The brass bell above the door of the Royal Society's archive office gave a thin, reedy chime when Phineas Whitlock pressed it inward. No one answered. He pressed again, and this time footsteps approached from somewhere deep within, accompanied by the unmistakable sound of a woman muttering imprecations against intruders who arrived without appointment.
The door swung open. Behind it stood a young woman of perhaps twenty-five, her auburn hair pinned in a hasty twist, ink stains darkening her left cuff to the elbow. She held a quill as though she had been interrupted mid-stroke.
"Mr. Whitlock, I presume," she said, before he could speak. "You're not expected. The Society's archives are not open to casual visitors, and I must ask the nature of your inquiry before permitting you entry."
Whitlock inclined his head, his expression settling into the courteous mask he reserved for institutions that considered themselves his betters. "Miss Beauchamp, I thank you for your courtesy. I come on a matter of some delicacy concerning certain holdings in your manuscript collection. Specifically, I wish to inquire about a codicil attributed to one Edmund Vexley."
The color left her face. The quill in her hand trembled, its tip leaving a small black blot on the cuff of her right sleeve. She did not seem to notice.
"I have no knowledge of any such codicil," she said, too quickly. "The Society holds a great many manuscripts, and I am not personally conversant with each catalogued item. You would do better to address your inquiries to the Registrar, who is unfortunately detained in Edinburgh until the eighth."
"That is most unfortunate," Whitlock said smoothly. He did not move from the threshold. "And yet I am informed, by sources I consider reliable, that Miss Beauchamp was personally responsible for the accession and cataloguing of the Vexley materials some six years past. That being the case, I wondered if you might recall certain particulars."
The blot on her cuff spread as she pressed the quill harder against the fabric. "I was junior to Mr. Hargreave at that time. My role was clerical. I made no independent decisions regarding acquisition or arrangement. Whatever I may have transcribed was done under his supervision and bears no significance of its own."
"I see." Whitlock reached into his coat and produced a small leather wallet, from which he withdrew a folded document. "Then perhaps you might assist me in another matter. This is a letter written in a cipher I have been unable to resolve. It bears a watermark consistent with paper manufactured for the Royal Society in the spring of 1847. I had hoped you might recognize the hand or the cipher, given your familiarity with documents of that period."
Miss Beauchamp looked at the document. Her eyes widened, and for an instant her careful composure fractured entirely. Then she stepped back, pulling the door open wider.
"You had better come inside, Mr. Whitlock," she said quietly. "The hallway is not the place for such discussions."
The archive office lay beyond a modest entrance hall, smelling strongly of beeswax and older paper. Shelves climbed the walls to a height of perhaps twelve feet, their wooden faces dark with age and the oils of generations of handling. Brass lamps burned steadily along the central aisle, casting pools of yellow light that did not quite reach the corners. Somewhere a clock ticked with the measured patience of an institution that had outlived its founders.
Miss Beauchamp led him to a desk near a window, where she gestured to a wooden chair upholstered in cracked green leather. She remained standing, her back to the shelves, her hands clasped before her.
"You must understand," she began, in a voice that shook only slightly, "that the Society is a body whose reputation rests upon discretion. There are materials within these walls that, if made public, would embarrass persons of consequence. Persons still living, in some cases. We do not discuss such materials with outsiders, however distinguished."
Whitlock folded the document and returned it to his wallet. "I am a scholar, Miss Beauchamp. I have no interest in embarrassing the living. I have an interest in solving a cipher that may have implications for the estate of a gentleman who died under circumstances that were never satisfactorily explained. If the Society holds documents relevant to that inquiry, I am prepared to make formal application through the proper channels."
"That would be wise," she said. "And I would advise you to make such application without mentioning Mr. Vexley by name. There are certain names, Mr. Whitlock, that one does not speak within these walls. Not because they are forgotten, but because they are remembered too well by persons who would prefer them forgotten."
The clock ticked. Somewhere in the building, a door closed softly.
Whitlock studied the young woman's face. There was fear in it, certainly, but beneath the fear he detected something else, a kind of weary determination, the look of a person who had carried a burden for too long and half-wished to be relieved of it.
"Miss Beauchamp," he said, in a gentler tone, "I do not wish to place you in an awkward position. If the matter is too delicate to discuss here, I would be grateful if you would tell me so plainly, and I shall take my leave and pursue the question elsewhere."
