The summons arrived on a Tuesday, tucked between a memo about inkwell requisitions and a circular regarding the proper folding of departmental correspondence. Mortimer Underbough noticed it first by its weight. The envelope was thick, cream-colored, and bore a wax seal in the shape of a small, geometric eye, the kind of seal that implied the contents had been considered at length before being released into the world.
He set down his pen. The Bureau of Pecuniary Affairs hummed with its usual afternoon sounds: the scratch of nibs on ledger paper, the occasional clatter of a brass fastener, and the distant wheeze of the pneumatic message tubes that connected the upper floors to the vault below. Mortimer's desk occupied a corner of the third sub-level, beneath a gas lamp that flickered with the building's particular rhythm, a slow, almost morse-code pulse that he had long since learned to ignore.
The letter was addressed to him personally. Not to the office. Not to The Occupant of This Desk. To Mr. Mortimer Underbough, in ink the color of dried blood, and in a hand he had not seen in nineteen years.
He knew the hand before he knew why he knew it. The letters leaned slightly to the left, as though each one were trying to escape the page and return to some earlier, warmer century. The downstrokes were heavy with confidence, and there, beside the address, a small flourish that could have been a signature or a bird taking flight.
Mortimer's mouth went dry. He glanced sideways at Mr. Tibbs two desks down, who was methodically alphabetizing a stack of coal subsidy applications and would not appreciate an interruption. Then he slid his thumb beneath the seal.
The wax cracked cleanly, more cleanly than wax that old had any right to. Inside was a single sheet of heavy paper, folded once, and a second, smaller envelope, which he set aside. The letter read:
Mr. Mortimer Underbough,
Pursuant to the Last Will and Testament of the late Mrs. Edna Underbough of Brackenhollow, deceased the fourteenth of last month, you are hereby summoned to appear at the offices of Pell, Crumbly and Associates, Solicitors, at ten o'clock on the morning of Friday next, for the formal reading of the said Will and the transfer of such bequests as pertain to your name.
You will find enclosed a token of the deceased's regard and a token of the deceased's instruction. The first is yours to keep. The second is not.
Yours, in duty and in some considerable weariness,
Executor Pell
P.S. Do not open the second envelope until instructed to do so. This is not a suggestion.
Mortimer read the letter twice. Then a third time, because the words had not changed but he had not yet begun to feel them. Great-Aunt Edna. The thought arrived with the faint, papery rustle of something long stored. Great-Aunt Edna, who had once sent him a jar of pickled onions for his twelfth birthday and a lecture for his eighteenth. Great-Aunt Edna, who smelled of peppermints and lamp oil and who had called him her little archivist when no one else was listening.
He had not seen her in nineteen years. He had assumed, as one assumes about the elderly who live in distant villages and write only at Christmas, that she would simply continue. That the world would, by some quiet administrative courtesy, refrain from rearranging itself in her absence.
He was, it transpired, wrong.
Mortimer set the letter down with the care of a man placing a glass object on an uneven shelf. He picked up the smaller envelope. It was lighter than the first, almost weightless, and bore no name, only a small printed instruction in a typeface he did not recognize: To Be Opened In the Presence of the Executor. Beneath that, in pencil, in a hand that could only be Edna's: Not before coffee, Morty. You will need it.
He put the envelope in his breast pocket. It sat there against his waistcoat with the particular insistence of an unasked question.
The rest of the afternoon passed in the manner of afternoons at the Bureau, which is to say slowly, and in a series of small, satisfying motions. Mortimer stamped forms. He initialed columns. He ate a cheese sandwich at his desk and brushed the crumbs from his waistcoat with the fastidiousness of a man who had once been told, by a supervisor, that crumbs were a form of protest. At four o'clock, the gas lamps along the third sub-level corridor were turned up, and the building settled into its evening register: a low, comfortable creak of wood and brass, the clop of Mr. Tibbs' boots as he departed, and the distant, papery hush of the pneumatic tubes exhaling their last deliveries.
Mortimer tidied his desk. He aligned his pens. He locked his top drawer, though there was nothing in it he could not have replaced, and then he stood for a moment with his hand on the back of his chair, listening to the building breathe.
