Chapter 11 #2
Nicholas was aware, as he thought this, that he was sitting in a glass room of considerable fragility. And he was reaching for a very large stone.
“I will pass along your regards,” he said again, with a pleasant finality, his sentence concluded and his meaning clear.
Cresswell, who was excellent at reading signals, inclined his head and wished him a pleasant afternoon.
Nicholas walked out into the Schools Quadrangle and kept walking.
He thought about the admissions book and what Cresswell would do with the information.
Thankfully, there was no record of Gabriel’s letter which was still in his pocket, and he could only hope the librarian had already forgotten about it.
He thought about the Malory manuscript. About the visit at the Metcalfe house, once a fortnight since January.
About the strange subtlety of the questions Cresswell had just asked, which on the surface seemed soft and without direction.
Questions that waited for the answer to a question he had not yet asked aloud.
And beneath all of it, persistent and uncomfortable, was the thought Nicholas had been carrying since the corridor and could not set down.
That there was something that did not sit right about Cresswell.
The maintained connection framed as collegiate friendship.
The questions that appeared to be about one thing and were about another.
The purpose that had not been disclosed to the people whose cooperation he solicited.
Exactly the kind of fellow I would have thoroughly disdained, he thought again.
And what of me? Does Millie feel that something about me does not sit right?
He did not answer. He walked on through the cold streets, and the question kept pace with him. It followed him directly into the Metcalfe house, an unsettling presence that had not yet had its full say on the matter.
* * *
The study was warm from the fire that had been built up after dinner. It smelled of old paper and pipe tobacco and the sharp, clean smell of glue, and the bookbinding tools were laid out on the worktable beside the materials Millie had assembled in the afternoon.
It was past midnight.
Millie sat with her sleeves shoved up, her spectacles slightly awkward on her nose, her fair hair coming loose from its pins in the way it always did by this hour.
She was working on the forgery with a meticulous attitude. She had been at it since dinner, barely noticing when Pike had made his final round and the house had become fully theirs.
The results of her effort were arranged on the worktable in the lamplight with a complicated organization that she understood based on what she planned to produce.
Papa had done bookbinding. It was a fact that had emerged naturally from the study’s contents when she had begun assembling the materials.
The tools kept in good order in the deep drawer of the right-hand cabinet.
The bone folder and the paring knife and the awl.
The pot of beeswax and the needles and the lengths of linen thread.
A scholar who loved books had learned to care for them.
He had the tools from maintaining his collection for decades and had never stopped finding the work worthwhile.
Millie had placed beside these tools the laid paper she had obtained from a stationer on the High Street that afternoon, explaining to the proprietor that she required it for a family archive project with a composure that Nick, who had been standing outside at her instruction, had declared he rather admired when she reported it.
She had the leather she had sourced from a bookbinder near the Bodleian. Pale calf, worked with beeswax and a trace of lampblack until it achieved the color Nick had described in his notes. A color between chestnut and tobacco. Not quite either.
She had the red Morocco leather for the label, and the fine dust she had gathered from the bottom of the coal scuttle, applied with a soft cloth in light circular motions to the leather until the aging resembled that of a volume that had sat on a shelf for centuries rather than the work of a single evening.
It was not perfect. She had said so without apology and without false modesty, presenting it as an operational assessment of her own work.
It did not need to be perfect. The clerk who received it would check the spine and the label and reshelve it without opening it.
And a volume did not need to be perfect to pass a spine-and-label check by an assistant who was not expecting to be deceived, nor was he the man who would have initially retrieved the original.
She had become aware of it at some point around ten o’clock.
Not in the way she was aware of the fire, or the distant sounds of the street settling, or the creaking of the floorboard at the foot of the stairs.
In a different way entirely. An unhelpful way that announced itself first as a faint warmth at the back of her neck, that had little to do with the fireplace, and as a tendency for the bone folder to require more deliberate direction than usual.
He is sitting in a chair. You are performing bookbinding. These are not remarkable circumstances.
She had devoted herself to the leather with renewed vigor. The warmth at her neck had not been persuaded.
Nick shifted in the chair.
It was a particular kind of shift. She had been learning, without entirely meaning to, the various shifts he made in the course of an evening.
There was the restless variety, the repositioning variety, and the shift that accompanied the drawing out of his notebook.
This one was none of those. It was the contained, deliberate shift of a man making a considered adjustment and not drawing attention to it, and it landed in her chest with a small, cold weight of recognition.
The treatment. She had not done the treatment.
He had not said anything. He had shifted in the chair in his careful way, accustomed to managing his own discomfort without requesting assistance, and had said nothing, and her stomach turned over with the guilt of a task she had undertaken and then abandoned in favor of a sixteenth-century forgery.
She put the bone folder down.
“We have not done your treatment.” She stated it as an observation and an apology folded together, chagrined about a promise she had failed to honor. “Nick, I am sorry. I became absorbed in the work.”
She was aware, in the disturbing and inconvenient way she had been aware of his proximity since Grimsfell, of his attention settling on her. The faint change in the atmosphere between them. Which was not a scientific observation and she knew it.
“You have spent the evening constructing a forgery of a medieval manuscript,” he said, “using a retired scholar’s bookbinding tools, at midnight, in your father’s study. I think we can permit the treatment to wait one evening.”
“A scholar’s bookbinding tools,” she said, a reflexive response that was an immediate, automatic correction that required accuracy. “Papa is not retired.”
“I beg your pardon,” Nick said. “A scholar’s tools, generously if temporarily available, and a forgery of creditable quality produced under admirable conditions. The treatment can wait.”
She returned her attention to the forgery.
The color had come up in her cheeks. She was aware of this and had made a decision about it, which was to continue working and to consider the matter resolved.
The matter was not resolved. The forgery required very careful handling, and she was finding the bone folder somewhat difficult to manage.
She worked in silence for a while. The fire crackled and outside Oxford continued its business with the established indifference of a city at night.
Then she set the bone folder down. Examined the forgery with critical, exact attention, assessing her own work against the standard she had set for it.
She turned it in the lamplight. She inspected the label placement.
She ran her thumbnail along the third spine band.
She held the page edges at an angle to the lamp and compared the color to his notes.
“It will do,” she said.
Nick stood. He crossed to the side table where Pike had left the tea tray before retiring, covered with a cloth against the night air. She heard him lift the cloth, the small domestic sound of it more pleasing than she cared to admit. Then he carried a cup to her elbow and set it there.
She had not asked. She had not been about to ask. She did not, as a general principle, ask for things she could arrange herself, and she had been arranging her own tea and her own needs for long enough that the habit had calcified into what could be called an identity.
Her heart did a complicated movement in her chest, a sharp commentary about the cup.
It is tea. He has brought me tea. This is not a significant act.
Her heart remained unpersuaded.
She stared at the cup, then glanced up at him. The expression on his face was not the sardonic one and not the neutral one. It was the one she could not fully evaluate and had not stopped attempting to, which was its own frustration, because she was generally quite good at evaluating.
She picked it up and drank.
Then she stood and set the manuscript aside to dry on the clean cloth she had laid out for the purpose.
She stretched, arching her back with the slow, languid movement of someone who had been bent over a worktable for hours; her spine had been yapping since eleven and now apparently was prepared to submit its complaints in formal written form.
Her hands pressed to the small of her back, and her chin tipped upward.
The silence in the room changed.