The Lost Prince (26 page)

The feeling of well-being stayed with her all the way to the Hyperion Fund office and as she opened the small amount of mail that had accumulated in her three days of absence.

However, one thing was different. Now Will avoided lingering in the office in those moments at the end of the day Eleanor had grown to enjoy, when, the comfort of boundaries firmly in place, they had shared the details of their business and their lives. She almost asked him if something had occurred to upset him, but the opportunity never arose, and he had always seemed to be of such an unusually even temperament that
nothing unsettled him. She hoped against hope that whatever it was, it would pass, and the ship would be righted.

Then one afternoon she arrived at the office and found Will removing items from his desk to a large wooden crate.

“Moving out, Mr. Honeycutt?” she said to him lightly.

Caught by surprise, he swung around and simply stared at her, unable to speak at first. “Actually, I am,” he said, looking awkward and uncomfortable. “I am leaving,” he said finally.

“Leaving?” At first, she could not believe what she was hearing.

“I’m going with Jesse Livermore. He is moving me to New York.”

Eleanor waited quietly for him to break into that smile she found charming, signaling an eccentric’s ironic twist. But none came. “You are joking,” she said.

“I am not joking,” he said. “I am moving to New York.”

“This cannot be.”

“Well, this
is,
” he said with a bitter finality that shocked her.

“Leaving just like that. No warning, no discussion, no—”

“I am going where I am needed.”

“Where you are needed?” she said, incredulous. “You are needed here. The Hyperion Fund needs you.” He only stared hard at her. “I need you.”

“You can find a replacement. You can find someone you don’t need to invent, to fulfill some twisted sense of destiny.”

The words and the biting tone took her breath away. “I didn’t need to
invent
,” she said. “I found you—”

“Well now you can
find
my cousin,” he interrupted curtly. “Remember? He is the one you were looking for in the first place. I was a mistake.”

“You have been the savior. I have told you that, many times. You are an indispensable part of all this.”

“That will be remedied soon. You can get Arnauld to take my place.”

“Arnauld?” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Arnauld is a history and German teacher.”

“I was a Harvard physicist. You are excellent at transformations.”

“Mr. Honeycutt,” she said decisively, as if to shake him out of some spell he had fallen under. Then she paused. “Arnauld,” she said. “Is that it? Is this about Arnauld Esterhazy? Do you think that I favor him over you? Is that what you think?”

“Quite frankly I do not care. You can fawn over him all you want. I am
accepting Mr. Livermore’s offer to move me to New York. You can do with yourself and your own affairs as you wish.”

“Have you signed a contract?”

That stopped him for a moment. “I have. I have signed a contract and have begun looking for an apartment.”

Now it was Eleanor who was staring hard. “Mr. Honeycutt—” she began, then stopped herself. “Will,” she said emphatically, “is it that smitten business again? Is that the cause of all this?”

He put his head down, unable to look at her. “It is a business decision,” he said quickly.

“I thought you were a scientist, above emotion.” She was now on the attack, still trying to shake him loose from this attitude she had never seen before.

“I am moving to New York.”

“It is jealousy, isn’t it?” she repeated. He still wouldn’t look at her. “Isn’t this taking things just a little too far?”

Will Honeycutt looked up, and a coldness came into his eyes. “Emotion has nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, Will,” she repeated, now trying desperately to break through this wall she had never seen before. “I am so sorry. I have neglected you, and you are so very important to me.”

“Save that for someone else,” he snapped, and he placed the last items in the box. “I shall finish packing when I can be alone here. I think you need time to collect your thoughts and absorb the fact that I am leaving. You will not have me to take for granted anymore.”

“Oh, Will,” she repeated in a burst, as if finally understanding. “I have taken you for granted. That is what is happening here.”

“It doesn’t matter. I am leaving.” He carried the box with him and approached the door. “I shall return later to finish the packing.” He opened the door, stepped out into the hallway. The door closed behind him, and Eleanor stood deathly still for a long moment. Will Honeycutt was gone.

After a sleepless night, she returned to the office, hoping to find him sitting at his desk, smiling and signaling that it had all been a grotesque mistake. His desk was empty. There was no sign of him left in the office. He was really gone.