On the way out, he passed the Bureau's front hall, where a large clock ticked with the ponderous authority of a thing that had never once been late. Beneath the clock, a notice board displayed the usual announcements: Lost Ledger Found, Found Ledger Returned, All Staff Reminded That the Consumption of Piped Music on Premises Is a Suspendable Offense. Mortimer paused, as he always did, to read them. The habit was not quite superstition. It was closer to a private form of devotion, the daily confirmation that the world still ran on rails, that the rules were the rules, and that the small, comprehensible text of official notices could be relied upon to outlast whatever the evening papers might claim.
He stepped out into the lamplit street. The city was settling into its autumn coat, fog curling along the cobbles, the gas lamps on Chancery Lane burning low and orange in the murk. Mortimer turned up his collar, set his hat at a sensible angle, and began the walk home.
His rooms were in Clerkenwell, on the second floor of a house kept by a landlady who asked no questions and tolerated no Radicals. The stairs creaked in a pattern he knew by heart. The third step from the bottom complained. The seventh step announced visitors. The landing at the top sighed. He climbed them in their usual order, unlocked his door, and stood for a moment in the small, tidy parlor that he had occupied for eleven years without once rearranging the furniture.
The room smelled of beeswax and cold tea. A fire had been laid but not lit. On the mantelpiece, a small framed photograph of his parents, taken on their wedding day, smiled the patient smile of people who would never grow older. Beside it, a single jar of pickled onions, kept long past the date any reasonable person would have disposed of them, because Great-Aunt Edna had sent it, and because he had never quite known what to do with a thing that was both a gift and a memory.
He hung up his hat. He took off his coat. He sat down in the chair by the cold fireplace and, for the first time all day, allowed himself to think.
Executor Pell. The name surfaced from the catalogues of his memory, cross-referenced in an instant. Pell, Crumbly and Associates. A firm that handled the paperwork of the peculiar, the posthumous, and the inconvenient. He had seen their letterheads in his own files, in the wills and codicils of clients whose estates had required the sort of attention that ordinary solicitors found distasteful. They were not a firm one consulted for a simple transfer of property. They were a firm one consulted when the property in question had opinions.
Mortimer pressed his fingers to his eyes. The fog from the street had left a dampness on his lashes, and the cold had begun to settle into his shoulders in the way it always did, a dull, persistent ache that he had learned to live with as one learns to live with an uncomplaining relative.
He took the small envelope from his breast pocket. He held it up to the gaslight. The paper was thick and faintly luminous, and through it he could see only the suggestion of something small and square inside, flat, the size of a playing card or a key. The instruction on the front was clear. Not before coffee, Morty. You will need it.
He set it on the mantelpiece, beside the photograph and the jar of onions. He lit the fire. He put the kettle on. And while the water came to its slow, musical boil, he stood with his back to the room and thought about a village he had not seen since he was a boy.
Brackenhollow. The word arrived in his mouth with the taste of wet stone and woodsmoke. He remembered little of it with any certainty. There had been a green, and a pond, and a shop with a window full of things that did not belong together: a stuffed owl, a brass telescope, a row of boots with no mates. There had been a woman in the doorway who had lifted him up, though he could no longer recall the feeling of being lifted, only the impression, years later, that he had once been trusted with a height he had not earned.
The kettle whistled. Mortimer poured. He drank his coffee standing, the way soldiers drank things, quickly and without pleasure, because the morning was coming, and the morning would not wait.
He did not open the envelope. He was, when it came down to it, a man who obeyed instructions, particularly those issued in his great-aunt's hand, and particularly those followed by a postscript that was not a suggestion.
He slept, when he slept, in a bed that was too large for one person, beneath blankets that smelled faintly of lavender and of the years. His dreams were of paperwork, of course. Always of paperwork. Of forms that filled themselves in as he watched, and of pens that wrote in hands he did not recognize, and of a door at the end of a corridor that, whenever he approached it, retreated by exactly the distance he had gained.
On Thursday morning, he rose early. He shaved with extra care, because the day would, he suspected, be the sort of day on which one was noticed. He laid out his good suit, the one he wore to funerals and to the occasional departmental reception, and discovered a button missing at the cuff. He sewed it on with a thread that did not quite match, and spent a disagreeable ten minutes convincing himself that this was the sort of detail no one would remark upon.
