The Street That Never Was

Lisbon in the autumn of 1893 smelled of roasting chestnuts and the river, and Beatriz Coelho had been sent to catalogue a dead man's maps. She was four-and-twenty, the youngest hand at the Torre do Tombo, and the work had fallen to her because no one senior wanted it: the cartographer Anselmo Vaz had died without heirs, willing his entire estate to the national archive, and an estate of maps is a tedious inheritance. For a fortnight she had worked alone in his shuttered house on the Calçada do Combro, among drawing tables and copper plates and the dry-paper smell of a thousand rolled charts, numbering each, noting its scale, tying it with linen tape. It was patient, dustless, lonely work, and she had grown almost fond of the dead man for the beauty of his hand. Vaz had mapped the whole kingdom in his sixty years — the terraces of the Douro, the salt-pans of the Algarve, every twist of the Tagus — and his Lisbon was the finest she had ever seen, drawn street by street with a draughtsman's love. She knew the city by heart, had been born three streets from where she sat, and so she felt it at once when something was wrong: a map, near the bottom of his last chest, that showed a street she had never walked. It ran off the Rua da Bica, where Beatriz knew there to be only a blank wall and the long public stair down to the river. On Vaz's map, between the wall and the stair, lay a