Ghost Image (15 page)

He grinned. “You certainly didn't inherit your mother's shopping gene. You going to get together with anyone?”

“I called Perry DiNardo, my old boss from IPS, before I left
home. He's in Istanbul but he's flying back to London tonight. We're going to meet up for lunch tomorrow. What about you? What are you going to do?”

“I might rest my eyes,” he said. “Just a quick nap. Then I'm having lunch with an old friend in Covent Garden. He used to come out to Middleburg to hunt when he was with the British embassy in the sixties . . . you're welcome to join us, you know.”

I kissed him. “Thanks, but if I'm not there you can talk about horses and hounds and hunting to your hearts' content. I can entertain myself . . . I'll probably just take a nostalgia tour of all the old special places.”

“If that's what you want, then. Have fun.” Harry knows when I'm lying, but he gave me the look that said he'd stay out of my business and respect my privacy. “What about tonight? Will you be free for dinner? I could ask James to make a reservation at the seafood place down the block. Drinks downstairs first in the Coburg Bar. What do you say?”

“That would be perfect, but if you mean Scott's, it might already be booked for this evening. That restaurant is always crowded.”

Harry flashed a roguish smile. “Sweetheart, you're staying at the Connaught. If I asked James to arrange it, he'd find a way for us to have tea at Buckingham Palace.”

I laughed. “Of course he would. What was I thinking?”

• • •

After living in London for more than a dozen years, I believe I'm entitled to call it home, or at least, I still feel I belong here. The doorman held the door for me and tipped his hat as I stepped outside, asking if I needed a cab or a map or directions to a particular museum or shop. I thanked him and told him I knew my way around, setting off down Mount Street and through Mayfair with its elegant banded buildings of red brick and white stone, luxury shops, quiet mews, and discreet clubs
and businesses like a kid who has been turned loose in the toy store.

Let me just get it out of the way that I believe, as Samuel Johnson did, if you are tired of London, you are tired of life. As an adopted daughter of the South—Harry's grandfather and great-uncles fought with Lee and Stonewall—I grew to love Southern culture and its tradition-steeped ways, which is why I probably slipped into life in London so easily. They had a lot in common. I love this city's vibrancy and rich history, the green parks and flower-filled gardens, royal palaces and picturesque squares, the Globe Theatre, the erudition of the
Times
, the culture of Radio 4, dry British wit and understated humor, the pageantry of Trooping the Colour, strawberries and cream at Wimbledon, Christmas lights that turn the city into a fairyland, and bonfires on Guy Fawkes Day. I find comfort in putting the kettle on for a cup of tea, cab drivers and shopkeepers who call me “love,” Big Ben chiming the hour, and I tear up when I hear a choir singing “I Vow to Thee, My Country” in Royal Albert Hall on Remembrance Day.

David Hockney—the modern British painter who decamped to California—says there's nothing wrong with photographers as long as you realize we see the world through one eye, or as he says, we're a bunch of momentarily paralyzed Cyclops. To me that implies that we miss a lot, or worse, we see the world flattened out in two dimensions, not fully formed in three. London, and Britain, for that matter, have their share of warts, which I'm not blind to—an ingrained class structure that can be stultifying, free socialized medicine that is worth what you pay for it, overly boiled vegetables, and more descriptive ways to describe rain and gray weather than any other country on the planet. I will never understand why the British celebrate so many days with the limp, uninspired title of bank holiday, and am still baffled by the illogical grammar of collective nouns and matching verbs so that it's correct to say, “England are winning the match.”

I know they return the favor with their aversion to our loud go-big-or-go-home swagger when we travel, our gun-toting culture and accompanying violence, which scares them, the staggering cost of our health-care system, our mindless fascination with people who are famous for no logical reason, and our belief that we are at the epicenter of world politics yet most of us probably couldn't correctly fill in a map identifying the countries of the United Kingdom if our life depended on it.