He left the house at half past eight. The fog had lifted, and the city was bright with the brittle, washed-out light of an October morning. The clerks were abroad, hastening to their posts with the determined expressions of people who believed that the world could be made to behave by the simple expedient of arriving at it on time. Mortimer joined them. He carried his umbrella, though the day did not threaten rain, because the etiquette of his profession required one always to be prepared to lend an umbrella, even if the umbrella in question had not seen use since the coronation.
The offices of Pell, Crumbly and Associates occupied a narrow building on the south side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, wedged between a print shop and an establishment that sold, according to its window, Antiquities and Sundries. The front door was painted a green so dark it was nearly black, and bore, in faded gold leaf, the firm’s name and, beneath it, a small motif Mortimer could not immediately identify. It might have been an eye. It might have been a leaf. He looked at it longer than was sensible, and then he went in.
The interior smelled of old paper and furniture polish and something else, something faintly sweet, like dried flowers kept in a drawer for too long. A narrow hallway led to a staircase. At the foot of the staircase, a door stood ajar, and through it came the low, unhurried murmur of a man reading aloud to no one in particular.
Mortimer climbed the stairs. The first landing was empty save for a chair and a framed certificate of some kind, the text of which he did not pause to read. The second landing held a window that looked out onto a courtyard in which a single, leafless tree stood in a circle of damp gravel. The third landing held a door, and on the door, in small black letters, the name Executor Pell.
He knocked.
Enter, said a voice from within, smooth and unhurried, with the crisp vowels of a man who had been educated at a place where education was taken seriously. You are, I trust, Mr. Underbough. You are precisely on time, which is more than I dared to hope.
Mortimer opened the door.
The room beyond was larger than the building's exterior had suggested, a common enough trick of old London architecture. Bookshelves lined three of the walls, each shelf packed with leather-bound volumes of varying ages, some so old their spines had given up the pretense of titles. A fire burned low in a grate to the left. A desk occupied the center of the room, and behind the desk, in a chair that had clearly been made for a man of slightly larger ambitions, sat Executor Pell.
He was elderly in the way that certain documents are elderly: with dignity, and with a faint, papery fragility that suggested he had been handled often but with care. His hair was white and brushed straight back. His spectacles were round and glinted in the firelight. He wore a black coat of excellent cut, a cravat of sober gray, and an expression that Mortimer could only describe as professionally sympathetic, the look of a man who had delivered bad news often enough to have refined it into a small, polished craft.
Mr. Underbough, said Executor Pell, rising. Do sit down. You have had a journey, and I have a will to read, and neither of us, I suspect, is in the mood for unnecessary preamble.
Mortimer sat. The chair was unexpectedly comfortable. He found this irritating.
Executor Pell opened a drawer and produced a folder, thick as a modest novel, bound in a green that matched the front door. He set it on the desk between them. He placed his hands flat on either side of it, the way a man might lay his hands on a sleeping animal.
Before I begin, he said, I must ask you a question, and I must ask you to answer it honestly. This is not a legal formality. It is a condition of the bequest.
Mortimer swallowed. Very well.
Did you, at any time during your minority, ever enter the room at the back of your great-aunt's shop in Brackenhollow, the room to which you were not, under any circumstances, to be admitted?
The question landed in the room like a stone in a still pond. Mortimer felt the surface of his composure ripple, then settle.
No, he said. I never did.
Executor Pell regarded him for a long moment. Then he opened the folder, adjusted his spectacles, and began to read.
Executor Pell read the will with the cadence of a man who had read many wills, each word given its precise weight, each clause a measured footfall down a long corridor.
I, Edna Wimple, of Brackenhollow, in the county of, well, you know the one, being of sound mind if not entirely sound body, do hereby leave, devise, and bequeath...
Mortimer listened. He heard the usual things: the cottage, the shop, the contents of both, the small sum in the savings bank, the modest pension from the Bureau. These were the comprehensible parts, the parts that fit into a ledger.
Then came the rest.
...to my great-nephew, Mortimer Underbough, I leave the key to the back room, together with all that is contained therein, on the condition that he enter alone, that he remain until he has understood, and that he do not, under any circumstances, attempt to leave through the front door...
Mortimer blinked. I beg your pardon?
