The Book of Lost Things Page 26

  The butler at 111 The Lakeview had just opened his mouth to say something unwelcoming to the plump, seedy man in his pork-pie hat and not overly clean bright blue waistcoat when the fellow thrust an envelope into his hand and turned on his heels to walk away. The butler had no time to refuse to accept the envelope or to demand that the fellow identify himself. He didn’t even have time to pin down a vague sense that he might recognize the man, although he certainly didn’t know him. It was the odd eyes—the color of brandy spilled on the stone cellar floor?—that struck him as somehow familiar, but it was only the man’s back that he could study, searching for a memory, watching the questionable character go down the drive with the side-to-side rolling gait of an overweight man or an old sailor. Then the butler looked down to see that the envelope was addressed to Mr. Bendiff, and he shrugged. His employer was a curious character, not at all what the butler had been used to but generous in his dealings with servants. Mr. Bendiff entertained some odd people at the house, and while he was himself—as the butler knew; he would never agree to work for someone of questionable morals—an upright and honest man, some of his business brought him into contact with the kind of people who seldom set foot on The Lakeview.

  Max went from Pia’s home to the castle, where the Baroness wanted someone to complain to. Max had his own business to conduct, so their conversation did not run smoothly. The Baroness greeted him crossly from her throne-like chair, “I’ve lost my heir.”

  “I’ve found you a scullery maid,” Max responded, standing in front of her with his round hat in his hands. He did not twist or rotate the hat; he did not fiddle with it. He might be dressed as the Unsuccessful Suitor, but he was playing Inspector Doddle, who always got his man.

  “The boy won’t live here, he doesn’t want the money, he doesn’t even want the title,” the Baroness complained.

  “This girl is simple,” said Max, as dry and undramatic as Inspector Doddle reading facts from a file. “But young and strong and of a good disposition. You aren’t young, and neither is Zenobia. A pair of strong shoulders will come in handy.”

  “On the other hand,” the Baroness admitted, her voice growing less sharp and unhappy, “he does come to see me. He keeps me company sometimes. He is willing to overlook”—she chose that word because she could not think of herself as someone who might need to be forgiven—“my error.”

  “This girl will have to keep her own name,” Max warned the Baroness. “She can’t be asked to make that change, any more than Zenobia could.”

  “He can’t escape the title,” the Baroness concluded with satisfaction. She regarded Max. “I have two Marthas working here already. What do I need with another?”

  “This girl will never marry. She has no family. She comes from the orphanage and is now much misused in the workhouse.”

  “I am not a soft-hearted do-gooder, Mister Max. I thought you understood that.”

  “You don’t need to be. You might, however, want to show your great-nephew that it’s possible for wealth to improve the lives of others,” said crafty Inspector Doddle.

  “Humph,” said the Baroness. “As if he weren’t smart enough to already know that. I hope you don’t expect any further fee for finding this new Martha.”

  “Her name is Nance,” Max said.

  Thursday afternoon, Max, wearing the town official’s uniform, walked through the old city and out along River Way to claim Nance away from the workhouse, where, as he arrived, the Master, his dark suit brushed clean, his white shirt collar starched stiff, was just entering an automobile with an ornate B painted in gold on its shiny black door. The Matron was in too much of a state of alarmed excitement to question the official’s demand to see the contract Nance had signed. He read it over slowly. Then he lay a finger on the wavery X with which one of the parties had signed and looked into the woman’s face. He was William Starling as the Queen’s Man, fighting to save Her Majesty’s reputation and the life of her infant son from the plots of the King’s evil brother. He kept his eyes on the Matron’s face as, without a word, he tore the paper along its length, once, twice, a third time. With a stern look, he handed the pieces back to her. “You wouldn’t want that to come to anyone’s notice,” he advised.

  “Especially not now,” she agreed unapologetically. “Not when the Master is about to move up in the world and take me out of this place.”

  She cared entirely too little for the way they had treated Nance. He warned her, speaking with all the power of displeased royalty behind him, “This malfeasance will not be forgotten.”