She let out a long breath, and her shoulders dropped by a fraction of an inch. "Mr. Whitlock, you are the first person in six years to walk through that door and ask me about Edmund Vexley. I had begun to believe no one ever would. I had begun to believe I had imagined the whole affair, or that it had been, in some fashion, erased."
"Erased from what, Miss Beauchamp?"
"From the record," she whispered. "From the catalogue. From memory itself, if such a thing were possible. Mr. Hargreave died within the year of the accession, poor man, and his successor, Mr. Quint, has been most particular in maintaining the appearance that certain materials never passed through these offices at all."
She glanced toward the door, as though she expected someone to enter and overhear.
"I copied the documents myself," she said rapidly, almost in a rush. "I spent three months on them, for Mr. Hargreave had a great interest in the cipher that pervaded them. He believed it to be a system of his own devising, though I now suspect he had been deceived. When the work was complete, he sent the originals to a private collector and retained the copies here, against some future need. Within weeks he was dead, and the copies had been removed from the catalogue. I do not know where they are now. I do not know whether they exist."
Whitlock leaned forward in his chair. "What was the name of the collector to whom Mr. Hargreave sent the originals?"
Miss Beauchamp's lips formed the word, but no sound emerged. She shook her head.
"I cannot," she said. "I cannot speak that name within these walls. There are persons employed here, Mr. Whitlock, whose loyalty is not to the Society but to other interests. If it were known that I had spoken of these matters, I should not remain in this position a single day. And I cannot afford to lose this position."
"I understand," Whitlock said, though he did not, entirely. "Then perhaps you might write the name for me, if speaking it is impossible."
She hesitated for a long moment. Then she moved to her desk, took up a fresh sheet of paper, and wrote a single word in a clear, deliberate hand. She folded the paper twice and handed it to him.
"Burn it when you have read it," she said. "And do not return to this office, Mr. Whitlock. Whatever you are pursuing, pursue it elsewhere. There are those who would not wish you to pursue it at all."
Whitlock took the folded paper but did not open it. "Miss Beauchamp, you have been most kind, and I am sensible of the risk you have taken. If there is any service I might render you in return, I hope you will call upon me. My shop is in St. James's Street, and I am there most afternoons."
She gave a small, unhappy smile. "You are a good man, Mr. Whitlock, which is perhaps the most dangerous thing you could be in this affair. Good men have a habit of coming to grief when they involve themselves in matters that ought to be left alone."
"Perhaps," he said. "And yet I have observed that matters left alone have an unfortunate tendency to refuse to stay left."
He rose, bowed, and walked back through the stacks toward the entrance. Behind him, he heard Miss Beauchamp lock the inner door, and he was alone with the smell of old paper and the steady ticking of the clock. He did not open the folded paper until he stood upon the pavement outside, with the bustle of the street washing over him.
He read the name once, then struck a match and set the paper alight. He watched it burn to a flake of ash, which the wind carried away into the gutter.
Barnaby Calloway. The name was not unfamiliar. Whitlock had heard it spoken in connection with certain acquisitions that had ruffled the rare book trade, with certain lawsuits that had settled out of court, with certain collectors whose collections seemed to expand under circumstances that did not bear close examination. He had never had any direct dealings with the man, but the reputation was sufficient.
Calloway, then, possessed the originals of the Vexley documents. Miss Beauchamp possessed the copies, or had possessed them once. The cipher itself, whatever its nature, had passed into Calloway's hands six years ago, and from there into whatever private archives the old collector maintained at his estate in Surrey.
Whitlock hailed a hansom cab and gave the driver the address of his bookshop in St. James's. He had work to do, and the afternoon was wasting.
He did not go to the bookshop. Instead, when the hansom had carried him past St. James's and into the maze of streets that lay behind Charing Cross, he tapped his cane against the roof and instructed the driver to set him down at the entrance to a certain quiet court that gave onto a narrow mews. Here, in a basement that smelled of damp stone and forgotten centuries, he kept the archive he did not advertise to his clients.
The descent was familiar to him. Seventeen steps, worn smooth in the centre by generations of feet that had carried their secrets down into the cool earth. At the bottom, a single gas lamp burned with a pale blue flame, and beyond it a corridor branched into three, each branch leading to a different chamber stacked floor to ceiling with the residue of other men's obsessions. Whitlock took the leftmost branch, pausing to unlock the iron door at its end with a key he wore upon a chain about his neck.
