Had he paused to think, Fitz would have thought about the house: this house, this great house, that was almost his own. He would have thought it strange, maybe, to find himself breaking into a place so familiar. After all, he might have gone in by the front door. Often in the past he had gone in by the door. He had a key, given him by Mr Ahmadi Senior, with strict instruction to visit the library every day. But since Mr Ahmadi Senior had died, and his son and heir had come to live in the Old Friary, since everything had changed, Fitz had tended to climb the drainpipe. Something about Mr Ahmadi Junior unsettled him; where his father had been slow, kindly and gentle, his son by contrast strode into every room with an abruptness, a restless immediacy that made Fitz jump. He seemed always about to step out from behind the door, always ready to deliver one of his mordant rebukes. So different from his father, and yet, somehow, alike, the son had slipped into his father’s place as a knife might a wound. As Fitz hung from the edge of the roof, digging his heel hard against the ancient brick wall, he might – had he thought about it – have made a resolution to avoid Mr Ahmadi Junior altogether, and evermore.
But today his hands and feet seemed to climb by themselves and, oblivious to the grounds around him, blind to the house and to the man who sat at its centre as a spider tends its web, Fitz had only one thought on his mind. He certainly wasn’t intending to borrow a book. Instead, tucked inside his shirt, close against his skin, lay the crisp, rigid square of an envelope. Where his body hung, slung against the wall, it seemed to arch instinctively away from the paper’s cool surface, from the sharp corners that dug into his flesh when he moved. As for the letter within the envelope – he wished he had never read it. He didn’t want anyone else to see it.
Above all, he didn’t want Clare to see it. Ever.
Fitz kicked his right foot against the hard brick wall. He was here. For a second the pain in his leg surged into, and joined with, a flush of something hot and vital that rose in his neck and swept down his back and hips. It was the sharpest, fullest feeling of presence.
For every presence, an absence. For every end, a beginning. For every height, a depth. The words of his old neighbour thrummed in his ears. Every zenith, my eyes, has its nadir.
Now he was losing his footing. Fitz turned to the heavy stone casement of the second storey gallery. Capped with an alcove almost entirely freestanding in cut stone, it had been added long after the friary was first built. Its high windows were always locked, but like most things that surrendered to the ingenuity and persistence of an eleven-year-old boy, these locks for the right fingers had a trick to them. Anything – even an impossible thing – can be open to you, if only you have a method. Fitz swung his left foot on to the ledge, heaved his body round the drainpipe and stood on the ledge. He pressed the warped iron pane, slipped his finger against the catch inside, then swung the window silently open. Like a cat he sprang to the floor, the pads of his feet making no more sound on the floorboards than water slipping into water.
Fitz was going to lose the letter in a place where it would never be found. When you come into my library, any library, you leave all the cares of your life behind you. You shut them out. When you are in the library, you are safe.
Mr Ahmadi Senior had been right enough about that. The library made Fitz feel safe. But it wasn’t the books, exactly, or the quiet afternoons which, undisturbed and lost to the world, he passed in reading at the decorated walnut table, beneath the room’s high windows. What made him feel safe were his words. Zenith. Nadir. Algorithm. Albatross. He recited them, often, like an incantation to ward away spirits, threats and curses, and when he had once run through them he circled back and pronounced them to himself again. Now, stepping down to the wooden boards of the gallery floor, each step was a syllable, each pace another. He stalked silently up the gentle slope of the long gallery floor. His gaze he focused on the little stairs that led from the far end of the gallery to the main hall and staircase, and beyond the stairs to the library. As he passed by, intoning his words with religious care, he dared not look to either side, where on his left and on his right hung grand portraits in full length and dress of the family’s illustrious ancestors: men swathed in strange, sumptuous fabrics, their hands resting with comfortable assurance on heavenly orbs or mariners’ instruments, on the hilts of swords, or smartly tailored in the long, formal clothes he knew marked them as Janissaries, elite soldiers of a vanished empire. Their precise moustachios, their beards and weapons and tools all placed just so, their unremitting eyes, and, above all, their likeness – these things, these things and so much more, so drilled into Fitz each time he had looked at them, that he had begun to think that their places had been reversed, that he was the portrait, and they the harsh critics who
