Page 56 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“It is.” He inclines his head in the small nod that turns a correction into an offer. “But it is not the reason. The reason is in your own case.”

He points, with one finger, at the bell.

“Bells were cast for the launch. That one has a date on the waist, beneath the crown. It is turned three-quarters away from the glass, which is why no one has read it in some years.”

Dr. Cardoso puts her drink down on top of a display case, which I suspect is a firing offense in her own building. Then she crouches down in a cocktail dress not designed for crouching and angles her phone flashlight up under the crown of a two-hundred-and-twenty-seven-year-old bell while eleven people watch her do it. She stays down there long enough that the people around us stop talking.

When she comes up, her face has the dazed happy look of someone unwrapping a truly fantastic gift.

“Seventeen ninety-nine,” she breathes. “Where did you read that?”

“Somewhere.”

“No. Where. I’ve got the Salem abstracts and I’ve got Pratt and I’ve got the insurance filings, and no one has ever put the re-rig against the tonnage. No one. Would you come in on a weekday? There’s a whole wall out there I don’t trust.”

“That’s very kind,” Julian says.

It’s the voice he uses for declining things, but she’s far too happy to hear it.

I stand there holding a paper napkin with a stuffed mushroom on it, and not one other person in that room finds any of it strange. That’s the part. Mabel is beaming. Doris is telling someone he’s a great reader. Everyone inside forty feet has filed the last ninety seconds under isn’t he clever and gone happily back to the auction.

What I feel is harder to file. There’s a warm, ridiculous pride in it that I have no right to feel, because I didn’t teach that man one single thing. Underneath the pride is something quieter and sharper. I have just watched him hand a stranger the best evening of her career out of a pocket he will not let me look into, and it hurts, and I would rather it didn’t.

Then he says near my ear, “There’s an alarming quantity of copper vessels in my kitchen. I don’t know what any of it is for. Come and tell me, if you have an afternoon.”

“Tomorrow after five,” I say before he’s finished, and his mouth curves.

“Tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 12

Ifind the portrait at ten, entirely by accident, because I’m looking for a bathroom.

The side gallery off the east hall is where this museum puts the things it hasn’t decided about. It’s drafty and badly lit and contains four ship portraits, a case of buttons, and a display about the ropewalk that has been in that exact spot since the Ford administration.

There’s an oil on the end wall, three feet high, in a frame someone has cleaned too hard. A man stands at a table in a dark coat and high collar, with one hand on a chart and the light off the water coming through the window behind him. He has dark hair pushed back off a high forehead and eyes so dark the painter appears to have given up and used the same color he used for the coat. He isn’t smiling, but there’s something at the corner of that mouth that says he might, later, once everyone has gone home.

I look at it for about nine seconds. Then I laugh out loud, alone in a gallery.

The card says Gentleman with a Chart, c. 1816. Artist unknown. Gift of the Pratt family, 1958.

“Julian,” I call.

He comes, unhurried, across thirty feet of two-hundred-year-old floorboard without making one single sound, which is something about him I stopped remarking on in October.

“Look at this.”

He looks at it.

For half a second something goes over his face that is not embarrassment and is not amusement. It’s the expression of a man watching a wave come in from a long way off and calculating, without any particular alarm, exactly where it is going to reach.

Then it’s gone.

“It is a portrait of a man in a coat,” he says.

“It’s your portrait of a man in a coat. That is your face. That’s the thing you do with your mouth when Theo talks about the Bruins.”

“His chin is different.”