“I don’t know how much you know about Dutch politics,” Johanna says brightly, pausing to pry open Boleyn’s jaws and extract the rat carcass she found in the gutter and was attempting to hork down before anyone noticed, “but two centuries ago, the government declared the country Protestant and all Catholic worship was made illegal. They either burned all the churches and monasteries or repurposed them. The university bought several, and turned them into professors’ offices and archives. That’s where van der Loos’s collection is housed—just here.”
She stops in front of what looks, indeed, like a Catholic chapel, complete with a steeple and rose window and massive oak doors carved with Biblical scenes. The only indication of its modern occupants is the intricate institutional gate on the curb, bearing a phrase I don’t remember enough Latin to translate. “I’m going to take the dogs to the Hortus—one of the groundskeepers lets them run on the lawn when there aren’t any classes. So I’ll leave you here—oh, but we’re meeting for supper, aren’t we? I gave you directions to the In’t Aepjen, didn’t I? It’s off the Kraans Boom—ask anyone and they can direct you there. Should we say seven? And Cornelius knows you’re coming.” Johanna nods toward the chapel. “I sent a note yesterday. He’s such a sweetheart; you’ll adore him.” She looks around at her brood, human and canine both, then claps her hands. “All right, good-bye, be good, have fun, don’t let the mess put you off. Seymour, don’t eat that.”
In spite of the presentational archway proclaiming it a hall of scholarship, not theology, there has been little done to make the interior of the chapel look any less like what it was built to be. The gray stone is offset by the enormous domed windows, their scenes obscured by the blazing gold sunlight coursing through them. Colored squares cast by the rose window sparkle across our feet as we walk down the aisle toward what must have once been the altar. Now there’s a flimsy-looking partition creating the illusion of an office, albeit with no ceiling and the door half open. I wonder if they merely converted the choir screen for their purposes. The hall is so silent, it feels like we shouldn’t be here.
The click of Monty’s cane against the stones sets my teeth on edge. Felicity checked his leg the night before and declared it was healing well, though Monty still grimaces with every uneven step.
When we reach the screen, I pause. “Do we just—” I start, raising my hand like I may knock, but before I can, the entire partition is whipped to the side with such force it nearly topples.
Behind the screen is the largest man I’ve ever seen. He is even taller than I am, which seems physically incompatible with a city as sloped and short as this one, and his shoulders are so broad I suspect he has to turn sideways to go through most doors. His skin is dark umber, and his curly hair is pulled into a severe queue that accentuates the pronounced lines of his face. His cheekbones must blunt razors, they’re so sharp.
He greets us with the enthusiasm of meeting royalty, and I wonder if everyone here is so jubilant or if it’s just him and Johanna. It’s no wonder the two of them get along. “Hullo, hullo, good morning, Goedemorgen, hullo!” He kisses us both on the cheek—“Three times, my dear, we kiss three times in Holland,” he tells me when I try to break off the unanticipated physical contact after the first and second. “You must be the Montagues! Johanna—pardon me, Mrs. Nijhuis—said you’d be coming. It’s so lovely to meet you both! And how fares your dear sister?”
“Do you know Felicity?” Monty asks with a frown, but Cornelius has already plowed into the next conversational row.
“Mrs. Nijhuis said you were looking for something in Professor van der Loos’s collection—was it a ship’s manifest?” He speaks English with a heavy Dutch accent, and a smile so wide it must bend his vowels. He isn’t hard to understand, but it takes my mind a moment to adjust, like sitting through the first scene of any play of Shakespeare and despairing over ever understanding the syntax before settling in before the end of the act.
Monty pokes me in the toe with his cane, then inclines his head toward Cornelius, who beams at me. I take a steadying breath, then another when that one fails to do any actual steadying. The spot on my forearm that I rubbed raw the night before is burning. I want to scratch it so badly my fingers twitch. I’ve just about sufficiently steeled myself when Monty says, “Adrian, you’re the only one with the answers here.” And I turn red and fall off course.
“It’s a ship,” I manage to stammer. “He bought a ship—not a . . . a shipwreck. I think it . . . maybe it’s not here, per se. But he . . . I think he purchased it. The claim. To—it’s called the Persephone. It wrecked off the coast of Porto, about a decade ago.”
Cornelius nods enthusiastically, and I realize he means for me to tell him more. I should have brought notes.
“Uh, there was a court case. I believe. I think. My father mentioned—and we went to Porto and the man at the harbor office told us that the claim had been bought by Professor van der Loos. So. We hoped we might . . . see the things he bought. If we have the right place.”
“Oh you certainly do!” Cornelius beams. “I can show you the archive, though in the spirit of full transparency, I must tell you, it’s a bit of a mess. Professor van der Loos sends crates and crates and crates back from whatever corner of the world he’s visiting and it’s so much to sort through, so when I know he won’t be back for several years, I tend to let it pile up. He’s been gone so long and there’s been no word about when he plans to return, so it always feels like the work can be put off another day. It’s a terrible habit, I know. Just a moment and I’ll fetch the lanterns.”
As Cornelius darts behind the screen, I feel Monty press his fingers into my palm. “Breathe,” he says quietly. “You’re doing fine.”
I can’t breathe. I still feel as though that goddamn dog is on top of me. Is it possible he did permanent damage to my rib cage? Before I can dwell on that, Cornelius reappears with a tinder box and a lantern for each of us. “We’ll want to light them now,” he says. “It’s very dark down there.”
Monty and I look at each other. “Down?” Monty repeats.
“Oh yes,” Cornelius replies. “We keep the collection in the crypt.”
All the bodies have been moved,” Cornelius assures us cheerfully as we descend into the chapel crypt, like that negates the sheer discomfort of being stared at by the carved faces of long-dead bishops on the sarcophagi that populate the floor. They’re either too heavy to move or rooted in the earth, so instead, they’ve become receptacles for the collection itself.
“Excellent,” Monty says quietly as we survey the room. “A filing system I understand.”
It’s true that the mess puts me in mind of nothing so much as the Hoffman office back in London. Amid, atop, and sometimes inside the stone coffins are the contents of entire cargo holds, all of which have clearly spent most of their life underwater. The outsides are oxidized green, frilled with dry seaweed and scabbed with barnacles. There are five figureheads lined up inside one of the vaults, tipped on their backs so it looks as though the women are digging their way out from under the ground, and a folded English flag that appears to be petrified, never to unfurl again. There are passenger trunks and fishing nets and sails hanging from the ceiling, emanating a foul, pickled odor. Then there are busts, paintings, model ships, books, atlases, encyclopedias, journals—some of them pulled from shipwrecks so that their pages have to be cracked apart. And then, seemingly just for the hell of it, one of the sarcophagi is full of seashells, beach glass, stones, dried starfish, and a bottled library of sand in jars, each labeled with a place and a date.