Executor Pell did not look up from the page. The front door, he repeated, tapping the relevant clause with one manicured finger, is not to be used as an exit from the back room. There is a second door. Your great-aunt was quite specific on this point. The second door must be found. The second door must be used.
Mortimer stared at him. Why?
Executor Pell turned a page. She did not say. She seldom did. There is more.
There was more.
...I further bequeath to my great-nephew the sum of one guinea, to be spent on a cup of tea at the establishment of Mrs. Crumbly, in the village of Lower Brackenhollow, on the day following his reading of this document, for the purpose of receiving such instructions as may be required, and I trust, Mortimer, that you will not be fool enough to mistake this bequest for a pleasantry...
Mortimer felt a chill that had nothing to do with the unlit fire.
...and I leave, as I have left for many years, my regards to Mr. Thistle, and to the three gentlemen who keep their appointment, and to the memory of my sister, who knew what she was about, even when I did not...
Executor Pell paused, cleared his throat softly, and resumed.
In the event that my great-nephew refuses this bequest, or fails to enter the back room within seven days of my death, or attempts to leave by the wrong door, then the whole of my estate, including the shop, the cottage, and the contents of both, shall pass to my executor, Executor Pell, to be held in trust until such time as the terms are fulfilled, or failing that, until such time as the firm of Pell, Crumbly and Associates shall itself be succeeded by another firm of similar purpose and lesser optimism...
Mortimer closed his eyes.
Mr. Underbough, said Executor Pell gently, are you quite well?
No, said Mortimer, I am not quite well at all.
Would you like a glass of water?
I would like several glasses of water, said Mortimer, and possibly a long holiday in a country where wills are short.
Executor Pell permitted himself the smallest of smiles. There are no such countries, Mr. Underbough. Shall I continue?
You might as well.
There was not much more. The will wound through its clauses like a river through a flat country, occasionally bending around a rock, but mostly going where it meant to go. There was a clause about a cat. There was a clause about a teapot. There was a clause about the proper folding of paper, which Executor Pell read with such careful gravity that Mortimer felt absurdly guilty for not having folded his own paper correctly.
At last, Executor Pell closed the folder.
That, he said, is the will.
Mortimer opened his eyes. He had not, he realized, been breathing in a regular fashion for some time. He drew a breath now, held it, released it.
There is a back room, he said.
There is.
I am not to leave it by the front door.
You are not.
I am to find a second door.
You are.
And then I am to take tea with a Mrs. Crumbly.
You are.
Mortimer looked at the folder. He looked at Executor Pell.
Is that all?
There is, said Executor Pell, the matter of the key.
Ah, said Mortimer. Yes. The key.
Executor Pell opened another drawer. From within it, he produced a small envelope, brown and stiff with age. He set it on the desk beside the folder.
Your great-aunt left this with me some years ago, he said. She said it would be needed when the time came. She did not say what it would be needed for. She said you would understand.
Mortimer reached for the envelope. His hand, he noticed, was trembling slightly. He found this humiliating, and tried to stop it, and failed.
He opened the envelope.
The key was small, brass, and old. The wards were intricate, cut in a pattern he did not recognize. He held it in his palm. It was warm. It should not have been warm; it had been in a drawer in an office in a city, and the day was not warm, and yet it was warm, and there was, he thought, the faintest suggestion of a hum against his skin, not a sound exactly, but a vibration, as if the metal were trying to remember how to sing.
He closed his fingers around it.
She said, said Executor Pell, that the room would know you.
Know me?
She said that if it did not, then the key would not turn.
Mortimer looked up. The fire in the grate had gone out at some point during the reading, or perhaps it had never been lit. He could not remember now. The room was cold, and the lamp on the desk flickered in a draught he could not feel.
What do you mean, it would not turn?
Executor Pell folded his hands. I do not mean anything, Mr. Underbough. I am repeating the words of your great-aunt. She had her own ways of speaking. I have spent forty years administering her estate, and I do not understand her, and I have made my peace with that.
Mortimer looked down at the key. It lay in his palm like a question.
There is, said Executor Pell, a train at half past nine.
To Brackenhollow?
To within a mile of it. There is a cart from the station. The driver knows the way.
