Page 67 of Control's Undoing

Annie snorted, while Colum self-consciously fiddled with his own glasses.

“Yes?”Colum’s inflection made it a question.

“Good.”Xavier pushed up off the couch where he’d been combing through the research materials Annie and Colum assigned him.

He’d failed at finding a clue in the manuscript, so they’d resorted to logic to figure out their next steps.

After going over every inch of the plaster skull, even reassembling it using museum putty to stick pieces back together, Annie agreed that there was no clue on or in the skull to point them to the next piece.He’d gone over the manuscript again, analyzing every word.But if Wilde had left a clue in those pages, the way he had in the first bit of the manuscript, Xavier couldn’t find it.

They’d resorted to research—going over everything that was known publicly about Wilde’s life, and using information in the manuscripts about Wilde’s acquaintances, to track his movements and make logical guesses about where he’d have gone next.

Logic is not half as useful as imagination, for it does not prove anything.

Xavier was sure, down to the marrow of his bones, that the answer wouldn’t lie in knowing who he visited for two days in 1883.The answer lay in knowing Wilde.In understanding a man who’d been unapologetically complicated, clever, and witty.

“Okay.”Annie sat back.“Let’s go over it again.The most likely location for future chunks of the manuscript is with people Wilde trusted.”

“But he wasn’t just handing it over,” Colum said.“The people he gave it to hid it.Who decided to put this piece in the skull?Wilde or Marie Prescott?”

“Wilde himself must have commissioned the painting, making sure the clues that led to Marie were included.And he knew as he was writing where she would hide it, which is why he underlined the text that obliquely mentioned her and a head,” Annie replied.

Colum pursed his lips, thinking.“The painting might have been retroactive.Maybe once he gave the next piece to Marie, who hid it in the skull, he went back to Dublin and had the painting made.”

Xavier smirked.“That makes sense, if you assume that Wilde didn’t trust people to be clever enough to follow the clue he left in the manuscript.He thought two clues were needed.”

Annie nodded slowly.“So our lack of clue might be because when he wrote this section, and when the skull was made, Wilde didn’t know who he would give the next piece to or where the next person he trusted would hide it.”

“Maybe our timeline is off, and this all happened later than we think, meaning, the reason Wilde didn’t come back to leave a clue was he was in prison.That was 1895.”Colum grimaced, shaking his head.“No, I think based on what he mentions, our timeline is right, so the next chunk was most likely written years before the trial and prison.”

Xavier’s head started to hurt as he listened to them.

“Let’s go back to Robbie Ross,” Annie said.

Xavier agreed that both logically and emotionally, Wilde would have trusted a piece of the manuscript to Robbie Ross, his lover and friend.

Colum sighed.“But where would Ross have been hiding it?The Rosses had property and interests all over the world.Ross’s father’s family is from Canada and had powerful political ties there.His mother’s family was French.”

Xavier went to look out the window.The view wasn’t world class, but it wasn’t terrible.He liked standing in the quiet and looking down on the hustle and bustle of the city.

“We can’t run all over the world based on hunches,” Annie said.“Our security team would have kittens.”

“The logical option would be to go to France, since that’s where Wilde died.And he called Ross to come to him right before his death,” Xavier countered.

“Where in France?”Annie asked.“Correct me if I’m wrong, Xavier, but it’s a big place, right?There’s that seaside village where he lived with Ross, the place in Paris where he died.The Ross family’s various properties all over the country…”

Xavier heard her but kept staring out the window, a strange new melancholy filling him, though he couldn’t tell why.

“That’s grand, then,” Colum said.“What if we go to London instead?Maybe he sent a piece to his sons.His great-great-grandson lives in London.”

“His sons were teenagers when he died,” Annie said, checking her notes.“So probably anything he sent would have been sent to his wife.Did he love and trust Constance?”

“Yes,” Xavier said, without turning from the window.“Wilde loved many people, including the woman he married.”

“Well, married legally, since he was already married by Masters’ Admiralty law,” Colum added.

Xavier went still.The hotel was in shadow, enough that the glass window acted like a faint mirror.Xavier transferred his attention from what he was seeing on the street to Annie’s and Colum’s reflections.

Wilde hadn’t tried to hide his relationships, much to his own detriment.Except for one.He’d never said anything publicly about his trinity marriage—Florence Balcombe and Bram Stoker.

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