The Copernicus Archives #2 (14 page)

Friday, March 28

9:28 a.m.

L
ast night, after everything we had done, my sleep was black, deep, and dreamless.

Nearly dreamless.

Sometime during the long night, I caught a glimpse of Joan, stumbling away on the dark sand to find Hans Holbein, the father of her child. The weight of early death had been lifted from her. I also saw Helmut Bern sailing to a monastery, heading for Kronos. I prayed he'd find it before the microhole closed.

I had no idea what horrors would happen because of what I had done, but neither of those two things seemed bad. It was only later, at Heathrow this morning, that the final puzzle piece clicked into place.

At the Pret A Manger in Terminal 3.

My parents had texted last night to say that they'd found seats on an evening flight out from Austin. As we waited now for the plane that would bring Lily's father and my parents and Maggie to us, we quietly worked out yesterday's events. The passage of Crux from Nicolaus to Thomas and then on the day of Thomas's death to Meg and Joan, and later to Joan's daughter, Rebecca. How Sir Felix had appeared as Hatman at the embankment yesterday morning, how he had planted the bug on my bag in his office, how he had worked with Doyle, how Wolff had finally taken him out, and how the Teutonic Order was cruel to its own.

My nose hadn't bled for hours, but unprepared as I always am, when I talked about Joan at the river, I had to use a table napkin to dry what I hoped would be my last round of tears. Or I would have dried them, if I hadn't stopped dead.

When I brought the Pret A Manger napkin to my face, I finally noticed the funny little recycling comment printed on it.

If Pret staff . . . hand you huge bunches of napkins (which you don't need or want) please give them the evil eye. Waste not want not.

I grew cold all over and realized what had really happened.

. . . the evil . . .

Because of the strange coilings of time, I had left something behind at the river nearly five hundred years ago. Joan Aleyn had kept the napkin I'd used to stop her bleeding forehead and put it in the locket that contained her husband's portrait of her. I couldn't tell you why Markus Wolff had the locket, but secreted inside it was the napkin that had mingled Joan's and my blood together. The napkin that Nicolaus somehow must have known about. The napkin that memorialized why Joan had named her daughter after me.

Copernicus had said it was good that she lived.

Yes, it was.

But then, what did
the evil
mean? Had a horrible thing already happened sometime in the past? Was it evil that Helmut Bern found his way back to Kronos? Would it have been better if Joan had died that night?

I knew I wouldn't have done anything different.

And why was Galina so obsessed with this mute girl in the first place? So much so that she sent her best agent to find out about her? What did Joan Aleyn
really
mean to Galina Krause? Were she and Galina related, as Wolff had suggested? Was
that
what this was all about? Blood?

Or more accurately . . .
bloodline
?

Only then did I understand that we—all of us—are as deeply woven into the protection of the Legacy as Copernicus himself was. We are part of his Legacy, tangled up and bound to it like he himself was—and is.

We make the horror happen. We make the good.

Copernicus swore a deadly oath to protect the world from a horror without end, and we are bound to swear that oath, too. Have I caused tragedies? Maybe. But aren't we causing tragedies every moment of our lives? Aren't we all blind men, setting fire to everything we touch? Have I gone into the past? Or has the past come forward for me? Is there any difference between the past and the present? And what about the future? Where—and when—
is
the future, exactly?

I daubed my eyes, then crunched the napkin and threw it away.

As the plane from Austin landed and we crowded together to see my parents and Maggie, I knew one thing at least. In my bag, nestled close to Copernicus's diary, was Holbein's wooden box. And inside the box lay the prisoner's cross.

We had Crux.

We were winning.

Two to one.

G
ratitude goes to many people who helped in the writing of this book, from the technical to the inspirational. In the first category is the National Trust Photo Library in England, whose splendid staff I contacted regarding Rowland Lockey's 1592 portrait of Thomas More's family, an image after a lost Holbein original. Readers can study this image for the hidden cross referred to in the story.

A hearty thank-you goes to the staff at HarperCollins UK, with whom I enjoyed a fine lunch in Hammersmith by the ever-present Thames, and especially to Ruth Alltimes and Sarah Radford; also to Tania Fitzgerald at Historic Royal Palaces for even entertaining a request to visit the Bell Tower—on Good Friday, of all days. I promise proper notice next time.

To Tony, the real buildings manager at Saint Andrew Undershaft, and John Ewington, OBE, at Saint Katharine Cree, thank you both for letting me poke around your churches, though certainly not to the extent
described in this book.

Visitors to Bletchley Park will already know the magic of the place. Since the beginning of this series I've wanted to set part of the Copernicus story there, and I'm happy to have had the opportunity. The men and women who worked there in the period between 1939 and 1945 are, as we now know, very real heroes. To say that I want to live and work at Bletchley during those years would remain no more than an idle dream—except for the possibilities suggested by this book. I'll keep hoping. During my visit, in addition to benefiting from the docent's fine description of the Enigma machine, I was honored to meet one of the original Wrens, the sparkly Joan Martin—“Lewis, when I was here.” If I have given my Bletchley character the name Mavis, I have also given her Mrs. Martin's resonant words to me: “I worked on the Bombe, you know. The
Turing
Bombe.”

Within the terms of this very short novel, I've tried to stick with as many facts as I could. Thomas More's life and death, his letters, his family, and his love for Meg are well known. Nicolaus Kratzer, Hans Holbein, and Joan Aleyn are real. Some facts—the shadiness of Kratzer, for example, or the dates of Holbein's actual residency in England—have been adjusted for this story. My playfulness with minor points of recorded history do not, of course, reflect on any of my outstanding sources. Of
those many I want to single out
The Life of Thomas More
by Peter Ackroyd,
Wolf Hall
, the novel by Hilary Mantel,
The Secret Lives of Codebreakers
by Sinclair McKay,
Hans Holbein: Revised and Expanded Second Edition
by Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Grenier, and
Saint Thomas More: Selected Writings
edited by John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne, with a preface by Joseph W. Koterski. The latter two volumes are quoted here, the first in reference to the likely location of Holbein's tomb, the second in the excerpts from More's last letter.

Gratitude, as always, to my wife, Dolores, for her close readings and suggestions; to my dear editor, Claudia Gabel; and to Katherine Tegen, Melissa, Alana, Ro, Lauren, my splendid copy editor Karen, and everyone else at KT Books and HarperCollins who make these stories live. Thank you, all.

Photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis

TONY ABBOTT
is the author of over a hundred books for young readers, including the bestselling series The Secrets of Droon. He has two daughters and lives in Connecticut with his wife and two dogs. You can visit him online at
www.tonyabbottbooks.com
.

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.

Cover art © 2015 by Bill Perkins
Logo art by Jason Cook/Début Art

Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

THE COPERNICUS ARCHIVES #2: BECCA AND THE PRISONER'S CROSS
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015935801

ISBN 978-0-06-231474-1

EPub Edition © May 2015 ISBN 9780062314758

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