In For a Penny (20 page)

When he stood up now to go to bed he spotted an out-of-place book lying on top of a shelf in the antechamber. It was a copy of one of Britnell’s Catalogue: he recognized the blue cloth and gold print on the spine of the narrow, oversized binding. He kept the old catalogues behind the counter, where customers couldn’t get at them, and yet here one was, moved from its spot and relocated. …

Curious, he stepped across to have a look. He picked up the catalogue and found that there was an etching slipped into it, and he saw straight off that it marked a page that advertised the very etching that marked the page: “978.—
Unknown
. Interesting mezzotint: View of a manorhouse, early part of the century.”
Which would be the last century
, he thought, but then he caught himself:
century before last
, although it hardly seemed possible. The picture was long ago dimmed with time and sunlight. That it was more than one hundred and fifty years old added little to its value. The catalogue listed it as framed, and he could see an unfaded border around the print, so it had lost the frame somewhere along the line. Both the etching and catalogue sat atop a volume of stories by M. R. James—a book from the library of his old friend Lambert Swann. He picked up the collection, and it fell open to a page with the corner folded down. The story at the folded page was titled “The Mezzotint” and he sat down curiously and read the story through, his mind increasingly gripped by wonder. The plot involved both the imaginary history of the etching on the table beside him and the very edition of Britnell’s catalogue that he had found the etching tucked into.

He found that he was oddly disturbed when he completed the story, and not only because the story itself was disturbing, but because of the puzzle of how the items had come to be gathered together and moved into the antechamber. Not only were the three pieces so closely connected as to be almost fabulous, but someone had known about the connection and deliberately gone to the trouble of searching them out, which must have taken an inordinate amount of time and attention.

Perhaps that someone had been thinking about
stealing
the pieces, but then had abandoned the idea and the pieces themselves and fled. But how, Henley wondered, had the would-be thief smuggled the catalogue from its place behind the counter and into the antechamber? Henley himself sat behind the counter during store hours, so it was unlikely that such meddling would have gone unseen. His mind spun with unlikely possibilities. He couldn’t recall having looked into Britnell’s at all in years; surely he himself hadn’t gathered these three pieces together, set them aside, and forgotten about them …?

… unless of course he had. His memory was a wreck, especially his short-term memory, something the doctor blamed on his bad heart and the congested plumbing that went along with it. His memory of the past was undiminished, though, and he often wished that the reverse were true. The past could be a burden, especially if it had been a happy past, and so there was more to regret about its passing. As it was, if his memory went, he himself would become the burden as he declined with age, and that was something he didn’t like to contemplate.

He rejected that entire line of reasoning. He himself hadn’t been the culprit. This had taken some work—a knowledge of the items in the catalogue and possibly hours of poring over the stock of photos and etchings, and all on the monstrously unlikely chance that the mezzotint would be among them. If he himself had gone to that trouble but couldn’t remember having done so, then he was clearly so far off his rocker that solving the mystery was beyond his capacity anyway.

He thought about his regular customers. There was Mrs. Beckett, a thin, wizened woman who stopped in regularly but almost never bought anything. She had the habit of removing books only to blow the dust off the top and then replace them, rarely even reading the title, but as far as Henley could make out she was a harmless old crank. Certainly she wouldn’t have trespassed behind the counter to get at the catalogues. There were a couple of local boys who were enthusiastic about the subject matter in the ghost room, but again, he couldn’t imagine when they’d have found the leisure to peruse the Britnell’s catalogues, or to give a damn about them in the first place.

