by Lev Grossman
“In a moment,” said Laura, unreadably. “You’re originally from—?”
Edward sighed.
“Well, I grew up in Bangor. Maine, that is. I know there’s one in England, too.”
“Yes, I think I would have detected a Welsh accent. Your parents?”
“My father passed away recently. I haven’t seen my mother in years.”
“Oh.” At least she seemed slightly abashed at that. “And you took your undergraduate degree at Yale. In English?”
“That’s right.”
“How unusual. Did you have a particular area of specialty?”
“Well, the twentieth century, broadly speaking. The modern novel. Henry James. Some poetry, too, I guess. It’s been a while.”
Being interrogated as to one’s qualifications was an occupational hazard when dealing with the very rich, but he hadn’t expected this particular line of questioning. His English degree was one of those shameful secrets he avoided mentioning, roughly on a par with having gone to a public high school and having once tried Ecstasy.
“And now you’re in private banking.”
“That’s right.”
“Right. Right.” She drew the word out in her upper-class English accent, nodding her long, shapely head.
“Well,” she said, relenting, “let me tell you a little bit about what we have in store for you. Upstairs in this apartment there is a library. It was brought over here by my employers, the Wents, about sixty years ago for safekeeping, shortly before the Second World War. There was a great deal of hysteria, you understand, everyone thought England would be overrun by the Huns at any moment. I don’t remember it, of course—I’m not that old—but at the time there was some wild talk of selling up and moving the entire family across to America. Thankfully that plan never came to fruition. But the library came over, and somehow it never went back. It had been in the Went family for quite a long time, since the sixteenth century at least. Not unusual in the grand old families, but they were terribly proud of it. Excuse me, it’s rather stuffy in here—would you mind opening that window for me, please?”
Edward stood and went over to the window. It was an old wooden window frame, and he expected it to stick, but when he opened the latch it floated up almost by itself, lifted by hidden counterweights. A breeze moved through the room, and the sound of honking horns drifted up from the intersection below.
“The books were brought over in crates,” she went on. “Probably would have been safer back in England, all things considered, but never mind that. Once they arrived here this apartment was procured—purchased from a professional baseball player, I believe—and the library was sent here. But then the war ended, and what with one thing and another the crates were never unpacked, or even opened, as far as I know. They’ve been upstairs ever since.
“Anyhow, that’s how things stand. It’s scandalous, really, but I think the Wents just lost interest in them. For a long time no one even remembered they were here, and then one day a family accountant was trying to balance the books and thought to wonder why we were paying such absurd taxes on this apartment—remind me to ask you about that later—and sure enough, somebody stumbled on the old library again. By now nobody has the slightest idea what’s up there, just that it’s very, very old and someone needs to take care of it.”
She paused. He waited for her to go on, but she just watched him patiently.
“And the books are...very valuable?” he prompted.
“Valuable? Oh, I wouldn’t have the first idea. Not my field, as they say.”
“So you wish to have the value of the real estate they occupy assessed.”
“Not really, no. By the way, did you do any medieval work in college?”
“No, I didn’t, but—”
There was a limit to how much storytelling Edward allowed his clients as a matter of professional principle, and Laura Crowlyk was now over her quota.
“Ms. Crowlyk, I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but why am I here? If you’ve come across some historical documents that need evaluating, the firm can certainly put you in touch with a specialist who handles that kind of thing. But I don’t really—”
“Oh, no, there’s no need for anything like that!” She seemed to find the suggestion slightly hilarious. “I was just getting to that. All we really need is for somebody to get it all unpacked and onto the shelves. Just to break those crates open, for one thing, and start putting it all in some kind of order. Organizing things, getting them cataloged. Sounds hideously boring, I know.”
“Oh, no,” Edward lied. “Not at all.”
He sighed. Either this woman was slightly insane, in some megalomaniacal English way, or a serious miscommunication had occurred. Someone somewhere along the line had Fucked Up. He was a senior analyst with Esslin & Hart, and she was apparently looking for some kind of glorified intern to do her housecleaning for her. Either way he, Edward, was going to have to clear things up, rapidly and if possible without provoking an international incident. He had a reasonable idea of the size of the accounts she represented, and offending her was not an option.
“I think there’s been a slight misunderstanding,” he purred. “Do you mind if I make a phone call?”
Edward extracted his cell phone from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. No signal. He looked around.
“Is there a phone here I can use?”
She nodded and stood up, giving him an unexpected flash of freckled cleavage as she leaned forward.
“Follow me.”
He had to take an extra step to catch up with her as she strode out the door. They turned right down the corridor, heading deeper into the apartment. An intricately woven and apparently endless maroon runner followed them underfoot. Edward frowned behind Laura’s back as he caught glimpses of more doorways and hallways and rooms. Even he, a frequent visitor to the abodes of the moneyed, was impressed by the apartment’s sheer size.
Laura stopped at a doorway. It was half the width of an ordinary door, with a miniature glass knob—it looked like the door to a broom closet, or the entrance to some secret fairy hideaway. She opened it to reveal a narrow, musty alcove, unlit and paneled in dark wood. The floor was littered with old paint chips and hanks of gray dust. It contained a narrow cast-iron spiral staircase leading up.
