The House On The Strand Part 2

"Well," he said, as we parted at the gate, "if you feel like coming, either to a service or just to wander around, it will be nice to see you."

We shook hands, and I walked up the road to where I had parked the car. I wondered whether I had been impossibly rude. I had not even thanked him for his courtesy, or introduced myself. Doubtless he considered me just another summer visitor, more boorish than usual, and a crank into the bargain. I got into the car, lit a cigarette, and sat there to collect my thoughts. The fact that there had been no physical reaction to the drug whatsoever was an astonishing relief. Not a suspicion of dizziness or nausea, and my limbs did not ache as they had done the day before, nor was I sweating.

I wound down the car window and looked up the street, then back again to the church. None of it fitted. The green where the people had so lately crowded must have covered all the present area, and beyond it too, where the modern road turned uphill. The Priory yard, where the bishop's equipage nearly came to grief would have been in that hollow below the gents hairdresser, boundering the east wall of the churchyard, and the Priory itself according to one theory mentioned by the vicar, filled the entire s.p.a.ce that the southern portion of the churchyard held today. I closed my eyes. I saw the entrance, the quadrangle, the long narrow building forming kitchens and refectory, monks dormitory, chapter-house, where the reception had been held, and the Prior's chamber above. Then I opened them again, but the pieces did not fit, and the church tower threw my jigsaw puzzle out of balance. It was no good-nothing tallied save the lie of the land.

I threw away my cigarette, started the car, and took the road past the church. A curious feeling of elation came to me as I swept downhill past the valley stream, and so to the low-lying, straggling shops of Par. Not ten minutes since the whole of this had been under water, the sloping Priory lands lapped by the sea. Sand-banks had bordered the wide sweep of the estuary where those bungalows stood now, and houses and shops were all blue channel with a running tide. I stopped the car by the chemists and bought some tooth-paste, the feeling of elation increasing as the girl wrapped it up. It seemed to me that she was without substance, the shop as well, and the two other people standing there, and I felt myself smiling furtively because of this, with an urge to say, You none of you exist. All this is under water.

I stood outside the shop, and it had stopped raining. The heavy pall that had been overhead all day had broken at last into a patchwork sky, squares of blue alternating with wisps of smoky cloud. Too soon to go back home. Too early to ring Magnus. One thing I had proved, if nothing else: this time there had been no telepathy between us. He might have had some intuition of my movements the preceding afternoon, but not today. The laboratory in Kilmarth was not a bogey-hole conjuring up ghosts, any more than the porch in Saint Andrew's church had been filled with phantoms. Magnus must be right in his a.s.sumption that some primary chemical process was reversible, the drug inducing this change; and conditions were such that the senses, reacting to the situation as a secondary effect, swung into action, capturing the past. I had not awakened from some nostalgic dream when the vicar tapped me on the shoulder, but had pa.s.sed from one living reality to another. Could time be all-dimensional-yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repet.i.tion? Perhaps it needed only a change of ingredient, a different enzyme, to show the future, myself a bald-headed buffer in New York with the boys grown-up and married, and Vita dead. The thought was disconcerting. I would rather concern myself with the Champernounes, the Carminowes, and Isolda. No telepathic communication here: Magnus had mentioned none of them, but the vicar had, and only after I had seen them as living persons. Then I decided what to do: I would drive to Saint Austell and see if there was some volume in the public library that would give proof of their ident.i.ty.

The library was perched above the town, and I parked the car and went inside. The girl at the desk was helpful. She advised me to go upstairs to the reference library, and search for pedigrees in a book called The Visitations of Cornwall.

I took the fat volume from the shelves and settled myse]f at one of the tables. First glance in alphabetical order was disappointing. No Bodrugans and no Champernounes. No Carminowes either. And no Cardinhams. I turned to the beginning once again, and then, with quickening interest, realised that I must have muddled the pages the first time, for I came upon the Carminowes of Carminowe. I let my eye travel down the page, and there Sir John was, married to a Joanna into the bargain-he must have found the similarity of name of wife and mistress confusing. He had a great brood of children, and one of his grandsons, Miles, had inherited Boconnoc. Bococcoc... Bockenod... a change in the spelling, but this was my Sir John without a doubt.

