Jo walked along the quay along the banks of the River Tyne. The river flowed beneath the Gateshead Monument Bridge; her side of the river boasted restaurants and nightlight hot spots. She’d known that Newcastle had once been an enormous commercial port for shipbuilding, glassmaking and—thanks to Lord Armstrong—munitions. She didn’t know it boasted an art scene. A center for the arts massed along one side of the quay, and despite MacAdams designating Newcastle as the “cheap” city by comparison to York, the lofts rising over the Tyne suggested ready money. Hadrian Hall looked positively luxurious.
The main entry resembled a hotel lobby, so much so that Jo almost went out again to check the address. She wished she was wearing something a bit more flashy; her classic Doc Martens, black jeans and a scoop-neck tee felt a bit like inappropriate in the present environment. Fargesia, ficus, freesia, she thought to herself—the recent dive into botany having provided a good supply of new words to chew on. Artemesia, asphodel—
“Can I help?” the clerk asked. Jo made her best attempt at a breezy, carefree smile and made her approach.
“I’m Jo Jones. I’m here to see Arthur Alston in Loft 8? He’s expecting me.”
“One moment.” She picked up the telephone receiver and dialed in a code. “Mr. Alston? A Ms. Jones to see you.”
Jo’s palms had begun to sweat. She felt like she was being buzzed in for an interview. Did everyone here get the same treatment? Or was Mr. Alston special? Breathe, she told herself. Which was terrible advice, as she promptly forgot how to do it properly.
The woman hung up the phone and pointed. “Choose the fourth floor. Loft eight will be to your right.”
Jo repositioned her backpack and hurried past the porter. There were six floors total; she made a reasonable guess that meant two lofts per level. If so, the apartments inside were utterly huge. In New York calculation, a place like this—on the water, no less—would be well into the millions. It did nothing to assuage her galloping heart.
The elevator dinged whimsically and opened into a long hall with windows at either end. She approached the right door, but it opened before she could ring the bell, accompanied by a lot of excited barking.
The man in the doorway looked to be in his fifties, dark hair streaked with iron gray and swept back from the temples like a silver screen icon. Lean, graceful limbs draped in a silk kimono dressing gown over slacks, dress shirt, neck scarf. If he wasn’t an avant-garde painter, he was missing his calling. In a moment, he swooped down to capture a Pomeranian attempting escape, then made a gesture of welcome.
“You must be Aiden’s niece,” he said, backing away to allow her inside. Jo swallowed the interior in a single gulp of extravagance and nodded as she entered the apartment. “It’s good to meet you. I am Aiden’s widower.”
Jo found her way to a sofa she’d originally taken for an art piece and sat down gingerly. Outside the bank of windows, the sun was starting to sink.
“I’ll make tea, shall I?” Arthur held up tiny Japanese cups. The Pomeranian was still circling Jo, and she’d just noticed a sad-looking Boston terrier snoozing on a shag rug. She ought to be putting a list of useful questions together in her head, but she was still trying to take in the art-laden walls, Persian carpet, squat little Moroccan footstools. The mantelpiece shone in glorious white marble, with a nested Russian doll curio and vase of orchids in the middle.
“Please, yes,” she said. “I didn’t know Aiden was married.”
“Ah. I should explain,” Arthur said, sitting across from her. “We were not married, in fact—though, for all practical purposes . . .” He poured tea.“We’d been together eighteen years. That’s before gay marriage had been legalized, but there were other reasons for keeping things unofficial.”
“What were they?” Jo asked. Then regretted it; probably this was impolite. Arthur sipped tea with engineering precision and a wry smile.
“So, jumping right in. Perhaps we should start a little further back,” he said. “How much do you know about your uncle?”
“My mother never spoke of him.”
“Never? I see. And what about your grandfather?”
Jo bit her lip. She didn’t even know who her own father was, much less anyone further back on either side.
“Nothing,” she said.
Arthur didn’t look surprised; he nodded his head and stood up, sending the dressing gown into butterfly flutters. He strolled along the wide windows, stopping at a large square painting on the opposite wall. Mostly red, with streaks of gray and a small black dot in the center.
“This is an original painting by a local artist: Chen Benton-Li. It’s called Hiding. Aiden bought it at an art auction. It’s where we met.”
“You’re an artist,” Jo said, but he laughed it off.
“No, alas. But I support the arts.”
“You’re a millionaire,” Jo said, not intentionally. Arthur laughed again, and it sounded to Jo a bit more natural.