But as I walked down the Sunday-quiet streets, London felt as familiar and welcoming as catching up with an old and well-loved friend. I took the side streets until I reached New Bond Street, where I lingered in front of Asquith's window and wondered if Bram had come to any conclusions about the value of Kevin's copy of
Adam in Eden.
At Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly I bought tea for Grace and my landlady from a gentleman in a morning coat who called me “madam” and afterward spent half an hour roaming the floors of Hatchards bookstore, running my hand over the dust jackets of books I hadn't seen in any bookstore at home, like a lover who has been told it's the end of the affair. A pub lunch at the crowded, noisy King's Head—a pot of tea to warm my hands and then fish and chips with a pint of Fuller's—while a television blared the Chelsea versus Spurs match. When I left, Chelsea were winning.

Eventually I gave in to the sharp, cold sting of English weather and bought a pair of forest-green knit gloves and a matching cloche at a shop on Regent Street after I walked down to the outdoor market at St. James's Church, where I would have found something offbeat and cheaper, until I realized it was Sunday so it was closed. By then it was time to take the Underground to Sloane Square and make my way to my meeting with Zara Remington, about a twenty-minute walk through the quiet residential streets of Chelsea. The wind had picked up again, buffeting me and whipping the last dry autumn leaves around my feet like small cyclones. I turned up the collar of my coat, glad for the hat and gloves.

Zara Remington hadn't given me any instructions other than to show up at the garden at four o'clock, so I first tried the visitors' entrance, a locked wrought-iron gate in the middle of an ancient brick wall on Swan Walk. No one was at the kiosk inside the garden, so I walked around the corner to Royal Hospital Road and rang the bell at the staff entrance.

A slender dark-eyed man opened the door. Early thirties, maybe, with curly brown hair that ringed his face, giving him an innocent, angelic look. Though he was staring directly at me, one eye was focused at something off to my right. “I'm sorry, miss, the garden's closed. I'm afraid the Easter lily sale has finished.”

“I know,” I said. “I have a four o'clock appointment with Ms. Remington.”

“Today?” He looked at me with interest. “And you are—?”

“Sophie Medina.”

“How do you do? Will Tennant. Why don't you come in and I'll let her know you're here?” Will Tennant opened the door wider and called over his shoulder, “Zara, Sophie Medina is here to see you.”

I stepped into a long, narrow anteroom dominated by a wall map of the Chelsea Physic Garden in the 1800s. Below it a wooden table held brochures and information sheets in neat piles. In a corner, the shade was pulled down at an information window across from a door with a
STAFF ONLY
sign.

A woman whose light brown hair was silvered with gray and done up in a windblown bun walked through a door at the far end of the hall. She wore Wellingtons and a quilted jacket over a tweed blazer and jeans as though she'd just come in from walking her spaniel across the moor. Her clothes smelled of the fresh chill of outdoors and Easter lilies, but more to the point, she didn't look happy to see me.

“Thank you, Will,” she said, her tone an unmistakable dismissal. He nodded, giving me another curious cockeyed look before he left through the door she had just used. Zara Reming
ton turned to me and added in a brisk voice, “We're just finishing up with the lily sale in the gift shop. I need a moment with Will, but if you'd care to have a look around the garden, I'll join you shortly.”

“Thank you.”

Something was wrong, because it was clear she was upset by my presence. Before I could say anything, she reached for one of the information sheets on the table and passed it to me. A map of the garden. “This ought to get you oriented.” She pointed to a patch of dark green squares surrounded by what looked like dirt paths next to a pond rockery. “I suggest you start here.”

I looked at the legend on the map. Garden of World Medicine. Next to it: Pharmaceutical Beds. “I'll do that.”

I followed her into the other room and entered a gift shop filled with books, potpourri, seeds, calendars, and plant-related souvenirs. Half a dozen Easter lilies, the flowers just beginning to open, sat in pots wrapped in lavender or pale yellow foil on a table in the middle of the room. Will stood behind a counter at the cash register, sorting through receipts.

“The door to the garden is in the next room,” Zara said to me. “Do go through.”

