LONDON, OXFORD STREET

1917

Harry Savage

Alone in his elegantly appointed office, the dapper middle-aged man crossed perfectly creased, black-on-gray pinstriped knees. He opened a carved mahogany desk drawer and, withdrawing a solid gold looking glass, peered into it, studying his carefully manicured fingernails and absently twisting the dovetailed ends of his heavily waxed handlebar mustache. Scents of balsam and clove hung in the air, signature traces of his favorite Guerlain cologne from Paris. Sliding his fingers along the edges of his Corliss, Coon & Co. starched white collar, he carefully tucked the corners under his worsted wool lapels.

To say the man obsessed about every aspect of his appearance would be like saying that J. Pierpont Morgan obsessed about every aspect of money. Actually, Harry knew J. P. fairly well. Well enough, in fact, to call him John. And that, of course, was because Harry, too, had money to be careful about.

Gobs of it.

At the moment, however, Harry wasn’t obsessing about his personal appearance, or money or fashion. He was obsessing about Harcott’s. He closed his right fist and pressed the knuckles against his upper lip. Damned Harcott’s. Harry had something to prove to those toffee-nosed wankers and prove it he would!

He crushed the last life from his cigar and, picking up a single, unsealed envelope from the desk, left his office.

Strolling down a wide corridor, Harry made his way to the one place he loved to go to think. Proceeding to a stairwell, he unlocked and opened the door. He climbed a set of steel stairs, his polished wood and hard leather heels making sharp ringing sounds with each step. He opened another door and now stood at his store’s highest point, an observation tower that loomed above the rooftop gardens.

From here, Harry could see all of London.

Cool air, cleansed by a recent downpour and only lightly tinged by petrol fumes and horse dung, touched his nostrils. There was no wind, and, from the sidewalks below, he could hear the footsteps of pedestrians echoing like distant castanets. Leaning on a wooden ledge, he looked up the street toward the distant emporium he hated.

Damned Harcott’s!

Harcott’s General Manager, Richard Bergeron—Sir Richard—had finished his revamped emporium in 1911. Two years later, the Queen awarded a Royal Warrant. She wasn’t the only aristo to shop there. Even Tsar Nicholas’s children, those not-so-distant royal cousins, had come from Russia for a foray. They all bought sailor suits. For God’s sake, Lillie Langtry, the actress who’d bedded the Prince of Wales, shopped at Harcott’s.

When, a decade ago, Harry had first moved to London from the states—Sir Richard and his stuffed shirt son Rodman still called them “the colonies”—British newspapers declared local height limits wouldn’t allow construction of his proposed ten-story, American-style department store.

But Harry had fought “they’s” all his life.

Purchasing several square blocks along Oxford Street’s then-unfashionable western end, he dug the site to a depth of four stories and followed with six more floors above ground. Harry got his ten stories alright, and he filled them with attractions most English shoppers had never seen—restaurants, a library, hairdressers, a chiropodist, roof gardens, even a post office. That is, most working-class shoppers hadn’t seen them.

Unless, of course, they’d been to damned Harcott’s.

He was tired of it. Tired of the titled snobs; tired of being the target of their whispered “jumped-up shopkeeper” dismissals; tired of the snide jibes about his personal life. Harry quite enjoyed the company of beautiful women, so what of it? They supplied the bouquets of existence. Besides Isadora Duncan, they’d included, in no particular order, Elinor Glyn, author of The Vicissitudes of Evangeline and other authoritative volumes on serial infidelity; Syrie Wellcome, wife of the pharmaceutical baron; and Lady—he chuckled whenever his butler announced her—Victoria Sackville. Even the great Pavlova, Russia’s Imperial prima ballerina, had mussed his sheets. Aside from her prowess in bed, the dancer’s impossibly dark eyes and long eyelashes were compelling. The latter were said to have been stitched into their lids before her 4,000 performances of “Swan Lake” in Paris; Pavlova supposedly hoped they would help shield her from the stage lights. Harry winced just thinking about it.

