What transpired in that room will accompany me to my grave and, I pray, to my Redeemer. Rime asked if he had my full authority, to do what must be done.
I said yes. God help me, I said yes.
Clay closed the heavy book.
“On the morning of September twentieth, Leda Swan arrived on a ship. The Earl of Sutherland, registered under an East India Company charter.”
“That was the day of the great fire,” Seelie said.
He gave her a nod. “Not the results the Howes were expecting, I’m sure. It’s funny. For the longest time, our people were certain that Swan was working for Rime. I mean, it looked like he was calling the shots.”
“But now she’s the big boss behind the Weaver Group and he’s on her payroll,” Tyler said.
“She points, he shoots,” Clay said. “But back then, when things started to go bad, real bad, between ’76 and ’81, that was all her. You know ‘Leda Swan’ isn’t her real name, right?”
“What is her real name?” Nell asked.
“Wish we could say. She’s used other aliases over the years, other family names. She called herself ‘Medusa Thamyris’ in the 1800s and signed a letter as ‘Hybris Actaeon’ back in 1938.”
“Names from Greek mythology,” Seelie said.
Not just random names. She frowned, thinking back. One of her recent couch-surfing treasures, a book she traded with a friend, was a trove of myths. Nell was watching her.
She shifted her footing, feeling awkward in the spotlight. “Maybe it’s a coincidence. I mean, I could just be reading too much into it.”
“Share,” Nell told her.
“Okay, so…Leda Swan. We know—we think—that’s from the myth about Zeus and Princess Leda, right?”
“Sure.”
“Everybody knows Medusa. Snaky hair, turns people to stone—”
“A monster,” Tyler said.
Seelie shook her head. “Not originally. Medusa was a priestess, a beautiful one. Poseidon saw her and…well, he raped her. On the floor of Athena’s temple.”
“I’m seeing a really disturbing theme here,” Nell muttered.
“Athena couldn’t punish Poseidon for what he’d done, seeing as he was a god, so she took it out on Medusa. She transformed her. That’s how she became a monster. And then there’s Actaeon. He was a hunter. He was out in the woods and stumbled upon the goddess Artemis while she was bathing naked in a stream. She caught him looking and turned him into a stag. His own hounds ripped him to pieces.”
“All of her names,” Tyler said, “they’re all references to people who were abused or punished by the gods.”
Clay slid the book back onto the shelf.
“And now you have everything we have, as far as her real identity goes,” he said. “What we do know is what she did once she arrived in America. And how we damn near lost everything.”
“The revolution?” Tyler said.
“No,” he said. “History.”
43.
Clay’s hand ran along the fat books, their black leather spines dressed in faded gilding.
“Volumes four through fifteen. These are the books where we keep the stories that never happened. Letters about the capture and hanging of Charles Lee and the British conquest of West Point. Washington shot and killed at the Battle of Brandywine. Cannibalism at Valley Forge, and a famine that led to starvation riots in Philadelphia.”
“Stories like…” Nell said, eyeing him, “…the execution of Benedict Arnold, and the pardon of Major André?”
“I see you’re familiar with the Hamilton letters,” Clay said.
“Professor Ramis is a friend of mine. He’s a good man.”
“And we’re trying to save his life,” Clay said. “The letters are real. We have stacks of correspondence from those years, from officers close to Washington’s side. Cleaning up the mess and making the evidence disappear is part of our duty. Sometimes one or two slip through the cracks. It’s the professor’s bad luck that he found a cache before we did, and his worse luck that it went public.”
“So, you want to ‘save his life’ by smearing him in the media and ruining his career.”
He spread his open hands, helpless. “You’ve got a better idea? The letters need to be discredited. Not just to protect people from the truth, but because Leda doesn’t want it getting out any more than we do. If he doesn’t back down, she won’t stop at his career. She’ll have him killed.”
“These ‘stories that never happened,’” Tyler said, shifting the subject. “What actually went down?”
“All of it. It all happened, and none of it happened, and the truth changed from day to day. Memories drifted, letters went into an envelope saying one thing and came out saying something else.