“Oh goodness, if we were I’d be living in Jesmond, wouldn’t we, boys?” Jo half turned to take in the modern eclectic Vogue shoot behind her, and Arthur went on. “Despite appearance, surprisingly affordable at the time of purchase. I do have somewhat expensive tastes.”
“This is a Persian Kerman Lavar from Esfahan,” Jo said, mentally adding A Guide to Eastern Rugs, 2014. It took her two extra weeks to edit because she kept falling down subject interest rabbit holes.
“Very good! Very. And you’ve caught me out; I am a rather uninteresting investment banker.” He winked. “Though a well-paid one.”
“And that’s not a reproduction on the mantel, is it?”
“Antique Russian iconography nesting dolls, tipped in gold. A present from your uncle, in fact.” The darkness outside was descending, so he turned on the lights, which simultaneously lit up the red painting. Then he returned to his leather club chair. “I realized you are seeing me at home, where I have the obligatory gay man’s dogs and kimono. But out in the world I do not cut an especially flamboyant figure. Which certainly appealed to Aiden. Your uncle, you see, was not out, Ms. Jones.”
“Jo, please.” She took a breath. “He didn’t want people to know you were together?”
“He began life not wanting his father to know. Then I think it became a habit with him.”
“But you lived together—here?” Jo said, trying to explain it to herself.
Arthur nodded. “Yes. You see, straight Aiden lived in York, at a flat he sublet most of the time. The real Aiden lived here, with me.” He swept his hand toward the red painting. “In Hiding.”
Jo stared at the square, this time focused on the small black dot behind a gray streak. A great deal had just clicked into place.
“My mother kept secrets, too. I was left a crumbling estate that I didn’t even know existed, until she died and I inherited it.”
“I know.” Arthur picked up a newspaper and handed it to her. Jo stared at a headline—and her own face. It was the interview she’d done before the garden opening.
“Oh.”
“American inherits mystery property, almost gets burned alive inside it, bequeathes a garden to the National Trust. You can understand why I wanted to meet you. Aiden would have wanted to, as well,” Arthur said.
Jo put the paper down and wet her lips.
“You said there were—letters,” she managed.
Arthur nodded, passed the gas fireplace and headed into the farther stretch of apartment. He returned with several envelopes and placed them into her hands. One of them had been addressed in Jo’s own handwriting.
“Oh God,” she panted. “This is mine? I sent it when I was twelve—”
“Yes. The other is his answer to you. It was returned unopened.”
“Wh-what do they say?” she whispered.
Arthur gave her a quiet sort of smile. “I only know what I’ve been told. I didn’t pry. Aiden was a very private man. Even with me.”
Jo was listening. She was also opening envelopes—starting with the response to her own.
Dear Josephine,
I’m so happy you wrote to me about the school trip. I would be delighted to meet you when you arrive. Here is my telephone number; if you give me the details, I can even meet you at the airport in London. Send love to your mother; my very best,
Uncle Aiden
“He wanted to see me,” Jo said, almost to herself. Arthur was kind enough to say nothing. She picked up the second letter; it had been sent to her aunt in Chicago.
Dearest Aunt Susan,
I know we have not spoken in some time. Not long ago, young Josephine wrote me; I tried to respond. I may not have the correct address. Can you please direct me?
“That one had been opened—by someone,” Arthur said. “It came back in a new envelope, postage paid. But without a single word.”
Jo understood the message too well. Both her mother and aunt had been silent sentinels as Jo was growing up. We don’t speak of the ugly thing, the hurtful thing. As if that would make it safe. But it was worse that than; Jo knew her mother was a holder of grudges. She knew keeping the letters secret would hurt Aiden. Apparently it never occurred to her that it would hurt Jo, too.
“And this one?” she asked; a smooth, white envelope, unmarked.
“Unsent,” Arthur said. “He kept it with the others. I feel like it’s for you. Just you.” He handed her a letter opener to break the seal; Jo’s hands were shaking, but she took it anyway and managed to split the seam.
The paper inside was from a notebook, faint blue lines on a sheet torn from something else. The writing looked the same, but not the same. A note left for the self, and not for others.
Dear Josephine,
I recognize even as I write this that I’ll probably never send it. I suppose I needed to put the feelings into words, somehow.
