This house in which Margery lived and where downstairs the business of the Temple went on was a deep brick structure wedged in between the corner house next door, now the Refuge, and the Hall, originally built as a theatre. As with the Refuge, the top storey was used mostly for storage. Margery’s quarters took up the first floor, and the ground floor and basement were given over to the Temple’s offices, meeting rooms, and soon-to-be library. The stairs were at the back of the building; a wide corridor connected them with Margery’s bedroom and dressing room, at the street end, and the other rooms: on the left side, the meeting room where the Circle gathered and then Margery’s chapel; on the right side, first a small lumber room, then Margery’s study, where she and I met for our tutorials, and finally the gorgon Marie’s room, just before Margery’s pair of doors at the end of the corridor.
I thought Margery would want her private safe in one of two places: the study or her dressing room. I considered the dressing room somewhat more likely, and although in cowardice I wanted to investigate the study first, I should have to go past that door and pray that neither Margery nor Marie were insomniac tonight. A light burnt directly over Margery’s two doors, and the only escape, if someone came into the corridor from the stairs, would be through Margery’s dressing-room window onto the street below.
The building was silent, but nothing in London is ever, entirely still. There was movement, but not close, perhaps even on the street outside. I eased down a few stairs and peered into the still, bright corridor, with its apricot wool carpet on the floor, the watercolour landscapes on the walls. The paint gleamed quietly in the brightness spilling from the pieced-glass lamp shade, colours of apricot and orange in a twining pattern that reminded me vaguely of Margery’s wineglasses. I walked down a few more steps and around the newel post, then stood for a long moment with my heart in my throat and fifty feet of waiting corridor stretched out in front of me, looking like the maw of a carnivorous plant, waiting for me, its insect prey.
My soles scrunched immensely on the deep pile, and as the doors of Margery’s rooms approached, I was made aware of how very bad my nerves were: I was convinced that both Margery and her Marie stood waiting, to leap on me the moment I turned my back.
It seemed a very long time, but was less than half a minute, before I was beneath the light. Without turning my back to the opposite doors, I reached down for the knob to the chapel door and found it open. The eternal candle burnt over the altar, lighting my way to the connecting door into the dressing room. This one was locked.
It was not, however, a very good lock, and it gave way to my probes in a short time. That alone warned me what further scrutiny confirmed: The room contained nothing more valuable than the clothing in the wardrobes (admittedly expensive enough, mostly Worth and Poiret, with a few Chanels adding a modern note). The prices of these clothes would make the elves’ place look like a pawnshop.
A slow, intense circuit of the room revealed nothing, except that Margery’s taste in underclothing was remarkably exotic and that she snored. I let myself out through the chapel, locking the dressing room door behind me, and went back out into the light.
The study door was locked, and this lock was a good one. By the time it opened, I was blinking sweat from my eyes and muttering silent but emphatic imprecations against all the locksmiths I knew and Mr Yale in particular. It took me twelve minutes to conquer it, and for every one of those 720-odd seconds, I fully expected Marie’s door to fly open and send me sprinting for my life. The damned thing finally clicked, the wire pick rattled slightly against the brass, and the knob in my greasy palm squeaked minutely when I turned it. I slipped inside, closed the door, eased the knob to and flipped the simple latch I had remembered from this side, and waited, breathless, counting off three long minutes before I relaxed into an irritating shakiness. The gorgon slept.
When my eyes had adjusted to the light easing in from under the door and the low glow from the fire, I could see that nothing much had been moved since my last tutorial with Margery. I reached out to the back of the sofa, picked up the thick cashmere shawl kept there, and went back three steps to lay it along the bottom of the door. The shawl would block any light from inside the room, and I then stuffed the end of my handkerchief into the keyhole. It was now safe to turn on the electric lights.
The familiar room came into view. There were three good possibilities for hiding a safe, as I remembered, and I found it at the second one: a block of the decorative supporting cornice at the fireplace. It slid away, revealing a solid eight-inch-square slab of iron with a handle on one side and a combination dial in the centre—a combination dial, not a key.
I sat down on the arm of the sofa and stared at it bleakly. I was a fool not to have let Holmes do it. This safe was of the best quality; it would not fall for any of the clever tricks taught me by Holmes’ pet safecracker
Tell it to Holmes, nagged a voice. Watch his brief flare of irritation give way to sympathy, understanding. Live with that, will you? If you don’t get it open tonight, there’s tomorrow, isn’t there?
I carried a chair over, flapped my hands about vigorously to wake them up, rubbed my fingertips firmly against the brickwork to increase their sensitivity, and then bent my entire body and mind to the problem of opening that safe.
I was soon dripping wet, more from the tension than from the coals at my knees. In half an hour, the quivering of my back muscles had spread to my hands, and I had to break off and do a series of noiseless calisthenics.
An hour crept past, then two, and still I bent with my cheek against the fireplace, my eyes shut, my whole being concentrated on the square inch of skin that caressed the dial. By this time, I could work only for ten minutes before the trembling of my muscles made it impossible to continue, and for two minutes I would stand, stretch, lie limp on the sofa, exercise violently, and then return to my work. The thought of Holmes’ sympathy drove me back at first, but later it was simply mindless determination, and I suppose I should have still been sitting there when Margery walked in, but that at 5:20, three hours and six minutes after I had begun, the giddy sweetness seized the dial and the mechanism opened itself to my shaking hands.
I sat back and scrubbed my face with both hands, and neither face nor hands felt connected to the rest of me. I took my spectacles out of my pocket and put them on, then carried the contents of the safe over to the desk to examine them.
Margery Childe’s secrets were few, but they were potent. My visual memory is normally excellent, but I could not trust my mind in its present state, so I took a piece of paper from the desk and, using Margery’s pen, wrote down the details of her hidden life. In chronological order they were:
A marriage certificate, to a Maj Thomas Silverton, 23 May 1915.
A Military Cross with its purple and white ribbon.
A telegram beginning, WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU, dated 3 November 1916.
A second marriage certificate, this one in French, dated 9 December 1920—just less than two months ago. Margery was listed by her maiden name alone, no mention of Silverton. Her husband was named Claude de Finetti, with an address in London. His given occupation was the French equivalent of our
A will, autograph by Margery and witnessed, on 19 December 1920, by Marie and another whose name was unfamiliar but whose writing was that of an uneducated woman. In it, Margery left one half of everything she owned to her husband, the other half to the maintenance of the New Temple in God.
Another will, written by the same hand that had signed the wedding certificate as Claude de Finetti, dated and witnessed as Margery’s was, leaving everything to his wife, Margery.
I looked long at the man’s writing, at the signatures of a name that was not his own, at the script of an opportunist and a sensualist and an expert at deceiving the world, at the amorality in his m’s and the deception in his t’s, at the cruelty and the self absorption in his upswings and his loops, and I knew, without a fragment of doubt, that I was looking at my captor. Claude, I thought, we have you now.
There were also four brief letters addressed to “My darling wife” and signed just “C.” I glanced at the first, and jerked back as if burned. My immediate impulse was to throw them onto the fire, my second to put them away unread, but I obviously could do neither, and so I reluctantly ran my eyes across his pen strokes. They were, one might say, love letters, were one to grant the word
