CHAPTER 8
A week later, Emma found a surprise by the river. She’d come from the North Gate, hitching up her rucksack. The last person she’d expected to see was hunched on the bank, unspeakably chic in raw-hemmed jeans and a structured shirt. Watching the froth churn, one knee hugged to her chest.
“Oh, hello.” Julia’s glassy eyes focused on Emma. “It’s you.”
A cigarette wavered in Julia’s fingers. There were smudges in her makeup and red rims around her eyes.
“I don’t smoke. Usually.” Julia ducked Emma’s glance and crushed the cigarette into a patch of moss. “It’s just—I had plans today with my friend. Imogen.” She hugged her knee closer. “Without her here, I… I’m not quite sure what to do with myself, to be honest.”
“I’m sure she’ll be along soon.”
Julia released a breath. “She just left the University.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I hope she’s okay.”
Julia looked at her as if for the first time. “She’s not. But thank you. You’re the first person to say that.” Her eyes snagged on Emma’s rucksack. “Where are you off to?”
“Meeting Jasper.” Emma tried not to blush. “We—we’re doing some photography together.”
“Oh yes?” said Julia, with faint amusement. “Well, don’t let me stop you.”
Emma got four steps away before turning back.
“But later,” she said. “If you’re missing your friend. We could eat together in the dining hall? If you want.”
“I’d like that.” Julia looked down, blinking rather quickly. “Now, do get on.” She lifted her chin, and Emma was treated to her real smile, crooked and glorious. “It won’t do to keep Jasper waiting, you know. He’s not used to it.”
Emma hurried down the river path, her heart fluttering in time with the falling leaves. Around a bend, Jasper was waiting for her, bathed in sunlight. He’d chosen a pool in a curve of the river, a golden cup for the afternoon. A kingfisher flashed among the reeds.
“There you are—come see.” He guided her to a tangle of greenery on the riverbank. Together, they pulled aside a summer’s worth of knotted stems. Behind was a statue of a bearded man, his lower half a curve of fish scales.
“He’s still here. I saw him last year, rowing past.”
The statue’s muscled torso reclined on a pitcher. Emma peered inside.
“It almost looks like a pipe here.”
“Old storm drain, maybe? Running into the river?”
Emma ran her fingers over veins in the glass-smooth stone. “It’s old, whatever it is.”
“And perfect for your first shoot. Watch how I set up the framing—”
At first, she barely lifted the camera at all. She was content to sit in the sun, her arm looped around the stone merman, listening to Jasper explain.
But by their third visit to the river, Jasper insisted she try by herself. It was hard to concentrate on the viewfinder with his breath on her neck. Her subject ruffled its wings, preparing to fly. Jasper leaned over her shoulder.
“Adjust the focus—you’ve got the shot now. You see?”
And she did. The way the sunlight hit the lapwing’s feathers. The beak questing up toward the sun. Hopeful, determined. Even as her finger brushed the shutter, she knew. It was going to be better than anything she’d ever taken.
“Just needed the right lens.” Jasper grinned down at her.
“The right teacher, more like. Would you hold the camera? I want to see if there’s a nest around here. If you don’t mind.”
“Go for it.” Jasper stretched out on a sunny spot on the bank.
Sighting a likely patch of reeds, Emma splashed deeper.
“You know what I like about you?” came Jasper’s voice. “You’re peaceful. Not needing to talk all the time…”
So it hadn’t occurred to him that she might be too nervous to think of anything to say.
“… disappearing into your focus, like a proper photographer. You’d probably make a good sailor too. Same skill.”
Emma resisted the pull of the vision. Jasper helping her onto his yacht. His arm around her waist as they reeled in a rope. A cabin below deck, just big enough for two…
“That’s what travel does. People like you and me, travelers, we don’t need to push a conversation. Because we’re less possessive. Of places, of people. Of relationships…”
There was a mass bobbing under her patch of reeds. She crouched.
Frogspawn. In September. Six months out of season, for this climate.
First the frogs mating on that city street, and now this. It was either a bizarre species mutation or environmental upheaval on a scale she’d never heard of. Her hand, stretching toward the cloud of spawn, stopped.
This had all happened after the flood. And she still had to check the University’s archives to be sure, but her blood told her that both it and these anomalies were something new.
Climate change in action. This could be genuinely groundbreaking research.
Journal-worthy, even. Her fellowship project plan would have to change.
She could survey the river in sections, checking for other anomalies.
She’d need to assign more budget for equipment.
Photograph it all. Run live-stream feeds, possibly.
There was a mystery here. And now that she almost had it between her teeth, she could not bear to let it rest.
Still musing, she turned to find Jasper’s camera pointing at her.
“There,” he breathed. “Just perfect.”
Emma swiped a strand of hair from her face.
“No, hold still,” he said softly. Their eyes met, and Emma could not look away. Under his gaze, her body was a river rippled by raindrops. Every inch of her, alive.
The shutter clicked. “Got it. Come on, you must be freezing in that water. Time for your rescue.”
He pulled her onto the bank, and she stumbled against his chest. Her head spun with his closeness.
That clean cotton smell where his T-shirt clung to his neck.
The animal scent of sun-warmed skin. And beneath, something she couldn’t identify.
Something smoky she had only smelled once, her nose buried in her father’s blazer on some rare, long-ago visit. She breathed him in.
He smiled, his face inches from hers. “Now I have the best shot I’ll get today. So…” He was going to kiss her. She knew it. Emma melted toward him. But then Jasper twisted, fitting the camera back into the padded bag. “So, what next?”
Emma swallowed her disappointment. Her eyes caught on a dome above the trees. “I actually kind of wanted to get to the Library today. For my project.”
