Minto House belonged, at least officially, to the University of Edinburgh. Yet it bore little resemblance to any ordinary university library. Access was restricted to members, visiting scholars and the occasional guest whose credentials, reputation or influence proved sufficiently persuasive.
Its collection exceeded twenty thousand volumes, with particular strengths in art history, architecture, antiquarian studies and the conservation of historic buildings. Those were the subjects listed in the university catalogue, at any rate. Less openly advertised were the shelves devoted to funerary customs, anatomical illustration, medieval demonology and the more macabre corners of European folklore.
Rowan had spent enough time within academic institutions to recognise the difference between books preserved for scholarship and books concealed because someone feared what might be found inside them. It was the latter collection that had brought her there that evening.
The library had long since closed to ordinary visitors, leaving the old house steeped in a silence broken only by the faint movement of rain against the windows and the measured turn of a page beneath her hand. A green-shaded lamp cast a small pool of light across the reading table, illuminating several open reference volumes, a scattering of handwritten notes and a pair of circular spectacles she had temporarily abandoned beside her elbow.
Before her lay a leather-bound journal that did not appear in any public catalogue. The binding had once been a rich, dark red, though age had deepened it towards black. Its corners were worn smooth, the leather cracked along the spine from repeated handling. There was no title upon the cover, only the faint impression of a laurel wreath tooled into the centre and the tarnished remains of a clasp that had long ago ceased to close.
The journal had been dated, in a later archivist’s hand, to the sixteenth century. Rowan suspected it had changed owners several times before reaching Edinburgh, though the entries themselves belonged unmistakably to one man.
The handwriting was disciplined and elegant, written principally in Latin, with passages in Italian and occasional annotations in Greek. Some entries were measured accounts of paintings, buildings and antiquities. Others recorded names, political alliances, private grievances and observations upon the mortal world with an intimacy no formal history could possess.
Venice appeared frequently. So too did Rome, Florence and Constantinople, though always with the peculiar familiarity of one recalling places they had known across more than one lifetime. Dates were recorded precisely, yet the writer’s references reached backwards into centuries that no sixteenth-century scholar should have remembered firsthand.
In several places, words had been scored through so violently that the nib had torn the vellum. Elsewhere, whole pages had been removed with a blade. On the inner cover, nearly concealed beneath a later bookplate, the original owner had written his name.
Rowan rested one finger beneath the inscription, studying it with the quiet concentration she ordinarily reserved for disputed attributions and badly restored frescoes. The name was not unfamiliar to her. It had surfaced too often in fragmentary records held by the Talamasca, appearing at the edge of Venetian inventories, Roman correspondence and accounts of patrons whose lives seemed to extend well beyond the limits of nature. Yet this was no secondhand reference copied by a credulous monk or embellished by a frightened witness. These were his own words.
She turned another page carefully, following a passage written in a darker, more hurried hand. Whatever composure governed the earlier entries had begun to fracture. Rowan’s expression softened, though only slightly.
“You have been remarkably difficult to classify,” she murmured to the empty room, her gaze still fixed upon his handwriting. “Though I suspect that was entirely deliberate.”
He had caught wind of her weeks ago. Not by accident, though mortals were fond of that word. Accident was a useful fiction, one they applied to every consequence whose origin they had failed to trace. Her request had passed through several hands before it reached the attention of those still loyal enough, or frightened enough, to tell me when my name stirred in the modern world. She had asked for access to articles that had belonged to me in another life.
At first, I thought little of it. Scholars were always prying at the bones of the past, tugging at burial cloth, holding a candle over graves and calling it research. Yet her name appeared again. Then again. Rowan Ruarach. Talamasca-affiliated, though not so carelessly as most of them. Educated. Cautious. Fluent enough in Latin to be dangerous, and in Italian to be unforgivably perceptive. There were notes attached to her requests, references she had no business knowing, questions framed with the precision of a blade passed lightly beneath the ribs.
Not closely at first. I am not, despite certain accusations made by those who lack my understanding, an impulsive creature. I observed from a distance, and with distance came interest. She did not move through archives as a thief moves through a house, greedy for possession. Nor did she handle the dead with that dreadful sentimental vulgarity so common among modern academics. She looked, she listened, she doubted and questioned me through her research. That, I confess, I admired.
Knowledge is not rare. Beauty is not rare either, though men have ruined themselves for less than what she possessed. But discipline joined to both? That is uncommon. Rowan had the face of a woman who had learned early that being underestimated was not only survivable, but useful. The pale fall of lamplight softened her features without diminishing their intelligence. Her hair, dark and severe in that greenish glow, framed her face like something painted by a hand too honest for flattery. There was beauty there, yes, but it was not the kind that begged to be praised. It seemed rather to stand apart from praise, indifferent to it, and therefore all the more difficult to ignore.
I had not intended to enter this library. That was the truth, though truth is often only the first movement in a larger deception. For some time I stood beyond the threshold, hidden in the deeper dark of the corridor, listening to the rain touch the windows and the faint, dry breath of vellum turning beneath her fingers. Minto House had always pleased me in a peculiar way. Edinburgh suited secrets. The city wore scholarship and burial in the same stone. Its libraries had the chastened air of confessionals, its private rooms the particular stillness of places where knowledge had been purchased at moral cost.
And there she sat beneath the green-shaded lamp, with my journal open before her. I recognised the binding before I recognised the page. That should have amused me. Perhaps it did, faintly. The leather had darkened nearly to black, the red of it buried beneath time and handling. I remembered ordering it made. I remembered the man who bound it for me. He had a squint, a nervous wife, and two sons he was determined would not take up his trade.
A poor little monument to arrogance, grief, study and boredom. There were years of my life in those pages that I had once believed worth preserving. There were names I had written only because I could not bear to speak them aloud. There were whole passages I had later destroyed because even immortality has moments it cannot look upon without contempt.
Then she spoke to the empty room. For a moment, I allowed the silence to remain. It seemed only courteous. She had, after all, addressed the dead, and the dead are expected to take their time. Then I stepped into the lamplight.
“Deliberate,” I said, quietly, “but not always successful.”
My voice carried no great force, yet in that closed room it seemed to alter the weight of the air. The rain continued its delicate work against the glass. Somewhere in the walls, the old house gave a small, settling sigh, as though it too had been listening.
I did not move nearer. There are entrances that demand theatre, and there are others that demand restraint. This one belonged to the latter category. She had found my name with ink on her fingers and suspicion already at work in her mind. To startle her further would have been vulgar. Still, I watched her closely. With interest.
I glanced towards the journal. “You have taken care with that. More care than most. I should thank you for it, though I admit gratitude becomes complicated when one discovers his private writings laid open beneath a university lamp.” Only then did I take another step into the room.
The light caught my hands first, then the dark cloth of my coat, then at last my face. I had chosen no disguise. There seemed little point in falsehood now, and I have always preferred a confrontation dressed honestly. My hair was shorter this evening, having chosen to cut it early this evening.
The page before her was one I knew too well. I could see, even from where I stood, the darker pitch of the ink, the pressure of a hand no longer willing to pretend at composure. “You have been following a trail I would have preferred left cold." A faint smile touched my mouth, not quite amusement. “That alone makes you more dangerous than most of your Order.”
