No, sir.
De Trinitate.
St. Augustine?
Smiling wistfully, Miss Prim kept on with her packing. She wasn’t going to go away immediately. She intended to leave enough clothes in the wardrobe for a few days, just enough time to say her good-byes and calmly decide what to do next. She couldn’t stay. Not now that she knew what she felt; not now that she also knew her feelings would never, could never, be reciprocated. But where would she go? And, above all, how would she explain her departure? Slowly she went to her bedroom window, pulled back the curtains, and looked out. It was a cold morning and the snow shone like polished marble in the sunlight. She’d woken late. After all, after the previous night’s conversation there wasn’t much left to do other than face her employer and tell him she was leaving.
Despite the overwhelming sadness and disappointment, she also felt relief. The last few days had been too turbulent for a woman like her, accustomed to order, balance, and neatness. She’d brooded too much, worried too much, gone over the words again and again, assessed the gestures, registered smiles, analyzed glances. Romance, she reflected wisely, could be an unbelievably heavy burden for the female psyche. What she needed now was somewhere pleasant and remote where she could rest, a refuge where she could write, an Eden where she could surround herself with beauty and admire emerald-green lawns and wisteria in flower.
Of course, she was also in pain: she didn’t want to—couldn’t—deny it. It had been a long time since she had experienced such anguish, had such difficulty organizing her thoughts, felt so acutely the impossibility of scanning the horizon and seeing any glint of light in the darkness ahead. But it would all pass. Miss Prim was sure of it. She knew herself well enough to estimate how long the sadness would last. By the spring, or the beginning of summer at most, the sun would come out again.
Tentatively, the librarian opened the door to the study. “Could I have a quick word?”
Bent over a document, the Man in the Wing Chair indicated that she should enter and sit down. She obeyed. For a few minutes, just long enough to rehearse in her mind how she would inform him of her departure, the only sound in the room was the crackling of the fire in the hearth.
“Look at this, Prudencia,” he said, holding out what appeared to be a facsimile of two small papyrus fragments.
With a sigh Miss Prim peered at the Man in the Wing Chair’s face. There was no sign of tension or anxiety, no hint that their conversation in the early hours had affected him in any way.
“Are you all right?” he asked, noticing how pale his employee was. “You look tired.”
The librarian assured him that she was fine and that her pallor was due to lack of sleep.
“We did talk till quite late last night, that’s true. Look at this,” he said, indicating the manuscript. “What do you think? Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Miss Prim examined it closely.
“What is it?”
“A facsimile of P52, commonly known as the Rylands Papyrus.”
“Let me guess... A little piece of the Book of Wisdom? Or the Book of Daniel?”
“No luck, it’s neither. They’re verses from the Gospel of John. Look closely, they’re written in koine Greek. See these lines?”
ΡΗΣΩ ΤΗ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ ΠΑΣΟ ΩΝ ΕΚ ΤΗΣ ΑΛΗΘΕΙ
ΑΣ ΑΚΟΥΕΙ ΜΟΥ ΤΗΣ ΦΩΝΗΣ ΛΕΓΕΙ ΑΥΤΩ Ο
ΠΙΛΑΤΟΣ ΤΙ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΤΟΥΤΟI
“I’m sure even a distinguished Jacobin like yourself has heard this before. Would you like me to translate it for you?”
Not deigning to reply, she continued to study the two tiny yellowed fragments.
“Is it very ancient?”
“The oldest found so far. It’s been dated to around AD 120. It was found in the desert in Egypt by Bernard Grenfell, a British Egyptologist. The consensus is that it’s from around thirty years later than the original written by John in Ephesus. Does that seem a bit much? Come over here, I’ll show you something.”
He opened an enormous filing cabinet at the other end of his study, and began taking out what Miss Prim could see were facsimiles of papyri, parchments, and codices.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked, pointing to one of them.
She shook her head.
“It’s one of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Have you ever heard of them?”
Miss Prim again shook her head.