Jasper groaned. “You really want to spend your afternoon looking at old photos of a river?”
“The Library’s archives are rare. I never thought I could find out so much about an ecosystem a hundred, even a hundred and fifty years in the past.”
“I wish I cared about something here as much as you care about this project. Maybe then I wouldn’t miss sailing so much.”
“But you’ve got people. Your friends. The ‘Society,’” she added, in strenuous air quotes, and Jasper laughed. “You have a gift. Leadership, or charisma, or whatever they call it. You’re good at people.”
“And you’re not?”
Emma pulled a face. “Animals are easier than people. If you look long enough, stay still enough, you can see everything you need to know. About who they are.”
“People are different?”
Emma smiled and nudged him onto the path that wound up to the Library. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that we can’t stay still enough around other people to see clearly.”
After an hour in the Library, Emma suspected that staying still might be a particular problem for Jasper. If he wasn’t darting around to look over her shoulder, he was taking photos of her from behind a bookcase.
“Are you done yet?”
The river records had been fruitful. She’d not found one mention of another notable flood for the past eight hundred years. Whatever was happening, it was indeed new.
“Mmm. Sorry.” Emma tore herself from a catalogue of photographs.
There were strange annotations on this one: The Edwardian author had an obsessive belief that animals native to the area—the river’s rats, foxes, ravens, and the like—were demonic forces, possessing “unholy and unnatural” traits.
Emma forced herself to close the file and reach for the next.
The historian’s ramblings were entertaining, but not exactly scientific.
“Like I said, you really can go home if you like. I think I’ll be a while here.”
“Seriously?”
Jasper’s face dropped. On anyone less beautiful, Emma might have described the lines between his brows as petulant.
“Do I need to remind you both that this is a no-talking area?”
They both jumped. The woman behind them had approached noiselessly. One eye was a hollow, an eyelid puckering over empty space. Emma had seen her working at the reception desk, but always wearing an eye patch. Jasper’s chair screeched.
“There’s no one else here.” He swept a hand at the empty reading room. “So what’s the problem?”
She looked sharply at Jasper.
“You. Your voice is familiar.”
“Happens to me all the time,” Jasper said, stretching back in his chair.
“A Balfour,” she pronounced, with the air of sentencing him for a crime.
“Yes.” Jasper’s smile faded. “How did you know? I don’t remember—”
“You’re just like your father.” The receptionist had already turned her back. Her gray hair snarled past her waist. She was piled into a shapeless top and floor-length skirt. But her walk was surprisingly graceful, and her answer floated back to them with a hint of barely concealed merriment.
Jasper’s face was white under its tan: with shock or anger, Emma couldn’t tell. When he spoke, his voice was tight.
“God, what a harpy. Maybe my father banged her and she’s been bitter about it ever since. Hard to believe, though—even my father has some standards.”
For Jasper to sound so unlike himself, Emma knew, meant he had to be very upset.
It did seem unfair for the woman to compare Jasper to his father.
Without even knowing him, Emma thought indignantly.
Children didn’t have to be like their fathers.
She wasn’t anything like—and more to the point, Jasper wasn’t anything like his father, from what she’d gathered.
Jasper had spoken of him almost with fear, as well as resentment.
Jasper waved off her concern.
“Come on, let me buy you a drink. Let’s leave the witch to her library.”
As they were leaving, a familiar Humpty-Dumpty figure emerged from a side corridor.
“Rich!” roared Jasper.
“J-dog!” bellowed back Richard.
“We’re going to Boddington’s, Emma ’n’ me, want to come with?”
“I just need to—ahem, lock up for the historical society,” said Richard.
Emma saw the look of suppressed mirth pass between him and Jasper, as the latter said gravely, “Very good, mate, very responsible.”
“You both go ahead,” she said. Whatever secret they had, it could wait. “I have one more thing to do here.”
Emma walked back through the stacks alone.
“Yes?” said the receptionist, without looking up from her computer.
“I—You gave me a map.” Emma wasn’t sure how to continue. “On my first visit here.”
“And do you… need another one?” The receptionist swept a hand at a box on the counter, brimming with maps.
“Oh. Thank you, no, I—I wanted to ask about someone who works here. A librarian? I met him up on the second floor?”
The receptionist didn’t say anything, but she did turn to face Emma for the first time.
“He was, um, an elderly gentleman, and he was breathing—That is… His hands were sort of…” Emma trailed off.
The receptionist had snapped back to face her computer.
“No, I don’t think anyone like that works here.
Could have been a stray professor. The dons are here all the time, and some of them are quite…
elderly.” She lingered on the last word, and Emma felt foolish.
It occurred to her the receptionist might not be that far apart in years from the man she’d seen.
“But he said he was a librarian. No, he said he was… the Librarian,” Emma realized.
The receptionist looked unimpressed. “Sorry. Is that everything? I have to get through this catalogue,” she said, typing furiously. “It’s full of errors.”
Emma left the Library, but she couldn’t let the problem go. It whirred round in her mind. She knew she had not imagined him, her strange librarian. Warning her of dangers in the shadows, pushing his trolley of blood-inked books. But the receptionist would have no reason to lie.
“What is it?” Jasper asked, as she slid into the booth at Boddington’s.
“Nothing,” said Emma, zipping up a pocket on her bag.
It had been exactly where she’d left it on her first visit to the Library.
A drawing of an eye and a monster’s teeth.
Proof. That her encounter had happened, just as she remembered it.
That somewhere, deep in the entrails of the Library, there was an eerie old man hunting through books.
And next time she came to use the photo archives, she would find him.
Then, two days later, Jasper and Richard’s mystery revealed itself.