On the succeeding page was his elder brother Sir Oliver Carminowe. By his first wife he had had several children. I glanced along the line and found Isould his second wife, daughter of one Reynold Ferrers of Bere in Devon, and below, at the bottom of the page, her daughters, Joanna and Margaret. I'd got her-not the vicar's Devon heiress, Isolda Cardinham, but a descendant.

I pushed the heavy volume aside, and found myself smiling fatuously into the face of a bespectacled man reading the Daily Telegraph, who stared at me suspiciously, then hid his face behind his paper. My la.s.s unparalleled was no figure of the imagination, nor a telepathic process of thought between Magnus and myself. She had lived, though the dates were sketchy: it did not state when she was born or when she died. I put the book back on the shelves and walked downstairs and out of the building, the feeling of elation increased by my discovery. Carminowes, Champernounes, Bodrugans, all dead for six hundred years, yet still alive in my other world of time. I drove away from Saint Austell thinking how much I had accomplished in one afternoon, witnessing a ceremony in a Priory long since crumbled, coupled with Martinmas upon the village green. And all through some wizard's brew concocted by Magnus, leaving no side-effect or aftermath, only a sense of well-being and delight. It was as easy as falling off a cliff. I drove up Polmear hill doing a cool sixty, and it was not until I had turned down the drive to Kilmarth, put away the car and let myself into the house that I thought of the simile again. Falling off a cliff... Was this the side-effect? This sense of exhilaration, that nothing mattered? Yesterday the nausea, the vertigo, because I had broken the rules. Today, moving from one world to another without effort, I was c.o.c.k-a-hoop.

I went upstairs to the library and dialled the number of Magnus's flat. He answered immediately.

"How was it?" he asked.

"What do you mean, how was it? How was what? It rained all day."

"Fine in London," he replied. "But forget the weather. How was the second trip?"

His certainty that I had made the experiment again irritated me. "What makes you think I took a second trip?"

"One always does."

"Well, you're right, as it happens. I didn't intend to, but I wanted to prove something."

"What did you want to prove?"

"That the experiment was nothing to do with any telepathic communication between us."

"I could have told you that," he said.

"Perhaps. But we had both experimented first in Blue-beard's chamber, which might have had an unconscious influence So... So, I poured the drops into your drinking-flask-forgive me for making myself at home-drove to the church, and swallowed them in the porch. His snort of delight annoyed me even more.

"What's the matter?" I asked. "Don't tell me you did the same."

"Precisely. But not in the porch, dear boy, in the churchyard after dark. The point is, what did you see?"

I told him, winding up with my encounter with the vicar, the visit to the public library, and the absence, or so I had thought, of any side-effects. He listened to my saga without interruption, as he had done the day before, and when I had concluded he told me to hang on, he was going to pour himself a drink, but he reminded me not to do likewise. The thought of his gin and tonic added fuel to my small flame of irritation.

"I think you came out of it all very well," he said, "and you seem to have met the flower of the county, which is more than I have ever done, in that time or this."

"You mean you did not have the same experience?"

"Quite the contrary. No chapter-house or village green for me. I found myself in the monks dormitory, a very different kettle of fish."

"What went on?" I asked.

"Exactly what you might suppose when a bunch of mediaeval Frenchmen got together. Use your imagination."

Now it was my turn to snort. The thought of fastidious Magnus playing peeping Tom amongst that fusty crowd brought my good humour back again.

"You know what I think?" I said. "I think we found what we deserved. I got His Grace the Bishop and the County, awaking in me all the forgotten sn.o.b appeal of Stonyhurst, and you got the s.e.xy deviations you have denied yourself for thirty years."

"How do you know I've denied them?"

"I don't. I give you credit for good behaviour."

"Thanks for the compliment. The point is, none of this can be put down to telepathic communication between us. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"Therefore we saw what we saw through another channel-the horseman, Roger. He was in the chapter-house and on the green with you, and in the dormitory with me. His is the brain that channels the information to us."

"Yes, but why?"

"Why? You don't think we are going to discover that in a couple of trips? You have work to do."

"That's all very well, but it's a bit of a bore having to shadow this chap, or have him shadow me, every time I may decide to make the experiment. I don't find him very sympathetic. Nor do I take to the lady of the manor."

"The lady of the manor?" He paused a moment, I supposed for reflection. "She's possibly the one I saw on my third trip. Auburn-haired, brown eyes, rather a b.i.t.c.h?"

