Chapter 7
I took my first gulp of air inside the world of a book and promptly began to cough, stumble, and rub at my eyes all at the same time.
Some sort of city street—the air smelled like smoke and sewage, and I could barely see a yard in front of me.
I gripped the Librarian’s arm for balance, and realized that the wool of her green cardigan had changed under my fingertips to a balloon sleeve in some sort of smooth worsted or gabardine (Beau would know which, my brain told me unhelpfully).
“Where—are we?” I coughed, blinking my watering eyes.
“The great cesspool into which all loungers and idlers are irresistibly drained,” said the Librarian, coming to a halt at the nearest corner.
“Florida?” I guessed.
She barked a laugh. “London, you ignoramus. What are you doing here?” she demanded before I could get a breath to marvel at the fact that I, Alix Watson who had never owned a passport or crossed the lines of her home state, had apparently just one-step-traveled into London.
Some version of it, anyway. “You aren’t supposed to be here, Miss Watson. ”
“Somehow I didn’t think it was a good idea to stay in the room where the books were panicking and the ghosts were running for the hills,” I retorted. “What the hell happened back there? Why did we abandon the Library?”
“The Library can protect itself,” she said grimly, peering around in the foggy gloom. “The threat lies elsewhere.”
I followed her gaze, hunting through the murk.
The streetlamp at my elbow cast a feeble circle of yellowish light down on the slimy cobbles under our feet; I stepped back hastily as a hackney coach rattled past with a whinny of its tired horses and nearly bumped into a gentleman hurrying by with an umbrella.
He glared, muttonchop whiskers waggling as I stammered an apology.
On the other side of the street I saw a flower seller in bright petticoats like something out of My Fair Lady, a gaggle of street urchins pelting past playing some game, and a woman in a bustle gown like the ones in Beau’s art book crossing the street on the arm of a top-hatted gentleman.
London. Victorian-era London, without a doubt. I’d done it, I’d traveled into a novel—
“What book are we in?” I whispered, but the Librarian wasn’t paying attention to me.
“Ah, Upper Regent Street.” She nodded at the dim outline of a castle-like building across the way: sandstone facade adorned with wrought-iron balconies, columned portico, fog clinging gummily to the French windows.
“The Langham hotel. Means we’ve a short walk ahead of us.
Margin-traveling, never the most precise means of transportation—” And she set off down the street at a brisk pace.
I hurried to keep up, belatedly realizing that her cardigan and knee-length skirt had somehow been swapped out for a balloon-sleeved bottle-green walking suit, a sealskin muff, and a huge hat complete with half a dead bird in flight on the wide brim.
The only thing about her that still said twenty-first century was the green tablet clutched tight in one gloved hand.
“Nice threads,” I said, remembering her telling me that the Library costumed its Librarian for inter-book travel, unlike the Patrons. “What exactly is margin-traveling?”
“Normally one makes a more formalized transit to and from books. Through the Library door, on scheduled passage. But for quick travel, Library staff can move through a book’s margins.” She peered each way down a foggy street corner before choosing a direction. “It’s never very exact, though . . .”
“Why?”
“That’s a question for the Logistics Department.”
“Who are they? You know what, never mind.” My loose hair, I realized, was getting glances from the passersby—every woman on this street had an updo and a hat.
Nothing I could do about the hat, but I hastily coiled my hair up into a knot at my neck and jabbed it through with a pencil from my beaded bag.
So much for all those period movies where Keira Knightley runs all over the moors without a hairpin in sight.
“What was that red card? You said something about a warning from the Library Board.”
“The Board issues cards as warnings when something has gone wrong with one of my placements,” she said without slowing down. “A blue card when a Patron is due to return or renew their book. A yellow card when the book they’ve chosen isn’t a good fit and intervention is required.”
“What’s a green card?” I couldn’t help asking.
“We don’t have green cards, this isn’t Immigration,” she snapped. “Though the way some of the Board talk . . .”
“Never mind,” I said again. “What’s a red card, and why did it send you into such a panic?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I never panic.”
I did an end run around her and planted myself in her path, stopping dead. “Answers, please!” I nearly shouted. “And don’t just tell me to ask the Library Board!”
