The Cloisters(40)

“You have seen it, haven’t you, Ann?” he said, now turning to face me. “In the deck. That night. You noticed something different, too. I saw it in you, you know.”

The way he searched my face, desperate and haunted, made me want to assure him that they were just cards, just a parlor trick. But he was right. I had felt it. And it had been following me, too, like a specter of something I couldn’t explain, something beyond the research and citations.

“Yes,” I said. “I think there’s something there.” And then I added quickly, “But Patrick, you need to remember that I might be wrong. These cards—it’s all still new to me.”

“Of course. But doesn’t that make it better? Make it proof that you—someone who isn’t experienced—can feel it too?”

“Sometimes,” I said gently, “we can’t trust what we feel. Intuition, a sensation—they’re not proof.”

I didn’t add the thing that had been troubling me, which was that I was starting to struggle to distinguish between what was real and what was imagined within the walls of The Cloisters. Some days, under the Gothic arches and among the funerary sculptures, it seemed as if the eyes of the statues were following me, as if the gold and the glitter were filling my vision and blurring it, as if, for a moment, my very body was dissolving in the space and becoming a feeling, a sensation, an intuition.

I knew where that instinct had come from, that insistence that the outlandish was worthwhile. It had germinated at my kitchen table in Washington, across scraps of paper and bits of language, across the pads of paper my father and I often filled together. Although sometimes, he worked alone. It was that instinct that had led me here, had led me in everything I did. Always. I was beginning to realize it when he died, but some of my belief had gone with him. Only now was it beginning to return. Patrick wasn’t wrong that I believed more than Rachel. Because perhaps one needed a little magic to make a narrow childhood more bearable.

Down at Ketch Rare Books and Antiques, we discovered the scene had not changed. If anything, it seemed that the antique bottles and books had grown in quantity, multiplied in the intervening time, as if they had copulated in the dark.

Despite having buzzed us through the gate, Stephen wasn’t in the main room. Patrick rang a bell on his desk, the echo of which I could hear in the upstairs room.

I pulled out a first edition of émile Zola and sat in one of the free chairs to wait, opening the pages to where the first few lines of French began. Patrick browsed the shelves, waiting for Stephen, until he came around to where I sat, and placed a hand on the back of my chair, his body angled into my space.

“Ah,” he said, looking down at the text in my lap. “?‘If you shut up the truth and bury it underground, it will but grow.’ Zola.”

I looked up at him and felt, for a moment, very young. As if I were looking up at my father as he leaned over my translation, checking that I had chosen the correct cases. The image so startling, it moved me to close the book, to stand up, to put some distance between myself and Patrick. Something that was maddeningly difficult in Stephen’s shop.

“You know,” he said, turning in a circle to take it all in—the rare books, the jewelry, the paintings. “We’ll find it. Eventually, we’ll find it. The deck, the document. The truth. The thing that will unlock it for us. We’ll find it.”

There was something in his voice, a pushing thinness that belied what every researcher knew: the thing may no longer exist. That was the reality of an archive—they were always incomplete despite their depth, made up, as they were, of fragments.

“Always a believer,” said Stephen from the end of the room. He had entered through the back door and now pawed through the papers on his desk until he came across a thick packet that he passed to Patrick, who absently handed it off to me.

“I have a few other things you might like to see?” Stephen said to Patrick, inclining his head toward the door. When I went to follow, Patrick held up a hand.

“We’ll only be a few minutes.”

I returned to my seat among the antiques, the packet in my lap, the image of Patrick standing above me morphing into an image of my father standing above me replayed in my mind. After more than a few minutes had passed, it was clear that they would be longer, and looking for a distraction, I stood and began to pick up objects and guess their age, their value, before consulting their tags. I did this until it felt like the only thing left in the shop I hadn’t examined was the packet Patrick had handed to me. I lifted it up in the dim light and looked at its closure. It was just a fold, one that I was quickly able to slide my finger beneath and shake the contents out into the palm of my hand. There were three cards: two pips and the Major Arcana card the Popess.

I set down the two pips and flipped over the Popess card to examine its back. It revealed not just stars against a blue sky, but delicate gold lines that connected the stars—constellations. There was Scorpio and Libra, the Pleiades and Cancer, as well as twinkling motes of gold leaf suspended above an outline of the earth, the world as black and unseeing as the night. I looked down at the card in my hand and felt its stiffness with my fingers.

I flexed it instinctively, just a test, to feel what Rachel and I had talked about, the strange stiffness of the cards, and as I did so, I felt one of the edges pop. At the top right corner, something had pulled away from the delicate blue and gold backing of the card, a piece of paper. And there, underneath, I could see something unusual—a strand of hair blowing against a pale blue and pink landscape. I wedged my nail gently into the gap and watched as the stiff card of the Popess fell away entirely, revealing a different card—the Huntress, Diana. Recognizable because of the bow she carried in one hand and the moon diadem on her head. Across from her, a stag drank from a pond. Above her, putti held a collection of arrows, and the constellation of Cancer—the astrological sign associated with the moon—hung in the sky.