“CHAMPAGNE, DAD?” ALEX LAUGHED. “THAT’S EXTRAVAGANT FOR A SUNDAY evening. What’s wrong with your Laphroaig?” Alex took the icy bottle from the bucket, eased the cork into his hand, and poured some into each glass. Lucy alone, who since surgery had savored just the occasional glass, waved him graciously away.
“It’s Mother’s Day today, Alex. I hoped we might drink to absent friends?” Henry raised his glass with the new arrivals. “I don’t want to leave you out, Simon. The cleaner was here on Friday; fresh linen on all the beds. The guest room is ready—if you’d like to enjoy a few drinks with dinner and drive back first thing tomorrow?”
“Henry, how kind. It would be churlish to refuse—if everyone else is happy with an early start?” Simon looked at the relaxing faces around him all nodding their agreement—a very different mood from that of the car journey. “But, Grace, I wish you’d warned me to ring my mother. I’ll get a terrible bollocking tomorrow.”
“I rang mine.” Grace was on safe ground. “Here’s to my mum, and yours, Simon. And,” she added quietly, “especially to Mrs. Stafford.”
“Lucy, should we drink to yours too? I suppose it’s a different date in Australia?”
Henry’s charm was so natural that Lucy found it easy to reply warmly. “I’d be very happy to drink to Alex’s mum, Henry. Alex, give me a little after all.” He gave her his glass and poured another for himself. “To Diana, then,” Lucy said with real feeling; and they echoed her.
“Oddly enough, Dad, she’s the person I want to talk to you about. As soon as I ring Elaine at the pub and book a table,” said Alex.
“Fait accompli, Alex. She’s expecting us. We’ve got the table in the window for seven-thirty. But we have an hour in hand before we stroll down, if that’s agreeable?”
Since his visit with Lucy to the Normandy garden, Alex’s world seemed to have shifted a few degrees. He’d always been in awe of his mother’s gentle strength and the diversity of her interests and knowledge; always thought her artistic hobbies were an expression of some aspect of herself that had been submerged for the sake of her marriage. Today, she would have painted professionally, possibly; or sculpted; or been a designer. But she was in the comet tail of a generation and a middle-class convention that put family first, and she’d made the boys and her home her life’s work, with her art embellishing the edges. But today had unearthed a secret—a side to his mother he hadn’t known existed—and he was restless to understand more. His father, he knew, would be unprepared for this line of questioning coming from him rather than Will. Alex’s life had been so full of certainties, so assured, and here was something less tangible, less straightforward, to grapple with.
“I haven’t told you, Lucy and I made an impromptu trip to Normandy. It was lovely there—although it rained almost solidly.” He looked at his father attentively. “Why did you buy the house in L’Aigle? Your choice, or Mum’s wish?”
“How good that you were there, Alex.”
Simon had been about to refill Henry’s glass and, looking up for his permission to do so, caught him smiling at Lucy and his son. Simon read it as a blessing, and it told him Henry had been much more concerned about Alex, with his locked silence about the family deaths and his failed marriage, than anyone would have guessed.
Henry addressed his son’s question: “It was her choice, very much so. Less her wish than her will, I would say. I was happy to go along with it—although the weather is so much warmer in Provence, of course. She said the Pays d’Auge was close enough to enjoy on a regular basis.” He looked quizzically at Alex. “Why do you ask?”
“OK—in at the deep end. Lucy and I realized today that she’d created her knot garden for a purpose. She explained to me and to Will—when we were little—about the significance of it as her moon garden, and that it was dedicated to her patron saint–cum-goddess, Diana. And the knot she laid out for the roses was the Stafford knot—so the whole place was like an Elizabethan rebus for her name.” His father was nodding. “But I think she meant it to be sacred, somehow—a reliquary. Am I making any sense?”
“Go on.” His father was quiet, reflective; and Grace and Simon sat motionless.
“I think there must have been something significant for her about the region itself—perhaps its proximity to Chartres. More by luck than intention, we discovered earlier today that the garden was a place of repose for…something. I’m not sure what. We found a loose tile with a space below it, large enough to put anything from a small statuette to another box perhaps—like the one Lucy scented out here under the mulberry.” Alex looked at Henry as evenly as possible, aware he would be surprised by his son’s interest. “Did you have any idea she’d planned something like this?”
“Alex,” Simon said, “your mother designed a garden just to hold a secret object—until some unspecified later time—and you and Will never knew about this?” He swallowed his champagne quickly.
