The Accidental Keyhand (11 page)

Hypatia tapped the tip of her pen against the desk and swept her gaze heavily over Dorrie and Marcus. “Do I have your word that you won't attempt to return to Passaic until we come to a decision about how to proceed?”

Dorrie and Marcus nodded vigorously.

“Then, that is good enough for me. Mr. Gormly can show you to the Apprentice Attics. You can stay there for now.” She drew the book that Francesco had pulled out of Dorrie's bag closer.

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

Once out of sight of the tower door, Mr. Gormly took his helmet off and tousled his short curls. “Damn shame to have to wear a hat this uncomfortable for a job I don't even like.” He tucked it under his arm as he led them farther along a corridor. “I'm no natural-born snitch, but it's this or live out in that dead crossroads of a village on the other end of the island, and I couldn't stand all that quiet. I'm a city man through and through.”

Dorrie, her bag again over her shoulder and Tiffany's sword in her hand, glanced sidelong at Mr. Gormly. “Are you a lybrarian?”

Mr. Gormly laughed out loud. “I'm afraid folks around here don't think I'm lybrarian material.” He said it as though it didn't bother him a bit. “But no lybrarian wanted to do internal security.”

“Were you born here?” asked Marcus.

Mr. Gormly moved his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “Refugee. The Lybrariad broke some of us out of a dungeon in Aberdeen, Scotland.”

“A dungeon!” said Dorrie. “Why were you there?”

“Oh,” said Mr. Gormly, making the toothpick disappear entirely into his mouth and then reappear. “Some of us tried to say that Scotland wasn't in need of the services of a king. Or a queen, for that matter. The crowned ones and their friends didn't like that. Quick as a wink, there we were, knee deep in dirty royal water, chained to a wall by our wrists.”

Dorrie looked at Mr. Gormly with new respect as he led them along a little balcony that overlooked a bright room filled with evenly spaced back-to-back bookcases and loaded with straight-backed chairs and colorful globes set on wooden stands. He stopped in front of a modest little white door made of planks. “I know what it's like to be mistrusted.” He set the ugly helmet back on his head. “Come to me if anyone gives you a hard time.”

Dorrie nodded gratefully and felt for the door's black iron handle. Marcus pushed the door open. They poked their heads inside, and Dorrie was instantly enchanted.

She had been expecting something cramped and dark and maybe cobwebby, but the Apprentice Attics were nothing of the sort. True, the ceiling sloped, but its peaked roof soared far overhead. Lower down, great rough beams crossed at intervals, and from a few hung swings and climbing ropes. Sunlight slanted through three arched windows at the far end of the room.

Though the air here was cool, a fire crackled in a roughly made but generous fireplace in the center of the room, its unplastered brick chimney crooking upward through the beams and finally out through the planked ceiling. A circus of chairs and sofas and footstools were scattered about the room, some drawn up in clusters by the windows and the fireplace, and others around tables and desks. Mathilde and Ebba huddled together on the end of a sagging couch with Kenzo perched on its back. Izel sat by one of the windows, her neck craned to catch better sight of something.

“You're not marooned!” cried Ebba, jumping up. “Oh, I'm so relieved!” She looked instantly sorry to have chosen those words. “I mean, not that I really thought you would be but I just, uh—I mean you're not going to be, right?”

“Not tonight at least,” said Dorrie. “We're supposed to stay here.”

Marcus threw himself into an armchair. “Not that Francesco wouldn't
like
to maroon us.”

Dorrie grinned and swung her bag off her shoulder, taking in the long row of sweaters and coats and capes that hung in layers from hooks on either side of the entrance, and the tumbling river of boots, shoes, fishing rods, and roller skates that flowed beneath the hooks.

“Here, I'll show you the bedroom you can have,” said Ebba. “It used to be Egeria's, but now that's she's made lybrarian, she's got her own place.”

“We'll take it!” burst out Marcus.

She led them to one of the doors that ran in two rows down the length of the room. Grinning, she pushed it open. “It's a bit of a squeeze.”