Mortimer nodded slowly. And the reading of the will? Is that all? Are there any other documents, any other bequests, any other small inheritances of guinea or teapot or folded paper?
No, said Executor Pell. That is the will.
And Mrs. Crumbly?
Mrs. Crumbly runs a tea shop in Lower Brackenhollow. She is expecting you tomorrow at four. You will find her establishment without difficulty. It is the only tea shop. It is also, I am told, the post office, the lending library, and the unofficial registry of births, marriages, and minor misfortunes.
Mortimer stood. The chair was no longer comfortable. He put the key in his waistcoat pocket. It sat there with a weight that seemed disproportionate to its size.
Mr. Underbough, said Executor Pell.
Mortimer turned at the door.
Executor Pell was standing behind his desk, hands folded, spectacles glinting. He looked, Mortimer thought, like a man about to say something he had been waiting a long time to say.
Your great-aunt, he said, was a very particular lady.
Yes, said Mortimer.
She did not, he continued, do things without reason.
No, said Mortimer.
And she did not, Executor Pell said, make mistakes.
No, said Mortimer. I do not suppose she did.
Executor Pell inclined his head. Then he said: Good day, Mr. Underbough. I wish you well of your inheritance.
There was something in the way he said it, a faint emphasis on the last word, that made Mortimer pause. He looked at the executor. The executor looked back. Neither of them smiled.
Good day, said Mortimer, and went out into the rain.
He stood for a moment under the green awning of Pell, Crumbly and Associates, watching the water run in thin sheets down the street. The key was warm in his pocket. He could feel it through the cloth of his waistcoat, a small insistent heat, like a coal that refused to go out.
A cab was waiting. The driver, a patient man in a sodden hat, did not ask questions. Mortimer gave the address of his lodgings. The cab lurched forward into the wet afternoon.
In his pocket, the key hummed.
In his mind, the will turned its pages, over and over, and each clause was a door, and each door was locked, and somewhere in Brackenhollow, in a back room he had never entered, in a shop he had not seen since he was a boy, a second door waited to be found.
He arrived at his lodgings. He paid the cab. He went inside. He made tea, because tea was what one did, and because his hands needed occupation. He sat at the small table in his small room and drank the tea and watched the rain on the window and did not think about the will.
He thought about the will.
He thought about it for a long time.
At half past eight, he began to pack.
The train to Brackenhollow left at quarter past ten. It was not, Mortimer discovered when he arrived at the platform, the sort of train one took to a place one had inherited. It was a branch line, local, the carriages dented and smelling of damp wool and the particular staleness of a heater that had been left on too long. The other passengers were few. A woman with a basket of eggs. A clergyman reading a small book. A boy asleep against his mother's shoulder with his mouth open. None of them looked as though they were traveling toward anything that could not wait until morning.
Mortimer found a corner seat. He took out the will and read it again, though he knew it by heart. The key was in his breast pocket, pinned there with a small brooch that had belonged to his mother. He could feel its heat through the lining of his coat, a steady, almost companionable warmth, as though it were pleased to be going home.
Outside the window, the city fell away in stages. Terraces gave way to hedgerow. Hedgerow gave way to the long, low outlines of hills, dark with rain. The names of the stations grew stranger: Little Muddicombe, Stoke Breeching, Penhallam Halt. At Penhallam Halt, a man got on carrying a cello, and the boy woke and stared at the cello, and the mother smiled, and the clergyman turned a page, and the train rocked on through the gathering dark.
Mortimer slept a little. He dreamed he was sorting papers, and the papers were on fire, and he could not find the right file. He woke with a start when the train slowed. The conductor came past, a thin man with a face like a folded napkin.
"Brackenhollow next, sir."
"Thank you."
"Visiting, are you?"
"Yes."
The conductor looked at him as if he would have liked to ask more, but thought better of it. He touched the brim of his cap and moved on. Mortimer sat up straight and adjusted his tie. The key pulsed once against his chest, like a second heartbeat.
Brackenhollow was a small station, a single platform, a lamp that had not been lit. Mortimer stepped down onto wet gravel and the train went on without him, the tail lamp dwindling into the dark like a coal carried off by a slow river. He stood for a moment with his bag in his hand and his coat pulled tight, and he listened to the silence, which was not really silence at all but the small, layered sounds of a place at rest: the drip of water from the eaves, the wind in the ivy that climbed the station wall, a dog barking somewhere far off, and once, very faintly, the chime of a clock that he could not see.
