Scholar's Plot (32 page)

“We’d no need of any notes to prove her guilt! Stint’s testimony, and Quicken’s if we needed to track him down, would provide plenty of evidence. Why take such a foolish risk?”

“Well, she seemed to think her experiment could succeed. And if there was some value in those notes, someone who turned them over to the Heir might be able to request … to get a favor in return.”

This made no sense to me, but his gaze had strayed to Kathy once more. And her face lit with sudden fury.

“Fisk, you moron! Is that what you were thinking? That you had to get someone
else’s
permission? You idiot!”

She threw her arms around Fisk’s neck, and kissed him. ’Twas not a sisterly kiss, either. Fisk’s arms went around her, gently, but in a way that made it clear he intended to hold onto this woman forever.

Kathy and Fisk
? I felt as if the fire had suddenly swept over me, sucking all the air away. Why hadn’t I noticed? Why hadn’t they said something?

For a moment I was outraged — not so much by the thought of them together, which was beginning to feel less strange by the minute — but by the fact that either one of them would keep something so important from me.

On the other hand, from what Kathy said, it sounded like they’d been keeping their feelings secret from each other, too. So I could hardly blame them.

Still, Kathy and Fisk…?

They stopped kissing, perhaps for want of breath, but instead of pulling apart Kathy lowered her head to Fisk’s shoulder. And in that moment, ’twas as clear as anything I’d ever seen that they were right for each other. Right
together
.

If anything, Fisk was holding her closer than when they’d kissed. As if he feared that, at any moment, she might be pulled from his arms.

As well he might! Father would disown Kathy, or lock her up in a tower, or marry her off to someone…

Unless he was stopped. And looking at the way my sister clung to Fisk, stopping him was a knight errant’s job. Father would never forgive any of us, but if it made Fisk and Kathy happy I didn’t care. I consider happiness more important in a marriage than rank or money — which was just as well, because Kathy wouldn’t inherit a cracked copper if she wed Fisk.

Without letting go of my sister, Fisk opened his eyes and looked at me. “I really hope you don’t have a problem with this.”

“Not at all.” In truth, I was pleased he didn’t ask my permission — a squire would have, but a friend didn’t have to. I returned the compliment, by not asking if his intentions were honorable. “But I advise you to get married now, before Father or anyone else hears about this. Kathy’s old enough to consent, but until she marries or turns twenty-five she’s Father’s legal ward.”

Fisk’s shoulders sagged in sudden relief, which amused me. He knew me too well to fear that I’d object, unless love of my sister had overset his reason. In fact, it had overset his reason so badly he’d almost gotten us both killed.

I resolved to keep a close eye on Fisk till he recovered his wits, and became more accustomed to being in love.

“Kathy’s actually the Liege’s ward,” was Fisk’s explanation for blatant insanity. “That’s why I needed to earn his favor. Or at least get on the Heir’s good side. But that idea’s in ashes now.”

His gaze went to the burning tower, still a bit wistful, and Kathy shivered.

“You really are crazy,” she told him. “Even if you’d found those notes, and they were worth something, we could still have gotten married now and you could have exchanged them for something more practical. Like a small estate.”

“You’re worth more than any estate,” Fisk told her. “There’s nothing worth more than love.”

This maudlin sentiment was so unlike my erstwhile squire, I almost asked what had become of the real Fisk. But it must have been the first time that word had passed between them, for they kissed again. And went on kissing, though I paid no attention, for something nagged at me. The worth of love, the price of love, no number for love… But there was a number for everything.

Motive bloomed in my mind, brighter than the flaming tower.

I gasped, but Fisk and Kathy ignored me. I glared at them, but they went on kissing. I finally had to shake Fisk’s shoulder, whereupon they both glared at me.

“I know, and I’m sorry, but I know who killed Hotchkiss! And I think I can prove it.”

Since he was babbling about Hotchkiss’ murder, I wasn’t too surprised when Michael led us to the library. I had requested, somewhat politely, that he either tell us who killed Hotchkiss or go away — and though I was deeply grateful to Michael for taking the news about Kathy and me so well, truthfully, I was hoping for the latter. But he said he had to check one more thing, and Kathy was beginning to be curious, so I pulled out Hotchkiss’ keys and let us into the dark building.

We could probably have gone from room to room using the moonlight that poured through the windows, but Michael took down one of the lamps beside the door — he had to pull it from its stand — and then kindled it.

I noted that his new ability to keep us alive in burning buildings didn’t mean he could suddenly do everything with magic, and used the darkness while he fumbled around to steal a few more kisses — a sweet theft, that could make the rest of my life joyous … if I could only figure out some way to marry the wench.

