********************
“And so you want to go to the library? On a harebrained scheme? To find Rose? What is she to you?” Mr. Connelly speaks out of the side of his mouth, through his cigarette. He removes it lazily and blows smoke in my direction, in more ways than one, it seems sometimes.
I wave my hand in front of my face and cough, annoyed. “I thought you said that stuff would kill you.”
“We’ll all die of something, my little one. Didn’t you know?”
“Don’t call me that.” I feel insulted, or patronized. I’m not sure which is worse. “Aren’t you concerned for her?”
“My questions first.”
I sigh and try to remember them. “Yes, it isn’t harebrained. Yes, I don’t know. But if she’s wandering around, that might be somewhere she’d like to go in her freedom.” I’m still loath to admit our other option is the original Bedlam. I’m in no hurry to go back there, and besides, if she isn’t locked in, why in the world would she stay? I certainly wouldn’t.
“Fair enough.” The corners of his lips turn up around the cigarette. “And you expect help, is that it?”
“I expect a ride. I can’t exactly walk to Oxford, and I hate trains. I don’t know why you aren’t more anxious to find her.”
“And I don’t know why you are.”
“Fair enough,” I echo. “We’ll agree to be mystified by one another. I’ll have to ask Miss Helmes for some time away.”
“Leave Miss Helmes to me. Shall we leave now?” He removes his hat long enough to run his fingers through his light colored hair, then puts it back on, a bit crooked. I fight the impulse to straighten it and cross my arms in a hurry.
“Now? Right this moment now?” I am taken aback.
“Why not? I am a wealthy, idle, young man. I have nothing else to do besides play bridge, woo women, drink gin, and gamble.”
I ignore that. “You don’t think we’ll find her there, do you?” I ask, curiously.
“No.” There is something like sadness in his eyes as he answers. “But I suppose I would like to walk in the steps she did, so long ago. It’d be nice to have something to do until she comes back.”
“How long ago? Her steps, I mean.” I falter a bit, but I don’t know why. Something about my question unsettles me, and I am almost afraid to hear the answer.
“Lifetimes, little one. Lifetimes ago.”
I’m getting a bit weary of the cryptic comments.
********************
Mr. Connelly’s car’s passenger seat is the most luxurious thing I’ve ever sat upon, and that includes Mina’s grandmother’s embroidered Windsor chair.
“It purrs like a kitten, but is sleek like a lion!” I exclaim, without even thinking.
Mr. Connelly throws back his head and laughs. “Oh, you do remind me of someone I used to know!” He tosses the butt of his cigarette out the window of the car. “Girls and cars,” he chuckles. “Some things never change.”
I ignore him and indulge myself with a daydream of being a fine lady, and him my muscular, eager to please chauffeur.
“What’s it called?” I ask, dreamily.
“A Rolls-Royce Phantom.”
“It must be the most lovely car in the world.”
“At the moment, yes. I suppose so.”
“And fast?” I sit up straighter, and I guess there must a gleam in my eye, for he laughs again.
“Not particularly.”
“Can I drive?”
“No. Now shut up so I can remember which road will get us there.”
“Great. You’re cryptic and bossy. Two of my favorite qualities in men.”
“Pout later. Open the glove box and get me a map, would you?” It takes me a moment of fiddling with the latch before I swing it open. Besides the proverbial pair of gloves, it’s empty. “Hey, Sherlock, where else would you have put your map?”
“I haven’t the foggiest. What I wouldn’t give for a GPS in this bloody century.”
“I would think you would organize this lovely car better. I know I would if it were mine,” I point out, only a little bit smugly, I’m sure.
“Perhaps it doesn’t belong to me either. Perhaps I stole it.” He turns his eyes back to me, and waggles his brows suggestively.
I roll my own eyes and hope the road signs to Oxford aren’t few and far between. The next few minutes pass in silence, but since I’ve never been a girl who knew when to shut up, it isn’t long before I am talking again.
“What’s a ghee-pee-esque?” I inquire.