"That sounds like her. Joanna Champernoune," I said. We both laughed, struck by the folly and the fascination of discussing someone who had been dead for centuries as if we had met her at some party in our own time.

"She was arguing about manor lands," he said. "I did not follow it. Incidentally, have you noticed how one gets the sense of the conversation without conscious translation from the mediaeval French they seem to be speaking? That's the link again, between his brain and ours. If we saw it before us in print, old English or Norman-French or Cornish, we shouldn't understand a word."

"You're right," I said. "It hadn't struck me. Magnus-"

"Yes?"

"I'm still a bit bothered about side-effects. What I mean is, thank G.o.d I had no nausea or vertigo today, but on the contrary a tremendous sense of elation, and I must have broken the speed-limit several times driving home."

He did not reply at once, and when he did his tone was guarded. "That's one of the things," he said, "one of the reasons we have to test the drug. It could be addictive."

"What do you mean exactly, addictive?"

"What I say. Not just the fascination of the experience itself; which we both know n.o.body else has tried, but the stimulation to the part of the brain affected. And I've warned you before of the possible physical dangers-being run over, that sort of thing. You must appreciate that part of the brain is shut off when you're under the influence of the drug. The functional part still controls your movements, rather as one can drive with a high percentage of alcohol in the blood and not have an accident, but the danger is always present, and there doesn't appear to be a warning system between one part of the brain and another. There may be. There may not. All this is part of what I have to find out."

"Yes," I said. "Yes, I see." I felt rather deflated. The sense of exhilaration which 1 had experienced while driving back had certainly been unusual. "I'd better lay off," I said, "give it a miss, unless the circ.u.mstances are absolutely right."

Again he paused before he answered. "That's up to you," he said. "You must judge for yourself. Any more questions? I'm dining out."

Any more questions... A dozen, twenty. But I should think of them all when he had rung off. "Yes," I said. "Did you know before you took your first trip that Roger had once lived here in this house?"

"Absolutely not," he replied. "Mother used to talk about the Bakers of the seventeenth century, and the Rashleighs who followed them. We knew nothing about their predecessors, although my father had a vague idea that the foundations went back to the fourteenth century; I don't know who told him."

"Is that why you converted the old laundry into Bluebeard's chamber?"

"No, it just seemed a suitable place, and the cloam oven is rather fun. It retains the heat if you light the fire, and I can keep liquids there at a high temperature while I'm working at something else alongside. Perfect atmosphere. Nothing sinister about it. Don't run away with the idea that this experiment is some sort of a ghost-hunt, dear boy. We're not conjuring spirits from the vasty deep."

"No, I realise that," I sald.

"To reduce it to its lowest level, if you sit in an armchair watching some old movie on television, the characters don't pop out of the screen to haunt you, although many of the actors are dead. It's not so very different from what you were up to this afternoon. Our guide Roger and his friends were living once, but are well and truly laid today."

I knew what he meant, but it was not as simple as that. The implications went deeper, and the impact too; the sensation was not so much that of witnessing their world as of taking part in it.

"I wish", I said, "we knew more about our guide. I dare-say I can dig up the others in the Saint Austell library-I've found the Carminowes already, as I told you, John, and his brother Oliver, and Oliver's wife Isolda-but a steward called Roger is rather a long shot, and is hardly likely to figure in any pedigree."

"Probably not, but you can never tell. One of my students has a buddy who works in the Public Record Office and the British Museum, and I've got the business in hand. I haven't told him why I am interested, just that I want a list of taxpayers in the parish of Tywardreath in the fourteenth century. He should be able to find it, I gather, in the Lay Subsidy Roll for 1327, which must be pretty near the period we want. If something turns up I'll let you know. Any news of Vita?"

"None."

"Pity you didn't arrange to fly the boys over to her in New York," he said.

"Too d.a.m.ned expensive. Besides, that would have meant I had to go too."

"Well, keep them all at bay for as long as you can. Say something has gone wrong with the drains-that will daunt her."

"Nothing daunts Vita," I told him. "She'd bring some plumbing expert down from the American Emba.s.sy."

"Well, press on before she arrives. And while I think of it, you know the sample marked B in the lab, alongside the A solution you're using?"

"Yes."

"Pack it carefully and send it up to me. I want to put it under test."

