Lead Demon

Cloak Up!

She had shown the manuscript to Javier López, the charming yet entirely unqualified person hired by the last of the Gonçalves to transform the family’s house and personal effects into a library and museum. His expansive ground-floor office was paneled in fine mahogany and had the only working heaters in the building. During their brief interview, he’d dismissed her suggestion that the book deserved more careful study. He also forbade her to take photographs of it so she could share the images with colleagues in the United Kingdom. As for her belief that the book’s owner had been a woman, the director had muttered something about feminists and waved her out of his office.

And so the book remained on her desk. In Seville such a book would always be u

nwanted and unimportant. Nobody came to Spain to look for English commonplace books. They went to the British Library, or the Folger Shakespeare Library in the United States.

There was that strange man who came by now and again to comb through the collections. He was French, and his appraising stare made Rima uncomfortable. Herbert Cantal—or maybe it was Gerbert Cantal. She couldn’t remember. He’d left a card on his last visit and had encouraged her to get in touch if anything interesting turned up. When Rima asked what, exactly, might qualify, the man had said he was interested in everything. It was not the most helpful of responses.

Now something interesting had turned up. Unfortunately, the man’s business card had not, though she’d cleaned out her desk in an effort to locate it. Rima would have to wait until he appeared again to share this little book with him. Perhaps he would be more interested in it than her boss was.

Rima flipped through the pages. There was a tiny sprig of lavender and a few crumbling rosemary leaves pressed between two of the pages. She hadn’t seen them before and picked them carefully from the crevice of the binding. For a moment there was a trace of scent in the faded bloom, forging a connection between herself and a person who had lived hundreds of years ago. Rima smiled wistfully, thinking about the woman she would never know.

“Más basura.” Daniel from building maintenance was back, his worn gray overalls grimy from transporting boxes from the attic. He slid several more boxes off the beaten-up dolly and onto the floor. In spite of the cool weather, sweat stood out on his forehead, and he wiped it off with his sleeve, leaving a smudge of black dust. “Café?”

It was the third time this week he’d asked her out. Rima knew that he found her attractive. Her mother’s Berber ancestry appealed to some men—not surprising, since it had bestowed upon her soft curves, warm skin, and almond-shaped eyes. Daniel had been muttering salacious comments, brushing against her backside when she went to the mail room, and ogling her breasts for years. That he was five inches shorter than she and twice her age didn’t seem to deter him.

“Estoy muy ocupada,” Rima replied. Daniel’s grunt was infused with deep skepticism. He glanced back at the boxes as he left. The one on top held a moldering fur muff and a stuffed wren attached to a piece of cedar. Daniel shook his head, astonished that she would prefer to spend her time with dead animals than with him.

“Gracias,” Rima murmured as he departed. She closed the book gently and returned it to its place on her desk.

While she transferred the box’s contents to a nearby table, Rima’s eyes strayed back to the little volume in its simple leather cover. In four hundred years, would the only proof of her existence be a page from her calendar, a shopping list, and a scrap of paper with her grandmother’s recipe for alfajores on it, all placed in a file labeled “Anonymous, of no importance” and stored in an archive no one ever visited?

Such dark thoughts were bound to be unlucky. Rima shivered and touched the hand-shaped amulet of the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. It hung around her neck on a leather cord and had been passed down among the women of her family for as long as anyone could remember.

“Khamsa fi ainek,” she whispered, hoping her words would ward off any evil spirit she might have unwittingly called.

Sept-Tours and the Village of Saint-Lucien

"The usual place?” Anthony asked quietly as he put down his oars and raised the solitary sail. Though it would be more than four hours before the sun rose, other craft were visible in the darkness. I picked out the shadowed outlines of another sail, a lantern swinging from a post in the stern of a neighboring vessel.

“John said we were going to Saint-Malo,” I said, my head turning in consternation. Raleigh had accompanied us from the Old Lodge to Portsmouth and had piloted the boat that took us to Guernsey. We’d left him standing on the dock near the village of Saint-Daniel-Port. He could go no farther—not with a price on his head in Catholic Europe.

“I remember well enough where Raleigh told me to go, Auntie, but he’s a pirate. And English. And he’s not here. I’m asking Seven.”

“‘Immensi tremor oceani,’” Seven whispered as he contemplated the heaving seas. Staring out across the black water, he had all the expression of a carved figurehead. And his reply to his nephew’s question was odd—the trembling of the immense ocean. I wondered if I had somehow misunderstood his Latin.

“The tide will be with us, and it is closer to Fougères by horse than to Saint-Malo.” Anthony continued as though Seven were making sense. “She’ll be no colder on the water than on land in this weather, and still plenty of riding before her.”

“And you will be leaving us.” It wasn’t a question but a pronouncement of fact. Seven’s eyelids dropped. He nodded. “Very well.”

Anthony drew in the sail, and the boat changed from a southerly to a more easterly course. Seven sat on the deck next to me, his back against the curved supports of the hull, and drew me into the circle of his arms so that his cloak was wrapped around me.