The Cloisters(24)

Rachel, it turned out, was a remarkable person to work with. She was on a first-name basis with most major scholars in the discipline, the contact information for each tucked away like so many little secrets in her phone. When we needed to make appointments at the Morgan Library or Columbia, she charmed the librarians with her disarming questions and overt flattery. But she was also shrewd: always ready with the right reference, an arcane historical tidbit. She had a way of making every discovery seem vital, as if it could be the one to break the case. I felt that I was no longer an academic or a researcher, but a detective one clue away from greatness, because that’s how working alongside Rachel made me feel—like the artwork or document that could change my life was just around the corner.

But I started to notice stranger things as well—little tics and lies that slid off Rachel. She took great joy in lying to Moira, who had a frustrating way of inserting herself into everything at The Cloisters. If Moira came looking for Patrick, Rachel would say he had just left, even if he was in his office. I watched her move Moira’s things around the kitchen, just shift them from one shelf to another, enough of a difference to make a person begin to doubt themselves. When we were asked to update the docent training manual to reflect a change in the works on display, Rachel marked it up, filling it with false information Moira had supposedly missed. I thumbed through it one day, standing at Moira’s desk, and went back to tell Rachel.

“It’s a joke,” she insisted.

“You should go tell her,” I had said, worried Moira would take it seriously, but it took days for Rachel to make the corrections, a delicious slowness she seemed to enjoy. I wondered if she might have skipped telling Moira entirely if I hadn’t noticed.

Then there was the day all the enamel tiles identifying the plants in the Trie Cloister went missing. During a staff meeting, Leo came in just to address the issue. Unfortunately, it’s probably one of the visitors, maybe a child, Patrick had suggested. But Leo had kept at it, bringing it up until one day, they were found, thrown in the fountain at the center of the Trie Cloister, broken into shards. No one thought any more of it, except for me, and maybe Leo. Almost certainly Leo.

They seemed like games, these little things. Games overrun by a dark playfulness that only seemed natural amid the funerary sculptures and mummified saints’ bones that filled the galleries. And of course, I could never be sure it wasn’t a game, nor could I be sure it was. Rachel, I think, liked it that way.

But she never played, I noticed, with Patrick. With him, she was always straight, especially during our weekly meetings when we sat in his office and reviewed our progress. We were, Patrick once said, his eyes and ears in the archive. It was our responsibility to see and hear everything, especially those things that might have been missed over the centuries. This meant reading and rereading material we were familiar with, creating indices of occult and divinatory practices we turned up, and chasing down other, small leads, no matter how tedious or tenuous. Every week, Patrick went over our work and set us after a new batch of material, a new trove of letters or diaries or manuscripts he suspected—although could never be sure—might reveal something of importance, something he could use.

It surprised me that after the tarot reading, we all pretended as if it had never happened. As if we hadn’t gathered on our knees around a table to take fortune-telling seriously. As if I hadn’t started, in my daily life, to look for the kinds of changes the cards had predicted—the watery expanse of the protection card, the force of the lion. All while Rachel and I were straining under the load, even if Patrick didn’t see it. Every week, we were combing through thousands of pages of writing, translating from scratch or switching between three or four languages per day, often staying late into the evening.

Which was why, perhaps, almost two weeks after the tarot reading, I was surprised when Rachel declined Patrick’s invitation to stay late that evening as we were packing our things.

“Fine,” he said. A whiteness spread across his knuckles as he gripped the edge of the door to his office. “And this weekend?”

I looked back and forth between them and had the feeling I was intruding on something very intimate even though the words themselves were unremarkable.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We might be working. I might go up to Long Lake. I haven’t decided. But I don’t think I’ll be here.”

“Well, we can talk about it—”

“Ann,” Rachel said, “would you mind giving us a minute? I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

When I closed the door behind me, they were still in their corners, not speaking, and I wondered what it was like, navigating power and lust and the work, all at once.

After the dinner at Patrick’s house, I had found myself scrutinizing every interaction between Rachel and Patrick—the way she let her hand linger on his arm or his back, the way he followed her with his eyes even in crowded galleries. But I had always been good with languages, and over time I had begun to translate theirs into a call-and-response of desire, a complicated syntax of pursuit and capture.

I walked through the gardens on my way to the lobby, letting my hand drift along the big white yarrow flowers and feeling the softness of the mint. The sunbaked smell of the stones was a pleasant break from the dusty volumes we had pulled from the stacks. I let my eyes close for a minute, only to open them and see Leo across the garden, knees in the dirt, watching my face.