The Lost Prince (60 page)

“Well,” she said quickly. “That is quite a compelling argument.” She pulled herself together and she rose. “I shall give it consideration,” she said, heading for the door. “But believe me, Will, this is not information that you want to know. It is knowledge that has tormented me for twenty years, and I do not want it to weigh on your mind as well.”

The next day she arrived at the office early. Will was looking remorseful as she made her way to her desk. “Come in here, Mr. Honeycutt,” she said formally, and he walked in, about to offer apologies. But she began before he could say anything. “I have given your request the serious thought I promised. In fact, I spent a rather sleepless night thinking about it. I do think of you as my most loyal and even devoted partner. I suppose I had not thought about it before, but I did last night. There have been times when I could not trust you, but I have come to believe that now I can, completely.”

She lifted a well-worn leather volume from her desk. “And it is time. This is, you will see, the most confidential of documents. No one must know of its existence or its contents. It is from my time in Vienna, and I have added to it over the years. It is the ‘full story,’ as you say. I have shared it with only one person since my return, and he has now died. You will be the only living person to know the story.”

She handed him the volume, and, sensing somehow its significance, he hesitated a moment before he took it.

“Prepare yourself, Mr. Honeycutt,” she said, and she walked past him and left him alone with the leather-bound book that had for twenty years controlled her life. “Even you are in for a surprise.”

The next morning they met again. He had a disheveled look she had seen before, as if he had slept in his clothes. “Well?” she said.

“I have read it all,” Will said. “A number of times. I stayed here late and returned early.”

“And?” she said finally.

“There is so much to take in,” he said.

“I know,” Eleanor said, looking down.

“You wrote
City of Music
.”

“I did.”

“You are Jonathan Trumpp.”

“I am. Actually, Johnny Trumpp was the janitor at my college dormitory. He was Slavic and spoke broken English. I stole his name for an article.”

“The
New York Times
published your article and then sent you to Vienna, and you wrote the book.”

“More or less. Going to Vienna was my headmistress’s idea.”

“And you met this Wheeler, who wrote this journal, and you fell in love.”

“Yes.”

“He was killed and you wrote
City of Music
based on what he told you about Vienna.”

Eleanor nodded. “More or less.”

“And his ideas he had gotten from his teacher at St. Gregory’s School, and that teacher the boys called the Haze was Arnauld?”

“That is correct.”

“And the Haze also taught your son, Standish.”

Again, Eleanor nodded. “Yes.”

“And from this journal you knew, at least in part, how you were to invest the monies from the Hyperion Fund, monies obtained from selling a ring of the crown prince Rudolf.”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“You know that one needs time to absorb all this,” he said, pausing for a long moment before changing the subject.

“I know.” She nodded. “It is overwhelming. You are not the first to encounter it all in one sitting.” She was thinking of her own first encounter with the journal twenty years ago, and then that of William James.

“As a result of this experience in Vienna,” he continued, “you made
certain that Arnauld would be invited to teach at St. Gregory’s because you were certain that he was destined to become a great teacher of both Standish and the Wheeler of the journal. You knew that the war was coming and you knew that Arnauld would be drawn into it on the side of the Austrians, but you also knew that as terrible as the war experience was for him, he is, he was, destined to survive and return to Boston and his position at St. Gregory’s. And that is why you knew that it was up to you to go find him, and it is why now you are the only one who is certain that he will recover from the sorry state in which he finds himself at Dr. Jung’s hospital in Zurich, although you do not know how.”

The stream of words came forth from Will Honeycutt without a break. Eleanor listened without reaction, no affirmation, and no denial. “I do not know how,” she said.

Will’s tone changed to one of reverence. “This is amazing, overwhelming, and you can be sure that I will hold it in the strictest confidence. And that I understand, I think.” He paused, looking deep into her eyes. “You do not need to fear. I know the weight of this.”

“It is very complicated,” she said wearily, “and indeed overwhelming.”

Will Honeycutt smiled, something new in his eyes. She had become impressed by how stable he had seemed over the past months, completing a mysterious transition that had begun back in the Loeb office during the Northern Pacific business. Suddenly, for this moment, it was not only she who bore the weight of her knowledge alone. He sat before her, armed now with the full import of the journal. “You forget,” he said. “I am a scientist. I like to think about complications and complexity.”

“What you hold in your hand now has determined the course of my life.”

“I can see that. And I know now why you sought me out at Harvard, intruded in my life.”