The road into the village was unlit. He walked it slowly, the gravel scuffing under his boots, the bag knocking against his knee. The houses he passed were dark, or nearly so, with only a thin line of candlelight at some windows, and the smell of woodsmoke coming from the chimneys, and the smell of wet earth, and the smell of something else, faint and sweet, that he could not name and that seemed to come from the hedgerows themselves, as though the brambles were in bloom in the wrong season.
He reached the village square. The war memorial stood in the middle of it, a stone angel with her head bowed and her hands folded, and the rain had gathered in the hollows of her wings. The pub was called the Bell and Bramble. The post office was closed. The vicarage had a light in the upstairs window. Beyond the square, the road forked, and Mortimer took the left fork, because the left fork was the one he had taken as a boy, and his feet remembered it even when his mind did not.
Aunt Edna's house was at the end of a lane. It was smaller than he had expected, though perhaps he had only expected too much. It was a terrace house, two up and two down, with a small front garden given over to herbs and a privet hedge that had grown taller than the downstairs windows. The paint on the door was green, a darker green than the awning of Pell, Crumbly and Associates, and the knocker was a brass hand holding a small bell. Mortimer stood at the gate for a long moment. He had not been here since he was seven. He had not been here since the summer his mother had brought him to stay while his father was away, and he had spent a week eating scones and being taught to play croquet by a woman who smelled of lavender and who never raised her voice. He had not been back. There had been no reason, and then there had been no Aunt Edna, and now there was a key in his pocket and a shop at the end of the garden that he had never been allowed to enter.
He opened the gate. It creaked. He walked up the path. The herbs brushed against his trousers and released their small, sharp scents: rosemary, thyme, something bitter he could not name. He stood on the step. He took the key from his pocket. It was no longer warm. It was cool, almost cold, and it lay in his palm with the weight of something that had waited a long time to be picked up.
He put it in the lock. It turned, easily, without a sound. The door opened inward, into a dark hallway that smelled of dust and lavender and the faint, sweet rot of old paper. He stepped inside. He closed the door behind him. He stood in the dark for a moment, listening to the house settle around him, the small creaks and sighs of a place that had been left to itself for a long time and was not yet sure it had a guest.
There was a candle on the hall table. There were matches in a drawer. He found them by feel, struck one, and lit the candle. The flame caught and steadied, and the hall came into view around him: a narrow passage, a staircase going up, a door on the left, a door on the right, and at the end, a third door, smaller than the other two, painted the same dark green as the front door. On the mat before it lay a single envelope, unsealed, with his name on it in a hand he recognized as Aunt Edna's.
He picked it up. He read it. The letter was short. It said:
Dear Mortimer,
If you are reading this, then the executor has done his work and the key has done its work, and you have come to the house at last. I am sorry I did not make it easier. I am sorry I did not tell you when you were a boy, when I might have told you and chosen you, and not left it to the terms of a will. But the terms are what they are, and you are who you are, and I hope you will forgive an old woman for being afraid of getting it wrong.
The shop is at the end of the garden. The door at the end of the hall leads to the garden. The key you have opens the front door of the house, and the front door of the shop, and nothing else. The door of the shop is the door you must find, and when you find it, you must not open it until you have read the will again, and understood it, and accepted the terms.
I cannot tell you what is inside. I was told only that it would be safe, and that it would be mine to keep, and that I would know when the time had come to pass it on. The time came for me sooner than I expected. I have done what I could. I have left the rest to you.
Be careful, Mortimer. Be patient. And do not, whatever you do, open the cabinet before you have spoken to the man in the bowler hat, for he is the one who will tell you whether the door is the right door, and the cabinet is the wrong cabinet, and the terms are the terms, and there is no going back once they have been met.
Your aunt, Edna
Mortimer read the letter twice. He folded it and put it in his breast pocket, beside the key. He set down his bag. He took the candle in his hand. He opened the small green door at the end of the hall.