So let his critic’s snigger. Was there one among them who didn’t keep a wench? Let him cast the first garter!

Now, he mused, he would cast something back, flinging his success at their feet like a duelist’s challenge.

He was, and always had been, a betting man. He loved the tables almost as much as he loved the scent and touch of a beautiful woman. This, however, would be a different gamble, the biggest of his life. On this spin of the wheel, he would risk not only money but his public face as well. To Harry, that meant risking his very soul.

He again looked out over the now darkened city. The streets had become almost silent. He peered upward, trying to probe the ominous clouds. This year, travel in and around London had grown especially perilous. Swooping Gotha bombers had already meted out death to some two dozen residents in ‘tip-and-run’ raids. Even more terrifying were the silent Zeppelin airships that dropped explosives at night. Rumors were the Kaiser planned more attacks next year.

Harcott’s. Damned Harcott’s!

Fishing in his pocket, Harry withdrew the envelope he’d taken from his desk. It contained a single sheet of parchment which set forth the wager’s unusual terms and conditions, terms and conditions he’d insisted upon and to which, to his quiet surprise, Sir Richard had quickly agreed. For one thing, their agreement would require use of a precious metal called platinum, only recently employed in jewelry, a metal rarer and more valuable than gold. To be privately delivered to Harcott’s three days hence, the document had been drafted in strictest confidence by one of London’s most respected barristers. At the bottom of the page were two signature lines. Bergeron’s name was printed beneath one line. His own name appeared below the other.

Despite all his careful preparations, however, one thing Harry could not foresee: that the greatest impact of his bet would not occur until many decades after his death.

Now, uncapping a mother-of-pearl fountain pen and bracing the parchment against the window ledge, he wrote in the same bold hand he’d perfected in the final years of the last century, as a rising star at Saks & Co. in New York City.

H. Gene Savage, esq.

LONDON, OXFORD STREET

Present Day

* 1 *

MONDAY

Mackenzie Farrar

IN The Reflected glow of an amber security light, Mackenzie Farrar stood in Harcott’s Gallery, admiring an etching of a beautiful woman lounging in a filmy gown on an elegantly curved chaise lounge. An ink-black Persian feline nestled in the woman’s lap and a Borzoi wolfhound sprawled at her feet; the dog’s long, silky white hair and narrow snout flowed gracefully over her hem. The title plate read “Fanny with Cat and Canine.”

“She was Fanny Volmers, his wife, you know,” Mackenzie’s companion murmured as they both admired the piece. Sir Reginald Woodlawn was Harcott’s longtime managing director and her boss. “The model in nearly all his works for the rest of his life.”

“She was just eighteen, and Louis Icart thirty-four when they married; he’d come back after serving as a French fighter pilot in the Great War.” Woodlawn fingered the two-thousand-pound price tag. The security light’s flavescent hues chiseled his narrow features into pale yellow panes. “Nice bit of work.” He added, resting a fatherly hand on Mackenzie’s shoulder.

“Too bad Art Deco’s not selling now,” his subordinate sighed. Stepping away, she lifted a pair of thick glasses from her nose then blinked three times. The etching swam before her as if she were gazing through a rain-drenched window. She rubbed her eyes, blinked again and snapped a quick photo of the Icart with her cell phone. Dropping the phone into a slim, shoulder-strap briefcase (she rarely carried a purse during business hours), Mackenzie returned the heavy glasses to their resting place. How would it be, the young executive wondered, for a man to so love you that he pictured only your face in hundreds of sketches, etchings, watercolors and paintings?

“We’ll mark it down for the sales,” Woodlawn sighed, his tone edged with finality. In the light’s flaxen glow, his aristocratic visage loomed like a jaundiced mask.

