“We owe them to Grenfell too. He and Arthur Hunt, another British archaeologist, found them at the end of the nineteenth century in a rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. They excavated many fragments from great works of antiquity. I think you’ll be delighted with the one you’re holding now. It’s an extract from Plato’sRepublic.”
“Really?” she said, impressed.
“Really. Do you know how many years separate Plato from the first fragments we have of his works?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’ll tell you: approximately one thousand two hundred. The texts we have of Plato’s thought and, through them, of Socrates’s—the works we’ve all read and studied—are copies made over ten centuries after the originals were written.”
He extracted a thick manuscript from the filing cabinet.
“And this? Any idea what it might be?”
The librarian, who now seemed to have forgotten the reason for her visit, scrutinized the manuscript.
“Let’s see,” she said with a smile. “I can decipher this. It’s Latin, at least. Tacitus?”
The Man in the Wing Chair shook his head.
“Julius Caesar.De Bello Civili—The Civil War. This is theLaurentianus Ashburnhamensis, the oldest remaining manuscript of this work. Do you know when it dates from? No, of course you don’t. It’s from the tenth century, a little over a thousand years after Julius Caesar wrote the original. The oldest copy we have of theCommentaries on the Gallic Waris from around nine hundred and fifty years after it was originally written.”
“This is all so interesting!” she murmured.
Her employer took up the copy of the Rylands Papyrus again.
“Interesting doesn’t come close, Prudencia. It’s absolutely fascinating. Now do you understand what the Rylands Papyrus is? Do you know how many copies just in koine Greek we have of the Four Evangelists’ writings? Around five thousand six hundred. Do you know how many we have of theCommentaries on the Gallic War, for instance? Ten copies. Only ten. And now, look closely,” he said, glancing over another facsimile. “How do you get on with Homer?”
Miss Prim assured him that if she were ever condemned to life in prison she’d want to take Homer with her. While the Man in the Wing Chair continued talking animatedly of papyri, parchments, and copies, she remembered with sadness why she was there. She would miss him, that was obvious; and not just him, but everything to do with him—the chats, the reading, the debates, the children, the books, and San Ireneo itself.
“Now that you’ve finished work on the library,” her employer was saying at that moment, “maybe you could help me catalogue all of this. I’m giving a lecture in London next month on the Bodmer Papyri.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” replied Miss Prim, heroically resisting the urge to ask what a Bodmer Papyrus was.
He looked at her, dumbfounded.
“Why not?”
She crossed her legs with a deliberate movement and took a deep breath before answering.
“Because I think my work here is finished. I came to tell you, I’ve decided to leave. I’ve completed the job, so I can’t see any reason to stay.”
Without a word, the Man in the Wing Chair gathered up the documents and returned them to the filing cabinet. Then he went over to the fireplace, freed an armchair from its heap of books, and gestured for his employee to sit.
“Has something happened that I should know about, Prudencia?” he asked.
“Not at all.”
“Has somebody in this house offended or upset you?”
“I’ve always been treated wonderfully well here.”
“Maybe it’s me. Have I said something that’s bothered you? An instance of the insensitivity you continually accuse me of?”
Miss Prim bowed her head so as to hide her face.
“It has nothing to do with you,” she whispered.
“Look at me, please,” he said.