  That did distract her, but only briefly. “It was the Master’s doing. I’ll tell him when he returns, but now—take the girl, go about on whatever your business is with her. It’s better that she be gone. And I’ve plans to make.”

  Nance was not surprised to see him and did as he told her without question, packed all her possessions into a shawl, gathered its corners together into a knot, and clutched the bundle to her chest as she followed him into the open brick courtyard. “I like your eyes,” she told him. “Friendly, like the fireplace before I scrub it clean. Do you want to see my fireplace?”

  Max did not.

  “Did you come to give me more ice cream?”

  He had to stop off at his house to change into the Unsuccessful Suitor’s suit that Inspector Doddle wore and was relieved that Nance was undisturbed by this. “Now you’re fat,” she told him, seating herself behind him on the bicycle. “Pretty vest,” she added, perfectly happy. She asked no questions when he took her to the castle, and curtseyed clumsily to Zenobia when he introduced the two. Then Max led her up the narrow back staircase to her new bedroom.

  For a long minute, Nance stood silent in the center of the small room. Then she set her bundle on the bed and went to look out the window. She returned to sit on the bed. She turned on the little lamp, then turned it off. She covered her mouth with her hands. “For me?” she said from behind her fingers. “Just for me?” She lowered her hands to tell him, “There’s a light.” She switched it on and off again and twisted around on the bed. “I can see the sky out there,” she said. “May I stay here? Please, Mister?”

  Back on The Lakeview, heading home, Max rode slowly. He was proud of his solution to the problem that Nance hadn’t even understood she had. He felt entirely satisfied with himself, as his feet pushed the pedals around and the lake shone silver off to his right. He was good at his work, resourceful and imaginative. He’d never been so good at anything before in his life, he thought, going through the Royal Gate and back into the old city, taking the shortcut through Misery Lane. But his happiness lasted only until he walked into his own kitchen.

  Because the house was empty. He had known it was empty, but standing in an empty house, solitude spreading out around him, he had to remember: When he paid Joachim for his next lesson, he would have only fifteen in his pockets, and no other job awaited him. All the activity of the last few days had distracted him from that reality. He could no more think of having business cards and stationery printed than fly to the moon. Worse, he had to recognize that without earnings his independence was at risk.

  But independence was all he had left. Max had a sudden bleak black intuition that he would never hear from his parents again.

  He fled from that thought. It was better to worry about work, and less frightening, too. How could he drum up business? He wasn’t thinking well about this problem, he knew. His only idea had to do with whether he could take that phrase literally and wander around the New Town with a drum—wasn’t there a drum in the prop room, for A Soldier’s Sweetheart?—proclaiming his own name to anyone passing by, in case anyone knew anyone with a problem needing solving.

  It was a relief to hear a ringing at the bell and to know by almost immediate opening and closing of his front door that Pia had decided to come pester him again. At least she would divert him, and maybe at best she would ask him some nosy question that would give him an idea. He needed an idea. He needed five ideas. H
e admitted that to himself as he went to welcome her.

  As usual Pia was dressed in her school uniform and carried a white box wrapped around with a scarlet ribbon, and as usual she had an irritating mysterious smile on her face as she charged into the kitchen. What was not usual was the long envelope she put down on the table beside the box. Mister Max was typed on the front of it. Also not usual was her failure to start talking, although he could almost see all the words she wanted to speak crowding up in her eyes and pushing up the ends of her mouth. Silently, she opened the box. Silently, she watched Max open the envelope.

  Inside were two tens and a five, folded inside a typed note, For services rendered, signed only Bendiff. Then, before Max had time to work it out for himself, Pia’s words burst out of her. “He thinks it’s the perfect location, and he’s already talked to the Mayor about buying it from the city. His architect will look at it Monday, and he’s putting those two in charge of a pub in the New Town. If they succeed at the job, that’s fine by him. If they fail, it’s too bad for them. He thinks,” Pia announced, taking a large bite of apple turnover, “they’ll fail.”

  “But what about the—?”

  “The old people are being moved into private homes. The city will pay for their care. It will cost the city less and they’ll be much more comfortable. Poppy will make sure of that. So, what do you think? Wasn’t that a good idea of mine?”

