Chapter 16
WHEN I RETURNED to campus the following summer, I found my office had reverted to its natural state as a storage closet.
I wandered, adrift, until a smiling secretary guided me to a palatial room on the fourth floor.
In the middle of the room there was a desk that must have taken ten men and a crane to move, and on top of the desk there was a brass nameplate: Sir Owen Mallory.
I had settled behind the desk, feeling like a child trying on grown-up clothes, when Harrison finally found me.
I hadn’t seen him since the day the book arrived in the post, and the past year hadn’t been kind to him. There was a pouchy, droopy quality to his features, as if the air had been let out of his face, and his skin had gone the color of chewed nails.
He made a circuit of the office, wearing an arch expression that suggested he found it all rather gauche. “My, haven’t you done well for yourself,” he drawled.
I had. In the past month, I had received two honorary degrees, a handful of prestigious job offers, and a prize which I suspected the Cantford Board of Fellows had invented and bestowed purely to get me to stay.
I had the fawning, if somewhat false, admiration of my colleagues; I had an embarrassingly large office with mullioned windows and thick carpeting; I had more money than I knew how to spend, a knighthood, and the endowed faculty position in Middle Dominion Studies.
I stared at Harrison, willing myself to feel even a flicker of pride or accomplishment, or at least petty delight at having won our inane little war.
But all I felt was the impotent regret that follows a bad trade.
I knew I had lost something in exchange for all of this, and I knew it had been precious to me, though I could no longer quite recall what it was.
“Thank you,” I said, in that steady, smooth voice that never sounded like it belonged to me. And then, surprising myself: “I’m not sure it was worth it.”
Harrison wheeled on me. “Of course it’s—any of us would—” I watched as the last tatters of his composure slipped from his hands.
He stepped forward and leaned over the desk until his face was so close, I could see the cobwebs of blood in his eyes and the tremor in his jaw.
I wondered if he’d had trouble sleeping, too, and if the doctors had prescribed him the same chalky white pills.
“It should have been me.” The hate in his voice was bare now, unadorned by false manners or good breeding.
“It was supposed to be me. I remember—I can remember—” He broke off abruptly.
He was looking down at his own hands with an expression I knew well: a weary, mad dread, as if he knew there was nothing there, but still expected to see a knife between his knuckles.
Our eyes met, very briefly. I wondered, with an irrational rush of jealousy, if Harrison had read your stories when he was a boy, as I had. If he, too, knew your eyes were not blue, and did not know how he knew it.
He left without saying anything more.
At my appointment later that day, my hands shook too badly to sign the receipt. The doctor prescribed a long visit to the seaside. The sunlight and the sound of the waves would calm my nerves, he said.
So I was looking out at the Slant Sea, quietly despising the sunlight and the sound of the waves, when I first heard the news. Someone had a wireless playing in the back of the café, and the Sunday sermon had just been interrupted by a breathless announcer.
“The cup and crown,” he panted, and even through the static I could hear the awe running under his voice, as if he knew already that people would tell each other, years later, where they’d been when they first heard the news, “they’ve been—well, they’ve been found.”
By noon the following day I was back on campus, sweating outside Professor Sawbridge’s office door. It was slightly ajar, as it hadn’t been in months, and light shone around the frame. I could hear someone moving on the other side.
I walked in without knocking, the way I used to.
“It was you, wasn’t it.” My lips felt strange, and I realized I was smiling. “That’s what you’ve been up to all year.”
Professor Sawbridge—who did not flinch from anything, who teased the college archivist and kept uncensored versions of dirty novels on her shelves, where anyone could see them—flinched from the sound of my voice.
When she recognized me, she closed her eyes in relief. “Saints, Mallory.”
“Sorry, Professor, I—”
“What are you doing here?” Her eyes snapped open, blue and querulous as they always had been. “Shouldn’t you be cutting a ribbon or kissing a ring?”
Cutting remarks were Sawbridge’s standard greeting, but there was a new jaggedness to her voice, as if it had been snapped off and poorly sharpened. Her cheeks, once broad and well-freckled, were now sallow, and her hair was thin and brittle.
My smile faltered. “I came straight here, as soon as I heard. It was you, wasn’t it, who found them?”
