Chapter 9 Fides et Fortitudo

Philip

On Wednesday night, while the nor'easter took slates off half the roofs in Old Harbor and a small boy on Netmaker Lane counted Rhys Calloway's heartbeat, Philip Whitlock slept nine hours without a dream.

He always slept well. He considered it a professional skill, like reading a balance sheet upside down across a desk.

On Thursday morning he stood at the tall window of his office on the second floor of the Whitlock Trust, unwrapping his first peppermint of the day. Below him State Street was strewn with branches and wet newspaper, and a city crew was dragging a fallen limb off the hood of a parked car. The sky had been scrubbed clean.

The peppermint was the old-fashioned kind, a hard white disc striped with red, wrapped in cellophane twisted at both ends. He'd bought them from the same confectioner on Harbor Street for forty years. He put it in his mouth and read his phone.

Philip. Have to tell you about this week. Monday the Swiss woman saw old Calloway in consult and Rhys C came out looking like a writ.

Then TWO SMALL CHILDREN turned up with her. Boy and a girl. Yesterday at heart team she put MY echo on the wall and re-measured it in front of Okafor and the residents. Okafor made me amend my note. In front of RESIDENTS. Call me. T.

Trent Kemp texted the way he operated: too many capitals and no sense of when to stop.

Philip read it twice. Then he read the other message, from a man at his club who sat on two boards and heard everything: Calloway had Benedict Carrow up to the tower Tuesday at four. Family law, I'm told. Lively times.

He went downstairs. The Whitlock Trust had been built in 1884 out of New Hampshire granite by his great-great-grandfather, who'd believed a bank ought to look like it would still be standing after the Second Coming.

The main hall was three stories high, with brass lamps and marble counters and a floor that echoed. Over the great bronze doors, cut deep into the stone, were the words his family had lived under for a hundred and forty-two years.

FIDES ET FORTITUDO.

Faith and fortitude. He'd learned to read Latin from that lintel, at six years old, with his father's hand on his shoulder. He'd quoted it at every board dinner and every funeral of every partner who'd ever served the family. He believed in it the way he believed in compound interest. It worked, whether or not you thought about it.

A teller at the first counter wished him good morning, and he asked after her son's knee. He knew the names of everyone who worked in this building and most of their children. It cost him nothing, and it bought him a great deal.

He stood under the lintel and read Kemp's text a third time.

The heart-team business he could use. A vain man corrected in front of his juniors was a man in the market for a friend, and Philip had always bought at the bottom.

But it was the other line he kept returning to.

Two small children.

---

The claim had arrived on the twelfth of January.

Philip had been trustee of the Celeste Whitlock Trust for thirty years. As trustee, he had been formally served with notice that a claim had been lodged against it: sealed, in the Probate and Family Court, by a party asserting a beneficial interest under the terms of his sister's will. The cover letter was three paragraphs long and signed by Quentin Pruitt in his small, upright, maddening hand.

That was all it said. That was all it needed to say.

He'd felt it lodge in him like an entry that would not reconcile. Quarter-end, the books almost balanced, and one small figure that would not net to zero however many times you ran it. It was never the large ones that ruined you. It was the small ones you couldn't explain.

He'd carried it for ten weeks now. He'd carried it to his mother's house for Sunday lunch, where he'd sat at the head of her table and watched her pour the wine and said nothing, and she'd said nothing, and they'd both known.

There were photographs in a locked drawer of his desk at home. He'd never shown them to anyone, and nobody had ever asked.

A man in Zurich had taken them over the years, a man Philip paid to be discreet and to know nothing about why. A small dark woman pushing a double pram up a steep street. The same woman on a lake ferry with two toddlers. The same woman in surgical scrubs, crossing a hospital parking lot in the rain, her head down.

Two children. A boy and a girl. He'd looked at them in the photographs as he looked at a footnote: present, noted, immaterial.

And now she had come back. With them.

He thought of her face as the Zurich man had caught it once, in a long lens across a café terrace. The set of the chin. The stillness. The head held a little to one side, listening to something no one else could hear.

He had stopped breathing when he first saw that photograph. He'd set his brandy down on the desk without a coaster, and the ring it left was still there.

Margot is Celeste again.

He hadn't said it aloud. He never would.

---

Kemp came to lunch at one.

The Trust kept a private dining room on the third floor, paneled in walnut, with a single round table and a window onto the old harbor. Philip used it for clients who liked to feel singled out and for men who needed to feel they were among friends. Trent Kemp was the second kind.

He was a good surgeon, Philip had heard, in the sense that his patients mostly lived. He was also vain, underpaid by his own standards, and easily wounded.

