whipped to a froth. There is something challenging about starting the day by putting a lethally sharp blade to one’s throat.
Downstairs, I started a fire in the stove and made coffee. Most of the food was gone, but there were still eggs. I made an omelette for myself, and though it was rudimentary and not approaching the sublimity of one of Etienne’s creations, it still took the edge off my hunger, which was all that concerned me.
I looked forward to going to the British Museum, which, in my opinion, did not even qualify as work. If I had been off that day I’d probably have gone there, anyway. The Reading Room might qualify as my favorite spot in London. It represents to me the height of beauty, comfort, and scholarship all brought together under one beautifully domed roof. Why would anyone want to leave it?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Shambhala was one of those names I’d heard or read of somewhere in my studies, and one a classics scholar is supposed to know, but to tell the truth, whether the place was actual or literary, I had not the slightest idea. There wasn’t a book on the subject in my employer’s library. As rough-and-tumble as he was, Cyrus Barker respected the knowledge that could be obtained in books, and his collection, while not especially deep on any one subject, was large enough to attract a bibliophile like myself. So far I had skipped across it like a flat stone on a placid lake. I hadn’t realized, up to that moment, how much I had come to rely upon it for information and research, if not for entertainment. Much of it was in foreign tongues and modern novels were scarce, but I was giving myself a second education through the study of Barker’s haphazard bookshelf.
Before settling myself in the Reading Room, I often liked to poke about the mummies from Egypt and the Asian relics, basking in the antiquity and the wisdom of ages past, but that day, I simply made my way to the desk which I consider my own, P-16, and fell into the chair. I breathed in the must of books and listened to the echoing murmur of scholarship. The Bodleian may beat it for research, but not for the sheer joy of sitting surrounded by books for which you never have to pay a farthing. I love its perfect gold-leafed dome and its curving recessed bookcases and the blue-green-leather-clad rows of desks radiating out like the spokes of a wheel. Its staff is deferential and knowledgeable and often better dressed than the patrons who can occasionally be rather scruffy and eccentric looking, present company excluded.
“Excuse me,” I said to a passing librarian. “Could you help me find something?”
“Certainly, sir,” the man replied with formality. “For what, pray, are we looking today?”
“I’m searching for something called Shambhala,” I told him.
“Aren’t we all? If you’ll excuse me, sir, I shall return in a couple of minutes.”
I listened to the echoed coughs and conversations, the whisper of pencil on paper and the scrapings of chairs. It never failed to soothe my fraught nerves. It’s as if the books absorbed all of the tension.
“Follow me, sir,” the librarian murmured at my elbow. I got up and went after him. He moved so silently that I could not help but look down at his shoes. On his feet, he wore a pair of patent-leather opera slippers with thick felt soles attached to the bottom. Perhaps, I told myself, the staff is in its way as eccentric as the patrons. He led me to a large table not far from the front entrance, stacked high with books and notepads. A space had been cleared in front of a brace of chairs save for two small and aged volumes in imminent danger of falling into dust. The librarian donned a pair of white gloves, sat in one of the chairs, and opened the first book carefully as I seated myself beside him. He was fiftyish with gray hair and hooded eyes behind a pair of pince-nez spectacles. He was tall, of medium build, and wholly unremarkable in appearance, a bookish man, even by the standards of the people who inhabited this vast chamber.
“There isn’t a great deal written about Shambhala, I’m afraid, at least very little that has been translated from the original Tibetan. Shambhala is a mythical city or country, either in Tibet or the Gobi Desert, or possibly along the ethereal plane.”
“Did you just say ‘ethereal plane’?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, I’m afraid I did. There is some question whether Shambhala exists on Earth at all. If it does, it is a fabulous city of gold and jewels and a highly enlightened people, a utopia, if you will, and if it does not, it is a place which exists outside of our universe, not unlike heaven, which one can enter at will only after many years of study in Tibetan Buddhism. Does that help you?”