Chapter 9 #2
“Third one,” I said as she fingered the crimson edges. “It came whizzing at me in the drawing room . . . What exactly are we dealing with here? It’s supposed to be impossible for even one uninvited person to break into the Astral Library system, and now we’ve got a coordinated attack?”
“That,” she said, not sounding one whit surprised, “is exactly what happened two hundred years ago.”
I really wanted to know exactly what had happened two hundred years ago, and more important, how the Library had beaten it, but the blonde in pink paled as if she was on the verge of collapsing and I didn’t want to send her over the edge.
That ripple of eerie laughter came through the door to my left again, this time with a soft scratching sound on the other side of the oak panels, and we all jumped.
“You don’t belong here,” the first Mrs. Rochester’s voice floated through, and my spine damn near clawed its way out of my blue moiré as I saw the doorknob rattle, as the blood-colored card looked up at me from the Librarian’s hand like a baleful eye.
But I just linked arms with the two women the Librarian had hidden away from the people who would hurt them, and followed our guide onto the roof. Where she grabbed us by the hands and pulled us after her into another book.
The Library system was apparently under siege, because another card swirled up to meet us on the waters of the Mississippi when we margin-traveled to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to snag a sixteen-year-old boy who’d been living in a white clapboard house in Missouri as a cousin of the Widow Douglas, the one helping to raise Huck Finn.
And we had not one but two cards swirl down lazily on a sea breeze when we margin-traveled to a pier in a town the Librarian said was called Whitby; dark blood spots on a sunny summer evening (what book was this, anyway?) where Englishwomen in white 1890s muslins and parasols promenaded the beach below and men used their walking sticks to point out the seagulls swooping overhead, the fishermen throwing lines out into the bright water, the children with their pails and shovels.
“I think we need to go back to the Library,” I said, low-voiced, to the Librarian as she picked up the new warnings. “This isn’t just one or two potential incursions we’re dealing with, it’s—” I didn’t want to say the words an army, but wasn’t it?
“Hmm” was all the Librarian would say. Her hair had changed from the Jane Eyre Apollo knot to a Tom Sawyer bun to a frizzed front fringe and a low chignon; her skirts had shrunk down to the narrow silhouette I remembered from Beau’s historical fashion book.
“Nothing I haven’t dealt with before.” But a furrow of worry had carved itself between her dark brows all the same, and Sarah and I exchanged glances.
“Two hundred years ago, right?” I took a deep breath. “What exactly happened two hundred years ago?”
“A coalition of angry, self-righteous men happened,” said the Librarian. “Who else is responsible for so much of the world’s violence?”
“What happened to them?”
That sharklike smile reappeared. “They lost. And they will lose again this time, I assure you.” She looked down at the two new red cards and tucked them into her sleeve.
“Still, we may as well go back to the Library before getting these next two,” she said.
“We’ve got too much of an entourage now to move fast, so we’ll take these Patrons back and get them settled. Let me make some arrangements . . .”
We. She was saying we, and quietly I hugged myself over that as she began tapping at her tablet.
She wasn’t wrong about the entourage: we were now a group of five, attracting a certain number of covert stares for the mixed costumes.
This nervous little group needed coaxing and comforting, which I figured fell into the scope of my duties as Page, though I wasn’t as good at it as Sarah—the blonde in the pink dress had attached herself to Sarah like a limpet, requiring a constant stream of quiet reassurances, and I found myself with the boy from Tom Sawyer, who shuffled along with a taut face, undoubtedly missing his world of fence whitewashing, river rafting, and hijinks.
“Don’t be scared,” I told him, doing my best to sound confident.
“The Librarian’s done this before; she knows how to keep you safe. ”
“I’m not scared, I’m pissed off.” A scowl as the boy crossed those bony arms across his chest. “I promised myself I was done running when I left Montana, and here I am on the run again.”
“What were you running from?” I asked diffidently. “I’m not saying you have to tell me, but if it helps to talk—”
“My family,” the boy said, jaw jutting. “They are all goddamn nutcases. The fire-and-brimstone kind.”
“The kind who like burning books instead of reading them?”