“I have no way of knowing when it was thought out, but it looks like there was an object, or some information, that she was storing. And I have to say I knew nothing about it—nor, I should think, did Will. But I’m certain for reasons I’ll go into in a moment that he knew at the end, and that’s part of what he wanted to talk to me about so urgently.” He turned to his father. “Did you know of this?”
“She’d have kept it from me, Alex. I wasn’t the most sympathetic soul in the world when it came to anything mystical, or people like John Dee, with his secrets, or indeed any other arcane information. But she was a fascinating mix herself. Not conventional in her religious ideas, but she was nevertheless respectful and interested in all faiths; she was what you would call ‘spiritual.’ She was patient with most people’s ideas about God, and faith; she had her own unique take on it. And she was perfectly unworried by our…agnosticism. You’re probably more of a true atheist than I.”
Henry didn’t seem agitated by the questions, and he moved to retrieve a framed object from the passage leading from the living room up toward the staircase. “You ask about the region. Do you remember this embroidery she did? A long time ago. There’s a cushion like this in the house in Normandy too.”
He handed Alex what was in fact a tapestry, to which he’d paid no attention since childhood. Now he looked closer. “It’s connected with the sacred geometry of Chartres,” his father was saying, trying to recall its significance for his wife.
Alex studied the canvas. It was a winged female angel, woven in blues and white; and she was holding a branch of palm in one hand and a sheaf of wheat in the other. The background was filled in with many shades of blue—mainly a lapis color, but in some areas, dark as midnight. Superimposed on her robes and features in gold-thread-like wool was a strange kite shape, with a tail leading off in the lower left of the frame. This kite was reproduced identically below the seraphic creature in the frame—a reciprocating version without the human details. He tilted it for Lucy’s view, next to him on the sofa.
“I think that’s the constellation of Virgo,” she said, hesitating.
“Yes, Lucy,” Henry responded, “I believe you’re right. She started working on it just after Alex was born—that’s your sign, Alex, isn’t it?” He nodded, mystified, at his father. “We bought the house before Will was on the way—you weren’t a year old. We started looking in the early spring for somewhere to buy, stayed with your godparents near Rouen while we house-hunted. You know you were baptized at Chartres? Your mother was keen, and it was arranged by your godfather, who knew someone. Will’s baptism was at Winchester.”
Lucy looked at Alex, who was shaking his head in surprise. “I didn’t know.”
Now she stared intently at the tapestry, noticing that the gold thread looped along between the individual white stars in the Virgo constellation—tiny crystalline shapes of pinprick light resembling jewels—and then linked the whole shape to make the kite figure, repeated in the lower diagram. The upper picture was labeled with symbols at the stellar points, which Lucy couldn’t read. Simon and Grace leaned over the sofa to see.
“This top left symbol is the number 3, written in mirror image.” Grace scrutinized it without success.
Alex explained. “It’s Greek—nothing more cryptic than the Greek alphabet. This one,” he pointed to the reversed 3, “is a Greek E, Epsilon, where the wing joins the arm. This one at the lowest part of the diamond shape is G—Gamma, the edge of the robe. And the top of the wing is Nu. They are three of the main stars in the constellation of Virgo. All these others are more minor—but still bright, I think. Nu is top right of the constellation; Eta, in the middle of the kite shape; and then this one is Beta at the sharp point of the rhomboid, Delta just opposite, and Alpha—the brightest of the stars—on the kite’s tail, marking the wheat.” He pointed to the clusters of other pinpricks, which had a series of tiny symbols embroidered next to them. “I believe the whole constellation of Virgo is named after the Greek letters, which is unique. But what’s going on in the lower diagram? The shape of the constellation, without the figure drawn in?”
They all leaned closer to look. Lucy read aloud the names of various French towns in corresponding positions, embroidered beside the stars. “Bayeux seems to correspond to the point on the map for Epsilon; Amiens is where Nu is; then Evreux fits neatly with Delta. What are these others again, Alex?”
“Well, Reims accords with Beta—one of the most important cathedrals in France, where the coronations took place. Do you think Laon fits Kappa?” He frowned a little. “Paris matches Eta; and Chartres seems on target for Gamma. Very strange. But why did she care?”
Henry took spectacles from his nose and answered with a surprising liveliness. “We made a tour of them together, when you were a baby, Alex, and she told me that these great French Gothic cathedrals are ‘Notre-Dames’ cathedrals—each dedicated to Our Lady. She said that they encrypt the constellation of Virgo, the virgin, on the earth below—which I always thought was a little far-fetched, but it pleased her so much! Virgo is the only female constellation in the zodiac, and she’s connected with Ceres, the corn goddess, and Isis in the Egyptian pantheon.”