The garden was long and narrow and very dark. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still heavy, and the only light came from the candle and from a thin, pale glow that seemed to come from the far end of the garden, where a low building stood against the back wall. It was smaller than the house, no taller than a single story, and it had no windows that he could see, only a door, and above the door a sign that he could not read in the dark. He walked down the path between the herb beds, and the gravel gave way to flagstones, and the flagstones gave way to damp earth, and the smell of lavender grew stronger, and the smell of something else, metallic and cold, that he had smelled once before, in a corridor in the Bureau when a clerk had opened a safe that had been sealed for a hundred years.
He reached the shop. He stood before the door. The sign above it was painted in gold on a black ground, and the gold had faded so that the letters were almost gone, but he could make out the shape of them, and he knew, without being able to say how, that they spelled the same words as the cabinet in the Bureau: Underbough and Associates, Pecuniary and Otherwise.
The door had a keyhole. The key in his pocket was warm again, and the warmth was a kind of insistence, a small, patient pressure against his ribs, as though it were saying: now, now, it is time.
He did not put the key in the lock.
He stood with his hand raised, and the candle flame guttering in the draft from the garden, and he thought of the will, and the cabinet, and the man in the bowler hat, and the terms, and he understood, with a clarity that surprised him, that the door before him was not the door he had come to open, that the shop was not the shop he had come to enter, that the inheritance was not the inheritance he had been given, and that the only thing he could do, the only thing Aunt Edna had ever wanted him to do, was to wait.
He lowered his hand.
He stepped back from the door.
He turned, and walked back up the garden, and into the house, and closed the green door behind him, and stood in the dark hallway with the candle in his hand and the key warm against his heart.
And then there came a knock at the front door.
It was a measured knock, three even raps, the sort of knock a man gives when he is not in a hurry and expects to be let in. Mortimer set down the candle. He walked to the door. He opened it.
The man on the step was very tall. He wore a black bowler hat, and a black coat, and black gloves, and his face was pale and still and calm in a way that Mortimer had never seen on a living face. He did not smile. He did not frown. He looked at Mortimer for a long moment, and then he spoke.
"You are Mr. Underbough," he said. His voice was low, and slow, and had the faintest trace of an accent that Mortimer could not place, something eastern, something old.
"Yes," said Mortimer.
"And you have come to open the shop."
"I have come to look at the door," said Mortimer. "I have not come to open it."
The man in the bowler hat regarded him. The rain had begun again, a thin, fine rain that did not seem to touch him, though it touched the step and the path and the privet hedge. After a moment, he inclined his head, a very small inclination, and something in his still face changed, very slightly, so that it might almost have been approval.
"That," he said, "is the first correct thing you have done."
He reached into his coat and took out a small black card, and he held it out to Mortimer, and Mortimer took it, and on it, in gold ink, were written the words: The door is not the door. The cabinet is not the cabinet. The terms will be met when the terms are met. Do not open the wrong door. Do not open the wrong cabinet. Wait for the man in the bowler hat. He will tell you when.
"Read it," said the man.
Mortimer read it.
"Now," said the man, "close the door, and go to bed, and in the morning I will return, and we will see what is to be seen."
"But the will," said Mortimer. "The executor. The inheritance. The shop. The cabinet. Aunt Edna."
The man in the bowler hat looked at him, and his eyes were very dark, and very steady, and there was something in them that was not unkind.
"Mr. Underbough," he said, "the will is the will, and the executor is the executor, and the inheritance is the inheritance, and the shop is the shop, and the cabinet is the cabinet, and your aunt is dead, and you are alive, and the door is the wrong door, and you have not opened it, and that, for tonight, is enough."
He turned. He walked down the path. He passed through the gate. He turned the corner of the lane. The rain closed over him, and he was gone, and Mortimer stood in the doorway with the card in his hand and the key warm against his heart and the candle flickering behind him, and he understood, at last, that the inheritance was not a thing to be taken but a thing to be kept, and that the keeping of it would take longer than a night, and that the man in the bowler hat would be there in the morning, and that the door would still be the wrong door, and that he would not open it.
He closed the front door. He locked it. He set down the candle. He climbed the stairs to the small bedroom at the front, and he lay down on the bed without undressing, and he folded his hands over the key, and he closed his eyes, and the last thing he heard before he slept was the rain on the window and the faint, sweet chime of the clock he still could not see.