Chapter Six #2
and therefore surreal replay of all the fantasies I’d ever had about meeting him.
I hated him for what he’d done to us. The way Mum told it, he’d refused to have anything to do with her after she got pregnant
with me. It happened when they were young, but not too young. His family had money. He’d told her he loved her. But when push
came to shove, he told her that she wasn’t “the right kind of girl” for his family, that he would be having nothing more to
do with her, or with me.
Your father has a cold, cold heart. And the same eyes as me.
He offered me his arm, but I leaned on Diana and limped back to the house on her arm.
I was silent, but my anger was swelling. She’d ambushed me. Had she ambushed him, too? He’d made it sound that way, but Magnus
Beaufort was a very good liar.
“The Biggest Project”
Feature, Telegraph Magazine
February 3, 2024
Libraries are in Magnus Beaufort’s family. He welcomed me to his home in Cambridge to talk about his latest project and why
it’s personal.
There’s a room at the end of a corridor in Beaufort’s spacious home on a leafy street in Cambridge that he—entrepreneur, physician,
collector, and philanthropist—cleans himself.
“I won’t let anyone in here except family.”
Inside, we admire the interior, but not all of it. The room and its contents burned 25 years ago, and although he’s had it
made safe, Beaufort hasn’t been able to bring himself to restore it fully.
Beaufort is coy about why, at first. Over lunch in the Orangery that has a charming view of their garden, with a planting
design originally provided by Gertrude Jekyll for Beaufort’s grandmother, and exquisitely maintained by this generation of
Beauforts, we’re joined by his charming wife, Cece (CEO of makeup and fashion brand cEcE).
“Magnus doesn’t like to talk about it,” she says. “It’s painful.”
She’s referring to the fire that consumed the private library built by Beaufort’s grandfather and destroyed his collection
of rare and special manuscripts.
Beaufort has a distant look in his eyes. “It’s still painful,” he says. “I mean, thank God there was no loss of life, but
what you need to understand is that the collection was so special to our family that quite apart from the monetary and historical
value of what we’d lost, it felt as if we’d lost part of ourselves, too.”
I do understand. His patrician features are softened by grief as he recalls the years his father and grandfather spent building the collection, with its emphasis on rare medical texts. Although, as Beaufort is keen to point out, they collected many other exceptional manuscripts, too.
The loss of his family’s collection is the reason he wants to build the Magnus Beaufort Library and why he’s determined not
to let the project fail, even in the face of fierce opposition.
“Book collecting is heroic,” he says. “I believe that. Over the centuries, men have risked their lives to collect manuscripts
because they knew that without preserving the knowledge we’ve accumulated over millennia, we’re doomed to live in very dark
times.”
The Beauforts are keen to talk about their enthusiasm for the initiatives they’re funding to boost literacy. “We love doing
all this grassroots work, it’s what gets us up in the morning, but we think it’s also important to gift this new institution
to the nation. We feel it’s the only way to make up for the loss of the books that burned on our family’s watch.”
It’s hard to tear myself away from the Beauforts’ beautiful home, but tear away we must. After a short drive we don hard hats
and inspect the site where the new library is beginning to rise from the ground. As Beaufort describes his vision, I understand
that it will be magnificent.
“Once the doors of this building are open, the new manuscripts I’ve been acquiring will become the cornerstone of a brand-new
collection.”
It takes a man with vision, determination, and very deep pockets to conceive and deliver a project like this. To steer it
past criticism and gift it to the nation, it takes a titan with a tear in his eye.
Detractors should make no mistake: the Magnus Beaufort Library is a phoenix rising from the ashes, and it will also be a jewel
in the crown of this nation.
Sid
Sid read the note again: “You need to know about Minxu Peng.”
Surely, it couldn’t be for him. He’d never heard that name before. He considered going back to ask the receptionist if she
knew more than she’d said, but that seemed unlikely. The note could hardly have been left for him by mistake because it was
so obviously deliberate: the fact that it had arrived at the department on the day he was due to be there, the careful printing
of his name on the envelope.
Back at the cottage, he took the note upstairs and set it down by his desk. He sent Professor Johns an email thanking him
for the chat and the offer of work and saying he was looking forward to starting. He thought about asking if Johns knew who
Minxu Peng was but decided against it for now. Better to keep things simple with that man. The situation was already tricky
enough.