“And, of course, subsequently, the Virgin Mary.” Lucy had been thinking about this in relation to what she had absorbed from the guidebook for Chartres. “These other cathedrals—Reims, Bayeux, and Amiens—all had labyrinths, though only Chartres has had its original intact since 1200.” She was fascinated, and thought of the palm cross in the Bible at the house. “It’s interesting that the Virgo figure holds the palm leaf, and you were christened on Palm Sunday, Alex. What about this star—Alpha, you said—which is at the bottom of the tail? Could that be the house in L’Aigle?”
Alex looked at her. “It’s an interesting idea. ‘My alpha and my omega.’ Do you feel it’s related to Will’s central document?”
Lucy smiled at him. “It could be, if whatever was in the garden is both the alpha star of Virgo and the omega of the clues—beginning and end.”
Alex suddenly felt uncomfortable. “Dad, you don’t believe all this sacred geometry means anything, do you?”
Henry took a moment. “What’s important, Alex, is not whether there is actually any truth in it. There may be, who knows? But what’s interesting is that the Gothic architects believed it. It does seem to have been constructed this way—whether you accept there’s anything supernatural about it or not. The overlay of Christianity on the site of some presumably older female shrine would have excited your mother. She loved that woven feel—the way one deep myth was the background of another. The plurality of faiths, she called it. She would have found it heartening that they had embraced rather than eradicated the old core rituals. She felt it gave continuity to the shape of human belief—that it showed how there was one common thread behind such a variety of religions. Virgo’s connection with the Virgin Mary would have delighted her.”
“There’s something written on the back of the frame,” Grace alerted them.
Turning it over, Lucy read: “‘She is both sister and bride.’” She spoke with animation. “And your mum obviously attached some significance to it, Alex. She made this tapestry, created that garden. Something was in her head. And Will must have started to decipher it too, don’t you think?”
At this point Alex looked at the intrigued faces in the room and softly asked Lucy: “Would you show my father what we found in the garden?”
She produced the tile, inverted it carefully to reveal the strange star-shaped pattern with its motto below, and the key taped teasingly in the center. “Whatever was there, Will found it first. This has to be connected with his bike, doesn’t it?” Lucy asked him.
Henry looked closely at the object. “‘And we came forth to look again at the stars,’” he said wistfully. “Dante’s Inferno. They’re the same words as the inscription on the back of the miniature. I looked at it carefully after it came back from Interpol.”
Alex’s brows knitted, but Henry’s thoughts had turned to the motorbike, and he shook his head doubtfully as he rubbed his thumb over the key. “You know, Alex, the Ducati was away being repaired for weeks, even though it wasn’t much damaged. The police went over it thoroughly, so I can’t imagine there’s anything still in it. We went through the saddlebags, which only leaves the storage box on top of the tank. Anything else would have been returned to us by now.”
Unless someone got to it in between, his son thought. But he said: “You’re right. Still, shall we check it, just to be sure?”
ALEX LOOSENED THE DUST COVER, AND THE RACING BIKE SHONE PRIMROSE beneath.
“His tetchy beauty, he called it. It’s in showroom condition.” Alex leaned against the hood of his father’s car with his arms folded, looking at the seemingly benign superbike. “Half again the cost of my Audi. He bought it with money from Mum, before she died. No one could talk him out if it.”
“It is beautiful.” Grace looked with admiration. “I think my brother would sink to his knees and pay homage to it.”
“It suited Will.” Simon ran a hand along the seat, and against the bodywork. “He was never late to a shoot. And he told me it was easier to ride than his first Ducati. Of course, you can’t be carrying any beer weight to ride one—real tail-in-the-breeze stuff. Only for a fit man, and bloody uncomfortable over any distance. Where’s the key?”
Lucy hesitated for some reason, reluctant to pass it to Simon, then freed it from the tile and put it in his hand. In a moment he had swung into the saddle, twisted the accelerator, turned the ignition. It roared, started the first time, and then stalled immediately in the hands of the novice. Everyone laughed nervously at the sudden noise.
Alex took back the key with a grin and unlocked the tank box: empty, as Henry had anticipated. Then he, too, ran his hand along the sides of the machine. There was no unusual feature, no compartment, nothing besides the fuel tank, and he knew that Will would never have risked its smooth function by putting anything in there. He shook his head and asked Henry: “Was there anything in the saddlebag? Or the rucksack?”