"Then you are going to try it out in London?"

"Not on myself, on a healthy young monkey. He won't see his mediaeval forebears, but he might get the staggers. Goodbye." Magnus had hung up on me again in his usual brusque fashion, leaving me with the inevitable sense of depletion. It was always so, whenever we met and talked, or spent an evening together. First the stimulation, sparks flying and the moments speeding by, then suddenly he would be gone, hailing a taxi and disappearing-not to be seen again for several weeks-while I wandered aimlessly back to my own fiat.

"And how was your Professor?" Vita would ask in the ironic, rather mocking tone she a.s.sumed when I had pa.s.sed an evening in Magnus's company, an emphasis on the 'your', which never failed to sting.

"In the usual form," I would answer. "Full of wild ideas I find amusing."

"Glad you had fun," was the reaction, but with a biting edge that implied the reverse of pleasure. She told me once, after a somewhat longer session than usual, when I had come home rather high about 2 a.m., that Magnus sapped me, and that when I returned to her I looked like a p.r.i.c.ked balloon.

It was one of our first rows, and I did not know how to deal with it.

She wandered around the sitting-room punching cushions and emptying her own ash-trays, while I sat on the sofa looking aggrieved. We went to bed without speaking, but the next morning, to my surprise and relief she behaved as if nothing had happened, and positively glowed with feminine warmth and charm. Magnus was not mentioned again, but I made a mental note not to dine with him again unless she had a date herself elsewhere.

Today I did not feel like a p.r.i.c.ked balloon when he rang off-the expression was rather offensive, come to think of it, suggesting the foetid air of somebody's breath exploding-merely denuded of stimulation, and a little uneasy too, because why did he suddenly want a test done on the bottle marked B? Did he want to make certain of his findings on the unfortunate monkey before putting me, the human guinea-pig, to a possibly sharper test? There was still sufficient solution in bottle A to keep me going...

I was brought up sharply in my train of thought. Keep me going? It sounded like an alcoholic preparing for a spree, and I remembered what Magnus had said about the possibilities of the drug being addictive. Perhaps this was another reason for trying it out on the monkey. I had a vision of the creature, bleary-eyed, leaping about his cage and panting for the next injection.

I felt in my pocket for the flask, and rinsed it out very thoroughly. I did not replace it on the pantry shelf however, for Mrs. Collins might take it into her head to move it somewhere else, and then if I happened to want it I should have to ask her where it was, which would be a bore. It was too early for supper, but the tray she had laid with ham and salad, fruit and cheese looked tempting, and I decided to carry it into the music-room and have a long evening by the wood fire. I took a stack of records at random and piled them one on top of the other on the turn-table. But, no matter what sounds filled the music-room, I kept returning to the scenes of this afternoon, the reception in the Priory chapter-house, the stripping of carca.s.ses on the village green, the hooded musician with his double horn wandering amongst the children and the barking dogs, and above all that la.s.s with braided hair and jewelled fillet who, one afternoon six hundred years ago, had looked so bored until, because of some remark which I could not catch, spoken by a man in another time, she had lifted her head and smiled.

CHAPTER FIVE.

THERE WAS AN airmall letter from Vita on my breakfast tray next morning. It was written from her brother's house on Long Island. The heat was terrific, she said, they were in the pool all day, and Joe was taking his family to Newport on the yacht he had chartered mid-week. What a pity we had not known his plans earlier on. I could have flown the boys over and we could all have spent the summer vacation together. As things were, it was too late to change anything. She only hoped the Professor's house would turn out to be a success-and how was it, anyway? Did I want her to bring a lot of food down from London? She was flying from New York on Wednesday, and hoped there would be a letter for her at the flat in London. Today was Wednesday. She was due in at London airport around ten o'clock this evening, and she would not find a letter in the flat because I had not expected her until the weekend.

The thought of Vita arriving in the country within a few hours came as a shock. The days I had thought my own, with complete freedom to plan as I wished, would be upset by telephone calls, demands, questions, the whole paraphernalia of life en famille. Somehow, before the first telephone call came through, I must be ready with a delaying device, some scheme to keep her and the boys in London for at least another few days.