At least, thank goodness, Michael was on our side — we’d need all the help we could get! It was very well for Kathy to say we that could get married legally right now — infuriating not only her powerful father, but the
High Liege.
Kathy seemed to think that if we were wed there was nothing they could do about it, which was nonsense. Even if they weren’t prepared to make her a widow — and I preferred not to bet my life on that — there were legal means to break up a marriage. It wasn’t easy, but it could be done — particularly if a well-dowered maiden entered into that marriage without her guardian’s consent. Mostly the guardian would just get the dowry back, but not always. I didn’t care about Kathy’s dowry, but the other legal possibilities went from bad to very bad in short order.

Convicting me of kidnapping, forcible marriage, and rape — no matter what either of us said — was one of the most likely.

Finding out who’d killed Hotchkiss might win us a bit of good will, from the local law, at least. So when Michael finally got the lamp lit, I followed him over to the directory with only moderate regret.

But he wasn’t looking at the directory, he was reading the numbered subject list beside it.

“Emotions, Thought, the Human Mind, 000 to 009,” he muttered. “That’s not enough. Where are they?”

“Far end of the hallway on the right,” Kathy told him, looking at the building map.

Michael set off without another word, striding briskly. With Kathy’s hand in mine, we trailed him at a more leisurely pace. By the time we reached the room, which had once been some lady’s parlor, Michael had already found the master sheet for that section, framed and hung on the wall beside the door.

“001,” he read. “Love of a child for a parent. 001.2, love of a child for a grandparent. 001.3, love of a child for a friend. 002 starts with romantic love, between man and woman.”

My heart contracted with sudden, painful understanding. Kathy had seen it too. Her grip on my hand was tight with horror and pity.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing,” she whispered. “The number for love.”

“Love of a parent for a child is 003,” Michael said. “It goes on all through life, listing all the loves that man may know. And Hotchkiss created this system years after the death of Seymour Peebles.”

“Whose mother,” I said, “has access to the keys to every building the university owns. Including Hotchkiss’ house. And that abandoned print shop.”

Michael turned to us, his face set with distress and determination.

“I’m going back to the tower to get Captain Chaldon. You two find one of those master lists you told me about, and meet us at the gates.”

He left us the lamp when he departed, and I heard him bump into something in the hallway and swear. But I had no desire to laugh.

Kathy’s face was full of sorrow and I put an arm around her, just for comfort. For both our comfort, which was almost sweeter than a kiss.

“Can we stop this, Fisk? Should we?”

“Michael will be talking to the Captain in minutes. As for whether we should have tried to stop him, I honestly don’t know. But your brother’s not just thinking about Clerk Peebles. He’s thinking about the next 
person who’ll be suspected of this murder. Some random burglar, say, who might not have an alibi.”

“Ah.” I felt her sigh as much as heard it. “Then I suppose we’d better get that master list for him.”

Since we knew where it was kept, that was easy. We reached the gates several minutes before Michael and Captain Chaldon came to join us.

“Good, you’ve got it,” Michael said. “Do you recognize this, Captain?”

“Not without reading the title.” The captain’s voice was tart, and I deduced that Michael hadn’t told him much.

People resist conclusions less if they reach them on their own, so I just handed over the thick book. To my surprise, he recognized it.

“This is the master list for the alphanumeric system. I thought they never let it out of the library.”

“They would for this,” I told him.

Michael had already passed through the gates, unguarded in this emergency. I took back the book and led the Captain and Kathy after him. Having walked her home after our dinner, Michael knew where Clerk Peebles lived.

It was a tall narrow house, in a row of such houses. As we approached, I couldn’t help but wonder if the cobbles we walked across were the ones that had shattered Seymour Peebles’ head when he jumped. And whether his mother remembered that, every time she approached her own front door.

If she’d gone to the fire I don’t know what we’d have done — I could hardly have picked her door lock under Captain Chaldon’s eyes. But candlelight glowed in her windows — she must have heard the alarm, and sensibly decided that a middle-aged woman wouldn’t be much use fighting fires. She was ready, though. She opened the door immediately when Michael knocked, fully dressed.

“What’s happening on the campus? Am I needed there? I thought…”

She took in the fact that none of us were scholar-messengers, and then the insignia on Captain Chaldon’s coat, and the animation died out of her face. This was how she’d look when she was old, and Kathy darted from my side to throw an arm around her, though she stood steady and straight.

“We’d like to see your son’s room,” Michael said.

It was all he needed to say and her face changed again … but oddly, she looked stronger now.

“It’s the second door at the top of the stairs,” she said. “I locked it after Seymour’s death. Couldn’t bear it. But it hasn’t been locked for over a month, now.”

Kathy took her into a comfortable front room, off to the right, while Michael led the rest of us up the stairs. He took a lit candle from the entry with him, and collected another from a stand on the landing.

Under the dust, Seymour Peebles’ room could have been that of any young scholar. Perhaps a bit tidier than most, before his death, but filled with the books and notes that were now scattered wildly over the floor, where he’d tossed them in his final despair. I understood why his mother hadn’t been able to clean it out, to throw those notes away. But even if she had, he’d scribbled on the walls as well, when a thought had struck him and he’d no paper to hand.

