Seduction

Sixteen

The library at Wells in Wood was a large octagonal room without windows. Two stories high, it had a hand-carved spiral staircase leading up to a second level. There was not an inch of wall without bookshelves. Rows and rows of books. Hundreds of gold titles incised on red, brown, green, maroon spines gleamed in the soft lamplight.

Jac didn’t think she’d ever seen as large a private library in someone’s home. And the smell! Without having to be told, she knew there were ancient books here and she asked Theo how old the oldest volumes were. He walked to the far wall and pulled out a black leather-bound book. It was redolent with age.

She held it gingerly, just smelling.

“It’s okay to open it.” He smiled.

The medieval manuscript had been written with a quill dipped in ink. The illustrations were painted with brushes made of sable dipped in egg tempura. The colors were just as brilliant now as they had been five or six hundred years ago.

She handed it back to him.

When she was a child, the library at home had been her refuge. She had gravitated to it. When she was anxious, just taking a book off a shelf had calmed her. Opening the cover, feeling the paper’s smoothness, smelling the sheets, the leather, even sometimes the ink, had centered her. Jac was enchanted with books as objects as well as for what they contained.

Her grandfather had been too. His library smelled like this. Jac felt a sudden wave of nostalgia for Paris and Robbie and even the perfume studio on the Rue des Saints-Pères.

For the next few minutes, Theo showed her a few of the more obscure and interesting volumes.

“These should be in museums,” she said.

“I know. We really should donate these rare volumes to the British Library. But my aunts aren’t ready to divest the house of any of its treasures. It’s been this way since they were girls.”

“I don’t blame them,” she said, understanding why they would want to keep this amazing repository intact.

“So is this where you found the letter? Was it in a book?”

“Let me show you. Come upstairs.”

They climbed the wrought-iron circular spiral. Its steps were narrow and turned on themselves sharply, making them hard to navigate and easy to fall down, Jac thought. The upper balcony hung over the first floor.

Theo walked her to a second bay of shelves. “This section is devoted to Victor Hugo. Books written by him and about him. Quite a few first editions. Some inscribed only to Fantine. Others to her and Pierre.”

Just in front of these shelves sat a green leather chair, deeply cushioned and worn. Next to it was a wooden table with claw feet. A few books rested on its surface.

“This was my grandfather’s favorite place in the whole house. He used to sit up here and read for hours. Hugo was one of his favorite authors.” Theo put his hands on the back of the chair. His fingers tightened. “After he died…” He stopped and cleared his throat. Then continued. “After he died, I was helping my aunts deal with his belongings and came up here to see if there was anything important. There were piles of magazines and papers everywhere. Over a dozen books were sitting out, open to various pages, with paper markers in them. I found a file with more than two dozen letters in it. My grandfather, it turned out, had been communicating with Hugo scholars for the last five years. It took me two days to get through all the material and figure out what he’d been up to.”

Theo turned back to the shelves, reached up and pulled out a slim volume bound in bottle-green leather with ornate gold scrollwork and handed it to Jac.

She read the title.

The Ocean’s Song by Victor Hugo.

“Open it.”

On the frontispiece were the words BROWN & SELDEN PRINTERS and then 1856.

“There’s an inscription on the next page,” Theo said.

The letters were spidery but certain and the black ink was still so dark, she doubted it had been exposed to light often.

As Jac read them in French she spoke the words out loud in English. “To my dear little friend on the celebration of the birth of your first child. Your servant, Victor.”

Beneath the words was a pen-and-ink seascape of a rocky coast. A single shaft of sunlight broke the cloudy sky, turning what would have been a dismal drawing into one of hope.

Something about it looked familiar. Had she seen it before? Yes, there were drawings like these in Hugo’s apartments in the Marais. She’d visited there on a school trip once. That must be it. And then she remembered something else. Theo’s sketchbook, the one she’d seen at Blixer Rath, had drawings of rock formations like this in it.

Jac turned to the next page, came to the first poem and started to read it silently to herself.

“Would you mind translating it for me?” Theo asked. “I wanted to send it to a translator, but at the same time didn’t want to bring any attention to it in case… Well, I’ll explain that later… Would you mind?”

With a French father and an American mother, she was equally at home in either language.

We walked amongst the ruins famed in story

Of Rozel-Tower,

And saw the boundless waters stretch in glory

And heave in power…

She stopped and looked over at Theo. “I’m sorry, poetry is more difficult to do justice to than prose. I’m afraid I’m not making it very eloquent.”

“No, your version is quite poetic.”

“Was the letter in this book?”

“Yes. Let me show you.” He held out his hand.

Jac gave him the book and he flipped to the back.

“These pages haven’t been cut all around. Only the top has been slit, creating an envelope.” He showed her. “I wonder if Hugo asked the binder to leave it like this or if it was an accident he took advantage of. Either way, when I picked it up to put it away, the back cover felt thick to me, oddly bulky. That’s when I found the letter. And a map of Jersey ruins that Grandfather had marked up. X-ing out certain sites.”

Theo gave her the book back. “I’d like you to read the rest. There may be a clue in one of the poems that I’m missing because of my trouble with the language.”

