Chapter 13
“I have never found prior knowledge of the outcome to be a reliable deterrent.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, considering her past mistakes.
* * *
The Malory manuscript lay open on the study table.
Millie allowed herself one moment before she touched it, which was not something she did with scholarly materials as a general rule.
She was a woman who used her sources rather than revered them, one who had been taught by Papa that a book’s value was in what it yielded when properly interrogated, and not in the handling of it.
But this one had been through enough in the past twenty-four hours, through Duke Humfrey’s Library, a folio portfolio, the cold Oxford air, and this table, that a moment of acknowledgment seemed warranted before she began.
Not to mention what it had gone through in January when Lord Trenwith had obtained it under suspicious circumstances from Sir Alpheus Danbury.
Nick was across from her with Matteo’s journal open at page two, his graphite pencil in his hand and his notebook placed to his left.
They established the method in the first ten minutes without needing to discuss it at any length.
He would read the cipher sequences from the journal column by column, slowly, giving her time to locate each corresponding passage in the Malory.
She would find each passage, identify the relevant word, and speak it aloud. Nick would write it down.
The rhythm between them established itself without announcement, the way rhythms did when two minds were both genuinely occupied by the same problem and had ceased thinking about the occupation itself and were simply inside it. What the Italians called simpatico.
She was aware of him across the table in the way she was aware of the fire, present and steady and contributing warmth while she paid mind to the task in front of her.
She noticed the scratch of his pencil, the nature of his attention when he was interpreting a sequence that resisted easy resolution, and the slight stillness that preceded his next notation.
She had learned these characteristics about him the way she had learned the injury in his leg, through sustained proximity.
Papa was in his chair by the fire with his book, where Pike had settled him after breakfast. The study was warmth and thoughtful seclusion in a way Millie associated with the days she thought of as good days, which were not days when everything went easily but days when Papa was present and content.
She did not question this too closely. She had learned that examining the good days while they were happening was a reliable method of shortening them.
The coded message yielded itself word by word across the morning and into the afternoon, with the unhurried stubbornness of an answer that had been waiting centuries for the right question to be asked in the right sequence.
Each cipher sequence in the column resolved against its Malory passage with the satisfying cooperation of a mechanism designed for exactly this purpose.
Each resolved word added itself to the sentence assembling in Nick’s notebook with the patient revelation of secret knowledge Matteo di Bianchi had gathered and left here across hundreds of years of waiting.
Page two contained two elements.
In the right margin was an architectural sketch, small and distinct, drawn in a draughtsman’s working shorthand rather than as a decorative exercise. It was the kind of notation an artist made when his eye registered beauty worth preserving and his hand moved to do so.
The subject was a circular illustration of a leopard’s head motif surrounded by a Tudor rose border, rendered in the economy of line that separated a professional craftsman’s observation from an amateur’s.
It was not labeled, not explained, simply the recording of a design seen by an eye trained and set down accurately.
Alongside the sketch sat the translated message.
Directions to a specific copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, to the chapters concerning the imperial campaign, carrying the instruction to count as Matteo had counted.
The message did not specify which copy of the Historia, nor which library, nor where to find it.
It stated only what to do when one located the right one.
Millie read it through five times.
“There is no copy specified,” she said.
“No,” Nick agreed.
“He named the text. He named the chapters. He told us what to do when we reach the relevant passage. He did not tell us which copy.”
“No,” Nick said again, preserving an admirable calm while clearly internally bewildered but refusing to vent it.
She stared at the sketch in the margin. At the leopard’s head and the Tudor rose border, lines by the hand of a man sitting in a specific room while leisurely drawing a picture.
Recording something he had seen and considered worth the notation.
Was it a clue or an idle illustration of something that caught his eye?
She had been staring at it for perhaps half a minute when she became aware, with the peripheral alertness she had developed for the recognizable sounds of the study when Papa was in it, of a figure approaching from behind.
She turned.
Papa was standing two feet from the table.
He had come from his chair at the fireplace without either of them noticing his approach, which was not unusual.
He moved quietly through spaces he had known for decades, with the ease of long familiarity.
And he was looking at the open journal on the table with an expression she had not seen on his face in some months, not the settled, slightly removed expression of a man reading in a comfortable chair, but something sharper that had surfaced from the depths of his mind, from the part that still held the fifty years of scholarly work intact and waiting for the right question to unlock it.
He moved forward and cocked his head at the sketch in the right margin of page two.
“That’s Merton,” Papa said. “Those are the library bosses.”
Then he straightened, turned, and walked back to his chair with a casual pace.
He had said what he had to say and had other reading to attend to.
He picked up his book from the arm of the chair, opened it, and was gone again, back into whatever country the text took him to, as quietly as he had surfaced.
The study was very quiet.
Nick was gazing at her. She was staring at her father, at his head bent over his book, at the waistcoat buttoned wrong by two buttons in the asymmetry that was consistent if not correct, at the ink-stained cuffs and the leather shoes and the mop of curling white hair that refused to be disciplined by any arrangement she had ever attempted.
She blinked once, fighting back the tears she had not expected that were threatening to arrive.
Then she turned to the bookcase behind the writing desk and ran her fingers along the spines with dexterity, having read these journals before and knowing approximately where each year was shelved.
She pulled out the one she wanted, one of Papa’s working journals from years earlier, when his mind had still been reliably present, his handwriting still legible, and his frustration at problems that resisted solution still productive rather than hopeless because he had expected, eventually, to solve them.
She found the entry. She turned to place the journal on the table and read it aloud.
Papa had written about page two with the frustration of having all the pieces and still no visible whole. The cipher column would not yield without the key from page 1. He had tried adjacent passages. He had tried variant readings. None of his efforts had produced a coherent result.
But in the margin of the entry, in a smaller, slightly different hand, as though the observation had been made at a separate time and been added after the main entry was complete, he had written that the sketch in the margin of page two …
a ceiling boss … was one he recognized from the Merton Upper Library.
Tudor roses and leopards’ heads, Henry VII’s arms, which she now read out loud to Nick.
“… I have worked in that library many times. Matteo di Bianchi was sitting there when he wrote this page.”
She closed the journal, set it flat on the table, and addressed Nick.
“He recognized the bosses,” she said. The plainness of her voice was not indifference. It was the plainness of hopes held at a careful distance in case she read too much into it. “He had worked in the Merton Upper Library, and he knew the room.”
“Then the copy of the Historia must be at Merton,” Nick said.
“It has to be,” Millie said. “Matteo must have been in residence at Merton. He used their chained manuscript, and he coded his cipher against it and then left this sketch as the only indication of which library held the key. For whoever deciphered this far to know it was Merton, if they had been paying attention.”
“Merton College Library,” Nick said. He said it with a sort of incredulous tone that implied the next step would be considerably more complicated than the previous one.
“Can you get in?” Millie asked.
“Merton is not the Bodleian,” he replied.
“And it is not the Radcliffe Camera. Merton is a private college with a fellowship that has been guarding its collection since the fourteenth century and has had many centuries to perfect the process.” He set his pencil down.
“No outside scholar enters without a formal introduction from a Fellow of the college. The library is not open to visitors without endorsement from a current Fellow. Women do not enter under any circumstances.”
“I was not proposing to go in myself,” Millie said.