“I am sorry,” she said. “I had to be—”

“No, no,” he interrupted firmly. “You don’t need to apologize. You have caused great and positive changes in my life, unbelievable ones, actually. It is all foretold here. I know now why our interactions must be as they are. I see all that now.” He held up the journal.

“You know now that it has been both a blessing and a curse.”

“I do. You think it is a curse because you must work hard to make things come about.”

She said nothing.

“Has it occurred to you that this is destiny, that you need do nothing?”

“I can’t believe that,” she said with a grim certitude that caught Will by surprise, causing him to think hard for a moment.

“No,” he said. “I guess I can see that. And in your position, come to think of it, I could not either.”

“And now you know everything.”

“I do. Of course.” He paused and looked deep into her eyes. “All except that one part, when you found out about the other T. Williams Honeycutt, the right one. Why didn’t you—”

“Why didn’t I abandon you?” she interrupted.

“Yes, that,” he said. “Why didn’t you abandon me?”

She had now fully returned to the present, looking him square in the eye. “You know why.”

“Tell me,” he said. “I want to hear it.”

“Because,” she said. “Because I had grown very fond of you.”

“That was not in the journal.”

“No,” she said. “I improvised.”

He stared for a moment, absorbing all that was there. “Well,” he said, signaling his discomfort. “I am very glad for it.” And then he changed his tone, becoming businesslike. “You went to Vienna just now because you
knew
Arnauld was alive.”

“Yes,” Eleanor said softly. “I knew. From what had to be, I knew.”

“Because of this.” He held up the journal again.

She nodded, a seriousness returning to her face. “You know that to be true now.”

“Fortunate for him.” A silence returned between them. “His return means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”

“It means everything.”

“And he is trapped now in his inner world, and there is fear he will never come out.”

She nodded silently, acknowledging the seriousness of his probing. “Yes,” she said. “And you know something about that isolation, don’t you, Will?”

It was shortly after that conversation that the letter came from her friend Jung in Zurich.

Eleanor stayed away from the office for a day, trying to think of what to do. She told no one but kept running the letter through her head. Carl Jung was a vibrant and optimistic man full of ideas. For him to reach a negative conclusion was the worst news she could imagine. “If Dr. Jung cannot see a way out,” one of the Burghölzli doctors once said to her, “there is no way out.”

When she finally did appear at the office, she found Will Honeycutt sitting at his desk. She told him she had news from Zurich and handed him Jung’s letter. Will took it and with concern on his face read it over several times.

“This is terrible news,” he said after a long silence. “The best doctors in
Europe have reached a dead end. If they give up, no one will pick up his case, and he will be done for. I now understand what this means.” She nodded, still looking down. “I know what this means to you.”

At first Eleanor said nothing, then, “I am for the moment without words.”

“Dr. Jung has told you that there seems to be no way to get Arnauld past the state in which he hears and sees and smiles but shows no sign of any of his former intelligence or personality.” There was now a look of intense curiosity on Will Honeycutt’s face.

“This comes from a man who always sees possibilities,” Eleanor said.

Will Honeycutt sat with her in the Hyperion Fund office for a long time. “You know there is one thing in all this”—he held up the journal—“one thing that has troubled me.”

“And that is?”

“And that is that you believe you have chosen in me the wrong person, and have had to compensate for that choice over the years.”

“I know that,” Eleanor said. “And I thought that I have eased that troubling aspect for you. I have become happy with my choice.”

“But it was the
right
choice,” he said suddenly and with conviction. “Don’t you see, it was the
right
choice.”

“Oh?” Eleanor said. She had noticed the return of a wild intensity to his eyes, and she had learned in those moments not to get in the way.

“Your son, Standish, is to grow up to be a great hero, and to play a part in saving others. I know that from my reading.” Eleanor said nothing and only nodded. “Arnauld is destined to return from the war and be his great mentor, an indispensable piece of the story….” Again she only nodded. “Your son is to have a son who is destined to become another kind of hero in his time, and seventy years from now, in 1988, he is to become dislocated in time and show up in Vienna twenty years ago and write this journal.” Again, he lifted the volume.

“I know it is hard to understand,” she said now with compassion. “But, yes, that is true.”

“This journal upon which you are going to base the rest of your life, it is an accurate description of how things will turn out.”

“Yes, all that is true.”

“The list of investment. That is what you will do, all that you will bring about.”

Eleanor looked at him for a long moment, then said very slowly, “Not what I will do. What I
did
.”