She spent one day and part of the next sitting alone in the office, trying to clear her mind and think through what to do next, but a stream of questions ran through that thinking, ruining her equilibrium. Had she really been so overtly attentive to Arnauld as to be an affront? Had Will Honeycutt’s affection for her risen so far beyond the gentle mutual respect that they both shared that he could no longer endure it? Had watching Arnauld triggered some deep insecurity in him? Had she said some one thing to offend him, or had it been an accumulation over time?

As if to assuage at least some of the desolation she was feeling, she rose and moved across the office to Will’s desk and sat staring at the now-cleared surface, then opened each of the emptied-out drawers. But one, the large broad central one, was not emptied. Without touching it, she stared for a long moment at the large, thick coil-bound artist’s sketchbook she saw there. Then carefully, respectfully, she reached for it and slowly removed it to the desk surface.

Almost afraid to move, she lifted the front cover and revealed the first page, a colored ink drawing of such intricate complexity that it took her a few minutes even to begin to make out what it might be.

Then she turned the page to the next intricate drawing, and then to the next, and then the next. Her attention became so rapt by what she was seeing that she lost total track of time, and a full hour passed before she completed a cursory review of the book’s contents.

On the front sides of each page were the drawings, most of them in India ink, colored in with pastels or watercolors, occasionally crayon, but a few were executed in brilliantly colored thick tempera paint.

The drawings were executed with surprising skill, and there seemed to be no practice sketches. The contents were varied, mostly representations of mythic characters or dragonlike creatures and complicated designs with a distinct Chinese or Tibetan look, some of recognizable human forms even. One series of smaller drawings, some two or three to a page, depicted a woman in white robes, a temple priestess, with the name Isis written carefully beneath them. The figure looked remarkably like Eleanor herself.

Later, she wrote Jung about her losing Will Honeycutt, “an unexpected and great blow,” she called it. Jung did not know all the details of her
secret source of knowledge, but he knew that she had had a complicated relationship with investments that had allowed her to have access to a great deal of money, and he knew at least the bare bones of her dependence on her young colleague Honeycutt. He knew also, through Eleanor’s accounts, of Will Honeycutt’s remarkable relationship to dreams and his recording of them that had led to his Harvard College dissertation dialogues on atomic structure with an ancient Greek, recorded in the slim paper-bound volume Eleanor had given him. “Now he is gone,” Eleanor wrote with finality. “I hope the situation is resolved by the time you read this, but I am not hopeful that it will be resolved satisfactorily.”

And she told him about the remarkable sketchbook she had found left behind in the desk drawer, described the drawings and paintings and the elegant cursive descriptions on the backs of pages. “His ancient Greek sage Democritus does appear many times, often surrounded by abstract drawings of atomic structures. And there is a character labeled Isis, with the look and robes of an ancient temple priestess. She is quite attractive, actually. It is artwork and elegant language beyond anything I knew him capable of,” she said. “And that is evidenced nowhere else in his life, at least that I know of.”

“That book is his world of dreams, the powerful language of the unconscious. Democritus, this is the wise old man,” Jung said. “An archetype for sure, and Isis, of course, is the Egyptian goddess, the divinity, mother, lover, magician at the center of life. She is probably the most comprehensive figure in all of mythology, but one senses here that your Mr. Will Honeycutt is calling her up in her more sensual aspects. And his forgetfulness, that was no accident, you realize. He wanted you to see it.” The thought had occurred to her, she admitted.

And one observation by her great Swiss friend stood out for Eleanor. “And this Isis character he draws,” Jung wrote. “No doubt she resembles you.”

She had no idea that she was losing Will Honeycutt until it was too late and he had moved his personal items out of their office. In retrospect, she could see how much she had counted on him and how unrealistic that had been, how because he had seemed able to take on any task, undaunted by any challenge—in fact, he seemed to thrive under what she gave him,
gaining strength with every new assignment—she had depended too much, leaned too hard, to the breaking point. She could see now, in retrospect, that it was the part of her story she kept from him—compared to what he saw happening—that had put the fatal strain on their working together.

He was from the beginning unflagging in his loyalty—he had, after all, given up his career as a university scientist for her—and he kept their dealings in the strictest confidence, as was their explicit understanding from the start. There was never a problem with confidentiality, as she knew in her bones the moment she met him. As he said back then, “I don’t have anyone I talk to.” And then, with time, that changed to “You are the only one I talk to.”