“It was you, wasn’t it.” My lips felt strange, and I realized I was smiling. “That’s what you’ve been up to all year.”
Professor Sawbridge—who did not flinch from anything, who teasedthe college archivist and kept uncensored versions of dirty novels on her shelves, where anyone could see them—flinched from the sound of my voice.
When she recognized me, she closed her eyes in relief. “Saints, Mallory.”
“Sorry, Professor, I—”
“What are you doing here?” Her eyes snapped open, blue and querulous as they always had been. “Shouldn’t you be cutting a ribbon or kissing a ring?”
Cutting remarks were Sawbridge’s standard greeting, but there was a new jaggedness to her voice, as if it had been snapped off and poorly sharpened. Her cheeks, once broad and well-freckled, were now sallow, and her hair was thin and brittle.
My smile faltered. “I came straight here, as soon as I heard. It was you, wasn’t it, who found them?”
“Yes. It was me.” Her eyes were on her work, which seemed to be sorting books into piles of varying height and stability. The air in the office was stale and swampish, like the inside of a closed mouth, but she hadn’t opened a window. “Well, me, Sylvie, and a couple of interns.”
“Sylvie?”
“Mistress Sylvia Shaw? The archivist.”
I tried and failed to imagine anyone addressing the college archivist—a woman with the stature and temperament of a starved heron—by a nickname. I wasn’t even sure I could imagine her outside the archives; I had assumed until now that she spent the night in one of her own glass cases, arms folded across her chest. Eventually I offered, “Congratulations.”
Professor Sawbridge ignored this, as if the greatest—well, perhaps second-greatest—discovery of the century was not worth mentioning. She hauled another armload of books off her shelves and began sorting it according to her own inscrutable system. Some of them—mostly dirty novels, a few dictionaries—she piled in a musty traveling trunk.
My smile returned, somewhat battered. I would miss her terribly. “Let me guess. Head of Curation at the Royal Museum? Vice-Provost of Cantford?”
This earned me a harassed look. “What?”
“I was trying to guess which position you’ve accepted. You wouldn’t pack your favorite books unless you were switching offices.”
She paused, finally, and looked at me with her customary mix of pityand love, as if I were a very stupid pet that she was inexplicably fond of. Gently, she said, “I was fired, Owen. I have until Friday to clear out my things, or what remains of them.”
It was only then that I registered the state of her office. Sawbridge was not a naturally neat person, but she did not typically rip all the drawers from her desk or smash her potted plants against the wall. There were loose papers covering the floor in drifts, and the shelves were half emptied, the remaining books slumped over one another like witnesses to some awful disaster.
Sawbridge nodded at the shelves. “They took all the really filthy stuff, of course. I hope they get an eyeful. Even plundering goons deserve an education.”
“I—I don’t—Fired?”
Professor Sawbridge had been the second woman ever to receive an advanced degree from Cantford College. She had spent the next decade traipsing across the countryside, digging up the most astonishing artifacts and publishing monographs under the name G. Sawbridge. She didn’t reveal her gender until the Board of Fellows had begged her on bended knee to accept a faculty appointment. And—despite decades of inflammatory statements, seditious lectures, and illicit book collecting—they hadn’t fired her. She was a genius, a real one, and geniuses are permitted their eccentricities.
“Why?” My voice was hoarse.
“Attempted destruction of objects significant to our national heritage.” When I blinked at her, she clarified, “I tried to smash the grail with a big rock.”
I blinked some more. I was aware that I ought to be worried about the destruction of a priceless historical artifact, but I found myself saying, almost in awe, “Mistress Shaw must’ve tried to skin you alive.”
“Sylvie was the one holding the flashlight, love.” There was a nearly imperceptible softening around her mouth. “I know she likes to frighten the undergraduates, but who doesn’t? She’s really quite… decent.” This constituted the highest praise I’d ever heard Professor Sawbridge offer a living person and caused me to blink several more times.
She returned, somewhat showily, to her book sorting. “We would have managed it, but one of the interns turned out to be on the Chancellor’s payroll. Sylvie and I were marched off the dig site with rifles to our backs.”
“But—but—” I said, inanely, as if I could offer some counter or defense,as if this were an argument I could win if I only cited the correct source. “Where have you been? Why didn’t you write?” I sounded peevish and young, even to myself.
Sawbridge’s eyes narrowed. “Mallory, I have spent the last five weeks detained without trial while my home and office were searched for evidence of conspiracy, answering very boring and repetitive questions about my loyalty to crown and country. Forgive me if I didn’t mail a letter.” The corner of Sawbridge’s mouth curled sourly. “They might be good with trains, these fascists, but they’re quite stingy with postage.”
Her voice was perfectly dry, as if she were reviewing a second-rate hotel, but I saw her teeth worrying her lower lip, a nervous habit she hadn’t had before. The flesh between her teeth was raw and red.
“Professor, I’m so—”
“Your father sends his love, by the way,” she said, in the slightly disgusted tone she used to deliver the killing blow in a debate, as if she knew there was about to be a great deal of blood and only hoped it didn’t stain her good coat.