"She's taking my department," Kemp said, before the soup had arrived. "Okafor brought her in over my head. He gave her my patient on her first morning. And yesterday she stood up in my own conference room and took my numbers apart in front of my residents. Okafor just sat there and let her."

"Bramport does love a novelty," Philip said. "It never lasts."

"It's forty patients. Forty! I've done more valve replacements than she's had birthdays." Kemp tore a roll in half. "And everyone's forgotten the history. She was the girl who poisoned old Calloway. The wife. And now she's in his room with a penlight."

Philip let him talk. It was the single most valuable thing his father had taught him: a man who feels heard will tell you twice as much and remember you as twice as wise.

When the soup bowls had been cleared, he took a long cream envelope from his inside pocket, unmarked, sealed. He slid it across the tablecloth, under the edge of the bread basket, until it stopped beside Kemp's hand.

Kemp looked at it.

"For the department's morale," Philip said. "I'm chair of the Foundation, Trent. I care about the people who've given that hospital their lives. It's been a difficult spring for you, and difficult springs are when a man finds out who his friends are." He smiled. "Fides et fortitudo. Keep the faith."

Kemp put his hand over the envelope. He didn't open it. He was not, Philip thought, entirely stupid.

"What would you need?"

"Need? Nothing." Philip offered him the dish of peppermints. "If anything ever occurs to you that the Foundation ought to know about, how the new program's running, whether Dr. Fairley is all she claims to be, you'll come to me first. As a friend."

Kemp took a peppermint. The envelope went into his jacket.

---

After Kemp had gone, Philip sat on alone with his coffee and looked at the harbor.

From this window, if you knew where to look, you could see the long dark line of the headland at Gull Point, and the pale road climbing along the top of it. The sea at the foot of the cliffs was flat and blue.

He did not often let himself think about that night. When he did, it came in one piece: a storm, a dark road, the telephone heavy and cold in his hand, a call he had made from a warm room with the curtains drawn, and then the long wait for the telephone to ring back.

He put the cup down and the thought went with it.

---

At three he telephoned Winston Okafor.

"Winston. Philip Whitlock. I hope the storm spared you."

"It took my gutter." Okafor's voice was guarded, as a surgeon's voice is with the man who signs the checks for his new scanners. "What can I do for you, Philip?"

"Nothing at all. I'm calling to congratulate you. The board is delighted about your new valve program. Dr. Fairley. A genuine coup."

"She's good."

"So I hear." Philip leaned back. "Though I gather there's some history. The Calloway family. One or two of our donors have asked me about it, and of course I've told them it's ancient gossip. But you know how donors are. They like to feel reassured."

There was a short pause on the line.

"Dr. Fairley was never charged with anything," Okafor said.

"Of course not. That's precisely what I tell them." Philip's voice was all warmth; his eyes were on Gull Point. "I'd love to meet her. And Winston, if the program ever needs anything, you'll come to me first. The Foundation looks after its own."

"Thank you, Philip."

"Fides et fortitudo," said Philip, and rang off, and left his hand resting on the receiver until it had warmed under his palm.

---

Hollis Grieve came in by the service door at half past three and stood in the doorway of Philip's office, dressed to fix a radiator.

He was a broad, unremarkable man of forty-five in a gray work jacket with the cuffs gone shiny, a man you'd pass in a hardware store and never remember. That was his gift. Philip had used him for eleven years, for things that required a man nobody remembered.

Philip didn't ask him to sit. He never did.

"Netmaker Lane," he said. "Number fourteen. Old Harbor."

Grieve wrote nothing down. He never did that either.

"A woman, thirty, a surgeon at St. Ansel. Two children, four years old. Someone will be minding them." Philip turned his peppermint over in his fingers.

"I want to know who comes to the house. Who goes. What time she leaves in the morning and what time she comes home. Whether a car from Whitlock Hall has been there, and how often, and what anyone carried in or out of it."

"Your mother's car."

"My mother's car." Philip looked at him. "Is that a difficulty?"

"No."

"And if she sees me?"

"She won't. Nobody ever does." Philip unwrapped the peppermint and held it up between finger and thumb, the red stripes catching the afternoon light. "Don't go near the house. Don't touch anything. Not yet. Park where a man waiting for a fish delivery would park. Watch."

Grieve's eyes went to the window and came back. That was all the acknowledgment Philip ever got from him, and all he wanted.

"She's been in Bramport five days," Philip said. "My mother has been to Zurich every spring for twenty years. My mother sits across from me every Sunday and says nothing, and smiles." He turned the peppermint so the light ran around its edge. "Find out what Beatrix has told her. Everything."