“What?”
“You said you wanted a ghee-pee-esque in this bloody century.”
“Oh. It’s a handy device for navigation. Very cutting edge.”
“Do sailors use it?”
“I suppose they do. Are you going to talk all the way to Oxford?”
“I suppose I am. How do you know Rose? Is she your...” I want to say lover, but at the last second I am too cowardly. “Your sister?”
“No. Not my sister, but very dear to me.”
“I’m sorry she’s so troubled. Has the hospital helped much?”
He laughs shortly and, I think, bitterly. “Bedlam has hurt her more than helped her, I’m afraid. But it’s better now. Better than it was before, I mean.”
“In the olden days, you mean? Yes, it must have been awful for the patients then. Today we’re so medically advanced! Really, she’s lucky to be with us. I mean, to have been with us. In this enlightened scientific time. And we prefer Bethlem, you know, as opposed to Bedlam.” Never mind that I typically call it that myself, and usually worse.
I can’t be sure, but it seems as though it’s Mr. Connelly’s turn to roll his eyes. “If you say so. Medically advanced, my right foot,” he mutters.
“And there you go with the cryptic comments again. You’re an odd man, Mr. Connelly.”
“I’ve been called worse,” he replies, mildly. “Now why don’t you get some sleep and give my ears a rest? They’re beginning to bleed from all the chatter. I’ll wake you when we get to Bodley.”
I quiet down and close my eyes, but I cannot sleep.
He called the library Bodley.
But he said he had never read the diary. How did he know its nickname?
“Silly girl,” I chide myself after my heart stops racing. He’s an educated man. I suppose everyone in all of England knows the names of libraries—everyone but silly orphan sandwich fetchers.
I tell myself to relax, but it’s no good. I’m on edge, and I’m beginning to feel there might be something sinister about my new comrade that I didn’t see before. Was I foolish to get in the car with him? My reputation isn’t something I ever cared a fig for, so driving off with a man without a proper chaperon doesn’t matter to me, but I hadn’t thought things through to an unsavory or dangerous element. I was so on fire to get to the last place I knew meant something to Rose.
Who was this Mr. Connelly, really? Was I foolish to trust him so? I wish I had been more specific in informing Miss Helmes of our destination, and I pick tiny flecks of red lipstick off my lips with my fingernails in a distracted fashion the rest of the car ride.
9
The library is so beautiful, and grand. More grand than anything I have ever seen, though to be fair, I haven’t seen much in my time. I was even too embarrassed to admit to Mr. Connelly that I had never been to Oxford, a mere 60 miles from London. I wish to be more world traveled; I wish to see America especially: the land of Hollywood and glamour. I would take my pigtails down and hobnob with all the actresses and cowboys. In America, I could be anybody; I just know it, and someday I will find my way there.
Then again, their architecture would not be so fine as this, here at Bodley. The proprietor is a chubby man with outdated mutton chops on his face (he makes me think of someone straight out of A Christmas Carol) and a habit of turning every conversation into a history lesson, even our introductions. I confess to feigning interest while my thoughts run away with myself.
I am picturing a young girl, a young, frail blonde girl, amongst the books. She would be daring and light on her feet and very quick. You might think you saw something, a shadow perhaps, over your shoulder or near your knee, but in the split second it would take your eyes to adjust, it would be gone. Light as a feather and twice as shifty, the ghost of what you thought you saw would be gone forever. The ghost of the library, she called herself, and it seemed to me that I could imagine her as such without any trouble at all.
I touch the spine of a volume of Shakespeare and recall what she wrote about The Bard; she was a lover of the tragedies and found the comedies a waste of his talent. What a twisted mind our Rose had. Has. Did I expect to find her here, among her treasures and the dusty memories of her childhood? Why would I think she would come back to the spot of her abandonment by Solomon, the cruel pretender? Would I, in such a spot? No, but I may have left a clue, and that is what I am wishing for.