“A red card is a warning that someone is attempting to break in from the outside,” she said, surprising me. “Trying to force their way into a book’s world without being invited by the Library.”
I blinked. “How is that possible?”
“It shouldn’t be. There are safeguards, ever since—” She broke off, glaring around the foggy street as if looking for an enemy to skewer.
“According to the bylaws no one can find the book worlds unless they find the Library, and they can’t find the Library unless it invites them in.
The fact that someone has found a workaround”—waving the dark red card—“is quite frankly disturbing. And should be impossible.”
“But it isn’t.” I nodded at the red card in her gloved hand. “You wouldn’t have safeguards in place without a precedent. It’s happened before, hasn’t it—an attempted invasion?”
Her lips pressed together into a flat hard line. “Once.”
She looked so forbidding I didn’t dare ask how it had turned out. “I don’t understand who would be trying to break in,” I said instead, shifting tack. “Why would anyone intend harm to the Library?”
“Not the Library. The people.” Her gaze whipped back to meet mine so abruptly that any further words withered in my throat.
Her black eyes were pools of pitch—I’d taken her rapid words and rapid pace for fear but it wasn’t.
It was fury. “The Library offers sanctuary to people who are desperate, who have nowhere else to go but between the pages. Quite often that means they are fleeing something—or someone. How many bruised, battered, and broken people over the decades do you think I’ve assisted into book worlds where their abusers can’t find them?
How many children do you think I’ve helped hide in fiction, far away from the adults exploiting them?
How many refugees have I pulled through that door away from enemies wishing them harm?
” She paused. “Or allow me to put it a different way: How many violent people in the world outside have lost a favorite target because this Library stepped in?”
I gulped. No one was looking for me with violent intentions or otherwise, but I thought of the little girl from West Virginia with the shadow bruises on her arms. What if someone—the wrong someone—wanted her back? Would do anything to get her back?
“The Patron I helped hide in this world is in danger, Miss Watson.” The Librarian resumed her brisk pace up the foggy London street, slapping the card into my hands. “This is a warning that someone is coming, specifically, for her.”
Finally I saw what was printed on the dark red card stock: Sarah Ross/Sarah Hudson; TAoSH by ACD; orig. checked out 2019.
I was too busy trying to decipher the initials to renew my question about what book we were in until we were mounting seventeen rather slimy steps toward a Georgian terrace house and I saw the number on the door.
“Wait, I thought there was no actual 221B Baker Street in London,” I said as the Librarian knocked.
“This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s London, not the London. It’s always the author’s world and operates according to the author’s rules, not the real—hello, Mrs. Hudson,” the Librarian broke off, addressing the motherly looking middle-aged woman who answered the door. “We’re here to see Sarah.”
I’m not sure any of the Sherlock Holmes stories ever bothered taking the reader downstairs into the kitchens, but that cheery well-scrubbed place with its warm fire and copper kettle was a dream.
Ushered in to sit at the scarred oak table where the ingredients for a lamb stew were laid out like a Dutch still life, I could see why a desperate person would choose to live here.
“I can’t leave,” the woman named Sarah burst out almost before the Librarian was done with her explanation.
I’d been half expecting a Chosen One type, someone doe-eyed and haunted who looked like she’d plausibly have a sinister stalker tracking her across astral lines, but the mid-thirties brunette sitting across from me looked utterly ordinary.
In her rose-printed twill dress with the cameo at her throat, she looked like she had been born to this world rather than mine.
“I just can’t,” she went on, twisting her fingers together.
“I’m Miss Hudson here, Mrs. Hudson the housekeeper’s niece from America.
I help her run the boardinghouse and I live on the top floor.
I sometimes get to consult with a mystery or two.
I go to the British Museum with Dr. Watson’s wife and we take tea afterward at the Palm Court in the Langham hotel.
I make scones, I’ve got a cat—” Looking over at the purring mound of calico fur curled up in a wicker basket on the hearth.
“I’ve got a life here,” she said, low-voiced. “I’ve got a life.”
“And what if your husband bursts in on it?” the Librarian asked.
“There’s no way he could—”
“But what if he does?”