He balked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “is this the way to your phone?”
She didn’t answer, just started up ahead of him. It was dark, and the stairs were extremely steep, and he snagged his foot on the lip of one of them and had to catch himself on the delicate helical railing. The metal rang faintly under their footsteps. The staircase wound around in a tight spiral, and after two revolutions up into the darkness he couldn’t see a thing. When she stopped he nearly walked into her. Standing behind her, he smelled the coconut smell of her shampoo and heard the jingle of keys and the clicking of heavy bolts and latches.
She braced her thin shoulders and pulled, but the door resisted, as if somebody were pulling back from the inside, somebody who adamantly did not want to be disturbed. She struggled for a few seconds, then gave up.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do it,” she said, panting a little. “Please open it for me.”
She stepped to one side and flattened herself against the wall, and they gingerly changed places on the tiny metal landing. The keys were still in the metal doorknob. He grasped them, wondering whether this was an elaborate prank, gave them a quarter turn and pulled, putting his back into it, then spread his feet wider apart and pulled again. Behind him he heard Laura take a step down to get out of his way. The door was surprisingly thick, like the entrance to an air raid shelter, and there was a cracking, tearing sound as it started to move, like a tree falling, roots snapping deep under the earth, then a sigh of relief as air began to flow through from behind him. The wind crescendoed as it swung open, then died away again as the air pressures equalized.
It was pitch black on the other side. He tapped gingerly at the f
loor with the toe of his shoe, but he could see nothing. The sound echoed. There were some glimmers of light, high up and indistinct, but that was all.
What the fuck is this? he thought. Laura stepped past him, putting a hand on his elbow in an unexpectedly familiar gesture. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
“It’ll just be a moment,” she said.
The hollow sound of her footsteps receded in the darkness. The air was refreshingly cool, even cold, fifteen or twenty degrees cooler than it had been downstairs. There was a strong, damp, almost sweet smell; he recognized it from somewhere as the odor of quietly decomposing leather. It felt like he’d wandered into a church. Suddenly he was far away from the sun-baked Manhattan outside. He took a deep breath, his lungs expanding with the chilly air. Edward walked forward a few steps, blindly, toward where he guessed Laura was standing.
“Here it is,” came her voice in the darkness. There was the plastic snap of a switch being turned, but nothing happened.
“Is there anything I can—?”
Edward let his voice trail off. He put out his hand and touched wood, coarse and splintery.
He was suddenly struck by a sense of the size of the room. The far wall was beginning to resolve itself out of the darkness into one enormous window, a hundred feet away and at least two full stories high.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said under his breath.
The light that would have been coming through it was almost completely stanched by masses of thick, dark curtains, so that only a ghostly rectangular glow showed through.
Finally the light snapped on. It was a standing lamp with a brown shade, and it gave out a cozy yellow living-room light. The room was indeed huge—it could have doubled as a ballroom. It was much longer than it was wide—it must have run the full depth of the building—and there were cubical wooden crates piled up here and there, mostly at the far end, in head-high stacks of two and three. An aluminum dolly was still parked next to one of them.
She had brought him to the library. Bookshelves ran along one wall, mostly empty. On one of them, at the end of a long, kinky black cord as thick as a garter snake, was the promised telephone, a squat black artifact from the rotary era.
“I thought you would want to see,” she said. “Before you called.”
He did see. He folded his arms. It had dawned on Edward that this dotty English woman, this rich woman’s lackey, actually thought he would go through with it. Even now she was watching him expectantly.
He looked around, composing a speech in his mind to express his righteous indignation. It was a brilliant speech, couched in terms of the most magnificently nuanced diplomacy, but at the same time mined with slights and insults almost too devastatingly subtle to be perceived; she would only realize decades later, as she sat rocking on the porch of the old lackeys’ home, how crushingly he had snubbed her. The speech rose up and hung there, poised for delivery, to be accompanied by a slow, steady backing away towards the door, but he hesitated.
“Nothing’s been touched,” she said. “If you can wait another minute I’ll bring you up a few more things.”
The speech was ready, but he still didn’t deliver it. He hesitated. What was he waiting for? What was the smart play here? He didn’t dare offend the Wents, even if it was by proxy. It was already midafternoon. He could kill the rest of the day, a couple of hours at most, then call Dan in the morning and have them send over a first-year associate or one of the more vigorous assistants. Dan had gotten him into this, he’d get him out. Wouldn’t that be the safest escape route? And for that matter, what else did he have to do today?
Laura stepped past him again, and he turned to watch her as she walked out the door.
When she was gone he kicked one of the wooden crates, and it boomed hollowly in the silence. Dust floated off it and settled to the floor. He tried his cell phone again. No signal—the whole apartment was in the grip of an evil enchantment.
“Fuck it,” he said out loud. He sighed.