“Do you have photographs of your librarians?” I ask Mr. Mutton Chops, and when he turns his gray eyes to me in surprise, I realize I have interrupted him rudely. I believe he was going on about the collection when my question flattened his diatribe. “Pardon me, sir. Do forgive me. I’m just terribly interested in the history of libraries, in the biographies of librarians, to be precise.”
“A commendable pursuit in your education, Miss, but I am afraid I do not know of many photographs of the Bodleian’s librarians. A few perhaps, scattered here and there. But you may ask away, young lady, and my substantial knowledge shall fill your hunger!” He beams at me proudly. Puffed like a peacock, he is, but I can’t help but like the silly man.
“I heard tale of a ghost,” I lower my voice conspiratorially. “A young child maybe? That haunts the books? This would have been, what?” I turn my gaze to Mr. Connelly for confirmation. “Recently? Within the last decade, certainly?”
Mr. Connelly ignores me; he seems distracted. He too, is running his hands along the spines of the old books. I feel like an interloper, a trespasser, and the touch of his hands is like a lover on skin. He does not seem to remember where we are, and I feel like I’m an intruder in his strange memories.
The mutton-chopped wonder does not seem to notice anything amiss, and he laughs when I mention the ghost.
“Ah! Yes! The ghost! How I’ve longed to see her myself, I have.”
“Her?” I echo, curiously, as though I didn’t know the sex.
“Yes, the murdered daughter of a French aristocrat. Or was it the murdered sister of a Belgian actress? The murdered mother of an English prostitute? Ah, well, the details don’t matter, do they? The murdered someone of someone who roams our ancient aisles by night! Walking to and fro, she does, creaking the floor boards and shaking loose the dust. Softly murmuring your name, though she has no business knowing it, lifting the novels off your hands and dropping them upon the floor…”
He is making things up and yet the description is so fitting of what I experienced that night at Bedlam that I am uncomfortable and find myself rubbing my arms to get rid of the gooseflesh there.
“Just a legend then? Was there no child that lived here at the library, even for a short time? The daughter of a librarian, perhaps?”
“Aye, there was, but they were employed only a short while. Left quite suddenly, they did, and never came back.”
“What happened to them? Did you know them?”
“No, not I. I’m not nearly old enough! This would have been… oh, dear me. The only librarian with a daughter was, if I’m not mistaken, was nearly a hundred years ago, to be sure. That’s why she’s just a ghost now, isn’t it? Can’t hardly be a ghost if you’re alive, now can you?”
“Can you?” I wonder to myself. It seems she can. Because Rose haunts this library the same way she haunts Bedlam, and if Mr. Connelly isn’t lying—which I don’t believe him to be—Rose is very much alive.
But why the discrepancy in dates? There must be some sort of mistake somewhere. I look to Connelly again, but he acts as though he hasn’t heard a word spoken, and he stares off into space. No help to me at all. It seems as though I must continue my investigation myself, so I plunge deeper.
“Will you be so kind as to point me towards Dante, sir? I’m afraid I am quite obsessed with him.”
“But of course, child. Right this way.”
We leave Connelly standing where he is, a sad expression on his face. Of course, I must be imagining things, but as I turn to leave him, he meets my eye, and the expression there is of such wistfulness and yearning that I am nearly undone. I feel as though I want to cry, and yet I do not know what I would be crying for.
********************
I convince the librarian to leave me in the Dante area alone by telling him I hear the footsteps of other wandering patrons on the floor above us, and he bustles off to attend to them and their literary desires. I thumb through each volume patiently and slowly, partly so as not to miss anything, and partly to delay my search. I do not really expect to find anything of value to me, and when I do, my heart leaps into my throat. I shake so that I nearly drop the book when I see Rose’s writing peering up at me from between the covers of Inferno. The original manuscript had been ripped out, and the edges of those old papers were jagged and torn and cradled a new sort of tale: that of Rose Gray. Trembling, I slip it under my coat as Connelly rounds the corner.