Tree-root-wood-bark-leaves-blossom-fruit-seed
appeared by the window, with a list of numbers in the 530’s. Beside a chest of drawers was a sketch of a human skeleton, with a list of numbers in the 650’s that ran from eye level down to the floor. A complex thing to number, human anatomy.

But Seymour Peebles had created a number for everything. And his “friend,” Winton Hotchkiss, had stolen them.

Chaldon must have spent more time in the library than I’d have expected, for he got it almost at once.

“These numbers.” He gestured to marked walls, the paper strewn floor. “Do they match?”

“You can check.” I held out the master list that had sprung from those tumbled notes.

The captain sighed. “There’s hardly any need, is there. The man I was partnered with when I first joined the guard, he’d investigated Seymour Peebles’ suicide. There was no doubt he took his own life, but his mother was so insistent that he’d been betrayed by someone he trusted… Dovan looked for the man. He never found a trace.”

“Hotchkiss hid their friendship,” Michael said. “Mayhap at first ’twas from embarrassment, fear of mockery if he befriended someone as odd as Seymour. Or mayhap he befriended him in the first place because he recognized that this odd, awkward youth had hit on something valuable … and he didn’t want anyone to suspect the truth when he stole it.”

From what I knew of Hotchkiss, I’d bet on the latter. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past him to have deliberately provoked the bright, unstable scholar. To have shattered that newfound trust as brutally as he could, hoping Seymour would be so traumatized, so incoherent, he’d be unable to present a convincing case that Hotchkiss had taken his work, instead of the other way around.

Though Seymour may have suspected something; Hotchkiss had clearly never been invited into this room, or seen the strange, brilliant scribbles on its walls.

As we walked back down the stairs to confront his mother, I found myself thinking that if he’d survived, Seymour Peebles might someday have acquired magic. Or maybe in time, with respect and the freedom to change the whole scholarly world with his numbers, he might have settled and become more normal.

Either way, Hotchkiss had made sure he’d never have the chance.

By the time we reached the front room, I was really hoping we’d find Nancy Peebles had run for it. I knew Kathy wouldn’t stop her, and I had a feeling the captain wouldn’t have pursued her very hard.

But she was waiting for us, seated on a very worn, upholstered chair. A matching chair, worn only a little, sat on the other side of a small table, and it took only a moment’s thought to understand why Kathy had chosen to sit on a footstool instead. None of the rest of us took that empty chair.

“Mistress Peebles,” Captain Chaldon said. “When did you first realize that Hotchkiss had stolen the alphanumeric system from your son?”

He was good. If he’d asked her if she’d killed the man, she might have lied. But that question was one she was dying — maybe literally — to answer. I wished, once again, that she’d run.

“Not for a very long time. I took that job with the university to look for the person who’d betrayed my son, you know.”

She spoke calmly, but her hands kept smoothing the skirt over her knees.

“Oh, I went to them, and said I’d lost my old job because I’d missed so much time after Seymour died. That much was true, and they gave me a job out of pity. But the reason I wanted to work there was to hunt for my son’s killer. Secretary to the admissions clerk, that’s where I started, and it was perfect. I studied the records of every scholar who was here at the same time as Seymour, watched them when they came back to visit, kept track of their careers.

“But Hotchkiss was clever. He waited for more than three years after Seymour’s death before he even began talking about the system, and he spent several more years ‘developing it.’ Talking to professors and department heads about how to subdivide their subjects, bringing out the numbers one discipline at a time. There was no reason to doubt he was working it all out slowly, just as he claimed. And I was looking at the mathematicians, and some of the sciences that use a lot of math, not at historians.”

She gave Michael a rueful smile. “So maybe it’s fitting, that it was a historian who helped me see it. I was there at your brother’s hearing, taking notes of the proceedings. He was so angry, so helpless. It reminded me of Seymour, that day he came home and locked himself in his room.”

Her gaze fell to her hands, clenched on her knees, and she released them self-consciously.

“I had no idea what he was going to do. What he’d done. He never let anyone into his room for fear they’d disturb his papers — that’s why there was a lock on his door. I was still pounding on it, begging him to tell me what was wrong, when the neighbors came. I only glanced into his room once after the guard had inspected it. Seeing all his neat piles of paper tossed about… I said I couldn’t bear to clean it, but the truth is he’d been so adamant about keeping everyone out, I felt like he’d know. Like he still cared, somehow. But after Professor Sevenson was betrayed as well, I dug out the key and went into my son’s room. I’d been using that library, using the alphanumeric system, for almost fifteen years. I knew then, who’d betrayed my son. And your brother, and who knows how many other people. Years I’d spent, looking in the wrong place, while that man walked around the campus collecting fame for Seymour’s genius. I searched his house, you know. I hoped there’d be some evidence that the system was Seymour’s work. I thought I could leave it on his desk or a shelf, that someone would find it...”