CHAPTER FOUR - The True Seam

The storm came in on the ninth day, and the Belgian said yes on the ninth day, and Eva would spend a very long time afterwards wondering whether those two things were a coincidence.

The message came through Ines at four in the afternoon, printed out, because Monsieur Adriaan was seventy-six and communicated by fax to a machine in the hotel office like a man transmitting from 1988.

Miss Cross may examine the object. She may not use solvents. She may not use heat. If she breaks it I will be philosophical, as I have been assured for twenty years that it cannot be mended and I have stopped believing in it. Tell her the library is hers. Tell her the butterflies were my wife's.

Eva read it twice, said a short word, and went to get her tools.

She travelled with them. She had always travelled with them, the way other people travel with a book they never open — a soft roll of grey canvas, a little over a kilo, and inside it the scalpels and the swabs and the dental picks and the three sable brushes she'd had since she was nineteen and the small brass loupe that had been her whole first paycheque. It had gone into her suitcase on the day she booked this trip and she had told herself it was superstition.

By six the sky in the west had gone the colour of a bad bruise.

By eight the wind was in the bougainvillea, and by nine the hotel had lost power and come back on generator, which meant half the lights and no air conditioning, and the twenty-one guests were all in the bar being delighted about it, and Eva Cross was alone in the library with a lamp, a cloth-covered table, and a heart of gold and black glass sitting on a folded towel.

Out of the case, it was heavier than it looked.

She sat with it for thirty minutes before she touched it with anything but her hands. That was the discipline. Everyone wanted to start; the whole trade was people who wanted to start. Her first teacher had made her sit with objects for an hour before she was allowed to breathe near them, and the point of it, he said, was that an object will tell you what happened to it if you let it finish talking.

So she let it talk.

It said: I am much older than I look. The goldwork was beautiful and the goldwork was also a later dress — she could see, under the loupe, where it had been cut and re-laid at least twice, by two different hands, centuries apart. Somebody had loved this enough to re-house it.

It said: I am not solid. When she turned it, very slowly, close to her ear, there was no rattle, but there was something else — a faint, dense shift, like a pool of oil moving in a sealed jar.

And it said, once she got the lamp low and raking across the surface at almost nothing degrees: that isn't a crack.

Eva sat back.

She put the loupe down, rubbed her eye, put it back up, and looked again for a long time while rain started to come sideways off the sea and hit the library windows like gravel.

The line ran from the notch at the top of the heart, around the swell of the left chamber, and down. It had the appearance of a fracture — the hairline width, the slight discontinuity where it crossed the gold. But a fracture in glass has a character. It has a conchoidal ripple, it has an origin point, it has hackle marks running away from the impact like the wake of a boat, and you can always, always find where it started.

This one had no origin.

It was the same width at every point along its length. It was the same width where it crossed glass and where it crossed gold, which was impossible, because those two materials do not fail in the same way. And when she traced it all the way around — three-quarters of the way round the object, which took her forty minutes and made her shoulders ache — it came back and met itself, and the join was invisible.

It wasn't a crack. It was a seam. It was a joint that had been made so well that four restorers in twenty years had looked at it and seen damage.

"Oh," said Eva, out loud, in an empty room, "you beauty."

Her hands were shaking, which was unprofessional, so she got up and walked around the library twice and drank a glass of water and looked at the dead butterflies until she was calm.

Then she sat down and thought about it properly.

If it was a joint, it opened. Everything that is joined can be unjoined; that is the whole faith of the trade. And it would not open with solvent or with heat, because there was nothing in there to dissolve or soften. The German from Munich had tried adhesive, which meant the German from Munich had thought he was closing a wound, and you could not blame him for that, because for twenty years the hotel's own printed card in the window recess had described the object as damaged.

Not damaged. Shut.

So: pressure. Somewhere on that seam there was a point that took a load and let the whole thing rotate or lift or spring. She'd seen the principle before — in puzzle boxes, in a fifteenth-century Bavarian pyx with a false floor, in that horrible fake Fabergé egg that had eaten six weeks of her life.

She found it at eleven forty.