  Max thought: He could make it through another week and maybe two, and that was a relief but no solution. He thought: Pia could teach Nance to read, at least enough to keep her from ever getting into that kind of trouble again. He thought: These turnovers look delicious, and he reached for one.

  The box held four turnovers, as well as two thick slices of a lemon sponge cake with lemon curd between each of the three tall layers and a light lemony buttercream frosting, and also, piled one on top of the other, four square pieces of linzer torte. “Everything looked good,” Pia explained. “Besides, what if she does go to work for my father and stops selling them?”

  Max hadn’t eaten any lunch and was hungry. He’d finished one turnover, was halfway through his piece of cake, and had begun the argument with Pia about teaching Nance—“Why should I? It’s not as if I have time on my hands,” she was arguing—when Ari entered the room from the back garden.

  He looked tired, his clothes were rumpled, and the light of hope in his eyes had gone out. Pia asked if he’d found his Martha, and he shook his head. Max asked if he still wanted to live up in the hills. At that question Ari did smile, his old sad smile, and say Yes; but he added right away, “It’s not possible, of course. Other things are more important.”

  “Didn’t you find out anything?” Pia demanded. “You were gone for days. I’m sorry,” she added.

  “Oh, I found my Martha’s family. Named Glompf,” Ari told them, “and I found out that the Bartholds aren’t the only ones good at staying angry, or judging harshly and holding grudges. When I told them their daughter had been absolutely and definitely proved innocent, all they said was that so much damage had been done to their reputation, they didn’t think it would ever be repaired. They didn’t even spare one thought for her. They have no idea where she disappeared to seven years ago, and they don’t care. Except that she used to send them most of what she was paid, and they are still cross at losing that. I tell you, both of you,” Ari announced, “I hope I never bear grudges like that. Great-Aunt at least acknowledges that she was wrong. But those people …” He fell silent, took a breath. “I’m going to unpack and have a quick bath, then we’ll have a lesson, Max.” At the dining room doorway he turned to say, “I did find out her name anyway. It’s Gabrielle,” and he turned away, valise in hand.

  Max clamped a hand down hard around Pia’s wrist to keep her from saying one word. When Ari’s footsteps could be heard going heavily up the stairs, he released her.

  “Our Gabrielle?” Pia asked, whispering.

  He nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell him? Why didn’t you let me? Did you already know?”

  “I know what I’m doing,” he said as firmly as Lorenzo Apiedi talking to the lawyer who was advising him to do whatever it took to save his own life. Like the young patriot, Max repeated it slowly. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Pia wanted to disagree but decided not to. “Hunh,” she grumped, then shrugged and picked up a linzer torte, took a bite, and took up their quarrel where it had been left off. “What if I just don’t want to teach someone to read? Someone too stupid to have learned how before?”

  They both had red angry cheeks when Ari came back into the room. He still carried a battered briefcase, but that was all that was left of the penniless student. Now he wore brown gabardine trousers, a soft golden sweater, and soft leather shoes. Now he looked wealthy and possibly important, like one of the redheaded Barons Barthold, although he lacked their imperious eyes. He interrupted the quarrel. “What’s wrong? What is this? I thought— What’s going on?”

  Pia started telling Ari about Max’s impossible request, which had grown to seem ever more impossible to her as the quarrel went on, and more difficult, and even less to her liking. Ari nodded and said only, “I see, I see.” He looked at Max with a calm expression. “I see,” he said, and nodded. He opened his briefcase and set his volume of Euclid out on the table as Pia went on about the pointlessness, anyway, of trying to teach someone who couldn’t read at this person’s age. Ari nodded. “I see, yes, I can’t argue.” He reached out to take a turnover, asking politely, “May I?” and pointed out to Max, “Pia is much too young. And immature. Well, that’s only to be expected at her age, but she’s right. She can’t teach someone simple-minded. The way she lives? How can you expect her to understand someone so very different? Even if she could do that, if she were that kind of a girl, do you think you could ask her to work that hard? I know just how you feel, Pia,” Ari concluded, and he bit into the golden-brown tip of the pastry.

