They didn’t find my leather pouch of lock-picking tools either. This I put into my inner coat pocket. Or my six-inch tungsten flashlight, which I snugged into my side pocket. Or my Luger, which I left in the comparable false bottom of the Gladstone.
I sat down on the edge of my bed and retied my shoes.
What sounded distantly like a small salon orchestra had arrived, out on the green, and was tuning up.
I was ready to begin.
I wasn’t interested in books or billiards. I wanted to look around. I’d carry my notebook and keep only Joseph W. Hunter notes in it, as if the grounds of the castle was local color in the Kent part of my feature story on Isabel Cobb.
I stepped out of my room and closed the door quietly behind me. The corridor was empty. I went along it and down the stairs and emerged in the screens passage. A scullery maid in white uniform and mobcap brushed past me with her face cast down and a quiet “Pardon, sir.”
I emerged into the Great Hall.
Though the windows here were limited to the west wall and looked into the courtyard, the place felt bright, for it was faced in white granite. The floor was covered by a single Persian rug large enough to define the foundation of a Sears ready-made bungalow. In its dense weave, hunters on horses leapt and gazelles fled.
A young Queen Victoria — the Stockmar family’s benefactress — was on horseback, as well, rendered massively in oils above the white ashlar walk-in fireplace. Beyond her was the doorway into the library. I was sanctioned to go there. Books and billiards. The things I needed to really learn about Stockman were in the unsanctioned places, but it was daylight and Stockman House was preparing to receive the public and Albert’s men would be prowling around, so for now I had to interpret what I could from the things I could access. A library was as good a place to start as any.
I set out across the Persian hunting ground, thinking of books. Early in my previous assignment I’d discovered at least a temporary Rosetta stone for one of the Germans’ methods of secret communication: a book called The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information, the placement of whose words were the basis for numbered codes. Not that Al’s Nuttall would be kept on the library table off the Great Hall. But if they weren’t simply tony wallpaper, I was interested in his books.
I approached three Brits in summer tweeds and spats drinking tea and talking low on red-velvet Jacobean chairs before the fireplace. Middle-aged gents, all of them. Other guests for the weekend, no doubt. One glanced my way as I approached and then back to the discussion, the voices clipping phrases and extending vowels in that toffish, fixed-jawed upper-class British way. The reporter in me thought to slide into their conversation and find out what they know about Albert. But a young American, out of the blue, asking the kinds of questions I’d need to ask to make it worth my while, would only create suspicion. My real work required that I remain mostly unnoticed.
I passed them by and stepped into the library.
The place was chockablock with wainscoted shelves full of books in great, uniform runs of sets, the blues and reds and browns and greens of their spines coordinated carefully into a variegated but orderly panorama. The east wall held a twenty-foot-wide bay window looking out to the strait.
I strolled along Stockman’s books, the sets a patchwork of writers and subjects. A dozen volumes of Illustrated World Geography running in green into fifteen umber Sam Johnsons into twenty tan Bulwer-Lyttons into a couple dozen French Shakespeares in black and gilt. I stopped here and saw, on the shelf below, another complete Shakespeare, in English, and then next to that a twelve-volume set of the Schlegel and Tieck German translation. Shakespeares sämtliche dramatische Werke.
I looked more closely at the Schlegel Shakespeare. They were placed in evenly at the front edge of the shelves. All the books in the library were arranged like this. Not quite flush. There was about a quarter of an inch lip between the edge of the shelf and the spine of the book. And that quarter inch was gray with dust. I pulled one of the Schlegels out. The shelf was instantly wiped clean in a band the width of the volume in my hand. I replaced it.
I continued on, more slowly, looking at the ubiquitous layer of dust. He was not a reader. Not from this library at least. And I also kept an eye out for the German works. There weren’t many and they were scattered along. The collected Goethe. Schiller. But Stockman’s books were mostly English. Still, if he was trying to make an impression, he didn’t mind showing at least some of his Germanic origins. Not that he was reading the English-language books either. Not lately.
I finally reached the wall of stuffed shelves at the far end. I stood with my back to the rest of the room and found twenty-two volumes of a German writer I did not know. Johann Gottfried von Herder. Two of the volumes had been pulled from the shelves recently. By Sir Albert or by an invited guest. I drew one out. The end board was marbled in blue and brown and cream. I opened the cover. The volume was from 1820. Die Vorwelt. “The Primeval World.”
I lifted my face from the page.
Perhaps he’d made some small sound. Or, if he’d quietly drawn close, perhaps there was some kinesthetic clue, a displacement of air perhaps. Whatever it was, it registered on me so quickly and subtly that I could not trace it. But I knew someone was in the room with me.
I turned.
Stockman was only a few strides away. He stood with his arms folded over his chest, changed from his tailcoat into more relaxed day wear, a three-piece gray linen suit.
I kept the book open in my hand.
Stockman unfolded his arms and moved to me, saying, “I’m happy you’re exploring the library, Mr. Hunter.”
“It’s impressive,” I said.
He stopped just a bit beyond arm’s length away.
He glanced at the volume in my hand. “Do you read German, Mr. Hunter?”
“Pretty well,” I said. “Do you, Sir Albert?”
“I do,” he said. “How are you with the Fraktur?”
Fraktur was the broken-angled, heavy black letter typeface Germany had used for nearly four hundred years. His identifying it only by its esoteric name in the question struck me as part of what was likely to be a subtle, ongoing test of my Germanic credentials.
“I should read it more often,” I said. “I do all right, but it still strikes my eye oddly.”
He smiled. “Of course. Were your parents born in their homeland?”
“Yes. They came to the United States when I was very young.”
“My family background is German as well,” Stockman said. “As is the case with a great many Englishmen.”
“Your present royal family. .” I began, hesitating only for a fraction of a second.
He finished my sentence. “Is Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.”
He looked at me for a moment. Though it was very brief, I felt certain it was filled with a serious, subtle, rapid assessment of me. He made a decision and said, “Some might say that a royal family by any other name would be a different royal family.”
“Would not smell as sweet,” I said, bringing his sly joke closer to the Shakespeare quote and to the political point we were quietly deciding to share.
He laughed out loud, a bright, sharp bark of a laugh.
He flipped his chin at the book in my hand. “Do you know von Herder?”
“I don’t.”
He smiled. He nodded to the shelf behind me. “May I?”
I stepped aside. He moved forward and removed a volume of von Herder and searched its pages for a moment. He found the passage he wanted and handed the book to me, taking Die Vorwelt from me. “Beginning of the second paragraph on the right-hand page,” he said.