He did an online search for Minxu Peng. A few pages of results appeared, and he scrolled idly down them, but they seemed irrelevant.
He spotted one link that looked promising, but when he clicked on it, it led to an error notification. He clicked back to
the results page and took another look at the link. It contained just enough information to suggest that Minxu Peng might
be associated with the Center for Computing and Business at the Hunan Normal University in China. He found the university’s
website and a page for the Center for Computing and Business. There were no staff photographs, but it had a list of staff
members. Minxu Peng wasn’t included on it, but another of the names he’d seen on the obsolete link was. That person was now
the director of the center.
“Right place,” he said aloud. “Wrong time.”
He felt as if he’d been set a puzzle, like the riddles Anya and her mum exchanged.
Occam’s razor: most straightforward approach first, he thought.
He ran a simple cache search, putting the address of the dead web page he found earlier into the search bar and searching for saved versions of it, but drew a blank.
Next, he opened a piece of software built to search billions of archived web pages for content and entered a few terms. This time, he got lucky.
Alongside seven others, Minxu Peng was listed as a member of the Center for Computing and Business in 2018. Her specialty
was cybersecurity, the same as Sid’s.
It felt like he was getting somewhere. He screenshotted the page and saved it. Now he was intrigued.
Anya
Magnus bound up my foot, neatly and carefully, while I stared at his surgeon’s hands and imagined them holding a blade and
cutting into other people’s skin to avoid thinking about how intimate the moment was.
I didn’t want to let him play dad or doctor. He didn’t deserve it. Where was he when I fell off my bike or grazed my knees as a kid? Where was he when my appendix
burst, or when I got strep throat? Where was he when Mum got her diagnosis?
He looked up at me and said, “I’m sorry this has been such a horrible shock for you. I was under the impression that you knew
we were going to meet.”
We both looked at Diana. She sat with her back to the window, and her face was in shadow. Her hands were clasped in her lap.
But her posture was straight and strong.
She said, “I should have been honest with you both, and I’m sorry I wasn’t. For what it’s worth, I had my reasons. Your father
has an exceptional collection of manuscripts, which will be the foundation of his new library and which he’s willing to make
available for study to the very best and very brightest. He asked us to find the right person for the job.”
I heard Mum’s voice: Excellence is the only thing he values. People are commodities to him. They’re disposable.
Diana went on: “We found you, Anya. Your eidetic memory, your linguistic knowledge, the breadth of your learning and experience. It’s exceptional.
Was I less than honest about the situation to bring you together?
Yes, because I didn’t think you’d agree to meet otherwise. Am I sorry? I don’t know yet.”
I was very angry with her, but part of me admired her honesty.
Magnus said, “I don’t know if it helps to hear this, but I felt the same as you when Diana first proposed this. But the more
I thought about it, the more it seemed right. At the very least, my hope was, is, that we can have a fruitful working relationship that helps your career and helps us get to know one another.”
“You’ve never been interested in helping me.”
“Is that what your mother told you? Did she tell you how often I tried? And how often she knocked me back?”
I bit my lip.
“I hurt her,” he said. “I own it. The way I treated you both was unforgivable, but I was very young and very stupid. I can’t
change the past, but I can try to improve things for us now.”
Don’t believe a word that man says.
I couldn’t hear it. “I want to leave,” I said.
He messaged his driver. I didn’t want to use his car, but my foot was throbbing, and I knew I couldn’t walk far on it. When
it arrived, Diana got in with me.
“No,” I said.
“Give me one more chance,” she said. “You don’t know everything, and I owe you the full picture.”
I didn’t know what to say or whether to trust her. I still felt ambushed, angry, used. She saw my indecision and leaned forward
to talk to the driver.
“Could you please take us to Cecil Court.”
We got out of the car near the National Portrait Gallery.
We were in the heart of London’s theater district, busy with billboards and traffic, on the roads and on foot.
I followed Diana down a short, pedestrianized street leading toward Covent Garden.
It was lined with small, independent bookshops, specializing in first and rare editions. A book lover’s paradise.