The chamber beyond was not large, but it had been fitted with such ingenuity that it seemed to contain far more than its actual dimensions would suggest. Shelves climbed the walls in tiers of three, each tier fitted with its own narrow walkway reached by means of a system of ladders that slid on brass rails. The air was dry and faintly warm, for he had arranged for a small stove to be kept burning through the colder months, and the smell was that peculiar blend of leather, vellum, and the faint chemical sharpness of old ink that he had come to associate with his truest home.
He lit three more lamps, and the chamber filled with a golden light that brought out the gilt spines of the volumes ranged along the nearer shelves. He moved among them with the ease of long acquaintance, pausing here to adjust a leaning folio, there to brush a speck of dust from a tooled cover. At length he came to a section of shelving that stood slightly apart from the rest, screened from the rest of the chamber by a curtain of dark green baize that he drew aside with something approaching reverence.
Behind the curtain stood a single writing desk, and upon the desk a locked box of iron-bound oak. Whitlock produced a second key from his waistcoat pocket and opened the box. From within it he drew a portfolio of Morocco leather, and from the portfolio a sheaf of papers that he carried to the reading stand he had set beneath the nearest lamp.
He spread the papers before him and regarded them for a long moment without touching them. They were facsimiles, these, the work of his own hand over the course of several patient years. Each one was a careful reproduction of a page from the Vexley cipher, copied stroke for stroke with such fidelity that even an expert might be forgiven for confusing the copy with the original. He had made them in secret, in the small hours of the night, working by candlelight in the back room of his shop, and he had never shown them to another living soul.
Now, with Miss Beauchamp's revelation fresh in his mind, he examined them again with renewed attention. The hand was feminine, that much he had established long since. The cipher itself was unlike any he had encountered in his reading of the literature upon such subjects. It was not a simple substitution, nor was it any of the more elaborate polyalphabetic systems that had come into vogue during the previous century. There was a quality to it, a certain organic complexity, that suggested to him the working of a mind that delighted in concealment for its own sake, that found in the act of encoding a satisfaction akin to that which another might find in the composition of a poem.
He took from his pocket the small slip upon which he had copied Miss Beauchamp's sample of her father's system, and laid it beside the facsimiles. The resemblance was immediate and unmistakable. The slope of the letters, the particular way in which the downstrokes thickened just above the baseline, the curious habit of leaving a slightly greater space between certain words as though for breath, or for emphasis, or perhaps as a clue to the manner in which the cipher was to be read. It was the same hand. He would have staked his professional reputation upon it.
Which meant that Miss Beauchamp's father, before his disgrace and his expulsion from the diplomatic service, had been the author of the Vexley cipher. Which meant that Calloway, in acquiring the originals six years ago, had acquired a record of something in which the younger Beauchamp had been complicit. Which meant that Miss Beauchamp herself, however unwittingly, had been used as an instrument by someone who had wished to perpetuate a deception long after its author had been removed from the scene.
Whitlock leaned back in his chair and permitted himself a long, slow exhalation. He had hoped, when he had first opened the Vexley manuscript in his back room some three years ago, that the cipher might yield to his customary methods. He had hoped in vain. The system was too intricate, too deeply embedded in the particular manner of its author's thought, to be broken by any process of mere mechanical analysis. He had tried. He had tried again. He had assembled a small library of works upon cryptology and had worked through them systematically, and at the end of it all he was no nearer to a solution than he had been upon the day he began. The cipher remained intact, its secret locked away behind a door to which he had not yet found the key.
And now he knew why. The key was not in the cipher itself. The key was in the man who had made it, and the man who had made it had a daughter who worked in his shop, and the daughter had just confessed that she possessed a system of marks by which the cipher might be unlocked.
He gathered up the papers and returned them to the portfolio, and the portfolio to the box, and the box he locked and pushed back beneath the desk. Then he sat for a while in the lamplight, thinking of the afternoon and of all that it had brought him.
When he emerged from the basement some two hours later, the light over the mews had begun to fade. He walked back to his shop by way of the longer route, through lanes that he knew would be quiet at this hour, and he let his thoughts range ahead to the meeting that must now take place. He had asked Miss Beauchamp to come to the shop on the morrow, and she had agreed. He had not told her what he intended to ask of her, and she had not pressed him. That, at least, was a good sign. She had the instincts of her class and her upbringing, which were to wait and to watch and to speak only when spoken to.