“Ah, there you are. Find anything useful?” His sorrowful demeanor is gone now, and I am left to wonder if I imagined it after all.
I hesitate, but only for the briefest of moments. Then I smile brightly.
“No, not really. It was a fool’s errand, I suppose. Still, it was nice to get out of the hospital. I’m ready if you are.”
“I thought we might stay a bit? I do find myself closer to Rose here than I thought. I would like to explore just a while? Would you mind very much?” His eyes, his nice eyes, peer into my heart it seems. He seems so… lost.
“That’s fine. I’ll stay here a spell, shall I? Never got to read much as a child, what with all the slave labor I was forced to perform at the orphanage. Ha ha, that was a joke. Don’t mind catching up a little now.” Again, my bright smile is back, and I wave him off.
“You won’t come then? Take a tour with me?” He appears disappointed though I suppose it is only politeness that pricks his conscience enough to ask me.
“No, I’ll stay right here where you can find me.” I smile, brightly.
He leaves, though he glances backwards at me once, peculiarly. I busy myself with volumes I’ve no intention to read, though I do intend to look quite immersed in books should anyone happen upon me. I am only interested in one, and the heat from it feels as though it will burn a hole in my chest. I can nearly feel it beating like a heart beneath my coat and when I pull it out, nestled in Dante’s arms, I breathe a sigh of relief.
Finally, I would know what happened after she left this place she loved to haunt.
I kept waiting, long after I knew he was never coming back, I kept waiting. Like a jilted lover, I kept waiting. I didn’t eat, nor did I sleep, though that was usual for me. I couldn’t believe Solomon would just discard me like a puppy or a bit of overcooked beef. I meant more to him than that, didn’t I? His golden girl? His Goose?
Ah, but those missing drawings and designs of mine. Those damned him and his excuses. His disappearance I could fantasize explanations for, but my magic plans, my schemes and ideas? Why would he take those for a simple trip to the market? The swindler had swindled me, and I had been taken in.
I felt a white hot rage like none I had never felt before. The hatred I had felt for the girl who eventually felt my anger at the tip of a blade was nothing compared to what I felt for the emotions that consumed me now. Not hatred for Solomon exactly, but hatred at my stupidity. Him I still respected, still lauded, still loved. I could not merely stop; it would be like ceasing to breathe. He was all I ever had, and I could not despise him for what he was, when what he was was what made me love him so despera
tely.
No, what I felt was a rage so thick and smothering that everything else melted away in the heat. I was angry at losing him, not learning everything I could from him, being alone. It was the left behind feeling of my family, only worse. My family, such as they were, I barely remembered anyway. Memories of Solomon invaded every pore.
His fathering of me.
His instructions.
His nose when I threw the book at him.
The way he shielded me from the gypsies and their accusing looks.
The view I had of the top of his head from atop Vlad, that dark night we escaped.
Learning to read.
The books.
So I took my rage out on the books. I brought stacks, as heavy as I could carry and as high as I could heap them in my arms, and I dumped them in the street in front of the library. Of course, by my fourth trip, I had drawn a crowd. I lit a fire as quickly as I could, in our little kitchen hearth in our living quarters, and carried a burning twig.
I hadn’t planned my little act of wrath out very well, and the twig was snatched before I could light the books. Someone yelled, and someone slapped me, and someone pulled the books to safety, out of the mud, and someone accused me of being the librarian’s daughter, and someone took me to the police. I bit someone, and I scratched someone else, and then I cursed so passionately and in so many different languages that someone spoke in low tones of an exorcist. Someone asked where my shoes were, and someone tried to give me a blanket; I bit them too. Someone shouted for my father, and I shouted for him too, and eventually all the someones went away, and I was strapped to a bed in a place they called Bedlam.
And I grew up.
I feel tears on my cheeks, though I hadn’t realized I was crying. I don’t wipe them away, but allow them to drip silently down onto Rose’s writing. A baptism of sorts. What a poor, wretched girl she was.
Shadows Falling: The Lost #2 Page 7