“It always made me nervous eating in here,” said Peggy. “All those glass eyes watching me.”
“He bought the whole thing from a small-town natural history museum that was closing its doors,” said Holliday. “He was never into birds or animals really. He told me he’d picked it up at an auction for next to nothing. It was the bargain that attracted him.”
“Was he working on anything?” Peggy asked. “I’ve been out of touch.”
“Me, too,” said Holliday. “I hadn’t talked to him in quite a while. The last time we spoke he’d just come back from some sort of research jaunt to Oxford. I think it was just an excuse to see some of his old friends from before the war. That was more than a year ago. I really don’t know what he was up to. He always had some sort of project going.”
They moved into the library. It was a magnificent room, the walls lined with arch-topped fruitwood bookcases, the spaces in between hung with fantastic oil paintings of medieval battle scenes done by long-forgotten artists. There was a wrought iron chandelier hanging from the dark oak coffered ceiling, and the floor was covered with a gigantic tree of life-pattern Persian carpet done in shades of rose and deep blue.
There was a functional desk set at an angle in one corner, several comfortable old fan-backed club chairs upholstered in faded velvet that had once been red but that had worn down through the years to a faded pink, a small couch, and Henry’s personal chair, a giant green leather monstrosity that looked as though it had been spirited out of a nineteenth-century English men’s club. There was a conveniently placed pole lamp with a fringed shade and a side table at the chair’s right hand, just the perfect size for a book and a late-night tipple of sherry, or perhaps a small tumbler of Henry’s favorite single malt.
The chair stood just beyond the hearth of the plain, practical fireplace. Above the fireplace was a signed mezzotint by the apocalyptic British artist John Martin, showing the fall of Babylon in desperate, murderous detail, complete with a tiny Assyrian priest being scorched by bolts of divine lightning descending from boiling, wrathful thunderheads above the ancient temple. There was a quotation in Italian printed within the frame. Holliday quoted it from memory; it had been Uncle Henry’s credo:
“Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
traffito da un raggio di sole:
ed и subito sera.”
“Which means?” Peggy asked.
“Every one of us stands alone on the heart of the
earth,
Transfixed by a beam of sun;
And suddenly it is evening.”
“Easy for you to say,” quipped Peggy.
“It’s from a poem called ‘It Is Now Evening’ by Salvatore Quasimodo.”
“The hunchback?”
“The Italian poet. He won the Nobel Prize, if I remember correctly. Henry met him in Rome after the war.”
“Sad,” said Peggy, staring up at the print above the fireplace.
“Not to Uncle Henry.” Holliday shrugged. “To him it was a caution: your time on earth is brief, don’t waste it. Death comes to us all. Every day is a gift.”
“And it came to Grandpa in the end,” sighed Peggy, slumping down into the big green chair.
Holliday went to the desk and sat down in Uncle Henry’s old-fashioned wooden swivel chair. The desk was a massive oak rectangle, the twin pedestals roughly carved with trails of ivy and shapes of birds and small forest animals. There was a large, leather-edged blotter on the top surface and a green-shaded brass banker’s lamp to light it.
The wood was dark, worm-eaten, and polished by time, the edges of the pedestals worn and chipped. Holliday had always assumed that the desk had been made from the remains of a shipwreck, although he’d never asked about it and now regretted not doing so. The desk looked Spanish, perhaps fifteenth century. He had no idea how it had come to be in a house on the shores of Lake Erie, but like many things in Uncle Henry’s life there was almost certainly a story behind it.
There were three drawers in each pedestal and another drawer in between. Holliday went through each drawer carefully and methodically. The drawers on the left were filled with personal files relating to Uncle Henry’s bills, banking, old tax returns, receipts, and the general maintenance of the house. The drawers on the right were filled with more files, these mostly relating to his years at the university and his professional correspondence.
There was one marble-sided cardboard accordion file filled with incomprehensible notes on scraps of paper, written in at least three languages that Holliday could decipher, including what appeared to be Hebrew. He also found several maps, including one of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay coast of France.
The map was small, the paper fragile and yellowed. It looked as though it had been torn out of an old Michelin guidebook. There were several faint notes on it in faded penciclass="underline" Huguenot? Ireland? Which Rock? Holliday put the map back in the cardboard file.
He looked in the center drawer. There was nothing in it but stationery and an old, blunt-bladed, ebony-handled dagger that looked as though Uncle Henry might have used it as a letter opener. Holliday had never seen it before, but he immediately recognized it for what it was. He flipped it over to check the inscription engraved on the tarnished blade just to be sure: Meine Ehre Heisst Treue-My Honor Is Loyalty. It was a Nazi SS dagger.
“What was he doing with one of these?” Holliday said aloud.
“What?” Peggy asked. Holliday explained.
“I guess it was a souvenir,” Holliday said finally, holding it up for her to see.
“Was he ever in Germany during the war?” Peggy asked, frowning. “I thought he was in intelligence, like Ian Fleming and all those guys who sat around smoking pipes and thinking up ways to irritate the Gestapo. I never thought he actually did anything. I mean, you know, anything dangerous.”
“Neither did I,” said Holliday.
“Maybe it’s a fake, a reproduction,” suggested Peggy.
“I don’t think so,” answered Holliday, hefting the old edged weapon. It had the cold weight of something used in a dark time for dark deeds. History was fused in the dagger, the sensuously shaped blade tempered in spilled blood. Or maybe he was reading too much into it. The lighting runes and swastika could still cast a nasty spell. He tipped the dagger back into the drawer and pushed it closed.
“Maybe that’s what Broadbent was talking about,” said Peggy, getting up out of the chair and going to the wall of bookcases on the other side of the room.
“You could call that dagger a lot of things,” answered Holliday. “But no one’s going to mistake it for a sword.”
“I wonder why it was so important to his father?” Peggy said. She smiled suddenly. “Look at this!” she said excitedly. “All the old kids’ books he introduced me to. They’re all here.” She started reading titles. “All the Narnia books, Five Children and It, Swallows and Amazons, The Wouldbegoods, The Famous Five by Enid Blyton; they’re all here!”
Holliday joined her, his eyes scanning the shelves and finally finding what he’d been searching for: a single heavy hardcover volume, still in its pale green and cream colored dust jacket, a first edition of T. H. White’s Arthurian epic, The Once and Future King.
Uncle Henry had read the entire four-part story to him when he was a young boy, and later Holliday had reread it again by himself many times over. If ever there’d been a story for a boy on a rainy day in upstate New York, that was it. He smiled at the memory; the kind of book that Harry Potter would have read and treasured. He flipped open the book to the title page and a small piece of paper fluttered out and drifted down onto the carpet. Holliday slid the book back into place and bent to retrieve the folded scrap. There was writing on it done in Uncle Henry’s unmistakable cop perplate script with a fountain pen, the black ink faded to a sepia.
“ ‘Hic iacet Arthurus rex quondam rexque futuris: Here lies Arthur, the Once and Future King. Seek through the storied years to find the treasure down below: thus it is for you to seek and thus it is for me to know.’ ”