Chapter 5: The Third Floor

"Why are you telling me?" I asked him on the steps.

Cian turned his collar up against the rain.

"Because if that silver leaves the building, there's nothing left for either of us."

He looked down at me.

"And because you took a fern out of a burning building. I respect that."

"It isn't burning."

"Not yet," he said, and went off toward the Dart with his newspaper.

At ten o'clock on Thursday night Ottoline let me in the back door of Fitzsimons & Sons.

She hadn't been fired yet. Under review, she still had her keys.

We went up the back stairs in the dark, past the empty workshop benches and the capped gas torches.

The archive took up the whole third floor.

It was a long room with tall sash windows over Dawson Street and a smell of cloth and tarnish.

For six years I had come up here on Friday afternoons for tea in china cups.

Tonight the glass cabinets stood open and empty.

Wooden crates stood in rows down the middle of the floor, thirty of them, packed and nailed.

Every lid was stencilled in fresh black paint. FITZSIMONS 1851.

"I packed silver for an exhibition in Vienna once," Ottoline said. "I've never packed it for a burglary."

She pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and handed me another pair from her cardigan pocket.

One crate at the end still stood open.

Inside, on a nest of acid-free tissue, sat the Wedding Cup.

It was a tall two-handled cup, made in this building in 1851, the first thing the Fitzsimonses ever sold.

They had bought it back a hundred years later and never let it go again.

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