“Nothing unusual, as I recall. Of course, I wasn’t looking for anything particular. We could go through the odd bits and pieces again. What did you hope to find?”
Lucy had been standing meditatively a few feet away; and now Alex noticed her expression. He wondered if she might have one of her sudden changes of mood, feel ill, or go quiet. Whatever was going on in her heart, she definitely felt a propinquity with Will, reacted to things connected with him—even though he was inclined to believe it was just psychological. But she seemed calm and in charge tonight, simply held out her hand for the key. He smiled with dry amusement and passed it to her.
She put her hand on the seat and bent over it, looking upward from under the seat back. She groped underneath, then slid back a small sprung cover under the casing behind the seat with her right hand. With her left, she inserted the key into the neat space that had been revealed. Alex squatted to watch, and the back half of the seat housing slid back just a few inches, exposing a small, carefully designed compartment, obviously custom-made to Will’s order. She was now able to slide the cover—which blended into the bodywork—right away, and she reached inside.
Four silent faces watched as she took out four small leather bags, then something rolled in a fine black velvet cloth lashed with a leather bootlace. A shadow passed over Simon’s face as Alex reached out for the last object, which Lucy gave him.
Grace looked at her friend, uncertain whether to be more mystified by the find, or the unusual manner of its discovery. Certainly Henry’s “Good heavens!” indicated that he too was at least surprised.
“Will’s Leica,” Alex said, with a tone of magic in his voice. “I wondered where it was. He kept it like this all the time, unless it was casually stuffed into his pocket when he was working. Almost impossible to buy them now. They change hands for a small fortune. This is the camera, and the bags must hold spare lenses—at least two of them.” Alex now sounded more like himself, but Amel would have detected something different in his voice—and both Lucy and Henry could too.
Simon tested the weight of a leather bag. “I remember. I think your grandfather gave it to him—is that right? Your father, Henry. Will told me it was passed to him on his eighteenth birthday.”
Henry looked steady, but his face twitched. He explained: “My father exchanged it for a truckload of food outside Frankfurt, very end of ’forty-four or early ’forty-five. I think he took it just to make the man feel easier about it—honestly never understood its value. The family was trying to cook a frozen horse apparently—children looked traumatized and hungry.”
Simon nodded. “Will told me his grandfather gave virtually all the supplies his company had to some starving refugees. They were retreating from the Russians, so I understand; had traveled all the way from Dresden. And one of them gave him the camera, virtually forced it on him. For Will, no modern camera came close to matching the finesse of an original Leica.”
Alex was untying the wrapping with careful fingers, and now he unrolled the camera. All the mountings were of warm-toned nickel, the case vulcanite; it looked well used and loved but in excellent shape. He glanced at the count: the roll was not used up.
Meanwhile, Lucy had taken the other leather bags and begun to investigate. As Alex had predicted, two beautiful original lenses were in two of the pouches; but in the third she found four film cassette tubs, which she shook. Simon found another two in his pouch, plus a small cassette which sounded empty when he shook it. Lucy relieved him of it, popped off the lid, and probed her finger inside.
“It’s a bunch of exposure notes for processing, and there’s a delivery slip, registered.” She scanned the paper. “Sent special service, from the post office in Caen. Addressed to somebody called Brown on Thirty-Fourth Street in New York City.”
Alex leaned across to see the writing. “Roland Brown—an independent, but associated with Magnum, Will’s photographic agency. They syndicated most of Will’s best stuff in the States. Roland was a good friend—kept an office in London too, I think. He was mad about Will’s Leica II, because the old uncoated lens gave a completely different quality to the pictures. Loved it even more fiercely once digital pictures started to dominate.”
“Will loved it because its shutter was silent, and no one knew you were taking the pictures,” Lucy stated calmly.
Simon nodded, but Grace looked at her, startled. “How on earth could you know that?”
Lucy smiled. “You learn a lot of useless things working on documentaries in South America, Grace. Not the same education you get from Light Entertainment,” Lucy suggested.
Alex looked at her. They hadn’t discussed keeping her secret—which would have a complex impact and be highly emotive for everyone; but he saw at once that they would never have to.
He took her hand appreciatively. “We’re late for dinner. Shall we bring these to the pub? Much too valuable to leave out here.” Henry turned off the garage light; they pulled coats on and started ambling down the lane in the cool air. “It’s only five minutes’ walk,” Alex assured them; but he slipped an arm around Lucy once out of his father’s hearing, and added for her alone: “Just five minutes down the road at the end of a rainbow.” And they grinned at each other.