The Historian (23 page)

―Those books? University property? Who are you to confiscate university library books?‖

The librarian‘s voice was angry and wheedling at the same time. ―You don‘t need to fool around with such books. They aren‘t nice books for a young lady to be reading. Just turn them in today and nothing more will be said.‖

―Why do you want them so badly?‖ Helen‘s voice was firm and clear. ―Does it have something to do with Professor Rossi, perhaps?‖

Cowering behind English feudalism, I wasn‘t sure whether to cringe or to cheer aloud.

Whatever Helen thought of all this, she was at least intrigued. Apparently she did not consider me crazy. And she was willing to help me, if only to gather information about Rossi for her own ends.

―Professor—who? I don‘t know what you mean,‖ the librarian snapped.

―Do you know where he is?‖ Helen asked sharply.

―Young lady, I have no idea what you‘re talking about. But I need you to return those books, for which the library has other plans, or there will certainly be consequences for your academic career.‖

―My career?‖ Helen scoffed. ―I cannot possibly return those books just now. I have important work to do with them.‖

―Then I will have to force you to return them. Where are they?‖ I heard a step, as if Helen had moved away. I was on the verge of swinging around the end of the stack and bringing a folio of Cistercian abbeys down on the nasty little weasel when Helen suddenly played a new card.

―I‘ll tell you what,‖ she said. ―If you can tell me something about Professor Rossi, maybe I could share with you a little—‖ She paused. ―A little map I saw recently.‖

My stomach dropped all seven stories at once. The map? What was Helen thinking? Why was she giving away such a vital piece of information? That map might be our most dangerous possession, if Rossi‘s analysis of its meaning were true, and our most important one. My most dangerous possession, I corrected myself. Was Helen double-crossing me? I saw it in a flash: she wanted to use the map to get to Rossi first, complete his research, use me to learn all he had learned and passed on to me, publish, expose him—I didn‘t have time for more than a fleeting revelation because the next moment the librarian let out a roar. ―The map! You have Rossi‘s map! I‘ll kill you for that map!‖ A gasp from Helen, then a cry and a thump. ―Put that down!‖ screamed the librarian.

My feet didn‘t touch the ground until I was on top of him. His little head hit the floor with a thump that rattled my brains, too. Helen crouched next to me. She was very white but looked calm. She was holding up her twenty-five-cent silver crucifix from the church, keeping it trained on him as he fought and spat under me. The librarian was frail, and for a few minutes I could more or less pin him down—lucky for me, since I‘d spent the last three years turning through brittle Dutch documents, not lifting weights. He flailed in my grasp, and I brought my knee down on his legs. ―Rossi!‖ he shrieked. ―It‘s not fair! I should have gone instead—it was my turn! Give me the map! I waited so long—I did twenty years of research for this!‖ He began to sob, a pitiful, ugly sound. As his head jerked back and forth, I saw the double wound near the edge of his collar, two scabby thorn holes. I kept my hands as far away from it as I could.

―Where‘s Rossi?‖ I growled. ―Tell us this instant where he is—did you hurt him?‖ Helen held the little cross closer and he turned his face away, writhing under my knees. It was astounding to me, even at that moment, to see the effect of that symbol on the creature.

Was this Hollywood, superstition, or history? I wondered how he‘d been able to walk into the church—but there he had stayed far from the altar and chapels, I remembered, and had shrunk away even from the altar-guild lady.

―I didn‘t touch him! I don‘t know anything about it!‖

―Oh, yes, you do.‖ Helen bent closer. Her expression was fierce, but she was very white, and I noticed now that she held her free hand tightly over her neck.

―Helen!‖

I must have gasped aloud, but she waved me away, glaring at the librarian. ―Where is Rossi? What was it you waited years for?‖ He shrank back. ―I‘m going to put this on your face now,‖ Helen said, lowering the crucifix.