Magnus had suggested drains. Drains it well might be, but the trouble was that when Vita finally arrived she would naturally start asking Mrs. Collins about it, and Mrs. Collins would stare at her in blank surprise. The rooms not ready? This would reflect on Mrs. Collins, and bode ill for future relations between the two women. Electricity failure? But it hadn't any more than the drains. Nor could I pretend to be ill, for this would bring Vita down immediately to move me, wrapped in blankets, to hospital back in London; she was suspicious of all medical treatment unless it was top grade. Well, I must think of something, if only for Magnus's sake; it would be letting him down if the experiment was brought to an abrupt conclusion after only two attempts to prove success. Today was Wednesday. Say experiment on Wednesday, give it a miss on Thursday, then experiment on Friday, a miss on Sat.u.r.day, experiment on Sunday, and, if Vita was adamant about coming down on Monday, then Monday she must come. This plan allowed for three trips (the L.S.D. phraseology was certainly apt) and, providing nothing went wrong and I chose my moment well, did nothing foolish, the side-effects would be nil, just as they had been yesterday, apart from the sense of exhilaration, which I should immediately recognise and accept as a warning. In any event I felt no exhilaration now; Vita's letter was doubtless the cause of the slight despondency that appeared to be my form today.

Breakfast over, I told Mrs. Collins that my wife was arriving in London tonight, and would probably be coming down with her boys next week, on Monday or Tuesday. She immediately produced a list of groceries and other things which would be needed. This gave me an opportunity to drive down to Par to collect them, and at the same time think out the text of a letter to Vita which she would get the following morning. The first person I saw in the grocer's was the vicar of Saint Andrew's, who crossed the shop to say good morning. I introduced myself, belatedly, as Richard Young, and told him that I had taken his advice and gone to the county library at Saint Austell after leaving the church. "You must be a real enthusiast," he smiled. "Did you find what you wanted?"

"In part," I replied. "The heiress Isolda de Cardinham proved elusive in the book of pedigrees, although I found a descendant, Isolda Carminowe, whose father was a Reynold Ferrers of Bere in Devon."

"Reynold Ferrers rings a bell, he said. The son, I believe I'm right in saying, of Sir William Ferrers who married the heiress. Therefore your Isolda would be their granddaughter. I know the heiress sold the manor of Tywardreath to one of the Champernounes in 1269, just before she married William Ferrers, for one hundred pounds. Quite a sum in those days."

I made a rapid calculation in my head. My Isolda could hardly have been born before 1300. She had not looked more than about twenty-eight at the bishop's reception, which would date that event around 1328. I followed the vicar round the shop as he made his purchases. "Do you still celebrate Martinmas at Tywardreath?" I asked.

"Martinmas?" he echoed, looking bewildered-he was hesitating between a choice of biscuits. "Forgive me, I don't quite follow you. It was a well-known feast in the centuries before the Reformation. We keep Saint Andrew's Day, of course, and generally hold the church fete in the middle of June."

"Sorry," I murmured, "I've got my dates rather mixed. The truth is, I was brought up a Catholic, and went to school at Stonyhurst, and I seem to remember we used to attach a certain importance to Saint Martin's Eve..."

"You are perfectly right," he interrupted, smiling. "November 11th, Armistice Day, has rather taken its place, hasn't it? Or rather, Armistice Sunday. But now I understand your interest in the Priory, if you're a Catholic."

"Non-practising," I admitted, "but you have a point. Old customs cling. Do you ever have a fair on the village green?"

"I'm afraid not," he said, plainly puzzled, "and to the best of my knowledge there has never been a village green at Tywardreath Excuse me..."

He leant forward to receive the purchases dropped in his basket, and the a.s.sistant turned his attention to me. I consulted the list given me by Mrs. Collins, and the vicar, with a cheery good morning, went his way. I wondered if he thought me mad, or merely one of Professor Lane's more eccentric friends. I had forgotten Saint Martin's Eve was November 11th. An odd coincidence of dates. Slaughter of oxen, pigs and sheep, and in the world of today a commemoration of uncounted numbers slain in battle. I must remember to tell Magnus. I carried my load of groceries outside, dumped them in the boot of the car, and drove out of Par by the church road to Tywardreath. But instead of parking outside the gents hairdressers, as I had done the day before, I drove slowly up the hill through the centre of the village, trying to reconstruct that non-existent village green. It was hopeless. There were houses to right and left of me, and at the top of the hill the road branched right to Fowey, while to the left the sign-post said To Treesmill. Somewhere, from the top of this hill, the Bishop and his cortege had driven yesterday, and the covered wagonettes of Carminowes, Champernounes and Bodrugans, their coats-of-arms emblazoned on the side. Sir John Carminowe would have taken the right-hand fork-if it existed-to Lostwithiel and his demesne of Bockenod, where his lady awaited her confinement. Today Bockenod was Boconnoc, a vast estate a few miles from Lostwithiel; I had pa.s.sed one of the lodge gates on my drive down from London. Where, then, did the lord of the manor, Sir Henry de Chainpernoune, have his demesne? His wife Joanna had told her steward, my horseman Roger, 'The Bodrugans lodge with us tonight.' Where would the manor house have stood?