Marcus had to duck to get through. Inside the tiny room, the ceiling started off low on the door side and slanted steeply to meet the opposite wall only a few feet from the floor. It afforded just enough height for a little round window. The room itself only had enough space for two narrow beds covered with patchwork quilts and a little table at the foot of each bed. On top of one stood a kerosene lamp with a glass chimney. Thick, square-headed nails had been bashed into the rough plaster here and there, and from one hung a thin silky scarf. On two others, the plaid bathrobe and the fur-cuffed dressing gown had been neatly hung.

Dorrie threw her bag on the bed nearest the blue dressing gown. Ebba flopped beside it. The mattress made a whispery sound, and the smell of straw wafted through the air. “The straw should be okay. Egeria was a pretty regular changer.” She giggled. “If it was Sven's, you'd need fresh.”

Back in the den, after Mathilde had pulled Sven out of his room and persuaded him to read out some caramels from a grubby yellow book that stood with a row of other equally grubby volumes on a plank above the fireplace, Dorrie and Marcus explained about all that had happened in Francesco's office.

“So you are keyhands,” said Kenzo matter-of-factly as he staggered around in a pair of the strange roller skates with the wheels that looked like miniature bicycle tires, caramel all over his face.

“Well, not really,” said Dorrie, her face warming.

“Can we see?” asked Mathilde, her eyes eager.

Slowly Dorrie turned over her hands to show the others her blank fingertips, one now stained with ink. Mathilde whistled. “The real thing.”

“Congratulations,” said Izel who had silently appeared between Mathilde and Ebba.

Something in her tone made Dorrie felt instantly embarrassed. “It was just an accident.”

“That too?” said Izel, pointing at Dorrie's now half-blackened thumbnail.

“Not exactly,” said Dorrie, remembering Tiffany's vicious blow. She reached for another caramel, remembering a part of the story that she and Marcus had left out. “Oh, and Francesco pulled this book out of my bag, but I'd never seen it before in my life. He acted like it was some very big deal that I had it.” Dorrie bit into the soft, sticky cube, allowing a delicate, glistening swoop of it to hang between her fingertips and her teeth.

“I envy you your talent, Sven,” said Mathilde.

“I shouldn't do it for you. It just keeps you from practicing so you can do it yourselves.”

“I can't read anything out yet!” said Kenzo, hovering over Sven's shoulder while the older apprentice struggled to turn bits of thread and feather into something that, when tied on to a bent pin, might possibly attract a very gullible trout.

Mathilde sighed. “All I seem to be able to read out with any consistency are baked potatoes.”

“What was so special about the book?” asked Ebba.

Dorrie hastily swallowed. “Well, someone had cut the shape of a star out of bunch of pages in the middle.”

“A secret compartment!” said Kenzo.

“Maybe…” said Dorrie, considering the possibility. She licked her fingers, as something new occurred to her. “You know what else was weird about it? The letters in the title didn't shift and change. I couldn't read them.”

Ebba stopped chewing, her eyes wide.

Dorrie pictured Hypatia flipping through the book's pages. “I don't think even Hypatia could read the writing.”

“That sounds like Petrarch's alphabet,” said Mathilde slowly. “It's the only language I know of that won't auto-translate here.”

Marcus reached for another caramel. “You're not going to start pointing at us and screaming ‘Foundation!' now, are you?”

“Of course not,” said Ebba. “But that's…that's….well, that's unusual.”

“I promise,” said Dorrie, sorry she'd brought it up. “I'd never seen the book before in my life!”

Ebba pushed back her hair band. “There's hardly anything in the world written in Petrarch's alphabet. It was like his own private language.”

Dorrie realized that she'd never thought of the Petrarch in “Petrarch's Library” as even being a real person. “Who is Petrarch anyway?”

“He was here at the Library's beginning,” said Mathilde. “One of the first lybrarians. When Petrarch's Library was much smaller, during the Dark History. No one can actually read stuff written in Petrarch's language. The Archivist's been searching for a way to translate it forever.”

