Bristol House Read Free

and the table with the lamp, unlit at this hour, when bright daylight came in the single window. She reached the place where the hall made the left-hand turn, paused long enough to take a deep breath, then went around the corner.
    The door to the back bedroom was open. There was nothing to see. Annie walked forward. When she reached the threshold, she stopped and whispered aloud, “ Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. ” The response, Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum, came only in her imagination.
    Shaking, she pulled the door shut and fled.
    ***
    Annie was a runner. She exulted in the pounding of her feet on pavement, in sweat that slicked her skin. She loved the way every inch of her felt alive when she was able to lengthen her stride and cover a decent distance. She would have liked to clear her head with a run when she left Bristol House, but she wasn’t dressed for it. Instead she retreated to a café called the Brew Hut, a few doors down the road.
    No monk today, where there had been one the day before, might well mean she had imagined the whole business. No, call it by its name. It might mean she’d been hallucinating. You’re a drunk, Annie my girl . You’re strong and beautiful, and you’ve run yourself clean, but you’ll always be a drunk. The voice in her head was not her own but that of Sidney O’Toole, her AA buddy, the guy who had taken her under his wing at the second meeting she’d attended, and one way or another had stayed by her side ever since.
    But Annie had not hallucinated when she stopped drinking. Not everyone does. So why now, after four years of strict sobriety?
    Perhaps she had a brain tumor. Or worse, perhaps she was losing her mind.
    After she had walked through hell and somehow, stripped naked though she was, come out the other side. Now. Madness.
    A clock on the wall said it was ten to nine. Work, she had long since learned, is the great, sometimes the only, salvation. Time to begin. First stop: the Tudor London Documents Collection, which, as luck would have it, was at this moment at the British Museum.
    ***
    London institutions did not post staff résumés or pictures on their Web sites. Since her appearance had been left to Annie’s imagination, she had decided the archivist she’d corresponded with before coming to England was old and slightly stooped and wore her gray hair in a bun. But Mrs. Franklin, who ten minutes after they met insisted on being called Jennifer, was tall, blond, and gorgeous. From the vantage point of five-two, with the freckles that went with her red hair, and around the same age—Annie would be thirty-three in a few months—it would have been easy to feel inadequate in Jennifer’s shadow. Except the archivist was also friendly and helpful. She stayed with Annie for something close to three hours, patiently pulling ancient papers out of floor-to-ceiling chests of wide, shallow drawers and discussing such mysteries of sixteenth-century Holborn as whether Crooked Bone Alley might have run between Red Lion and Great Ormond streets.
    Annie began to feel guilty. “You’re being enormously helpful, but I think I shouldn’t be keeping you so long.”
    “Not to worry,” Jennifer said, “I’m delighted. I don’t get many chances to talk about exciting stuff like this these days. Everyone here turns up their noses at anything that didn’t happen before Caesar conquered Gaul.”
    Jennifer was actually on the staff of the London Archives, but parts of the documents and maps section of that institution was currently closed for remodeling. It was sheer good fortune that the specific collection that interested Annie, along with its archivist, was being housed temporarily in a basement room of the British Museum, a four-minute walk from Bristol House.
    “Given the name,” Jennifer said, “I take it this Shalom Foundation is Jewish. Israelis?”
    “No. American Jews interested in the European Diaspora.