Chapter 11
“It is occasionally necessary to proceed in full knowledge of what one is doing.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on providing a false alibi to her son, Simon, for the night of the baron’s murder.
* * *
The Schools Quadrangle was cold in the way of enclosed Oxford stone.
The cold of a place that had spent nearly a thousand years deciding that heat was a visitor rather than a resident and had settled upon this position with complete and irrevocable conclusion.
Nicholas passed through the main gate, his cane striking the cobbles, his breath visible in the chilly air, feigning the composure that he had every reason to be here and rejected outright any accusation to the contrary.
He crossed the quadrangle and gave his name and college at the Bodleian door. N. Scott of Christ Church. He produced the letter of introduction from Viscount Trenwith. Folded once, sealed with the viscount’s seal, Gabriel’s hand on the outside.
The viscount had provided it at Grimsfell with the foresight born of years spent arranging access to places that required meticulous arrangement, knowing that Christ Church credentials alone might not carry a man into Duke Humfrey’s Library without additional weight behind them.
The Bodleian did not admit men on the strength of past residence alone.
It required current endorsement. Current purpose. Current accountability.
Gabriel had known this without being told and had produced the letter before Nicholas had thought to ask for it. It was one of the aspects that made Gabriel Strathmore useful and quietly infuriating in equal measure.
Millie did not know about the letter. She believed his Oxford connections were sufficient for the purpose, which was not entirely false and was also not the complete picture.
He had made the decision at Grimsfell and not revisited it since that this gap in her information did not require immediate correction.
He felt the decision now with the flat, familiar discomfort that had become the standard accompaniment to this line of thinking.
The sub-librarian glanced over the letter with the sedate attention of a man performing a function he had performed many times and found neither tedious nor interesting.
He had Nicholas entered into the admissions book. Name, college, purpose of consultation. Nicholas wrote in: Textual comparison, Arthurian manuscript tradition, Caxton printed editions versus manuscript variants. The sub-librarian read it. Nodded without expression. Passed him through.
Once admitted, he was treated as any other scholar.
He passed into the reading rooms without escort.
Selected two volumes from the open shelves that were consistent with his stated scholarly purpose, and carried them to the inner room as if he had an entirely legitimate reason for going there.
Nicholas knew these rooms well. He had buried himself in them when he needed to be alone.
He pushed open the door to Duke Humfrey’s Library and went in.
The room presented itself the way it always had, immediately and without concession. He had been here three times as a student, arriving each time with the combination of privilege and displacement of a young man who had come to Oxford later than his contemporaries.
He had never quite lost the sensation of being marginally out of step with the institution’s rhythms, but Duke Humfrey’s did not notice individual hesitations. It was too old and too certain of its own significance for that.
Dark oak bookcases lined the walls from floor to ceiling. The painted frieze above depicted the coats of arms of early benefactors in faded colors, having been here so long they had become part of the architecture rather than mere decoration.
The air smelled permanently of old vellum and beeswax and was shrouded in the cold of a building that had never quite been warm and had long since made its peace with that fact.
Long study tables ran the length of the room. The tall windows above admitted muted sunlight. The scholars at those tables were centered on their books.
It was beautiful in the austere, entirely unwelcoming way of a place that had decided what it was several centuries ago and found the question of visitors’ comfort beside the point.
He took a place at one of the desks. Laid his working papers out with the arrangement of a man settling in for a productive morning.
Submitted his request for the Malory manuscript.
The morning clerk accepted the written request without comment and disappeared into the locked bookroom beyond the desks.
Nicholas arranged the two volumes he had selected. Opened the first, and waited with the patience learned over the past year of sobriety, having discovered at last that waiting no longer needed to be filled immediately with distractions.
The manuscript was brought to him.
The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of the Rounde Table, bound in brown calf leather.
Moderately worn at the corners in the way of a volume that had been seriously but gently used over a considerable period.
Five raised bands on the spine with faint patterns pressed into the spaces between them.
The third band sat fractionally higher than the mathematical spacing would have placed it, which he saw immediately and which he confirmed by laying the edge of his thumbnail against each band in turn under the pretense of examining the tooling.
Red spine label, hand-lettered library shelf mark in faded ink.
The label offset approximately an eighth of an inch to the left of center.
Vellum pages, slightly rippling at the fore-edge from age, with the pale tint that old vellum acquired in cold rooms over long periods.
A color between yellow and green which had no name because it belonged entirely to itself.
He did not read it. He studied it with imminent necessity, committing each detail to memory before the opportunity vanished.
Pulling out his portfolio, he opened it across his lap below the desk’s edge, out of the sight-lines of the other scholars and the clerk at his station.
Then he laid a sheet of blank paper against the manuscript’s spine.
He made a small pencil mark at the position of the third band.
He noted the label’s offset with a second mark.
He sketched the binding in his notebook, then noted the leather tone.
Not quite chestnut. Not quite tobacco. A hue between that which could be replicated with the right preparation.
He noted the sound the manuscript made when closed. Not the sound of paper, but the soft compression of old vellum, heavier and more decided.
Then, he placed the manuscript out and waited to observe the return procedure. The neighboring scholar at the far end of the table returned a different volume to the morning clerk. The clerk accepted it. Checked the spine. Checked the label. Turned to reshelve without opening it.
He waited for the shift change, the morning clerk handing over to an afternoon assistant. Younger, less experienced, still settling into the rhythms of the position. Therefore, less familiar with the current holdings and their specificities.
Nicholas returned the manuscript at half past three, thirty minutes after the shift change, with the attitude of satisfied achievement while being internally bored to the verge of tears.
The afternoon assistant accepted it. Nicholas gathered his papers, closed the portfolio, and made his way to the exit.
He was almost through the door when he heard his name.
“Mr. Scott.” The voice was low and grating.
Nicholas turned.
Mr. Edwin Cresswell stood in the corridor with his hat in his long-fingered hands, turning it once with the painstaking proprietary gesture he had used the morning he had called on Millie.
The pale gray eyes moved over Nicholas with quiet attentiveness, as though he had discovered an unexpected pattern worth examining.
“Mr. Cresswell,” Nicholas replied, somewhat surprised the other man had paid enough attention to him to recollect his name.
“I did not know you were a reader here.” Cresswell said it with a soft inflection that hinted he was gathering information by making statements and observing the reactions that turned up in response.
“I am an avid scholar,” Nicholas lied. He kept his voice in the range of mild and pleasant.
His expression did the same. Cresswell was the Deputy Keeper of Manuscripts at the Bodleian.
He had access to the admissions book. The scholar might already know that N.
Scott of Christ Church had consulted the Malory manuscript this morning and had cited Arthurian textual variants as his scholarly purpose.
And Cresswell struck him as a man who did not need much to raise his curiosity.
He is filing this, Nicholas thought. Every syllable.
“I had heard,” Cresswell said, his hat making its circumspect rotation, “that Miss Metcalfe is having a difficult time.” A pause, pitched as academic warmth.
“Which is why I called last week to inquire after her father. A gifted scholar. A great loss to the university community, this decline of his.”
He spoke about Mr. Metcalfe in the past tense as if he had already filed him under … concluded.
“I will pass along your regards,” Nicholas said.
“You are assisting her, perhaps? With the management of her father’s affairs?
” The questions were wrapped in the same smooth, inquiring warmth as all the words Cresswell said.
The sympathy that did not quite reach the right temperature.
The interest that was not quite the interest it presented as being.
The kind of fellow, Nicholas thought, he would have thoroughly disdained during his time here.
The kind who had learned that scholarly authority and social ease were useful instruments in the service of purposes that were expedient to his ambitions.