I could have wept when I received your letter. You have excellent penmanship, by the way. A wonderful, grown-up way of expressing yourself, too. I imagine that you look like your mother did, at your age, full of life and adventure. I had thought the past was behind us, that your letter was an olive branch. I wanted—
But those two words had been crossed out. On a new line, he’d begun again:
I think about you, waiting to get my letter. It hurts me to know you never will. I wonder what possessed her to allow you to write at all—to set up your hopes only that I may disappoint them. Then I realize this was no doubt the intent all along—for I am “not to be trusted.”
I will keep your letter in fondness.
With love, Uncle Aiden
Jo felt pain—sharp edged but hard to articulate. It was the tragedy of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, the rotting wedding feast of joyous anticipation. It was the party that never happened, the gift never given. Jo spent her life trying to meet expectations of others, but always seemed to see the need too late or met it the wrong way. This time, she had been Aiden’s joyous anticipation. She thought of his excitement at her letter, making little plans, hoping for a reunion that would never come—and it hurt her. God, did it hurt. For once in her life, she had been the gift, the promise. And she could never, ever fulfill it.
Jo’s mother once accused her of having no feelings. The truth was much harder to live with. She had too many, had learned to turn them off to keep from drowning. She was certainly trying to now, folding away the feelings with the envelopes and training her mind on practical questions and tidy lists.
“He said he wasn’t to be trusted. That my mother may have been trying to . . .” She struggled to get the words right, and ended up with the baldest honesty. “To disappoint me on purpose so I would never try to reach out again. It’s awful. That’s awful. Why would she do that?”
“I did not know your mother,” he said after a long breath. He hesitated, lips pressed tight together, as if he feared something not very nice might come out. He was sparing her. But at the moment, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be spared.
“What happened between them? I know my mother left England in her twenties, alone and pregnant with me. It was as if she was banished from their family. She never spoke of Aiden, and she didn’t go to his funeral. You know more, though, don’t you? I need to know.” Jo’s tone had wandered into desperate demanding and she wrestled it back. He just gave her a faint smile.
“Your grandfather was a vicious, hateful man. At some point, he discovered that Aiden was gay—I’m not sure when; after that, Aiden was as good as dead to him. Then there was your mother.”
“Pregnant and unwed,” Jo added.
Arthur nodded. “Aiden was very cagey about it. But I suspect she met a similar fate. Both of them cast off by their only living parent.”
“Wouldn’t that make them allies?” Jo asked.
“In a perfect world, I’m sure. Of course, in a perfect world they wouldn’t be cast out at all.” He set his cup down and scooped up the Pomeranian again. “Aiden lived a great deal in his own head, but he kept things locked up there.”
“In his mental attic,” Jo said, slipping into Sherlock parlance. Arthur gave a slight chuckle, possibly in response to an ear lick rather than the turn of phrase.
“I suppose. He could be private to the point of secrecy. Your letter came when we were first dating, and he was surprised into giving me the details I just gave you. There was a falling-out over trust. That’s all I know. But I feel somehow the family patriarch must surely be to blame.”
Jo rolled this around her head, looking for a good shelf to keep it on. She was upset. She understood the mental attic problem. She felt anger at her mother, confusion, and disappointment, but she couldn’t deal with that now; instead, she clung to a sliver of maybe good news. Aiden kept secrets. He had a painting he called Hiding. Maybe he also believed in seeking.
“Did Aiden like puzzles?” she asked. “Problem solving, clues?”
“How do you mean?”
“I have a painting, too,” Jo said slowly. “I discovered it last year in the Ardemore estate. It’s by Augustus John, we think.”
“Really?” Arthur sat a little straighter, and Jo felt an odd sort of pride that he knew what she was talking about.
“Yes, but it had been damaged. Badly. Aiden had it restored. I never found out the artist he hired to do it. Thing is, the woman in the painting is a mystery, a family member of mine—and Aiden’s—that no one talks about. I can scarcely find any historical records. Did Aiden tell you about the Ardemores? About the love triangle between our ancestors—Gwen and William and Evelyn Davies? The baby?”
It was fortuitous that Arthur was not, at that moment, drinking tea. He would have choked.
“Baby? Whose baby, now?”
“Oh boy.” Jo bit her lip. Was there a way to be concise here? Just the facts, ma’am . . . “So, Evelyn was the sister of our ancestor Gwen Ardemore. And she had a baby with Gwen’s husband, William. And then Evelyn died, we think from childbirth. And got buried under the house.”
Jo heard Arthur’s sharp intake of breath.