  “I am not too young,” Pia answered, and turned her impatience on Ari. “You can’t say I’m spoiled, because I’m not. Not one bit. I’ll show you,” she told him, eyebrows drawn together over stormy eyes. “I’ll do it, and I’ll do it so well—”

  But Ari had stopped listening. He had swallowed his bite of turnover and, still holding the pastry in one hand, reached out with the other to take Max’s fork—this time without a polite apology—to take a bite of the lemon cake. He ate that bite and then another. Then he looked from one of them to the other, too stunned to speak.

  Pia looked at Max. Max looked at Pia. Then they both looked back at Ari, who was now sinking his teeth into a linzer torte square. After savoring and swallowing, “Where did these come from?” he asked, almost whispering, as if he didn’t dare to speak something out loud.

  “Pia brought them,” Max said. He had decided, since he had just won the argument, to let Pia have the pleasure of telling Ari where, as always on a Tuesday afternoon, Gabrielle Glompf was to be found.

  Ari forgot that he was supposed to be giving Max a lesson. “It has to be her,” he told them. “Nobody else can bake like that. Do you think it’s her? I have to go—I’m going to—I have to—” and he was out of the room, out of the house, on his way, his eyes bright with hope.

  In which what was lost is—in a way—found

  Max had made up his mind not to waste a day worrying. In the morning, he ate a quick breakfast and took his easel out to the back garden to see if he could paint the overcast morning sky’s shades of orangey-pink-streaked gray. It was a pearly light he was trying to capture on paper with color and water and his hand, too. In painting, he thought as he painted, it was literally your hand that made things happen, whereas in other things—in the theater, in business, at Grammie’s library—it was a metaphorical hand at work. Gabrielle’s literal hands mixed and shaped her pastries, and Captain Francis’s hands steered The Water Rat, but it was metaphorical hands—whose? the Master’s or Matron’s? the city’s?—that had created the unhappy and c
ruel situation at the workhouse, where Nance had lived like a slave, or some misused pet. His Solutioneer hands, Max decided, could work either literally or metaphorically, and he rather liked that.

  By the time Ari brought his cup of morning tea outside to sit on the back steps and take a look at this first new morning of his renewed life, there were two finished watercolors, neither of them entirely satisfactory, although Max was pleased with the pink underbelly of one of the clouds. Max was ready to be disturbed. He took off his red beret and turned to his tutor-tenant-friend. “Well?”

  Ari knew what he was asking. He held the mug of tea in cupped hands and smiled, flushing with pleasure, then he shook his head gently, in puzzlement or sorrow or perhaps just the confusion of so much happening in so short a time. “She was glad to see me alive and well. She forgives me. She let me wait in the shop until it closed, and walk her home.” Then he remembered. “You already knew her, Max.”

  Max swallowed. “Yes.”

  “Did you always know who she was?”

  “No,” Max said, then admitted, “I wondered, when I first talked with the Baroness. I started to wonder then, because of something Gabrielle had said, but I only figured it out … just a few days ago.”

  Ari studied him. “Seven years ago, I’d have horsewhipped you for keeping quiet,” he said thoughtfully. “But now I know better. If I hadn’t gone looking for her myself, hadn’t tried to find her myself, if I hadn’t—I think she’d have sent me away again. You did me a favor by not telling me, Max.”

  Relief washed over Max. He hadn’t been sure how Ari would react. Ari was, after all, a Barthold.

  “Because of course Gabrielle knew.” Ari spoke the name joyously, and he repeated it. “Gabrielle knew all along she hadn’t taken the spoon, so that it could be found didn’t surprise her. But she didn’t know about me. I was—I still am—a question mark.” Ari turned to Max, smiling, to say, “She didn’t know it was you who’d found the spoon, so I could at least surprise her about that. And now”—Ari stood up, stretched—“now I’m going to tell Great-Aunt that if she can’t welcome both of us, Gabrielle and me, I mean, into her life, then she won’t see either one of us. Any idea what she’ll say?”