Page 59 of Under Arthur’s Protection

Once my hands were washed, I let Arthur guide me to the reading room.

It was bright and open, with wooden tables, upholstered chairs, and a wall of windows along the back. They looked out onto a wide green space with walking paths and trees whose leaves were turning color. A few other researchers were settled at tables near the emergency doors at the center of the window wall.

Arthur steered me to a table against the far wall. My back would be to the wall, with a clear view of the entrance, and Arthur between me and the glass.

Being closer to the natural light would have been ideal, but I didn’t argue. It wasn’t a battle I wanted to pick.

Arthur spoke to a staff member in French, confirming a few details about the building’s layout. He’d spoken the language at every stop between Roscoff and Troyes, and at the hotel last night. And his accent was far better than mine. One more thing to add to my mental list of what I hadn’t expected from Mr. Sexy Protector.

I set the sword case beside my chair and unpacked my messenger bag.

An archivist arrived with a cart carrying two large cardboard boxes, catalog numbers written in marker on the ends. She set them on the table. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours, but you can check with the front desk if you need anything.”

Once she was gone, Arthur said, “I’ll scout the building. I should be back within fifteen minutes, but call me if anything feels off.”

I nodded, and he left through a side corridor.

‘If anything feels off?’ Really? What did he think was going to happen? One of the other people in the room was going to jump out of their seat and attack me?

I shook my head and opened the first box.

The scent hit me first—old paper and dust in the dry air of a climate-controlled room. The second thing that hit me was the quantity. The container was a foot high and stuffed to the brim. It was after one in the afternoon, and the archive would close at five. I definitely needed more time.

I smiled to myself and fished an elastic from my bag. A second day of research meant another night at the hotel with Arthur. This trip was steadily improving. I secured my hair in a messy bun and dove in.

As I opened the first folder, the rest of the world fell away. This was the part of my work that made everything else worth it. I didn’t do it for the politics or the conferences where people smiled at you while they calculated your usefulness. None of that existed in an archive. In an archive, it was me and the source material, and the material didn’t care about my reputation.

I worked through the first folder, taking notes and photographs of a few findings I’d follow up on. References to Avalon were everywhere in the French medieval chronicles, monastery records, and manuscripts. Chrétien de Troyes and his contemporaries had woven Avalon into their romances so thoroughly the word appeared in dozens of contexts, most of them literary rather than geographical.

Nothing alarming. Nothing unexpected. But nothing that told me what I wanted to hear—that I’d been right about the church. I turned pages carefully, skimming the text as I went.

Arthur returned and stood near the windows, where he could monitor both me and the green space outside. He appeared ready to stand there all day, which he probably was.

A young woman at one of the other tables looked up at him before quickly averting her eyes. I recognized her reaction—it was the same one I’d had when he first walked into the storeroom at Ferraro’s.

I flipped to a new page in the second folder.

Last night, I’d woken up at two, still on the couch, with a blanket over me and my laptop closed on the table. I didn’t remember grabbing the blanket or moving the laptop.

For a few groggy seconds, I’d considered padding down to Arthur’s room to thank him. My half-asleep brain had thought it was a perfectly reasonable idea. The half-awake part had told me to get up, go to my own room, and deal with it in the morning.

But in the morning, he’d had coffee ready and started talking about our plan for the day as though he wasn’t interested in discussing throw blankets. Or maybe I’d done it all in my sleep and was getting so used to him doing nice things, I’d simply assumed it was him.

I pulled another series of documents from the box. On top, a monastery inventory, dated 1487.

Of course I’d assumed the man who’d walked silently in the rain next to me was the kind of man who’d cover me with a blanket. The same man who hadn’t judged me after I’d told him about the Lionel thing. He hadn’t gone all awkward the way people did when they weren’t sure how much of it to believe. He’d merely listened and made me feel better.

I turned the page. A record of land transfers, nothing relevant.

When the whole thing had happened, I’d confessed the truth to my closest friends. Since then, I hadn’t said a word. It was humiliating. I was a smart woman, and smart women didn’t get wrapped up in shit like that.

But of course we did. All the time. Far too many of us. And yet, how many people thought I’d opened my legs to get the Marlcombe position?

Arthur was the first person I’d chosen to tell in over two years, and things hadn’t gotten worse between us. They’d gotten better.

Sometimes the truth can actually set you free, Gwen.

I almost laughed.