“Yes. It was me.” Her eyes were on her work, which seemed to be sorting books into piles of varying height and stability. The air in the office was stale and swampish, like the inside of a closed mouth, but she hadn’t opened a window. “Well, me, Sylvie, and a couple of interns.”
“Sylvie?”
“Mistress Sylvia Shaw? The archivist.”
I tried and failed to imagine anyone addressing the college archivist—a woman with the stature and temperament of a starved heron—by a nickname.
I wasn’t even sure I could imagine her outside the archives; I had assumed until now that she spent the night in one of her own glass cases, arms folded across her chest. Eventually I offered, “Congratulations.”
Professor Sawbridge ignored this, as if the greatest—well, perhaps second-greatest—discovery of the century was not worth mentioning.
She hauled another armload of books off her shelves and began sorting it according to her own inscrutable system.
Some of them—mostly dirty novels, a few dictionaries—she piled in a musty traveling trunk.
My smile returned, somewhat battered. I would miss her terribly. “Let me guess. Head of Curation at the Royal Museum? Vice-Provost of Cantford?”
This earned me a harassed look. “What?”
“I was trying to guess which position you’ve accepted. You wouldn’t pack your favorite books unless you were switching offices.”
She paused, finally, and looked at me with her customary mix of pity and love, as if I were a very stupid pet that she was inexplicably fond of. Gently, she said, “I was fired, Owen. I have until Friday to clear out my things, or what remains of them.”
It was only then that I registered the state of her office.
Sawbridge was not a naturally neat person, but she did not typically rip all the drawers from her desk or smash her potted plants against the wall.
There were loose papers covering the floor in drifts, and the shelves were half emptied, the remaining books slumped over one another like witnesses to some awful disaster.
Sawbridge nodded at the shelves. “They took all the really filthy stuff, of course. I hope they get an eyeful. Even plundering goons deserve an education.”
“I—I don’t—Fired?”
Professor Sawbridge had been the second woman ever to receive an advanced degree from Cantford College.
She had spent the next decade traipsing across the countryside, digging up the most astonishing artifacts and publishing monographs under the name G.
Sawbridge. She didn’t reveal her gender until the Board of Fellows had begged her on bended knee to accept a faculty appointment.
And—despite decades of inflammatory statements, seditious lectures, and illicit book collecting—they hadn’t fired her.
She was a genius, a real one, and geniuses are permitted their eccentricities.
“Why?” My voice was hoarse.
“Attempted destruction of objects significant to our national heritage.” When I blinked at her, she clarified, “I tried to smash the grail with a big rock.”
I blinked some more. I was aware that I ought to be worried about the destruction of a priceless historical artifact, but I found myself saying, almost in awe, “Mistress Shaw must’ve tried to skin you alive.”
“Sylvie was the one holding the flashlight, love.” There was a nearly imperceptible softening around her mouth.
“I know she likes to frighten the undergraduates, but who doesn’t?
She’s really quite … decent.” This constituted the highest praise I’d ever heard Professor Sawbridge offer a living person and caused me to blink several more times.
She returned, somewhat showily, to her book sorting. “We would have managed it, but one of the interns turned out to be on the Chancellor’s payroll. Sylvie and I were marched off the dig site with rifles to our backs.”
“But—but—” I said, inanely, as if I could offer some counter or defense, as if this were an argument I could win if I only cited the correct source. “Where have you been? Why didn’t you write?” I sounded peevish and young, even to myself.
Sawbridge’s eyes narrowed. “Mallory, I have spent the last five weeks detained without trial while my home and office were searched for evidence of conspiracy, answering very boring and repetitive questions about my loyalty to crown and country. Forgive me if I didn’t mail a letter.
” The corner of Sawbridge’s mouth curled sourly.
“They might be good with trains, these fascists, but they’re quite stingy with postage. ”
Her voice was perfectly dry, as if she were reviewing a second-rate hotel, but I saw her teeth worrying her lower lip, a nervous habit she hadn’t had before. The flesh between her teeth was raw and red.
“Professor, I’m so—”
“Your father sends his love, by the way,” she said, in the slightly disgusted tone she used to deliver the killing blow in a debate, as if she knew there was about to be a great deal of blood and only hoped it didn’t stain her good coat.