Pandora(19)

Dora pulls on some woollen socks, bundles herself into her father’s old banyan. She takes the candle, pats her shoulder. With a quiet caw Hermes perches on it; his sharp talons bunch the quilted silk, adding to the holes he has already made in the padding. Dora lifts the latch of the bedroom door, breath held for the squeak. It does not come. She breathes out.

Four flights of stairs call for care. She tiptoes her way down them, has memorised their creaks, their weak spots, the bow of rotten wood. At the bottom Dora bites her lip. The bell. In the dark of the stairwell she ponders how to manage it. Impatient with her lack of movement, Hermes emits a tiny squawk.

‘Isychia!’ Dora presses her forefinger and thumb to his beak. The candle wobbles in its chamberstick. ‘Don’t let me down now.’

In answer to her whispered plea the magpie shakes his head, ruffles his feathers against her hair. Dora releases him, frowns deeply at the door.

All she can do is try.

Placing her palm flat against the wood Dora ever so slowly pushes it open. The door is heavy; it gives with a dull creak. She winces, tries to gauge the distance between casement and bell. It cannot be much. After a moment she hears the door touch metal, the tinny scrape of clapper on lip, and Dora stops before the bell can make another sound. She looks at the gap she has made.

There is just enough room for her to squeeze through.



Strange, how differently the familiar appears in the dark.

Outside, snow is forming tufty mountains on the windowsill. The muffled sounds of coffee-house merriment filter in through the thin glass. The light from the window only serves to throw the towering cabinets into silhouette and Dora blinks into the semi-darkness, stretches her candle arm in front of her. She can just make out the counterfeit Shang dynasty china bowls on the shelves.

First things first.

The cabinet she thinks of can be found deep within the shop and Dora makes her way there from memory, thankful that Hezekiah ensured a wide path through to the back wall.

Still, she must walk carefully. The candle only offers a weak flame and though her eyes have adjusted to the dark, the cabinets towering either side of her block out the light from the street. She holds a hand out in front of her, counting her steps:

?nas, d?o, tría, téssera …

The tips of her fingers hit wood. She turns right.

Októ, ennéa, déka.

Deeper in now, the light grows denser. It is only when she reaches the cool of whitewash on the fifteenth step that she knows she has reached the basement doors. Right again, she thinks, but Dora hesitates a moment. Is Hezekiah down there? She strains to listen but she cannot hear a thing.

She must stop herself from giving in to temptation and continues carefully to the back of the shop. There it is: a small, squat cabinet with clawed feet tucked into the furthest corner of the room. It barely reaches the tops of her thighs. She remembers playing in front of it while her parents informed their clients with news of recent digs, its panelled doors wide open, its treasures littering the floor. Dora sets down the candle on the cabinet’s worn unpolished top. On her shoulder, Hermes bobs.

Dora sinks to her knees. The doors are stiff. She places her palm against the hinge to steady herself and when she tugs the doors open, the candle wobbles dangerously above her. Dora’s eyes flick up to it in alarm.

Do not fall, please, do not fall.

The candle settles. Hermes chitters. Dora lets out a sigh of relief.

The inside is shallower than she remembers it to be, not much room here at all, and its contents seem to have been shoved unceremoniously in. Dora removes them with care. A dented brass cup, a pocket sundial, a set of pewter spoons, a pipe … She raises this closer to her face, squints at the pattern. An embossed heart. No good. She reaches in again, pulls out a snuffbox, a miniature of an old woman wearing a towering wig, two matching candlesticks made of brass. At the very back of the cabinet her fingers skim over something small, cool, hard. Dora reaches for it, brings it out, tilts it in the candle flame.

For a long moment Dora stares. She had completely forgotten it existed.

In her hand is an unusual gold key about the size of her thumb, its cylindrical stem – dull now with age and misuse – detailed with pretty filigree patterns. At its head is a revolving oval jet disc. On the disc, a relief. A bearded face.

She has a vague memory of playing with the key when she was a small child, for no reason at all except that she liked to spin the disc around, over and over. Did she ever find out what it belonged to? She cannot remember. Dora reaches her hand back into the cabinet, wonders if perhaps the key accompanies a trinket box, though she has no recollection of the fact, but there is nothing of the kind hidden in the cabinet’s bowels. Dora looks at the key again, bites her lip. Can she use it? It is beautiful to be sure, but the detailing has no bearance on the Grecian designs she seeks. Certainly, she has no use for it now. With a shrug Dora places it aside, then searches through some pouches full of nothing more than unserviceable scraps of leather and satin.

Eventually she sags. No mosaics. No pottery fragments, no coins. Dora was sure there had been a small bust of Athena with her nose and helmet plume chipped. But no, there is nothing. Nothing she can use. Dora bites back her disappointment. Even though the items she remembers were broken or in poor condition they were, at least, genuine. Someone would have wanted them. They must then have been sold.

So. That leaves only one place, her second quarry of the night.