“More or less. And who don’t believe that girls can actually be boys even if they don’t have the right plumbing.”
“Got it.” I started to pat his shoulder but he looked too prickly to welcome it, so I went for a soft reassuring punch on the arm instead. “Well, you know the Librarian. She won’t let anything happen to you.”
“What if they make her? There’s only one of her and she’s saddled with four of us plus whoever she picks up here.”
It was a fair point, and I looked worriedly at the Librarian, who had stopped mid-pier to wrestle with the green tablet. “Where are we going to hide them all?” I asked, approaching her to speak quietly.
“That depends on if the Gallerist has answered my email. Oh, you goddamn machine,” she swore. The tablet was clearly in a mood again, repeating PASSWORD INCORRECT when she recited “‘Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination.’”
“I’m not going to stand here on a fictional boardwalk guessing flattering book quotes,” she snarled at it, giving the screen a good shake.
It gave one of its electronic squawks, sounding somehow smug. Oh yes, you are, I could imagine it saying. It was almost a relief, knowing for certain that inanimate devices were in fact both alive and actively malicious. I mean, we all know they are, but finally: confirmation.
I leaned over the Librarian’s silk faille sleeve and cooed at the tablet in my sweetest tones, “‘Libraries are full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.’” It gave a little purring sound and the screen unlocked.
“What?” I shrugged at the Librarian’s slanted look over her glasses. “I’m not without skills.”
She snorted, clearly thinking of my damsel-in-distress jaunt to the opium den. “You mean, you’re not without book quotes. That seems to be your primary skill as far as I can see, Miss Watson.”
“Yes, but I’m stuffed to the gills with book quotes and that’s what you need right now.”
“Hmph.” She began swiping at the screen. “What’s that quote from, anyway? Not that tedious Erasmus, he could be so everlastingly precious about libraries—”
“Nope, Throne of Glass. So don’t you look down your nose at my reading habits, because my taste in popular fantasy just opened your email account.”
“I never look down my nose at anyone for what they read. As long as they’re reading, at least they aren’t watching reality television.
” Her fingers flew over the tablet. “Well, the Gallerist is waiting back at the Library for me, so we’ll head back there once we’ve collected the latest Patron—” And she headed off down the pier again, completely ignoring my “Who’s the Gallerist? ”
Of course she did. Maybe I was part of the we now, but that wasn’t netting me any more answers.
“Ms. Ferreira?” the Librarian called to a short woman standing near the end of the pier.
The sun was starting to slant in long brilliant rays and even longer shadows; all I could really see was a flood of garnet-red taffeta flounces at the back of the woman’s dress and a jet-handled parasol angled over one shoulder.
(Chic, I could hear Beau approving.) Then she turned and smiled: mid-fifties, dark chignon, frothing black lace up to the throat and black kid gloves down to her fingertips even in the warmth of the summer evening.
“Ms. Ferreira?” she said. “Do make it Elaine. I haven’t heard ‘Ms. Ferreira’ in a dog’s age.”
“What book is this again?” the boy from Tom Sawyer wondered.
I wasn’t sure—what classic novel was set in a Victorian seaside town?
I tried to remember as the Librarian launched into her little explanation, and I’d heard her give it enough times by now that I could admire her delivery.
She was matter-of-fact without being cold, empathetic without being emotional, efficient without being rushed.
Just what you want in a Librarian: a keeper of information who knows exactly how to dispense it.
“I don’t think I’ll be going,” said the woman in red at the end of the Librarian’s recitation, sounding utterly unworried. “No need to hide me. I’m safe where I am.”
“Are you?” The Librarian put a hand to her hat, a wide-brimmed straw with a green-striped ribbon to keep it from whipping off her head into the sea below. “I remember you were very anxious, when I placed you here, that your brother not be able to find you.”
“Mmmm.” The woman angled her sunshade so not a ray of the setting sun could fall on her face, and her smile widened. “A few things have changed since then.”
That’s when I remembered just what classic work of English literature happens to be set in the charming seaside town of Whitby during the 1890s. The second half, anyway. The novel begins in Transylvania, with a young lawyer named Jonathan Harker . . .