After a brief preview, the store’s annual Summer Sale would begin in mid-July, exactly a week away. The odds, Mackenzie knew, made it likely that was when the Icart would find a buyer, at a reduced price, of course. As the current century entered a third decade, Harcott’s was still attracting fifteen million shoppers a year—often exceeding 50,000 a day during holidays—drawn by the motto pro omni humano genere—“for all mankind.”

As an American, Mackenzie especially respected the fact that, through most of its history, Harcott’s had done its best to live up to those words. For example, before being rendered extinct by the Endangered Species Act, for nearly a century, the store’s Pet Kingdom had offered customers almost any animal he or she could desire. It was here, in the 1950s, that comedienne Beatrice Lillie bought Noel Coward an alligator for Christmas. In 1967, a California governor ordered a baby elephant named Gertie for a Republican political rally. According to legend, when the politician called, the nonplussed clerk cooly asked: “Would that be an African or Indian elephant, sir?” Two years later, a pair of Australian backpackers bought “Christian”, a lion cub; the cat was soon released in Kenya when his romping’s grew too boisterous for their London flat.

Right now, however, Mackenzie needed to focus on the immediate present. In a mere seven days, thousands of bargain hunters—their faces illuminated by nearly two hundred blazing window displays—would queue up before dawn outside the store’s ten entrances. When the doors opened, they’d abandon all pretense of British reserve, swarming inside like invading army ants, jostling, grunting, shouting, shoving, plundering. Thus, often in bedlam and chaos, Harcott’s Summer Sales would begin. Mackenzie Farrar had only a single week to get the store—and herself—ready for them.

Fingers stuffed deep in her jacket pockets, Mackenzie fidgeted as she padded in silence behind the man who’d become her mentor and, in important ways, her savior. She wrinkled her short nose; before the store’s doors swung open, the air always seemed stale. She again removed her glasses, fogged the lenses with her breath, and polished them with a tissue. It was a gesture she’d repeat a hundred times that day, hating each occasion.

Normally, Mackenzie’s business attire included contact lenses but her near sightedness—“high myopia”, the ophthalmologist called it—required contacts that irritated her eyes if worn for a full day. She’d shopped for designer eyeglasses for weeks, hoping to find something with a bit of style. Eventually she gave up, settling on the circular-lensed, buffalo-horned rims she wore now. She knew they gave her an owlish look, like a bookish prude, her BFF Dusty Dunham had said, but they were virtually indestructible. And—face it, girl, she’d told herself—you drop your glasses a lot.

From Harcott’s dimly lit gallery walls, shapes and colors clamored in the stuffy quiet. Snowy alpine peaks dusted pink in sunset; flocks of tan and green mallards wedged in flight; dark-skinned matadors, arms upswept like descending angels of death.

Mackenzie ran a hand through the strawberry stripe in her otherwise blonde hair. Her own taste favored Picasso’s “Blue Period”, which she considered a perfect marriage of form and pigment. It was, she conceded, a character trait—a preference for controlled abstraction over unfettered—and nakedly emotional—expression. Now, intently, she scribbled private “mirror” notes—written in reverse and unintelligible to anyone but herself—on a pink Post-It.

Sheer determination had propelled the sight-challenged young woman upward in a tough, volatile business. That, and a knack, in any financial proposal, for quickly making her way to the bottom-line. To colleagues, the American-educated executive’s thoughts and emotions often seemed hidden behind her thick eyeglasses. Behind her back, rank-and-file store workers called her Mack the Ice. Mackenzie told herself she didn’t care. The success of the store—her store—had become synonymous with her own success, or, more accurately, with her quest for a very personal sense of redemption.

Those same coworkers would have been surprised to learn their ice woman spent most Saturday mornings tutoring a seven-year-old Nigerian girl in Braille. Religious fanatics had attacked Ajeeta’s northern Christian village six years before, killing both her parents. Blunt trauma, the same source of Mackenzie’s vision problems, had left the child nearly sightless. This sense of shared loss drew MacKenzie and her young student closer.

