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 thecollection, 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 pieceof 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 dadordoctor. 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.”