He reached the shop as the lamplighters were beginning their rounds. He let himself in by the side door and climbed the stairs to the rooms above, where he dined sparingly off cold meat and bread and a glass of the modest claret he permitted himself on ordinary evenings. He did not read. He sat by the window and watched the street below, where the lamps came on one by one and the last of the day's traffic thinned away into the evening quiet.
His thoughts returned, as they were won't to do, to the question of Calloway. The old collector was a figure of considerable notoriety in the circles in which Whitlock moved, and the notoriety was not of a kind that reflected well upon its object. There were stories told of acquisitions made under circumstances that bore no scrutiny, of documents and objects that had found their way into his hands through means that could not bear the light of day. There were whispers of lawsuits that had been settled out of court, of witnesses who had withdrawn their testimony at the last moment, of collectors in distant lands who had suffered strange misfortunes after refusing to part with some particular treasure that Calloway had set his heart upon.
Whitlock did not put much stock in whispers as a general rule, but he had observed that in the case of Calloway the whispers had a way of accumulating into a body of evidence that was difficult to disregard. He had also observed that the man himself, when one encountered him at one of the gatherings that occasionally brought their kind together, had a way of deflecting inquiry with a charm that was almost mechanical in its efficiency. He was the kind of man, Whitlock thought, who would smile at you while picking your pocket, and who would expect you to thank him for the favour.
And now this man possessed the Vexley originals. The thought sat uneasily with him. If the cipher was what he suspected it might be, a record of some transaction so compromising that its author had gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal its meaning, then the possession of that record placed Calloway in a position of considerable leverage over someone. The question was, over whom.
He finished his wine and sat for a while longer in the gathering dark. Then he rose, drew the curtains, and made his way to the small chamber at the back of the upper rooms that he used as a study. Here, at a desk much less grand than the one in the archive basement, he set down a sheet of paper and wrote a brief letter in his own hand. It was addressed to a person whose name he would not have dreamed of speaking aloud, and it requested a meeting at a place and hour that he specified with a precision that was meant to convey the seriousness of the matter in hand. He sealed the letter, set it aside for the morning post, and then, having seen to the security of the shop, retired to his bed.
He did not sleep well. The events of the day returned to him in a disordered sequence that mingled the smell of the archive with the sound of Miss Beauchamp's voice and the name of Calloway spoken aloud in the quiet of the shop. At some point in the small hours he rose and went to the window, and stood for a while looking out at the street below, where a solitary cat made its way along the pavement with the purposeful air of one who has business of its own to attend to. He watched it until it turned the corner and disappeared from view, and then he returned to his bed and lay there until the light began to grow grey at the edges of the curtains.
When he came down to the shop in the morning, he found that Mrs. Tibbs, who came in daily to lay the fires and set the rooms in order, had left a note upon the counter to say that she had been taken poorly in the night and would not be in that day. He tutted to himself, set the note aside, and made his own preparations for opening. He was behind the counter, arranging the day's display of acquisitions, when the door opened and Miss Beauchamp came in.
She looked, he thought, as though she had not slept much better than he had himself. There were shadows beneath her eyes that had not been there upon the previous day, and her manner, usually so composed, had a quality of suppressed agitation that she was plainly at pains to conceal. She greeted him with a nod and a murmured word about the weather, and then she came to the counter and stood before him with her hands clasped before her, waiting.
"I have been thinking," Whitlock said, "about what you told me yesterday."
"I had rather you had not," she said.
"Nevertheless. And I have come to a conclusion that I think you will find of interest. But before I share it with you, I must ask you to do something for me, and I must ask you to do it without knowing the reason why."
She regarded him for a moment with an expression that he could not quite read. Then she said, "That is a great deal to ask."
"It is," he agreed. "And I would not ask it if I did not believe it to be necessary."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then I shall respect your refusal, and I shall trouble you no further upon the matter. But I think you will not refuse."
"Why?"
"Because," he said, "you are not the kind of person who leaves a thing half done, once you have begun it. And because I think you wish to know what your father did, quite as much as I do."
She did not answer at once. She stood there in the silence of the shop, with the morning light falling in long bars across the floor and the dust motes drifting in it like motes of gold, and he saw the struggle play out across her features. Then she drew a breath, and nodded.