“That wasn’t in the paper.”
“No,” Jo agreed. She had left that bit out for the interview, partly at MacAdams’s suggestion. It had been an ongoing investigation at the time. “I found a hope chest in the garden full of baby clothes and love letters between Evelyn and William Ardemore.” Jo tried not to squirm. It sounded incredibly bald when you said it in shorthand. She rushed through the rest, forgetting to pause between sentences.
“We didn’t find the baby—so maybe it lived or was buried somewhere else—I’ve been looking everywhere—and I think was Aiden looking, too, when he was alive, because I’ve heard that he spent time in Abington and was looking in archives and maybe even found something—because—because—” She gulped a breath. “Because he left a note.”
Arthur said nothing for a long moment. Then he nodded and pressed his fingers together, prayer-hands style.
“You’re looking for Evelyn’s child, and you think Aiden might have been, too?”
Jo swallowed. She felt deeply embarrassed all of a sudden. She was and she did, but her only evidence was an archive box, the torn photo and half a sentence.
“I’m so sorry,” she sputtered, but Arthur raised a hand.
“Tut, now. If anyone should apologize, it’s me. I realize you’ve come to me for answers, and that so far I’ve been something of a bust. Let’s just get some facts together. You said Aiden was in Abington. When, exactly?”
Jo didn’t have an exactly. But she gave him the approximate date.
“Yes. Okay. He would have been diagnosed by then,” he said. “Pancreatic cancer. Treatment for a year. We had hope at first, but in the end, there wasn’t a lot they could do. He was away a lot, settling his affairs. I know his solicitor was in Abington, but he never asked me to go with him. And he never said anything about Evelyn or the painting. I might still be of some help, though, if you’re looking for the artist Aiden hired. I have some some artist connections. And after all, not everyone could convincingly match the style of an Augustus John.”
Jo had done everything to try to find out more about the painting, including taking it to an art restoration organization in York. But she only came up empty again and again, with no clearer understanding of who repaired it or why it was even ruined in the first place.
Arthur went on. “It’s not as simple as copying someone’s work; that’s what all this business about artificial intelligence gets wrong. Yes, of course, you can copy the content itself; we see two-dimensional prints all the time, posters and greeting cards. But even a copy machine is only capturing the color and lines.”
“Right,” Jo agreed. “There would be brush strokes, and some paints and varnishes can be aged. The person I took the painting to used microscopes, types of X-ray.”
“Layers, yes. A mere copy lacks depth. Optical and stereo microscopy . . . spectrometry to identify pigments . . . infrared. But there’s more.” Arthur handed her a teaspoon. “Take a look at this spoon.”
Ornate, silver, it had a flower design worked into the handle. She gave it back to him, and he held it up between them.
“A jewelry artist designed and forged this for me. With the right equipment, you could copy the design and have it mass-produced. The end result might look a lot like the original. But it won’t have a soul. The particular sheen and ripples of metal. All art works this way.”
He set the spoon once more upon his saucer. “I’m not a collector of Augustus John paintings, but I know plenty about him. He was known for darker, moodier portrayals, revealing these piercing, even unkind, psychological insights in his portraits. He did Yeats, you know? Dylan Thomas.”
“I’ve seen it online,” Jo said, but Arthur shook his head.
“Then you have only seen a copy of it. The real thing, the real work—if it’s his work—makes you feel the suffering. The point of all this,” Arthur said, standing up and finally rousing the Boston terrier, “isn’t the art lesson. It’s that I know—and more importantly, Aiden knew—an artist who considered Augustus John the greatest master of the form.”
“Oh my God, you’re serious?” Jo gulped air, nearly swallowed spit wrong. She was going to have the worst emotion hangover in the morning.
“I know her personally. And if you’ll consent to stay the night—I’ve an extra bedroom—I can introduce you tomorrow.”
“I can get a hotel—I don’t want to impose,” she said, silently appending and I might need to have a good cry somewhere private because what the fuck is this day? Arthur, however, shook his head.
“Pepper,” Arthur said, pointing to the Boston terrier panting beneath the coffee table, “loves guests. And the little prince here, Hans—he loves an early-morning walk. If you would be so kind, I would consider it full repayment for room and board.”
Jo conceded the point; it would save the night’s stay, too . . . and the flat was nicer than any penthouse.
“The artist, though—who?”
“Ah! Didn’t I say? You’ve already seen her work,” he said. “She painted Hiding. Chen Benton-Li.”