Margaret apartment (part three)

The door creaked open with a reluctant groan as I stepped inside, closing it behind me with a muted click. My apartment, perched on the upper floor of an aging London bookstore , smelled faintly of tobacco, ink, and the ghosts of midnight lamplight.

Heavy drapes, drawn halfway, let in the dull gray of a foggy morning, casting long shadows over worn oriental rugs and a fireplace choked with yesterday’s ashes. On the mantle sat my battered violin case, unopened for weeks, beside a stack of yellowing monographs on poisons, cryptography, and rare birds of the Pyrenees.

The sitting room was cluttered, but not disorderly. Everything had its place just not one that any other human might anticipate. A Persian slipper dangled from the corner of a chair, a revolver tucked into its toe like a forgotten toy. A rack near the hearth held three pipes, each scorched and blackened from use one still faintly warm. Chemical glassware glinted from a corner table, where a single notebook lay open, its pages inked with spidery handwriting and geometric diagrams no ordinary mind could decipher at a glance.

I moved through the room deliberately, my coat brushing past an overstuffed armchair that had seen better centuries. There was a peculiar dignity to the dust in this place, as though even the grime understood it had settled among a sage.

In the adjacent room, the bed had not been made nor had it been slept in recently. A travel trunk waited at the foot of it, half-packed with charcoal suits, fine linen shirts, a shaving kit of old-world silver, and a vial of something amber and unmistakably expensive.

I exhaled softly, ran a finger along the edge of a monograph titled The Symbolism of Obscure Languages, then straightened my cuffs and adjusted the collar of my espresso-brown sweater beneath my dark coat. This place had served me well, and would again but now, I had oceans to cross and mysteries to follow.

But first Margaret.

 It was not by the front door that I arrived at Margaret’s apartment.

I’ve never cared much for ceremony, especially not when time is tight and the air tastes of rain. Instead, I took the fire escape the iron-grated stairs climbing the back of the building like a spinal column of the forgotten. Each step creaked underfoot, slick with the condensation of London fog, and I emerged just beyond her drawing-room window, where the warm gaslight painted shifting rings of light  across the panes.

Margaret saw me almost immediately. She didn’t flinch or scold just turned her head from the armchair where she sat, lifted a single hand, and waved me in with the weary grace of a woman long accustomed to curious men doing peculiar things.

“You’re later than I expected,” she said as I raised the sash and stepped inside. “But somehow precisely on time.”

“I’m told that’s my nature,” I replied, brushing droplets from my sleeves. “As though I plan for chaos and simply happen to arrive in rhythm with it.”

Her rooms were, as ever, exquisite in their restraint: lace and rosewood, embroidered cushions, and that soft floral hush peculiar to feminine Victorian spaces untouched by soot or hardship. The gramophone played something slow and Bach  from the corner. Margaret poured two cups of tea and gestured for me to sit.

“I assume this is about the hotel,” she said.

“It is.”

“My aunt Eliza,” she continued, “checked into the Grand San Antonio some months ago. She writes occasionally. Pleasant, if vague. She says the staff are kind, the food tolerable, the weather unbearable. But something in her tone feels… off. I can’t explain it.”

“No need,” I said. “You’re right to feel it.”

Margaret studied me over the rim of her teacup. “What do you expect to find?”

I paused before answering. Then, in a tone more thoughtful than precise, I said, “There are no things, Margaret. Only patterns.”

She frowned slightly.

I leaned back in my chair, watching the steam rise from the porcelain. “We talk as though the world is made of objects. Stones, letters, intentions. But it’s all motion. Vibration. Arrangement. The mind gets confused because it tries to name everything. But names are only labels we slap on temporary shapes.”

“And what does that mean for the hotel?”

“It means that if something is off—as you say—it must be a pattern out of place. A repetition broken. A melody that plays the same three notes, but the fourth is wrong, or missing altogether.”

She said nothing.

“That’s how I know where to look,” I continued. “Not for answers. For misalignments. I follow them like threads.”

I sipped my tea, then gave her a sideways glance and allowed the softness to fall from my voice.

“But that’s theory,” I said, in the clipped tone I reserve for work. “In practice, I observe. I record. I test the accounts against each other. I introduce contradiction, and I watch what collapses. I walk the perimeter until I find the point where the walls no longer meet. That’s where the truth waits.”

Margaret exhaled, long and low. “That sounds exhausting.”

“Only to those who require certainty,” I said, standing.

From her desk, she retrieved a small envelope and passed it to me. Inside, a note from Eliza—nothing more than a forwarding address and the date of her last correspondence. No details. No cries for help.

“She’s there,” Margaret said. “And I think she wants to be found, even if she doesn’t know it.”

I nodded, slipping the envelope into my coat.

“She won’t recognize you,” Margaret added, rising to fetch something from a small box near the hearth. “But she’ll know this.”

It was a brooch modest, gold, with a single violet in enamel. A Winters family piece.

“She gave it to me when I was sixteen,” Margaret said. “Said I’d know when to send it back.”

I pinned it to my lapel. “Then let’s consider this return post.”

There was no farewell. We both knew the nature of such departures. I stepped back through the window, onto the iron ledge, and into the London dusk once more fog clinging to the rooftops, ship bells sounding in the far distance, and something strange already calling to me from the other side of the world. 🔎