The Chelsea Physic Garden was larger than I expected, an expansive private park with well-swept tree-lined gravel paths converging at a moss-covered statue of Sir Hans Sloane, the wealthy benefactor who bought the garden in the 1700s to ensure it could be maintained in perpetuity as an herbal garden and a place to teach. According to the map, I was looking at a large rectangle that was slightly squashed at the far end where the boundary followed the contours of the Thames and the Chelsea Embankment on the other side of a high redbrick wall. Here, as everywhere else in London, the trees were bare, but spring seemed more imminent in this rich garden with its peaty aroma of fresh mulch, vivid green carpet of grass, and the new growth of plants that had pushed through the soil.

The Garden of World Medicine was laid out in a way that reminded me of Monticello, with the same grassy pathways separating neat, tilled beds. Zara Remington found me on one knee, reading about a plant called
Hyssopus officinalis
among the Western European medicinal plants. The description on the little black-and-white marker read
For all cold griefes of diseases of the chest and lungs, helping to expectorate tough phlemn.
It sounded a lot like the hyssop plant William Coles described in
Adam in Eden.

I stood up and said, “I'm sorry if I've come at an inconvenient time.”

She pressed her lips together. I couldn't tell if she was worried or upset, or both. “I was rather hoping you would have looked at your e-mail before you arrived and found one from me asking you to delay coming until half four. Unfortunately, I didn't have your number or I would have rung you. I assumed we'd be through with the lily sale ages ago. Will stayed around to help me finish totaling the receipts . . . I suppose it'll be all right. He doesn't know why you're here and he's also one of my most trusted and loyal volunteers. He's been with me for years.”

She was the first person so far who brought up the need for secrecy in discussing Kevin's letter. Maybe that meant she knew something, that Kevin had confided in her.

“I'm sorry,” I said again. “I should have checked. London used to be my home and it's my first visit back in a while . . . I'm afraid I got sidetracked.” I pointed to the hyssop. “About this plant—”

“Yes, we'll come back to that later.” She folded her arms across her chest and studied me. “And before we go any further, I need to know about your relationship with Brother Kevin Boyle and how you managed to acquire the Fairbairn letter.” She gave me a pointed look and added, “If you have the letter, you also have the book, do you not?”

Ryan had made the same request two days ago at Monticello.
Explain yourself.
The difference this time was that Zara Remington knew about Kevin's copy of
Adam in Eden.

“I do have it,” I said. Then I answered her questions, except I left out telling her about Bram Asquith and that the book was now safely in his vault in Washington. But I did tell her I was fairly certain Kevin had left the Solander box with the book and the letter in a locker at the Natural History Museum because he needed to hide them.

“Kevin hid them for a good reason.” Her voice was grim. “And now he's dead. He rang me the day before he passed away and told me he was convinced someone else was looking for the book. Was that person you?”

A seagull screeched and wheeled overhead, disappearing over the wall in the direction of the Thames. “No. It wasn't,” I said, taken aback.

Zara gave me a searching look. “I'll have to take your word for it, won't I? And Ryan vouched for you.”

I said a silent prayer of thanks to Ryan. “I'm afraid there isn't anyone else to ask. Ryan didn't know any of this before I visited him Friday at Monticello. And Kevin told me roughly the same thing he told you, that he believed someone was stalking him. You're the first person I've spoken to who knew he was worried about being followed.”

That seemed to surprise her. “Do you have any idea who it was?”

“None.”

“There was a rather gorgeous coffee-table book published a number of years ago called
The Beauty of Marlborough Gardens
,” she said. “Would it be too great a coincidence to assume you're the same Sophie Medina who took the photographs for that book?”

“When my husband and I lived in London, we rented what used to be the gardener's cottage on the old Marlborough estate,” I said, “before the garden was turned into a private communal park for the homes in that neighborhood. I put together that book as a fund-raiser for the garden club.”

“Your photographs were stunning. I bought a copy at the Chelsea Flower Show and then I went to see the garden for myself.” She paused. “Now I'm really curious what brings you here. You obviously have no professional connection to Kevin.”