In an important way, the sessions with Ajeeta also brought honor to Mackenzie’s affair with a married man. Somehow, as the girl’s small fingers crawled over the bumpy Braille pages, they proclaimed that something good had come out of it all, something besides death and dishonor. Keeping their Saturday mornings under the radar—if anyone asked, MacKenzie was “in a meeting”—avoided drawing further attention to her own handicap. The very last thing Mackenzie Farrar wanted, especially from coworkers, was the four-letter ‘P’ word she hated to her core—P-I-T-Y.

Besides, while it damaged her optic nerve, the tragedy aboard Jack Kyle’s sloop had also left her with her quirky gift. In addition to reading and writing normally, Mackenzie possessed the rare ability—especially unusual among adults—to “mirror write”, to scribe her cursive in reverse, from right to left. This meant she could draft memos to herself that, to others, were unintelligible. At this very moment, in fact, she intently scribbled in reverse on her ever-present Post-It pad. (Once she’d forgotten herself and texted a reverse message to a colleague on her cell phone; never again would she stray from her low-tech but reliable paper notes.) Now, tearing off the small pink square of paper, Mackenzie flipped it over and held it up to a ceiling light. “Art merch poorly displayed”, the note read. “Ck gross sls past 5 years. Ck comp prices other stores.” Tucking the square of paper in her briefcase, she withdrew a tissue and briefly dabbed her eyes. She then creased the material with her lips, leaving a scented, rose-colored half-moon.

“Nearly all mirror-writers are, like you, left-handed,” the National Health Service doctor had said, bringing his face close to hers and observing her eyes intently. Mackenzie remembered feeling uncomfortably cramped and cold in the small office.  She’d gone to him shortly after first experiencing the phenomenon nearly a year after the accident with Jack. Her strange ability had seemed to manifest itself by chance, when she unexpectedly discovered that she’d scrawled a one-sentence business memo backwards. “We believe the key lies somewhere in the corpus callosum,” the physician continued, “the part of the brain that neurologically connects its right and left hemispheres.”

Whatever, thought Mackenzie.

“You should think of yourself as special,” he’d gone on, trying to buoy her spirits. “Only one in several thousand people have this ability. And nobody really knows precisely how or why. It simply happens. Very often the ability appears in childhood, especially among young girls, then disappears in puberty. The true mirror-writer can write right-to-left and write normally—it’s like being visually ambidextrous. You should feel privileged.”

Well, she didn’t feel privileged. Besides robbing much of her vision, the accident that apparently triggered her unusual ability had claimed the life of the man she’d loved. In his absence, she’d been left with memories of loss and sadness and shame and regret, often jumbled together all at once.

For now, though, the days ahead demanded a laser focus. She shuddered and quickened her pace; Reggie was nearly half a floor ahead.

Just the thought of Harcott’s sales—the first she’d helped manage as the store’s recently appointed assistant director—made her head spin. The extravaganzas—Sir Reginald called them the mercantile equivalent of opera’s Ring Cycle—would demand every skill she’d mastered in nearly a decade of retailing.

They trotted up two flights of stairs. Though nearly sixty, Sir Reginald breathed easily as he opened the beauty salon’s immense, mahogany doors. Almond-colored walls, draped in broad bands of looped linen, rose around them. Chandeliers twinkled from the high ceiling. Below, stretched fifteen rows of open shampooing stalls and behind these, batteries of enclosed cubicles. Ramparts of class, the discretely elegant chambers were especially cherished by older female patrons.

As they headed back downstairs, Mackenzie’s tightly clutched pencil moved again, gliding from right-to-left across a second Post-It.

Reversed, the new messages read: “Remod private booths to attract younger women,” and “Same elegance, less sq-ft. Obj: Faster turnover.”

Thinking again about the girl in the painting, Mackenzie pulled out her cell phone. Studying the photo she’d taken earlier, she felt a sudden flash of resentment. All Fanny Icart had to do was sit there, look pretty, and pet her cat!