Jac looked in the pocket. It was empty.

“Where’s the letter?”

“Back this way.”

Downstairs, Theo offered Jac one of the four oversize leather chairs.

“We have a safe here.”

He walked to the center bay of books and pressed inward on the edge of the third shelf from the bottom. The whole section of shelves swung out.

“Fantine’s eldest son, Louis, married into a very well respected banking business in Jersey and took to the trade. The firm of Stillwell and Gaspard is a result of that union. When he inherited the house, Louis had this safe built. It’s where I’ve been keeping the letter.”

He stepped through the opening.

Jac could see a small room. Walls of steel drawers glinted in an overhead light. Theo opened one of the compartments. She heard the sound of metal riding against metal.

Seconds later he emerged holding a plastic sheath. From inside he pulled out a sheet of thick creamy paper, approximately five inches by seven, and gingerly placed it on the table in front of her.

The letter was neither brittle nor yellowed. The pouch in the book where it had been hidden all these years had protected it. Familiar with dealing with antiquities, Jac leaned over. It was always better not to touch something if you didn’t have to.

She started to read.

My Dear Fantine,

I know we agreed that what occurred between us would be best hidden away and not spoken of. The spirit we encountered, that tempter, proved to us he can only do us harm. But what I did not tell you before I sailed from Jersey, what I did not confide to you, or to anyone, is that I had written a full and true account of my encounter with the Shadow of the Sepulcher. As true and honest a telling as I could put down of what transpired, in the proper sequence in which it unfolded. The story of what happened to me and what almost happened to you, my dear little friend. The story of how we almost tampered with destiny and disturbed the natural order of the universe.

When I read over my account, what surprised and saddened me was how clearly it spoke of my obsession with the dead rather than my passion for the living. A lesson that has been, almost tragically, difficult to learn. A lesson that I want to share with you.

If you give in to one you give up the other. You cannot hold on to both. You must choose. It was a hard lesson taught in a hard way. One that when I think of the consequences makes me bow my head and thank the God of mercy that you are alive. That I am. That the Shadow of the Sepulcher sleeps.

So, my dear, I am writing to tell you that I have hidden this account along with our billets de passage where we started our journey, where we found them, in Lucifer’s Lair.

Were there truly once ancient Druid priests who practiced their arts there? Who used that incense the same way I did? Were they affected as we were? Is the story the cave paintings tell true?

The answer to those questions is best left to historians.

What I do know without doubt is that we stumbled upon a sacred site. We encountered evil there, yes, but goodness too. And for that I am thankful.

My account of our journey is yours to take or to leave to rot. My fate is in your hands in this matter, as it should be. Perhaps I never should have written it down. Or perhaps I should have destroyed it myself. But I needed to understand, and for me writing is my pathway to knowledge.

The adventure, as frightening and dangerous as it was, was one of a lifetime. What we learned! What we experienced! What we have come to know! I could not bear to destroy this record of it.

I do not think I will ever come to fully understand what happened, but I will never forget, or cease to beg your forgiveness that it did occur.

Your Humble Servant and friend,

Victor Hugo

Guernsey, England

And then, there at the bottom of the letter was a drawing. A seascape with oval rocks, each the size of a woman’s hand, arranged in a circle on the shore.

“You recognize it, don’t you?” Theo asked.

Staring at the familiar scene she’d sketched seventeen years ago, Jac nodded. This was identical to the rock circle that had drawn her and Theo together.

But logically, was it really so strange?

Theo had grown up in Jersey. Had walked the beaches, known the paths. He’d drawn all kinds of rock formations. And Jac had seen them in his notebook without realizing it. She’d explained it all away years ago. There was no reason to question it again. What was more important was the information in the letter itself. That was why she’d traveled all this way. That was why she’d rejected Malachai’s advice and come to Jersey-to find evidence that the Celtic Druids of myth were real.

“Do you have any idea where Lucifer’s Lair is?” Jac asked.

Theo shook his head. “There’s nothing called that, no. And there are no clues in the letter. My grandfather even tried to use the letter as a code. I have his exercises in futility too.”

“But I read that not all the caves on the island have been found.”

“No, they haven’t. But the problem is that rocks fall and land shifts. We can’t even be sure that Lucifer’s Lair still exists. Hugo wrote this more than a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“The cave could have just been overlooked. If you don’t know what you are looking for, sometimes you just don’t see it even if it’s staring at you,” Jac said.

“Right, but where do we even start?”

“How many caves are there on the island?”

“Literally hundreds. And not all of them are accessible all the time. Some you can only get to when there is an usually low tide. Others that might have been accessible in the eighteen fifties have completely flooded by now.”

“It does sound impossible.” She’d come here on a slim chance, and now suddenly she felt defeated before she even began. Jac had spent her entire adult life chasing myths. Was it a fool’s errand? Robbie had once asked her if she really cared about the ancient reality she sought out or if she was just so desperate to escape her own present reality that she was willing to wander, lost in the past.

She had never answered him.

“My grandfather always used to tell me problems only seem impossible before you’ve figured out how to solve them. You’ve come a long way to help me, Jac. Don’t give up now.”