Edward felt his irritation seeping away. He walked the length of the room. He could clean up the mess tomorrow. And it was just a bunch of books—didn’t he, in his sensitive, idealistic youth, used to read books? The floor was a fine, expensive-looking parquet with long narrow boards. The weak, angled light brought out tiny imperfections in the finish. A solid old wooden table stood along one wall, and he brushed his hand along it. His fingertips came away dusty. The table had one drawer, with one old screwdriver rattling around in it.
It was the weirdest thing, but he actually felt almost glad to be here. There was something about this grand, romantic old room that made him want to stay in it—some invisible body was asserting its gravitational force over him, an undetectable black hole gently drawing him into its orbit. Walking up to the window, he pushed back the curtain a little and looked out. The windows went all the way down to the floor, so he could look straight down at the gray asphalt of Madison Avenue. From this height all the traffic lines and crosswalks looked very neat and precisely drawn. Sunflower-yellow cabs veered and swooped through the intersection, always managing to miss each other at the last possible moment. The building across the street was a hive of activity. He had a perfect god’s-eye view: Each window held a desk covered with paper, a blue pulsing computer monitor, generic modern art, dying ficus plants, men and women talking on the phone, earnestly confiding in and consulting with one another, comically unaware of what was happening in the windows all around them. It was a hall of mirrors, the same scene endlessly replicated. That used to be him. He glanced at his watch. It was almost three thirty, the middle of what would have been his work day.
It was the oddest, most uncanny feeling, not working. He never realized how complicated his own life was until he had to get out of it. It had taken Edward six months to plan for the move to London, delegating projects, handing off contacts, transitioning key clients to the stewardship of his colleagues in an endless series of lunches, dinners, meetings, e-mails, conference calls, brain-dumps, and mind-melds. The sheer number of threads from which he had to delicately disentangle himself one at a time was staggering, and every time he pulled one out he found more threads attached to it.
“Please keep the curtains closed. For the books.” Laura’s prim, expressionless voice came from the doorway, where she had silently reappeared like the hoary old housekeeper in a horror movie. He stepped back guiltily. “We keep the temperature artificially low for the same reason.”
She went over to the table and laid down a black binder and a laptop in a carrying case.
“These should help you with the cataloging. There are some guidelines in this notebook, and you can keep the records on the computer for now. We had Alberto—he takes care of our computers—install a cataloging program that might be of some help to you. If you have any questions, just ask Margot, she’ll tell you where to find me. Oh, and keep an eye out for anything by an author named Gervase of Langford. These would be very early books, I’m told, very old. If you see anything by him, do let me know right away.”
“Okay,” he said. “Gervase of Langford.”
There was a moment of silence.
“I’m sure I’ll be seeing you later on,” she said.
“I’m sure you will.”
Now he just wanted her to leave.
“Good to meet you, then.” She obviously had no desire to stay, either.
“Bye.” Edward felt like he should have asked her something else, but nothing came to mind. He listened to the sound of her footsteps as she descended the metal staircase. He was alone.
There was one chair in the room, an antique rolling desk chair standing in the pool of light cast by the one lamp. He brushed it off and sat down; it was hard, but the back flexed very comfortably on an intricate array of springs. Edward rolled himself over to the window and cheated open the crack in the curtains a little wider, then he rolled himself back with a sound like a gutter ball in an empty bowling alley. The three-ring binder on the table
was covered in black leather, and inside were twenty or thirty sheets of onionskin paper closely covered with single-spaced typing. They were old, and the hard keystrokes of a manual typewriter had embossed the words into the paper:
It is my intention that the books in this collection be described according to the Principles of the Science of Bibliography. These Principles are simple and precise, although the variety of the objects with which they are concerned can give rise to scenarios of considerable complexity....
Edward rolled his eyes. He already regretted his impulse decision. He seemed to be developing a dangerous habit of helping strange women in distress—first that woman on the sidewalk, now Laura Crowlyk. He flipped through the pages. They were full of diagrams and definitions and descriptions of different kinds of bookbindings, catalogs of various papers and parchments and leathers, examples of assorted handwritings and scripts and typefaces, lists of ornaments, colophons, imperfections, irregularities, printings, editions, watermarks, and so on and so on and so forth.
At the bottom of the last page was a faded blue signature, absurdly elaborate. It was almost illegible, but the author had typed his name below it:
DESMOND WENT
And then a title:
13TH DUKE OF BOWMRY
WEYMARSHE CASTLE
After the final e came a long series of flourishes, meaningless loops and curls and rosettes that stretched all the way down to the bottom of the page.
2
“BOWMRY,” HE SAID. His voice sounded very small in the vast, empty room. “Where the hell is Bowmry?”
Edward set the binder back down on the table and unzipped the laptop case. Of course, that must have been them out on the street, he thought. Mr. and Mrs. Went—the Duke and Duchess, presumably. He should have known. He supposed they must be on their way back there now, wherever there was. What an odd couple of birds. Prying up the screen with one hand, gently, he felt with the other for the rocker switch on the back. The computer chimed softly in the silence. While it whirred and clicked into life he opened the drawer and took out the screwdriver.