It was on the underside of the right chamber, a place where the gold made a tiny raised boss that read, to the eye, as a flaw in the casting. It wasn't a flaw. It was worn — microscopically, beautifully worn, in an oval about the size of a thumbprint, because for however many hundreds of years, somebody's thumb had gone exactly there.

Eva put her thumb on it.

It fitted the way a stair fits your foot in the dark.

Outside, the storm took a breath. There was that odd suspended hush that comes in the middle of weather, when the wind drops and you can hear the water running off the roof.

And Eva Cross, twenty-four years old and eleven minutes from being twenty-five, sat alone in a lamplit room with her thumb on a piece of gold and thought, with perfect clarity:

This is the single most interesting thing that has ever happened to me.

She pressed.

There was no click.

The heart simply became, under her hands, two things where there had been one — the seam opening along its whole length at once, smooth as a mouth, with a sigh of air that smelled, absurdly, of snow and hot iron and something green.

And light came out.

Not a beam. Nothing so vulgar. The light came out slowly, the way water comes out of a tipped glass, a thick amber-gold rope of it that poured over her hands and off the edge of the table and did not reach the floor, and where it touched her it was cold.

Eva did not let go. That was the thing she was proudest of, afterwards, and the thing she cursed for years.

She did not let go, because her hands were on a four-hundred-year-old object and you do not drop an object, you never drop the object, you go down with it if you have to. So when the table stopped being under her elbows, and the lamp went out, and the sound of the rain cut off as cleanly as a switch being thrown, Evangeline Cross was still holding on with both hands.

The last thing she saw in her own century was the wall of butterflies, lit gold, every case at once.

She landed in mud.

It went over her wrists and into her mouth and up her nose, freezing, gritty, stinking of rot and animals, and she came up onto her hands and knees retching and gasping and her first thought was the heart, where's the heart and she scrabbled for it and found nothing but stones.

The cold hit second. It came through the linen dress in about four seconds and took her breath.

She got her head up.

She was on a slope. Below her, a long way below, there was a valley with a river in it going silver, and the black shapes of trees, and no lights — none, anywhere, not one — and above her there was a mountain, and above the mountain there was a sky so crowded with stars that she made a sound in her throat, because she had never in her life seen that many, and because there was something wrong with them.

She'd done a season of astronomy at fourteen. She knew the shapes. And they were all there, all the ones she could name, and they were all slightly wrong, the way a face in a dream is wrong — as if someone had taken the sky and nudged it a quarter of a degree while she wasn't looking.

Eva knelt in the mud on a mountainside in her holiday dress, and heard herself start to hyperventilate, and made herself stop, because she had a system for this, she had spent a great deal of money on a system for this.

Five things you can see.

Stars. Trees. A river. The mountain. A track — there, ten feet below her, a rutted track running along the slope.

Four things you can hear.

Wind. Water. Her own breathing.

And voices.

They came up the track about ninety minutes later, and by then she was so cold that she was almost glad to see a light.

Four men, two horses, one lantern, and a wagon with a canvas tilt. She stood up out of the scrub with her hands open in front of her, and the lantern came round, and a man said something.

And she understood it.

That was worse than the stars. That was worse than everything.

Because she heard the sound of it, and it was not any language she had ever encountered, it had a shape her mouth had never made, and at the same time — in the same instant, with no gap at all, no translation, no lag — she knew that he had said:

"Well. Look what the mountain left out."

Eva's mouth was open. Nothing came out.

The man got down off the horse. He was not unkind-looking. He held the lantern up and looked at her bare feet, and her ruined dress, and her hands.

"No shoes," he said, to the others. "No shoes and a good dress. She's run from somewhere."

"Please," said Eva, and heard it come out of her in his language, and the top of her mind went white with terror. "Please, I need — I don't know where I am, I need a phone, I need —"

He'd stopped listening around the word please.

"She's got no people," he said. "Look at her. Nobody's up here in the dark with no shoes because they've got people."

He turned around and went back to the wagon, and Eva, still saying things, still explaining, still reaching into a pocket that wasn't there for a phone that was in another century, watched him lift the canvas.

In the lantern-light she saw a chain.

She had been in the fifteenth century for three hours and fifty minutes.