He was glad to see the bench when they reached the top, but two women stood by it, blocking the way, their heads bent over a laminated map. They were young and fit, wearing walking boots and leggings that revealed the muscled contours of their legs. Both wore baseball caps and had their hair tied in ponytails. Walking poles hung from their wrists. Serious hikers, Sid thought.
They were close to the women now, but neither looked up or moved out of the way as they approached.
“Ladies,” Paul said. “Morning.”
Unsmiling, they stepped out of the way. One of them nodded curtly. Sid met her eyes and instantly recoiled at the flinty coldness in them. As he and Paul walked on, Sid looked back over his shoulder, as drawn to that gaze as he’d been repelled by it, because it felt as if it was personal somehow. The women stood shoulder to shoulder, staring back. Blatantly. If they’d been men, it would have been threatening.
Sid told himself not to let Paul’s paranoia infect him. They were just hikers.
It was vital he keep his own head together if he was going to work out what was happening and what to do.
Anya
My father’s house in Cambridge was a mansion distinguished enough to have its own Wikipedia page. His family had owned it for three generations. It occupied a spacious and very private end lot on a beautiful wide street just a ten-minute walk from the library site.
The street was lined with mature beech trees, grown so large their roots had forced up paving stones; their trunks were thick and gnarled. The leaves were starting to turn, from acid green into copper. Beechnuts fell around me, plinking onto the roofs of the high-end vehicles parked along the verges and crunching beneath my shoes.
I walked through a set of open gates onto a wide, paved driveway. A perfectly shiny Ferrari was parked in front of a large garage. The home looked to be Victorian, and Gothic in style, though it was hard to see much evidence of its age in the fabric of the building. Every inch had been restored and maintained. Window frames gleamed with white paint; the stonework was pristine, the yew globes in the front garden immaculately clipped. There wasn’t a stray leaf on the ground. Beneath it all, I wondered if the old bones of the house could breathe.
Your father’s a control freak.
Evidence of Magnus’s obsession with legacy was here, too, in the family motto chipped into stone above the door, the cuts, appropriately enough, surgically clean. The motto:Ingenio et industria.By wit and industry. So squeaky clean.
He opened the door himself and let me in. I rubbernecked shamelessly. My greedy eyes didn’t want to miss a thing. I’d had to imagine his family home for so many years; seeing it for myself felt unreal. It was a riot of rich Victorian architecture: a finely etchedglass porch door, original, beautifully tiled floors, molded ceilings, brass hardware on the doors, William Morris wallpaper, glass lanterns, intricately carved banisters, unfeasibly large bouquets of fresh flowers spraying from urns on polished side tables. There were family portraits, too. My father and, presumably, my grandfather and great-grandfather beside him.
“I made some calls,” he said. “For your mother.”
“I heard from her. It seems like you got her on the trial. Thank you.”
Dust motes spiraled in a shaft of sunshine that crept through a doorway from a room I couldn’t see into. This place was impressive, but lugubrious. It was hard to imagine Mum here; she must have found it stifling.
I was kicking myself for not approaching Magnus for help earlier. I’d been so passive where he was concerned, so eager not to upset Mum. Why did I buy into her invective so wholly that I didn’t even think to ask one of the most medically well-connected men in the country to help us? Why didn’t I make my own mind up about that as she got sicker? Perhaps I needed to grow up. In answer, I heard her.
Don’t deal with the devil.
I tried to ignore her, but she was persistent.
If you give your father an inch, he’ll take a thousand miles.
“This way,” he said, and I followed him.
I was alert for any sign of my half siblings, even though they were surely at school. It was hard to believe I was in the family home, the place I might have grown up in if things had been different.
It was also hard to believe itwasa family home. It was more like a museum.
At the end of one wing of the house, in a room with tall, arched windows, designed to make the most of its garden views, he invited me to sit down.
I took a seat opposite the windows. I felt buzzed but edgy, too. I’d been running on adrenaline for too many hours. I’d taken painkillers for my foot, but they were wearing off.
There were four professional archival boxes on the table in front of me and two empty book stands. I inched forward to look at the boxes but didn’t touch. They were plain and unlabeled, cream colored, not a fingerprint on them. Magnus hit a button on the wall and semi-sheer blinds rose from the base of each window to the top. The light in the room dimmed to a pearly gray and the air felt soupy.
“Which would you like to open first?” he asked, and I flinched, because the question had echoes of my childhood birthday parties. At every single one, I’d fantasized that he would turn up to surprise me.
“You choose,” I said.
He opened the one closest to him and extracted a white bag, which he handed to me. I loosened its drawstring and removed a book. Written in Latin and exquisitely illustrated, it was a medical encyclopedia.
“Fifteenth century?” I asked.