Suddenly weary of speculating, he picked up his pipe and can of tobacco, switched out the light and went out into the front room where he laid everything on the countertop. Johnson, the shop watchdog, was asleep on the rug in the center of the floor, breathing heavily and twitching his feet, evidently engaged in a dream. A week ago Henley had found Johnson wandering on the highway and had taken him back to the shop, advertising in the newspaper and putting up signs around the village. To Henley’s relief, no one had claimed him, for if ever there was a dog built for a bookshop, it was Johnson. He was apparently some variety of vastly overgrown pug or misshapen bulldog—a hairy, wall-eyed creature, very stout and immensely comical. His evident likeness to Samuel Johnson had brought the name to Henley’s mind, especially since Henley had for the past ten years kept a cockatoo named Boswell in the shop, despite the bird’s occasional savage treatment of the stock.

Above Johnson’s sleeping form Boswell sat on a heavy perch, which hung by two chains from a block and tackle mechanism affixed to the roof beam. A rope, which Henley had rigged to raise and lower the perch, led from the block to a halyard over the window and then dropped to a little iron bollard on the wainscot where he could tie it off. Boswell opened one eye now and regarded him for a moment, and then shut the eye again and dozed off.

Henley went out through the kitchen and opened the rear door, blocking it open with a dictionary. Before the season turned he would have a doggy door installed so that Johnson could go in and out as he pleased, but for the past few days he had simply left the door cocked open all night, taking advantage of the fine summer weather and letting Johnson avail himself of the fenced back garden. He emptied a carton of yogurt into Johnson’s bowl and broke some Carr’s oatmeal biscuits into it. Tomorrow he would buy some proper dog food when he went through town.

From his bedroom he heard Boswell’s sudden raucous squawking at the front of the shop, and then the word “wolf!” shouted three times in rapid succession, after which the bird fell silent. Yesterday Henley had thought Boswell was attempting to bark like a dog, perhaps encouraged by Johnson, but then it had dawned on him that the bird was literally crying wolf, which was much more in keeping with Boswell’s usual style. His vocabulary was made up almost entirely of wild alarms, but it was only this week that he had mastered this new one, getting the intonation down perfectly. Who had taught it to him Henley couldn’t say: certainly he himself hadn’t, although he had his suspicions about the ghost room boys. If they were secretly teaching Boswell new words, however, they were very damned secretive about it, and so far the bird hadn’t taken to profanity, which was a small blessing.

Johnson wandered into the bedroom now, his muzzle smeared with yogurt, and lay down on the rug, regarding Henley uneasily “It’s nothing,” Henley said to him, pouring himself a glass of whiskey. “He’s all talk. You’d best just ignore him.” He switched on the reading lamp beside his chair, sat down with a book, and tasted the whiskey. Some time ago he had given up Laphroaig in favor of Talisker, which meant that he wasn’t too old a dog to learn a new trick, and he swirled the amber liquid in his glass for a moment, breathing in the smoky vapors. It was true, though, that he couldn’t drink much, whether he wanted to or not, because his head wouldn’t stand it and because his doctor forbade it.

“Doctors is all swabs,” he said to Johnson, quoting Billy Bones, and he opened the volume on the table—a collection of epigrams bound in green cloth with embossed vines and flowers in the arts and crafts fashion popular early in the last century. He had kept the book out of the collection he had purchased from Swann’s estate. There was a bookplate on the inside cover: “From the library of Lambert Swann.” Seeing it brought to Henley’s mind his acquaintance with the man, which had been quite pleasant. Iris and Henley had been at Niagara Falls, honeymooning, and had met Swann at the hotel, where they had eaten a couple of meals together. Henley realized that his memory of those days had grown a little dim, and that some of the memories were in fact not actual memories at all, but were left over from conversations he’d had with Iris over the years since—recollections of that happy time, and perhaps recollections of the recollections, the events themselves having receded into the mists. He could recall Swann’s face quite clearly, though. He and Iris had stopped in to visit him up in Windermere, and he had always intended to return, but time had passed and it hadn’t happened, something that he still felt guilty about. Swann had lived alone, with his books and a view of the lake, and in their correspondence Henley had come to understand that the man was essentially lonely. It was because of that correspondence that Henley had still been in the picture two years ago when Swann died, and in a position to wind up with his collection of ghost books.

