Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Still Life

Page 11

Finn watches the trees blur past, his elbow resting on the window ledge, fingers absently tracing the outline of a pine needle stuck to his sleeve. He hasn’t asked where they’re going again. He’s waiting for Susie to tell him why.

She drives with a kind of practiced detachment, her eyes fixed on the road, her thoughts somewhere else entirely.

“I first heard about them in a seminar at Yale,” she says, finally. “Eighteenth century literature. The professor was obsessed with minor nobility; people who never made it into the novels but shaped the margins.”

Finn glances at her, but says nothing.

“There was this Dutch family,” she continues. “Old money. Royal, but not famous. But they had a library; one of those private collections that never got catalogued. Just sat there, in a manor house, gathering dust and secrets.”

She shifts gears, the car lurching slightly as they crest a hill.

“I found out last month that the castle is still standing. The family’s mostly gone. What’s left is ...... well, it’s fragile. And I want to see it before it disappears.”