Page 47 of In Just a Year
“Oh no!” Ben felt an icy dread seize Stone’s eyes. “He’s a champion of Nagy’s-”
“Yes. He hates Jews and wants-”
“You don’t have to explain, Greg. I understand.” Except that Ben yearned to understand whatever he was missing to find the treasure. If the Governor-General, the highest official of the East India Company and Britain’s representative here colluded with Nagy, he truly had to go home. Yet, he felt naked without finding what Izaac Pearler had hidden here. And he knew it was close, he could feel it in his bones. This was the right place and yet he hadn’t solved the mystery of the exact location.
“Be ready at dawn, I’ll have your things picked up. We’ll leave from theSyama Prasad MookerjeePort. There’s no time to lose, so we set sail from Calcutta.” Greg spoke with a finality that signaled he’d already made arrangements. If he needed to extract Ben, he had his reasons. Ben was well aware of the respect his brother Caleb and both Fave and Arnold bore for Greg as a friend and as a diplomat.
Greg left but instead of packing, Ben looked at the little monkey. Amberley was asleep on a makeshift bed Ben had set up for him out of soft towels in a wooden box. Remembering that he still held the letter in his hand, Ben unfolded the paper. He was surprised that it came in an envelope, which doubled the price of postage. In the corner, Raphi had scribbled a note:
Copied for you.Original destroyed.
R.
Frustratedto the point that he could snap like a branch of the palms outside his window, Ben held the letter close to the oil lantern on his writing desk. It showed the same symbols he’d copied from the layers of the relief from the Dreidel of Destiny, only magnified and set into a key. The first meant marble, the second meant “outward tree,” and the third sign meant jewel.
“Marble near a tree and a jewel,” Ben mumbled as he looked at the intricate window again.
What did Izaac Pearler mean? His mind trailed back to London and the many times they’d spent in the Pearler’s large house. He smiled, recalling the Purim plays and Esther. His Queen Esther, his … Ben blinked.
Every Purim, the Pearlers erected a makeshift stage with shawls and large fabrics draped over theGobelins. Except one of them wasn’t a Gobelin from the French manufacture, was it? It was Indian. The colors were different, resembling paled versions of the hues of mustard yellow, saffron orange, and alizarin-producing madder root in stark contrast to the indigo skies there.
Ben jumped up and paced the room. At last, he remembered where he’d seen the window pattern before—on the large wall tapestry at the Pearlers with the monkeys on the palm trees! Of course, why hadn’t he thought of that sooner? The monkeys were the same as the macaques here, and the tapestry frame was the exact shape of these windows.
Ben’s pulse quickened. Izaac Pearler brought the tapestry home to ensure all the children would know what to look for.
Ben rushed back to his notes and opened the leather folder with his sketches of the medallion.
“That’s it!” He turned his sketch around and held it against the lantern. The flickering light shone through the paper from the back. Amberley had woken up, perched on his shoulder, and squeaked lightheartedly like a young child.
It was all in the perspective, just as Greg had said. But Ben had made a mistake. He shouldn’t be looking out through the window, but in from the outside. Hadn’t Fave Pearler said something similar when they’d opened the Dreidel of Destiny?
In architecture, the axis refers to an imaginary line that guides the viewer’s gaze, creating a sense of visual flow and directing attention toward a focal point.
Ben paced the room as he put the clues together. The medallion’s layers had guided him so he’d know the point from which to view the palace—the point from where to look for Izaac Pearler’s hidden treasure.
He needed to find a stone structure near a large tree, and to look from there toward this part of the palace where the windows bore the exact adornment as Pearler’s wall tapestry. But what was the connection to Durga and the lion?
He rubbed his head as the clues clustered in his mind.
An hour or more passed. If he could figure out how the clues came together, he’d know where he had to search for the point from where he could see the windows of this section of the palace. But where was the key word. And how?
Consumed by the riddle of the point he had to find, Ben didn’t realize how much time had passed and that it was time for Amberley’s meal. As usual, a servant delivered another cart with a platter of mangoes, bananas, and guavas. Except that it wasn’t one of the female servants Vati usually sent alone. In the doorway, shrouded by the shadow in the hall just outside Ben’s room, stood the servant he’d seen before. It was the same man who’d tried to take Vati’s basket with the baby monkeys away. Was he watching him?
Ben thought it best to wait in his room until Greg came to pick him up. If the Governor didn’t welcome him or worked for Nagy, it was not safe at the palace.
Amberley polished off his yogurt and enjoyed the little bananas Ben had shared with him. Four teeth had erupted in the front of Amberley’s mouth, and he could bite the soft fruit. He obviously reveled in it as he smacked his lips and chattered while eating.
Ben took a folded napkin from the cart and realized something was under the cloth on the top tray of the cart.
He removed the fruit bowl, milk pitcher, and bowl of yogurt, then lifted the tablecloth off to find two books lying next to each other, covering the surface of the tray. They were large atlases written in Hindi using the Devanagari alphabet. He picked up the atlases and sat on the edge of his bed. Something pointy stuck out from them, several tiny sharp palm leaves … oh, Vati had sent these as hidden messages.
Ben opened the atlases on the pages where the points led. She was referencing their conversation.
One of the pages, a double spread, showed architectural plans for the palace. He saw the path for the courtyard surrounding three walls of the palace, the large gates leading to the city, and circles with ragged edges to depict where trees were planted. Upon further inspection, he realized that the little pond between the trees where Vati had met her macaque pets wasn’t on the plans. Neither was the path they’d taken.
Ben put his finger on the bottom right edge of the page to turn the leaf, but it separated. He pushed against the one on the bottom, and a transparent sheet lifted off the page.
“Rice paper,” he whispered to Amberley, “it’s used for tracing in architectural drawings.”
