Стефани Баррон - The White Garden - A Novel of Virginia Woolf

“The chase? Is that what this is? — A hunt for the Missing Margaux?”

“Not Margaux,” he retorted. “Never Margaux. I wouldn’t risk the loss of lunch — much less my job — to hare after her . But this… Jo, this thing you’ve stumbled on is worth any amount of senseless driving and future unemployment. Don’t tell me you don’t agree. You want to know the truth more than I do. It’s personal for you.”

Jock , she thought. But she did not say anything. She was torn between halting the mad dash to Cambridge before it began, demanding that Peter find his ex-wife and restore her notebook, and the desire to plunge further into this inadvertent treasure hunt. There was a whisper of doubt, too, in her heart of hearts: Was she just avoiding London and Gray and the terror of choosing?

“I saw your face back there,” Peter persisted. “What did you worm out of Glenna?”

“Photographs. Or copies of them.” She tossed the pictures in Peter’s lap and held the Triumph’s wheel as he looked down. “I know I’m American and we never recognize anything more recent than our own birthdays, but could you please humor me and explain what an Apostle is?”

“Actually, you’re not supposed to know,” Peter said kindly. “Nobody is.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

He laughed. “The Cambridge Apostles are a Secret Society. Rather like your Skull and Bones in America — a group of hush-hush movers and shakers from a particular university, blood sworn to keep mum about what they do together. Or where. Or for how long.”

“I’ve heard of Bonesmen,” Jo said cautiously. She couldn’t exactly quote the Skull & Bones rule book — if one existed — for Peter’s benefit. But they surfaced occasionally in movies. She had a vague idea they were misogynistic and somehow tied to the CIA. Or was it the Mafia? There was something about a coffin.…

“The Apostles began way back in the Napoleonic period, I believe, as a kind of evangelical Christian movement. Hence the name. Although most people think it’s because there’s rarely more than twelve of them at any one time. Undergraduates, that is. The alumni group is much larger, of course — scattered through all walks of British life.”

“What do they do?”

“I think,” Peter answered carefully, “that they talk a lot. The other name for the group is the Cambridge Conversazione Society. The idea is that the Apostles gather in a room somewhere, every Saturday I believe, and somebody reads a paper he’s written. Then the rest discuss it. And take a vote on something that came up in the conversation. They used to eat sardines on toast — one hopes the fare has improved now they’ve started admitting women — and then disband until the next week.”

“Sounds incredibly dull.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” he agreed. “One sort of expects sex with a Secret Society, or at least one of the Seven Deadlies. But the unifying factor among Apostles has been genius , I think — some of the most extraordinary minds in Britain have been members.”

“Keynes,” Jo suggested.

“Keynes. Also Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Rupert Brooke, the godlike poet of World War One. Lytton Strachey — who was a flaming queen and a damn good biographer — E. M. Forster, who wrote A Room with a View and Howards End . And your Virginia’s husband, of course — Leonard Woolf.”

“So Virginia knew about them.”

“Of course. She practically lived in their pockets. It’s extraordinary, really — only a handful of people in the past two hundred years were chosen, and there they all are: the heart of Bloomsbury. One wonders whether the Bloomsbury Group would have existed, absent the Apostles.”

“So you think the whitewashed mural is some kind of clue, pointing us toward Cambridge. What if Vanessa just decided she hated it? Once both Virginia and Keynes — if it is a portrait of Keynes — were dead?”

Thoughtfully, Peter shook his head. “It’s too weird. I mean, why would Vanessa stick that picture in Keynes’s old bedroom, long after he’d acquired a house of his own in the neighborhood? And think about the atmosphere of the piece. He’s on his knees. It’s like he’s praying for forgiveness. There’s guilt behind it. Don’t you think?”

“So where in Cambridge do we look?”

Peter took his time answering this. They were coming into the southern suburbs of London now, skirting around the city on the ring road toward East Anglia. Jo glanced at the map, no longer interested in forcing Peter to drive to the Connaught and drop her there. She at least ought to call Gray. But she had turned off her cell phone to save the battery — her charger was back at the George Hotel in Kent, she hadn’t expected to be gone this long — and a curious languor was sweeping over her. The first sign of starvation, probably.

What she wanted was to sit in a basket chair like Virginia, skirt pooling around her, dancer’s feet extended. While the Apostles showed off their Genius…

“Apostles Screed,” Peter muttered. “That phrase meant something to Margaux, obviously. She was studying the back cover of the notebook yesterday right before she kicked us out. And then she skipped her vital departmental dinner, rang somebody up — and set an appointment with the bloke for today. Who would it have been?”

“A present-day Apostle?”

“That’s a start. Somebody with access at Cambridge. A professor, perhaps. Christ, it could be anyone! Pity they don’t announce which of their dons is Apostolic, on the university website. We could just go down the list.”

“Peter,” Jo said, “we shouldn’t bother retracing Margaux’s steps. She won’t take your calls. She’s not going to give up the notebook. And she’s probably already left Cambridge.”

“Are you declaring defeat, then?”

“No. I’m suggesting we beat her at her own game.” Jo shifted in her seat so that she faced Peter’s profile. “Margaux’s set her course. We followed ours — to Charleston. We have to assume it’s a race — and get to the finish before she does.”

He shot her a glance, at once derisive and smug. “This, from the woman who was parting company at London.”

“You said something back there, at Vanessa’s house — when I referred to Apostles Screed . What were you thinking?”

“About the Ark,” he said.

“The what?”

“It’s supposed to be a sort of box. Actually, it must be countless numbers of boxes by now. Each week, after the chosen Apostle stands on the hearth rug and delivers his or her paper, a copy is stored in the Ark. The Apostolic Holy-of-Holies.”

“Is that where Margaux will look first?”

“It’s the obvious place. But the question is: Where exactly have the Apostles hidden it?”

Jo frowned. “You mean, you don’t know?”

“Nobody does,” he said calmly, “who isn’t a member. Margaux can’t know. And so she’ll guess. She’ll look at the fact that most Apostles hailed from certain colleges — King’s and Trinity — and she’ll nose around them.”

“But, Peter — where do you think the Ark might be?”

“In the bowels of the Wren. That’s the library at Trinity.”

“Can we get access?”

“Possibly.” He downshifted as a massive lorry thrust itself in front of the Triumph. “There’s a fellow I know. Hamish Caruthers. Did him a favor, once. He’s Head Librarian. I suppose he might just be an Apostle himself. I’d never ask, of course.”

“But why would this guy violate his oath — and show us the Holy-of-Holies?”

Peter smiled cryptically. “Now that really is a secret. You’ll have to pry it out of Hamish himself.”