"Very well," she said. "What is it you wish me to do?"
"I wish you to look after the shop for the remainder of the day," he said. "Alone. And I wish you to tell no one that I have gone."
She raised her eyebrows. "You are leaving?"
"I have an errand that will not wait. And I find that I cannot undertake it with a clear conscience whilst there remains the possibility that certain parties may come here seeking information that I am not yet prepared to give. You understand."
"I understand that you are asking me to act as a decoy," she said, with a slight edge to her voice.
"I am asking you to act as a guardian of the shop, and of its contents. The distinction may appear subtle, but I assure you it is a real one."
She studied his face for a long moment. Then she said, "Where are you going?"
"If all goes well, I shall return before the shop closes. If I do not, you may assume that I have met with some obstacle, and you are to summon Inspector Doyle without delay."
"And if I am asked, during the course of the day, what has become of you?"
"You will tell them that Mr. Whitlock has stepped out upon a private matter, and that he is expected back shortly. Which is, as it happens, the truth."
She drew a long breath. "Very well," she said again. "But I do not like it."
"Nor do I," he said. "But I like the alternative considerably less."
He took his hat from the stand behind the counter, and his greatcoat, and he crossed to the door. There he paused, and turned back to her.
"Constance."
"Yes?"
"The key. The one your father gave you. I should like you to keep it somewhere safe until I return. Not upon your person. Somewhere in the shop, where you will remember, and where it will not be observed."
A flicker of something, perhaps resentment, perhaps only surprise, crossed her features. But she merely nodded, and drew the thin chain from about her neck, and held the key in her palm for a moment before crossing to the till and placing it in the small drawer beneath the counter, where the receipts and the spare coins were kept.
"Good," he said. "I shall be back before five."
And then he was gone, and the shop bell gave its small bright note behind him, and Constance Beauchamp was left alone among the books.
She stood for a moment where he had left her, listening to the sound of his footsteps dying away in the street outside. Then she drew a breath, and set about the work of the day.
It was a peculiar sensation, being in the shop without him. She had worked there for nearly two years now, but always with the comforting awareness of his presence somewhere in the back, or above, or coming in from some errand with his coat dusty and his hat at an angle. The shop had a different quality when he was not in it. The books seemed to draw a little closer together, as if conferring. The dust motes moved more deliberately in the slanting light.
She swept the front, and dusted the counter, and made herself a pot of tea upon the small spirit-lamp in the back room. She took a book from the shelf, one of the new acquisitions, a little volume of Italian poetry with a damaged spine, and she sat down to read it, and to wait.
An hour passed, and another. The morning became afternoon. The bell rang twice: once for a boy who wanted to know if they had any penny dreadfuls, which they did not, and once for an elderly gentleman who wished to purchase a particular edition of the King James Bible, which they also did not, and who departed with a sniff and a muttered complaint about the standard of modern bookselling.
At half past three, as the shadows were beginning to lengthen across the floor, she heard footsteps in the street outside, and she looked up with a certain readiness, expecting Whitlock.
The bell rang.
It was not Whitlock.
It was a tall gentleman in a dark coat, with a silk hat and a walking stick, and a face that she did not at once recognise, and then did, with a small sinking of the heart that she was at pains to conceal.
"Miss Beauchamp," said Barnaby Calloway, removing his hat. "What a fortunate chance. I had hoped to find Mr. Whitlock within."
"He has stepped out," she said, with what she hoped was a natural manner. "I expect him back at any moment. Perhaps you would care to wait?"
"I should be delighted," said Calloway, and he advanced into the shop with the easy confidence of a man who was accustomed to being welcome wherever he went. His eyes moved over the shelves with the quick, appraising look of a collector. "A charming establishment. I never tire of it."
"Thank you," said Constance, and she remained behind the counter, with her hands folded, and her heart beating rather faster than she would have wished.
Calloway strolled about the shop, drawing out a volume here and there, examining the bindings, replacing them with a small click of tongue against teeth that she found intensely irritating. He asked her one or two questions about the provenance of a particular book, and she answered them as best she could, and he smiled at her in a manner that was, perhaps, intended to be ingratiating, but that she found, for reasons she could not quite have articulated, faintly repellent.
