Chapter 7 - The Solicitor’s Vault
The punt was twelve feet long, built of narrow larch planks nailed over oak ribs, double-ended, and painted the color of dead bulrushes.
Tobias stood in the stern, wielding an eighteen-foot spruce pole with an iron shoe shaped like a duck’s foot. He didn't splash. Every thrust into the soft silt of the Roman ditch was smooth, silent, and steady, driving the narrow craft through the reeds with a sound like a silk skirt brushing against a carpet.
I sat in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in an old canvas tarpaulin that smelled of fish oil and creosote, with the green goatskin ledger and Eleanor’s zinc box resting between my knees.
The fog had rolled back in, thick and white as sheep's fleece, rising four feet above the surface of the water. Above us, the branches of the ancient oaks formed a grey, dripping canopy; below us, the dark water of the ditch moved sluggishly toward the estuary.
We traveled for four hours in absolute silence.
Twice we heard the rumble of a heavy diesel truck passing over an iron bridge somewhere high above the fog, its headlamps casting a diffuse, amber glow through the mist before vanishing. Once we heard the distant, frantic whine of Julian’s drone, far to the south, searching the empty marsh where we had been three hours before.
At eight o'clock, the high stone embankments of High Falls began to rise through the mist.
High Falls was an old river town, built where the navigable water met the rocky rapids of the limestone gorge. In the nineteenth century, it had been a bustling port of transshipment for slate and timber; now it was a quiet, gray municipal center whose Victorian brick warehouses had been converted into council offices, bailiff’s archives, and dusty legal chambers.
Tobias brought the punt alongside an ancient water-gate built of moss-covered limestone, beneath the foundations of the Old Town Hall.
"Up the ladder, Miss Clara," he whispered, holding the gunwale against the slimy stone. "Watch the third rung; the iron’s rusted through on the left side."
I climbed. The iron was cold and slick with river weed, but my boots found purchase. I hauled myself onto the damp flagstones of the lower quay, my arms shaking with the effort, and turned to take the zinc box and the ledger from Tobias’s hands.
The old man didn't follow me up. He stayed in the punt, his spruce pole braced against the river bottom, his flat cap pulled down until his eyes were entirely in shadow.
"You're not coming?" I asked, panic suddenly tightening my throat.
"I'm a water-bailiff with two criminal trespass cautions on my record from Victoria’s bench, Miss Clara," he said grimly. "If I walk into the High Sheriff’s office with a shotgun and an old ledger, they’ll have me in the holding cells before you can finish your first sentence. You go to 14 St. Jude’s Lane. Third floor. The brass plate says *Finch, MacIntyre & Sterling*."
I stopped. "Sterling?"
"Old Alexander Sterling," Tobias spat into the water. "Richard’s uncle. The one who hated him. He died in 2005, but his partner, Mr. Alistair MacIntyre, was Eleanor’s legal executor before your father ever met Victoria. He’s eighty-four years old, he drinks port at ten in the morning, and he has been waiting twelve years for someone to walk through his door with that hexagonal key."
He pushed the punt off with his pole. The larch craft drifted back into the white curtain of fog, vanishing within five strokes.
"Ten o'clock, Miss Clara!" his voice drifted back, thin and disembodied as a ghost’s. "Don't let them sign the red book!"
I stood alone on the wet quay.
I picked up the zinc box, tucked the green ledger beneath my arm, and walked up the narrow, cobbled alleyway that led to the upper town.
High Falls was waking up.
The bakeries were turning on their yellow window lights; a milk float rattled over the wet cobbles; three clerks in dark raincoats hurried past me with their umbrellas angled against the drizzle, not looking twice at the pale girl in the oversized blue wool sweater with river mud on her boots.
St. Jude’s Lane was a narrow cul-de-sac behind the county courthouse, lined with four-story Georgian brick townhouses whose front doors were flanked by black iron boot-scrapers and brass knockers shaped like lion heads.
Number 14 had three brass plates beside the bell-pull.
The lowest plate, green with verdigris around the screw-heads, read:
*Alistair MacIntyre, W.S.*
*Notary Public & Keeper of the Private Rolls.*
I walked into the vestibule. The smell of the building hit me like a familiar book being opened: coal dust, old sheepskin parchment, damp horsehair plaster, and the dry, sweet scent of lavender floor wax.
I climbed the sixty-four stairs to the third floor.
The door was frosted glass, cracked at the lower left corner and repaired with yellowed cellophane tape.
I didn't knock. I pushed the door open.
Behind a massive mahogany partner's desk—stacked so high with foolscap briefs, red-taped briefs, and dusty tin deed boxes that only his silver head was visible—sat Mr. Alistair MacIntyre.
He was tiny, bird-like, with spectacles so thick that his pale grey eyes appeared twice their natural size. He wore a high, stiff wing-collar that belonged in the Edwardian era, a black alpaca clerk's coat with frayed cuffs, and he was holding a bone-handled letter opener poised over a brown envelope.
He looked up over the rims of his glasses.
He didn't ask who I was. He didn't ask why I had mud on my boots or why I was carrying a zinc box smelling of river silt.
His eyes dropped to the hexagonal brass key that hung from my fingers by its cord.
He laid the letter opener down on his blotter with a faint, dry click.
May you like
"You took your time, Clara," he said, his voice high, thin, and precise as a silver flute. "Your mother told me you’d be here when you were twenty-one. You're fourteen months late, and Victoria Sterling has been parked outside the Land Registry in a Daimler since eight o'clock this morning."
***