―No!‖ he screamed. ―I‘ll tell you. Rossi didn‘t want to go. I wanted to. It wasn‘t fair. He took Rossi instead of me! He took him by force—I would have gone willingly to serve him, to help him, to catalog—‖ He suddenly clamped his mouth shut.

―What?‖ I thumped his head slightly on the floor for good measure. ―Who took Rossi?

Are you keeping him somewhere?‖

Helen held the cross right over his nose, and he began to sob again. ―My master,‖ he whimpered. Helen, next to me, drew a long breath and sat back on her heels, as if recoiling involuntarily from his words.

―Who is your master?‖ I dug my knee into his leg. ―Where did he take Rossi?‖

His eyes blazed. It was a shocking sight—the contortion, the normal human features hieroglyphic with terrible meaning. ―Where I should have been allowed to go! To the tomb!‖

Maybe my grip had weakened, or maybe his confession made him suddenly strong—

probably from terror for himself, I realized afterward. In any case, he suddenly freed one hand, swung around like a scorpion, and bent my wrist backward where it held down his shoulder. The pain was unbearably sharp, and I jerked my arm back in fury. He was gone before I could understand what had happened, and I took off after him down the stairs, clattering past the undergraduate seminar and the quiet realms of knowledge below. But I was hampered by my briefcase, which I still clutched in one hand. Even in that first moment of pursuit, I realized fleetingly, I hadn‘t wanted to drop it. Or throw it to Helen.

She had told him about the map. She was a traitor. And he had bitten her, if only for a moment. Wouldn‘t she be tainted herself now?

For the first and last time I ran through the hushed nave of the library instead of walking, only half seeing the astonished faces that turned toward me as I flew along. There was no sign of the librarian. He could have escaped into any backstage region, I realized with despair, any cataloging dungeon or broom closet for librarians only. I thrust open the heavy front door, an opening cut in the great double Gothic-style doors to the hall, which were never fully opened. Then I stopped short on the steps. The afternoon light blinded me as if I, too, had been living in an underworld, a cave of bats and rodents. On the street in front of the library, several cars had stopped. Traffic was at a halt, in fact, and a girl in a waitress uniform was crying on the sidewalk, pointing at something. Someone was shouting, and a couple of men knelt by the front tire of one of the stopped cars. The weaselly librarian‘s legs stuck out from under the car, twisted at an impossible angle. One of his arms was flung over his head. He lay facedown on the pavement in a little blood, asleep forever.

My father was reluctant to take me to Oxford. He would be there six days, he said, a long time for me to miss school again. I was surprised that he was willing to leave me at home; he hadn‘t done that even once since I‘d found the dragon book. Was he planning to leave me with particular precautions? I pointed out that our trip along the Yugoslav coast had taken almost two weeks, without any sign of detriment to my schoolwork. He said education should always come first. I pointed out that he had always postulated travel as the best education, and that May was the pleasantest month for travel. I produced my latest report card, which gleamed with high grades, and a history paper on which my rather pompous instructor had written, ―You show extraordinary insight into the nature of historical research, especially for one of your years,‖ a comment I had memorized and often repeated to myself as a mantra before I slept.

My father wavered visibly, setting his knife and fork down in a way I knew meant a pause in our dinner in the old Dutch dining room, not a decisive end to the first course.

He said his work would prevent him from showing me around properly this time and he didn‘t want to spoil my first impressions of Oxford by keeping me cooped up somewhere. I said I preferred being cooped up in Oxford to being cooped up at home with Mrs. Clay—at this point we dropped our voices, although she was having her evening off. Besides, I was old enough, I said, to wander around by myself. He said he just didn‘t know if it was a good idea for me to go, since these talks promised to be rather—tense. It might not be quite—but he couldn‘t go on and I knew why. Just as I could not use my real argument for going to Oxford, he could not use his for wanting to prevent me from going. I could not tell him aloud that I couldn‘t bear to let him, with his dark-circled eyes and the fatigued stoop of shoulder and head, out of my sight now. And he could not counter aloud that he might not be safe in Oxford and that, therefore, I might not be safe with him. He was silent for a minute or two, and then he asked me very gently what we were having for dessert, and I brought in Mrs. Clay‘s dreary rice pudding with currants, which she always left as a compensation for going out to the movies at the British Centre without us.