He opened the book of epigrams at random and read the first line on the page: “… we have heard the mermaids singing, and know that we shall never see dry land any more.” Henley closed the book.
Dry land
, he thought, and he tried to remember when he had set out on this particular cruise, the last he would make. He poured himself a second glass of Scotch now, said, “Cheers,” to poor old Swann, and took a generous sip. Before he had read much further, though, his head nodded and he fell asleep in his chair with his reading glasses on and the book in his lap.

. . .

Johnson raised his head, perking up his ears, and listening curiously as Henley snored in his chair. “Assassin!” Boswell shouted from the front of the shop, a little too shrill to be convincing. Henley slept on undisturbed. After a moment Johnson stood up, watched Henley’s sleeping form for another moment, and then trotted away down the hall.

. . .

The Little Comberton heiress turned out to be more pleasant than Henley had anticipated, and when she asked him to stay for supper he felt absolutely guilty that he had thought badly of her. Easy money had nothing to do with her haste in getting rid of her father’s things: she simply didn’t want to live with them—too many dusty memories. He understood that well enough. After supper he found it hard to work up a second wind, but he was damned if he wanted to stretch this into tomorrow, and so he pitched in resolutely, filling cartons and hauling them out. After a couple of hours of it he was compelled to swallow a nitroglycerine tablet, and he thought again about giving it up—what the doctor would order—but he was too close to finishing, and so he worked on, and it was midnight by the time he was back on the road, wearily heading south. Outside Evesham he fell asleep at the wheel, but woke up to the sound of a horn honking and pulled the lorry back into the lane. He was utterly worn out—a danger to the world. Without a second thought he turned off the highway and into the lot of an inn where a light was still burning. As usual, he had blocked open the rear door back at the shop, and had left a torn up ham sandwich and a pile of chips for Johnson, who would have to get along for better or worse without him tonight.

. . .

Johnson went out through the open door and made a circuit of the moonlit garden, peering into the shrubbery here and there but finding nothing very interesting aside from an indifferent hedgehog that stepped out from the bushes and hurried out through the fence pickets without looking back. Johnson sniffed after it and then watched it disappear into the high grass beyond. He turned and padded back toward the door, nosing it farther open and entering the shop, where he stopped to look into his empty food bowl, staring at it for a time as if in hope that another ham sandwich might appear there. He moved on to the water bowl where he refreshed himself, and then headed toward Boswell’s room where there was a heavy braided rug on the floor. He paused abruptly in the doorway, though, the fur on his neck and back standing up, and he growled low in his throat.

The room was dimly lit with a foggy glow and was occupied by four men, one of them standing at the counter, two sitting, and one browsing through the books. Through another door, with a sign over it that said “Ghosts and Houses,” yet another man could be seen moving both his hands like an orchestra conductor, an orchestra that was playing something very slow and ponderous. There was the smell of pipe tobacco in the air and also of whiskey, and an open decanter sat on the wood and glass counter. Next to it a can of Dunhill Nightcap tobacco lay open.

“Here’s the creature now,” one of the sitting men said. “Look at that flattened face, Algernon. Apparently he was born in a stiff wind.”

“Dogs are sensitive beasts, Swinton. Take care what you say to it. And your own face isn’t any sort of prize, either. Here, boy.” Algernon made a clicking sound, and Johnson turned his head and peered into the room, then took a tentative step forward.

“I was actually considered quite good-looking in my day,” Swinton said. Swinton was short and heavy-set, almost round, with shaggy eyebrows and a formidable nose. “In fact many people have told me that I looked a little like Edward VII in his prime.” There was a wheeze of laughter from the direction of the counter, and Swinton looked up sharply at Patrick Clemens, the man standing there, who was now waving his hand over the top of the whiskey decanter as if performing an incantation.

Patrick bent forward and breathed in a lungful of fumes. “Water of life,” he said, looking across at the man looking through the books. “Come over here and take a snort, Algernon.”