"You are the copyist, are you not?" he said at length. "The young lady who transcribes the manuscripts for Mr. Whitlock?"
"I am," she said.
"A delicate work. I have often thought that one requires a particular sensibility for such a thing. A patience. A certain, shall we say, attention to detail."
He was looking at her with a small smile that did not reach his eyes. She held his gaze, and said nothing.
"Your father," said Calloway, "was a man of remarkable attainments. It has always seemed to me a pity that his career ended as it did."
"I do not discuss my father with strangers," said Constance, and she was pleased to observe that her voice did not tremble.
"A commendable reticence," said Calloway. "I merely mention it because there are those of us who believe that his disgrace was not entirely deserved. There are even those who believe that certain documents, were they to come to light, might serve to vindicate him entirely."
She felt the colour rise to her cheeks, and she turned away, ostensibly to adjust a stack of volumes upon the counter, but in truth to hide the expression upon her face. She was aware of Calloway's eyes upon her, and she was aware of the thin drawer beneath her hand in which the key lay, and she was aware, with a sudden intensity, of how very much she wished that Whitlock would return.
"You have heard nothing, I suppose," said Calloway, "of any recent discovery in the matter? Any new manuscript, any coded document?"
"Nothing," said Constance. "I am a copyist. I copy what is set before me. I do not inquire into its origins."
"Of course," said Calloway. "Of course. And yet, I cannot help but feel that you are a young woman of some discernment. That you notice things. That you are, perhaps, in a position to notice things that others might overlook."
He said it lightly, almost as a jest, but the implication was not lost upon her. She drew a breath.
"Mr. Calloway," she said, "I am sure Mr. Whitlock will be back at any moment. If you would care to leave your card, I shall see that he receives it."
"I shall wait a little longer," said Calloway, and he drew up a chair, and sat down upon it with the air of a man entirely at his ease.
The minutes passed. Constance busied herself with small tasks, rearranging this, dusting that, always with one ear turned toward the door. The light in the shop began to take on that golden, slanting quality that presaged the closing of the day. The street outside grew quieter. The shadows lengthened.
At a quarter past four, she heard footsteps again, and the bell rang, and Whitlock came in.
He was a little out of breath, and there was a smudge of dust upon his cuff, and he looked, she thought, both tired and exhilarated. His eyes swept the shop and lighted upon Calloway, and something passed across his face that she could not read.
"Mr. Calloway," he said. "What an unexpected pleasure."
"Phineas," said Calloway, rising. "I was beginning to fear you had gone out of town."
"I had an errand," said Whitlock. "I see that Constance has been looking after you."
"Most ably," said Calloway. "We have been discussing your father, as it happens."
Whitlock's expression did not change, but she saw his hand, resting upon the counter, tighten almost imperceptibly.
"Then you will have had a very short discussion," he said, "for there is nothing to discuss. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a number of matters to attend to before the shop closes. I am sure you will understand."
"I am sure I shall," said Calloway. He reached for his hat, and placed it upon his head, and gave a little bow to Constance that was, perhaps, intended to be gallant. "Miss Beauchamp. A pleasure."
She inclined her head, and said nothing.
Calloway departed. The bell rang. The door closed.
In the silence that followed, Whitlock turned to her, and his face was pale.
"The key," he said. "Where is it?"
"Here," said Constance, and she drew it from the drawer, and held it out to him.
He took it from her, and closed his hand about it, and stood there for a moment as if gathering his thoughts. Then he looked up, and his eyes met hers, and she saw something in them that she had never seen there before: a kind of bleak and resolute certainty.
"I have found the manuscript," he said.
"Where?"
"At a house in Hackney, where it has lain for thirty years, wrapped in an oilskin, beneath a floorboard. It is, as I suspected, in your father's hand. And it tells, among other things, the story of a certain transaction that took place in the year eighteen hundred and sixty-seven, a transaction involving a sum of money so large, and certain parties so prominent, that its revelation would bring down a great many distinguished heads."
He paused, and drew a breath.
"Including," he said, "that of Mr. Barnaby Calloway."
She looked at him, and the shop was very quiet, and the dust motes drifted in the late light, and somewhere in the street a clock was striking the hour.
"What are you going to do?" she said.
"I am going to do," he said, "what your father would have done, had he been brave enough. I am going to publish it."
He placed the key upon the counter, and looked at her steadily.
"And I am going to need," he said, "your help."