“The guy's who's into oranges?” and “The really bad singer?” said Dorrie and Marcus simultaneously.

“Oh, you've met him?” said Ebba.

Mathilde shuddered. “He's like a living cobweb. He gives me the creeps.”

“He does mumble and mutter a lot,” said Ebba, as if sorry to have to admit it. “But he can't help that.”

Mathilde sucked noisily on her caramel. “I think he's cracked.”

“Well, I'm sure there's some explanation for the book being there,” said Ebba.

Marcus snorted. “Yeah, like the director of security stuck it in there himself.”

“He wouldn't do that,” said Sven, one eye squinting as he threaded a needle.

Ebba turned to Dorrie. “If you get to stay, maybe we can share a room.”

Gleeful, Dorrie and Ebba threw their arms around each other. Then Ebba held Dorrie at arm's length. “Either way, we have to find your poor mongoose. He must be so frightened.”

“Moe?” said Marcus. “I don't think he even understands that word.”

“What's he like?” asked Ebba.

Dorrie racked her brain for something nice to say about the mongoose. “Well, he really makes Rosa happy.”

Marcus cut to the chase. “He's a biting, scratching evil nightmare.”

“Probably because he's shy,” said Ebba with great finality.

“You'd have to meet him to understand,” said Marcus.

In high spirits, Dorrie and Marcus ate dinner with the apprentices that evening and then sat on the stone windowsills of the Duc D'Aumale's Reading Room with Mathilde and Saul to watch a group of student lybrarians hold an archery tournament. Ebba, who had errands to run for the fire-and-explosives mistress, said she'd see them later up in the attics. Halfway through the tournament, Sven stuck his long legs through the next window over.

“What took you so long?” said Mathilde. “You missed five bull's-eyes in a row for Lady Marion.”

“Callamachus is on the warpath.”

“Who's Callamachus?” asked Dorrie.

“Director of reference services,” said Mathilde, accidentally dislodging a bit of mortar from the wall with her heel. “Whoops.”

It landed on an archer's head. Dorrie, Marcus, Saul, and Sven all quickly pulled their legs back into the room.

Sven looked tentatively down into the archers' courtyard again. “Callamachus made me miss dinner to look all over the Reference Room for some missing page of a book. He wouldn't even tell me what it was. Just that it would be torn on one edge, and that it was very important. He seemed really upset. Kept mumbling about the poor Archivist, and how he's getting too old for his job, and how he didn't want to have to bring it up with Francesco.”

Dorrie's high spirits plummeted. Yesterday seemed like a week ago. She had forgotten all about the page Marcus had ripped out of the
History
of
Histories
book.

Back in the attics, she and Marcus feigned exhaustion and shut themselves away in their bedroom, with just the little kerosene lamp burning for light.

Marcus insisted on pacing in the tiny space with Egeria's left-behind scarf draped around his neck. “I asked Saul what the
History
of
Histories
was, and he said it's a record of all the deeds of the lybrarians over the last four hundred years! All there, spelled out in black and white. Lybrarian O'Malley rescued this person from a torture chamber. Keyhand Omar foiled a plot to burn down the Sandwich Isles Public Library. Remember I said it all sounded very James Bond?”

Dorrie felt her stomach drop, as though that part of her alone had been thrown off a cliff. “I guess it's not the kind of thing a secret society wants floating around.”

“It would be gold for their enemies.” Marcus dropped down on his bed.

“They'd know just what the lybrarians had been up to. Their cover would be blown.”

“When Callamachus tells Francesco that page is missing, Francesco's just going to get up on his big, fat judgmental horse and assume we took it.”

“Yeah, well, we did.”

“I know, but it still seems unfair! We didn't take it on purpose. We didn't have nefarious intentions!”

“What are those?”

“Like bad ones. But worse.”

“There goes our chance to become apprentices.”

“And here comes our second chance at that marooning.”