— the seventh life of aline lloyd —
prises that would alter our perception of Damon forever. I booked the flight arrangements then and there, concerned more for the tone in Vienne’s voice than anything our elder brother wrote into his will.
I managed to sleep for most of the flight from Dulles, finishing the last drops of morning coffee by the time we broke out of the cloud layer inbound for Heathrow. Vienne had flown in from Spain two days earlier and she was waiting as my taxi squeaked to a halt in front of an imposing hotel off Sloane Square— very British, very grand. Damon’s solicitor, a tall, scarlet-faced man called Liam Fields-Donnelley, met us two hours later at his firm’s offices on the east side of London near the boundary of Whitechapel. While we waited on a junior solicitor laying out documents in tidy groups on a splendid oak table, I reminded Vienne of the neighborhood’s notorious past as Jack the Ripper’s hunting grounds. I said so mostly to pass the time but she didn’t seem to care. A moment later Donnelley arrived and with him was the first step of my sudden, bizarre odyssey. “Yes, well,” he began as he traced a finger along the lines on a page of notes before him, “we have concluded most of your brother’s affairs with his employer—the artifacts he left as legacies to the university.” We waited again as he shifted his eyes between folders as though he needed to convince himself all was in order. On a wall behind us a massive clock the size of a stop sign—transparent to show off its polished brass gears—clunked and clicked the seconds away, and from it the only break from silence I knew was wearing thin on Vienne’s patience. Donnelley seemed to know it, too. “Oh, and Damon’s personal effects in Spain have been boxed by our Madrid representative’s local agents as well; they were given access to his apartment by way of a surprisingly cooperative former girlfriend, I’m told.” Vienne waited through a last pause as Donnelley shuffled the release papers she would be required to sign, until at last he drew from his folio the reason and purpose that brought us all the way to England. “Your sister saw the contents before you arrived, Mr. Morgan, but the bulk of his estate and its disposition, such that it is, can be finalized now that both of you are here. The document is rather crude by professional standards, of course, but British law recognizes and accepts its authenticity, regardless that he was not 19