“Well, thank goodness you and Professor Trevelyan got your heads together on it,” Diana said.
“Have you applied this to any other manuscripts?” Giulia asked. “I wonder how many might benefit.”
“Not yet,” I said. “But I’ve wondered, too.”
We talked for an hour or more, unpicking my work on Folio 9. They were generous with their praise, asked intelligent questions, and I relaxed as the interview passed. By the end, I felt like I’d found my people.
The rest of the day passed in a whirlwind. They treated Sid and me to lunch. Giulia and her husband, Paul, showed us where we might live. It was an old fisherman’s cottage, two stories and in the middle of a terrace. It was being gutted for a total renovation. We put on hard hats and trod carefully on the exposed joists and over the dirt floor, where archaeologists had dug an exploration pit before okaying the build. From its narrow garden and back windows, it had a partial view of the cathedral ruins. From the front, even over the metal hoardings erected around it, sunshine poured through the salt-crusted windows, and the view of the ocean was spectacular.
Giulia showed me the plans for the finished building while Paul and Sid stood outside, arms folded, chatting. It seemed like they were getting along nicely, and I liked Giulia, too.
“The cottage will look mostly the same from the front,” she said. “But the roof will be raised and the attic made into an extra room.”
I thought it was going to be perfect.
Chapter Three
Anya
That evening, I waited alone outside the hotel for Diana to pick me up. It was dark already. Sid had gone out to meet Paul and Giulia at the pub. They’d promised him some good whiskey.
I was riddled with nerves, partly in case the manuscripts were disappointing—the Bodleian Library was a hard act to live up to, as was the promise of the Beinecke—but also in case the benefactor didn’t like me. Neither Diana Cornish nor her colleagues had given anything away about this mysterious person, and I didn’t know what to imagine, but I had a feeling they might be the one to make a final decision on whether or not I received a formal offer from the Institute.
At seven on the dot, a smart town car with tinted windows pulled up outside the hotel. I watched as a female driver got out and opened a back door. She said, “Ms. Brown?”
“For me?” I asked. She nodded. Feeling self-conscious, I slid into the back to find Diana there already.
She greeted me with a mischievous smile, as if we were complicit in an adventure. I was running on adrenaline. She pulled some paperwork from her bag. “I’m sorry to be boring, but would you mind signing this? It’s an NDA.”
I skimmed it. It forbade me from discussing anything about this evening, including who I met, and where, what was said, and anything I saw. I signed and handed it back to her. It made me hopeful about the quality of what I was going to see. In my prior experience of manuscript collectors, secrecy levels had a direct relationship to the value of the collection.
A few turns out of town the streetlights gave way to pitch darkness, and I lost my sense of direction. The headlamps illuminated fragments of the countryside as we drove: a stone bridge, dense forest on either side of the road, its understory wadded with thickets of bracken and bramble. After about half an hour, a well-kept wall, maybe eight or nine feet high. We drove alongside it for long enough to suggest that we were adjacent to a large private estate and pulled up in front of a grand pair of gates.
The glassy eye of a camera swiveled and trained itself on the driver. Seconds later, the gates swung open smoothly. They were topped with razor wire. The car rolled down a long driveway, and a building loomed into view. It wasn’t so much a house as a small castle, its exterior spotlit dramatically. It looked very old and was hemmed in closely by pitch dark forest.
We mounted the steps beneath a sky clotted with stars, as the town car cruised around the side of the building to park out of sight. Diana pulled a thick cord, and a bell chimed inside. We were let in by a housekeeper who asked us to follow her.
I didn’t expect to recognize the person who rose from one of the red couches as we entered a large sitting room wrapped in wooden paneling.
She was casually dressed, wore glasses with tortoiseshell frames, and had long, straight hair, honey tinted, framing a beautiful, heart-shaped face. She was startlingly familiar, but I couldn’t place her. She saw my confusion and looked amused.
“Hello, I’m Tracy,” she said, and I realized with a shock that I was in the presence of a woman who’d mysteriously disappeared from public life at the peak of her fame just a couple of years before.
Tracy Lock was a British actress who’d had Hollywood in thrall before making herself invisible without explanation. There had been some rumored sightings here and there, but nothing confirmed. The media occasionally erupted with speculation over whether she’d suffered a terrible accident, or had a drug problem, or bad plastic surgery, yet here she was, looking perfectly sober and extremely beautiful, her face unaltered so far as I could tell.
“I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you,” she said, as if this were the most normal thing in the world. “Are you ready to see the manuscripts?”
I glanced at Diana, as if I needed her permission. She was smiling.
“Yes, please.” I must have sounded as eager as a child, because they both laughed.
“Follow me,” Tracy said.
I wished Sid were there. I would tell him all about it later, I thought, before remembering that the NDA forbade it.
We followed Tracy as she led us away from the reception area of the castle and down a stone-floored corridor also paneled from floor to ceiling. Guns and ornate, historic swords were hung along its length. A suit of armor was mounted at the far end.
“Excuse theGame of Thronesdécor,” Tracy said.
