Setting down his cup, he snatched the paper from her and examined it.
Instead of merely his ugly beetle, which was visible on the other side, there was now a drawing of a skull, a “death head” as Poe had described it in his tale, sketched in a murky brown ink.
“And what is that?” He pointed diagonally to the other edge in case she hadn’t noticed it.
“It looks like a goat,” she said.
“But so small,” he pointed out. “Like a baby goat, or a kid, don’t you think?” He had certainly tried to evoke a kid, at any rate. “And then, what is all that gibberish in between?”
She took it back from him, then she walked to the window. Today was another overcast day, yet still, there was a bright steely light.
“You’re right. There are lines of nonsense text between the goat—”
“Kid,” he interrupted.
“And the skull,” she said. “I can make neither heads nor tails of it.”
He walked to her side and studied it with her, able to sniff the delightful floral scent of hereau de toilette.
He thought he’d done a rather good job. For clearly, though faintly, he could see four lines of numbers and symbols, starting with “53++! 305)) 6*; 4826) 4+.) 4+);8.”
“Whatever can it mean?” she mused. “It must be a puzzle, don’t you think?”
She looked up at him, and they were so close, he could see the reflection of the clouds in her brown eyes.
He nodded. He would have agreed with whatever words came out of her luscious mouth at that moment.
She flipped the paper over, and there was his beetle.
“How strange! It looks so much like the skull, as if you invoked the image on the other side by drawing your ugly bug.”
He couldn’t help smiling at her assessment of his beetle.
“How can one invoke something onto paper?” he teased. “By magic?”
“It would seem so. I saw the paper a few minutes ago, and it was blank except for your drawing. Where did this come from? It’s giving me goosebumps.”
He glanced at her arm. It looked perfectly smooth to him.
“Where did you get this sheet of paper?” she asked.
“That is a good question. I didn’t have a sketchpad at my disposal as you do, so I hunted around in here. I was about to ask Lord Angsley when I saw a book sticking out a little farther than the others on the shelf. I was only going to push it back in, but instead, I pulled it out because of the title.”
He went to the shelf and from amongst a number of large, thick volumes whose spines were nearly identical, he drew the one he’d found the night before and held it before her.
“I imagine, as an ambassador for her queen, Lord Angsley had an interest in the subject,” he told her.
She glanced down at the massive book in his hands with a reddish-brown spine and a deep-green leather cover, and read the title, “A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
“Volume fourteen,” he added, because he’d memorized it.
She laughed. “Unquestionably, one of the longest titles I’ve ever seen.” Glancing up at him, she asked, “And it grabbed your interest enough to pull the book from the shelf among all the other volumes with theexactsame title?”
Was she doubting his ridiculous story?
He shrugged. “It seemed to be calling to me by the fact of it being stuck out a little. It caught my shoulder as I went by.” In truth, he’d searched for an hour looking for a book that mentioned the pirate Captain Kidd, and this boring looking volume was the only one. In fact, stumbling upon Kidd in volume fourteen had been a godsend.
She frowned, then looked down at the book again. “I’ve been in a bookshop and felt as if a book were ‘calling’ to me, as you put it.”
