She looked at me as if curious to witness my reaction to her mention of my father. You knew everything all along, I thought, but I wasn’t intimidated by her anymore. I figured she was Magnus’s pawn, just like everyone else.
“You’re good at keeping secrets,” I said.
She pushed the door open, and flicked another switch. “I’m an actress. It’s my job to be whoever other people want me to be. In the case of your father, it’s been my pleasure to act as custodian for these books. They’re really no trouble at all. In fact, it’s been a great deal easier to hide them than it has been to hide myself.”
I barely listened to what she was saying. I had eyes only for the manuscripts, which were arranged on shelves around three walls of a plain, windowless room. She said, “They’re all yours. Do your thing. That laptop is for you to make notes on. It doesn’t leave this room.” They’d provided a brand-new MacBook. I flipped it open. It was already set up for me and, no surprise, it had no internet access.
Tracy gave me a fob of my own, which she said would let me into the tower and the manuscript room, then left me there, shutting the door firmly yet quietly behind her, and I took stock.
The only entrance and exit was the door we’d come through. Artificial lighting had been designed to show off the books and was dimmed to conservation levels. In the middle of the space there was a large desk, where the laptop lay alongside a book stand and a lamp for examining the manuscripts.
The books waited silently on the shelves; they had a quiet, confident presence. I made a conscious effort to empty my brain of distractions, so that when I opened the first book, my memory would be primed to preserve copies of every page I looked at. Confiscating my iPhone might stop me from photographing the manuscripts andsharing them, but it couldn’t stop me from recalling every detail. And I needed to. My burner phone was too basic to have a camera. It was only good for making and receiving calls.
I ran my fingers gently along the spines of the books and thought of all the people who’d handled them before me, the scribes, illustrators, bookbinders, booksellers, and owners. My father and grandfather. My mother, too. I supposed I could count her, since she’d spent one afternoon with them. And now me. It was hard to think of any other objects in my life that had been handled by my mother, father, and me.
I decided to make an inventory first, a list of the books with a description of each. Then I could organize them by type, for serious study.
As I contemplated them—there were so many—a surge of doubt rose like nausea, doubt that I couldn’t deliver the standard of scholarship Magnus wanted. My heart thumped, but I had to start somewhere. I picked out a book at random and laid it on the cushion beneath the light, and I heard Mum’s voice, the same way I always did when I handled a precious manuscript.
Books connect us to the past and teach us how to map our future.
I hoped so. So long as I had what it took, these books could save her life.
I worked on the collection for hours without stopping. Compiling my list was slow going because I kept getting distracted. Every book I took from the shelf was breathtaking in its beauty and rarity. Time flew, until I suddenly realized I needed food, and fresh air. I went downstairs, collecting my phone on the way.
Once I’d left the dead quiet of the manuscript room and the tower, I wasn’t sure where I was allowed to go. Instinctually I kept away from the busier areas of the castle, which wasn’t hard, since the place was so big. I found a side door and slipped outside to find myself in an area of the grounds that was out of sight of the castle’s main rooms. It was a perfect, private place to call Mum from.
I tried her phone and when she didn’t pick up I called the ward again.
The nurse was upbeat: “Rose is doing much better today. I’ll transfer you to her bed.”
“Mum!” I said when she answered. “It’s me!”
“Hello, darling.”
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“Viv took it downstairs to pay for some drinks. I’m so bored with this place. Tell me what you’re up to. I want to know everything.”
“I already started work on the manuscripts.” One of the books I’d looked at that morning had an especially gorgeous binding. I knew she’d love to hear about it. She missed her work. I weighed telling her about it, and figured it was fine because she’d only seen those books once, many years ago, and like everyone else, she thought they’d burned.
“One of them had a gold repoussé binding with encrusted gems. It was stunning.”
“Oh, wow. This is the drink of water I needed. Tell me more.”
I smiled and then I made a mistake. My brain had a runaway moment. Maybe because it was bliss to escape into the fantasy that life was okay, that St. Andrews was everything it had promised, and that Mum and I could chat about our shared passion. I started to describe another binding to her when she snapped, “Say that again.”
“It was a clasped gold binding with filigree work, showing the Adoration of the Magi.”
She said nothing.
“Mum?” I said. “Hello?”
The silence stretched further and stifled that little bit of pleasure I’d let myself feel, and with a horrible sinking feeling, I knew that I’d said too much.
“Darling, I need you to listen to me very, very carefully. Are you alone?” Mum asked.
“Sort of.” I’d wandered around the back of the castle. There were vans parked, back doors open, caterers and chefs unloading yet more stuff. A team of landscapers was tidying up the garden nearby.