I stopped the car at the top of the hill and looked about me. There was no house of any great size in the village of Tywardreath itself; some of the cottages could be late eighteenth century, but none belonged to an earlier period. Reason told me that manor houses were seldom destroyed, unless by fire, and even if they were burnt to the ground, or the walls crumbled, the site would be put to another purpose within a few years, and a farmhouse erected on the spot to serve the one-time manor lands. Somewhere, within a radius of a mile or two of Priory and church, the Champernounes would have built their own dwelling, or the original manor-house would have awaited them when the first Isolda, the Cardinham heiress, sold them the manor lands in 1269. Somewhere-down that left-hand fork, perhaps, where the sign-post read To Treesmill-the foot-tapping Joanna, impatient to be home, had driven in her painted wagonette from the Priory reception, accompanied by her sad-faced lord Sir Henry, and their son William, and followed by her brother Otto Bodrugan and his wife Margaret.

I glanced at my watch. It was past twelve, and Mrs. Collins would be waiting to put away the groceries and cook my lunch. Also I had to write to Vita.

I settled to the letter after lunch. It took an hour or so to compose, nor was I satisfied with the result, but it would have to serve. Darling, I said, I had not realised, until your letter came this morning, that you were actually flying back today, so you won't get this before tomorrow. If I've muddled things, forgive me. The fact is there has been a tremendous amount to do here to get the place straight for you and the boys, and I've been hard at it ever since I arrived. Mrs. Collins, Magnus's daily, has been wonderful, but you know what a bachelor household is, and Magnus himself has not been down since Easter, so things were a bit sketchy. Also, and this is the real crux, Magnus asked me to go through a lot of his papers, and so on-he keeps a ma.s.s of scientific stuff in his laboratory which must not be touched-and all this has to be put away safely. He asked me to see to it as a personal favour, and I can't let him down, because after all we are getting the house rent-free, and it's some sort of return. I ought to be clear of this ch.o.r.e by Monday, but want the next few days free to get on with it, and the weekend too. Incidentally, the weather has been foul. It rained without ceasing all yesterday, so you aren't missing anything, but the locals say it will improve next week.

Don't worry about food, Mrs. C has everything under control, and she's a very good cook, so you won't have to worry on that score. Anyway, I'm sure you can occupy the boys until Monday, there must be museums and things they haven't seen, and you will want to meet people, so, darling, I suggest we plan for next week, and by then there should be no problems.

I'm so glad you enjoyed yourself with Joe and family. Yes-perhaps, in retrospect, it might have been a good idea to have flown the boys out to New York, but it's easy to be wise after the event. I hope you're not too tired, darling, after the flight. Ring me when you get this.

Your loving d.i.c.k.

I read the letter through twice. It seemed better the second time: it rang true. And I did have to sort things for Magnus. When I lie I like to base the lie on a foundation of fact, for it appeases not only conscience but a sense of justice. I stamped the envelope and put it in my pocket, and then I remembered that Magnus wanted bottle B from the laboratory sent up to him in London. I rummaged about, found a small box, paper and string, and went down to the lab. I compared bottle B with bottle A, but there seemed to be no difference between the two. I was still carrying the flask of yesterday in my jacket pocket, and it was a simple matter to measure a second dose from A into the flask. I could use my judgement when, and if, I decided to take it. Then I locked the lab and went upstairs, and had a look at the weather through the library window. It was not raining, and the sky was clearing out to sea. I packed up bottle B with great care, then drove down to Par to register it and to drop Vita's letter in the box, wondering, not so much what she would say when she read it, as how the monkey would react to his first trip into the unknown.