I
had
imagined Oxford hushed and green, a kind of outdoor cathedral where dons in medieval dress paraded around, each with a single student at his side, lecturing on history, literature, obscure theology. The reality was shockingly lively: beeping motorcycles, little cars darting here and there and narrowly missing students as they crossed the streets, a crowd of tourists photographing a cross on the sidewalk where a couple of bishops had been burned at the stake four hundred years earlier, before sidewalks. The dons and students alike wore disappointingly modern dress, mostly wool sweaters, with dark flannel trousers for the mentor and blue jeans for the disciple. I thought with regret that in Rossi‘s time, a good forty years before we stepped off our bus onto Broad Street, Oxford must at least have dressed with a little more dignity.

Then I caught sight of the first college I ever saw there, towering over its walled enclosure in the morning light, and looming near it the perfect shape of the Radcliffe Camera, which I took at first for a small observatory. Behind that rose the spires of a great brown church, and along the street ran a wall that looked so old even the lichens on it seemed antique. I couldn‘t imagine how we would have appeared to whoever had walked these streets when that wall was young—I in my short red dress and crocheted white stockings and my book bag, my father in his navy jacket and gray slacks, his black turtleneck and tweed hat, each of us lugging a small suitcase. ―Here we are,‖ my father pronounced, and to my delight we turned in at a gate in the lichened wall. It was locked, and we waited there until a student held the wrought-iron bars open for us.

At Oxford my father was to speak at a conference on political relations between the United States and Eastern Europe, now in the full flower of a thaw. Because the university was hosting the conference, we were invited to stay in private rooms in the house of one of the college masters. The masters, my father explained, were benevolent dictators who looked after the students who lived in each college. As we made our way through the dark, low entryway and into the blazing sunlight of the college quadrangle, I realized for the first time that soon I, too, would go to college, and I crossed my fingers on my book-bag handle and breathed a wish that I would then find myself in a haven like this one.

Around us lay softly worn flagstones, interrupted here and there by heavy shade trees—

serious, melancholy old trees with the occasional bench underneath. A little rectangle of perfect grass and a narrow pool of water lay at the feet of the college‘s main building. It was one of Oxford‘s oldest, endowed by Edward III in the thirteenth century, its newest additions shaped by Elizabethan architects. Even that patch of carefully clipped grass looked venerable; certainly I never saw anyone step on it.

We skirted the grass and water and made our way to the porter‘s office just inside, and from there to a suite of rooms adjoining the master‘s house. These rooms must have been part of the original design of the college, although it was hard to tell what they had originally been used for; they were very low-ceilinged, with dark paneling and tiny leaded windows. My father‘s bedroom had blue draperies. Mine, to my infinite satisfaction, had a high chintz canopy bed.

We unpacked a little, washed our travelers‘ faces in a pale-yellow basin in our shared bathroom, and went to meet Master James, who was expecting us in his office at the other end of the building. He turned out to be a hearty, kind-spoken man with graying hair and a knobby scar on one cheekbone. I liked his warm handshake and the expression of his large, rather protuberant hazel eyes. He seemed to find nothing strange about my accompanying my father to the conference and went so far as to suggest that I tour the college with his student assistant that afternoon. His assistant, he said, was an obliging and very knowledgeable young gentleman. My father said I could certainly do that; he himself would be busy with meetings then, and why shouldn‘t I see the treasures of the place while I was there?

I turned up eagerly at three o‘clock, my new beret in one hand and a notebook in the other, since my father had suggested I might get notes for a school paper out of the tour.