Rose by Martin Cruz Smith Page B

for the girl. She might be a fool, but in contrast to Charlotte Hannay a fool was positively attractive. He instantly saw Charlotte’s future: she had a mouth on which no smile would ever perch, eyes that would never soften, a body that would never be unbound from mourning. She might have arrived late but she was a proper mistress for the Cannel Room.
    From his end of the table, Hannay said, “Charlotte, it seems to me that your devotion to Maypole grows in proportion to his absence.”
    “Or in proportion to your inconvenience,” she suggested.
    “Maybe Blair will put an end to both,” Hannay said.
    Charlotte regarded Blair with, if possible, increased hostility. “You’ll do anything to get back to Africa?”
    “Yes.”
    She told her father, “Congratulations, you certainly have found your man. And, Blair, are you being adequately recompensed?”
    “I hope so.”
    Charlotte said, “You had better hope. My father is like Saturn, except that he doesn’t eat all his children. He lets them fight it out, and then he eats the survivor.”
    Lydia Rowland put her hand over her mouth.
    Hannay stood. “Well, it’s been a very successful party.”
    The men moved to a library fully as large as the Royal Society’s. Two stories of stacks and chart drawers with an iron balcony surrounded birds of paradise in bell jars, tables of fossils and meteorites, a rose-marble fireplace, ebony desk and deep leather furniture. Blair noticed the steady gas glow of wall lamps. Apparently only the Cannel Room was lit with candles.
    “The women are happy in the study.” Hannay poured port left to right. “The family has been building Hannay Hall for eight hundred years, so that now it’s a perfect monster. You exit from a Gothic gallery and enter a Georgian ballroom. Step out of a Restoration library and run into the plumbing of a modern water closet. The scullery dates back to the Black Prince. Pity the wretches who work there.”
    “My aunt works there,” Fellowes said.
    “Excellent.” Hannay proposed a toast. “Your aunt.”
    “Very kind, milord,” Fellowes said.
    They drank. Blair asked, “Do you mean there’s another library?”
    “Yes. This was a chapel,” Hannay said.
    “Roman Catholic,” Chubb whispered.
    Hannay pointed to a small oil portrait of a long-haired man wearing an earring and a flamboyant Elizabethan collar. “The Hannays were resolute Catholics, hiding and running priests from here to the Highlands. The tenthearl, whom you see there, was an abject coward who converted to save his neck and estate, for which his descendants eternally thank him. The chapel was allowed to go to rack and ruin. The lead was stripped, roof and windows fell in. Being in a back courtyard no one much noticed. I decided to make something of it.”
    Earnshaw and Chubb were reduced to reverence by a framed manuscript of gilded Latin designed into Celtic knots. Leveret and Blair lingered over the fossils: a fiddlehead fern curled like the scroll of a cello, the cross section of a fossilized tree as iridescent as a peacock’s tail.
    Hannay opened drawers with maps in Greek, Persian and Arabic drawn on tree bark, papyrus, vellum, and pilot charts written in Portuguese and Dutch. On them Africa evolved and grew from Egyptian delta, to Carthaginian empire, to indeterminate landmass guarded by boiling waters, to the saints’ names of a newly navigated but still ominous continent, to a modern, well-plotted coastline and beckoning interior.
    “Africa does seem to be your special interest,” Earnshaw said.
    “Not entirely. This is the prize of the library.” Hannay opened a velvet slipcase and as painstakingly as if he were lifting air brought out a book with a badly worn leather cover faded to a powdery mauve. He raised the front just enough for Blair and Earnshaw to read, handwritten on the frontispiece,
Roman de la Rose
. “Every fine medieval lady had her copy of
The Romance of the Rose
,” Hannay said. “This was written,