Codex

by Lev Grossman

  She opened the book. The handwriting was a cramped mix of pointy angles and looping flourishes. Edward couldn’t read it.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a fishing handbook, fifteenth century. The Treatyse of Fishing with an Angle.”

  “Is this what you wanted me to see?” Edward looked over at the door nervously.

  “No,” she said, setting it aside. “This is.”

  She indicated a blank page torn out of her notebook lying flat on the tabletop. On the page was gathered a collection of tiny scraps of paper, four or five of them, hardly more than flakes. Some of them had fragments of writing on them, random shards of shattered black letters.

  Edward squinted at them.

  “What is this?”

  “Paper,” she said, deadpan. “I found these chips down at the bottom of one of the crates after I cleared the books out. If you hold some of them up to the light you can see fragments of a watermark.”

  She paused, evidently expecting him to look for himself, but he didn’t bother.

  “And?”

  “I recognized it. It’s a known watermark, a boar’s head and a flower. You can look it up in the Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier and find out when and where the paper was made. In this case the answer is Basel, around 1450. The texture is also distinctive—you can see here the laid lines”—she indicated one long fragment with her finger—“and here the chain lines, wider apart. Quite crude, in this case, not an aristocrat’s paper, but I recognize the text from the fragments: It’s Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, late fifteenth century. Terrible stuff, like medieval Jerry Falwell, but it would be a huge find. There are no complete copies in existence.”

  “Huh,” he said, grudgingly impressed.

  “But the book itself isn’t here.”

  Margaret turned to the thick old volume he’d looked at on his first day, the locked book that had its own case. She rested her pale hand on the rough, dark cover.

  “This is the only book I haven’t been able to examine. Based on the external evidence, it fits the text and the period, although the binding’s a little fancy for Lydgate.”

  Edward sat down on the edge of the table, which crackled loudly under his weight.

  “Great. So here’s Lydgate. Where’s Gervase?”

  She frowned a little and cocked her head, miming incomprehension.

  “Gervase,” he repeated. “You know, the Viage to the Whatever of the Whoever.”

  “Edward,” Margaret said evenly. “I’m not working for you anymore. That arrangement is over. So please listen to me: There is no Viage, and the sooner you accept that and stop looking for it the better.”

  Their eyes met. He held her gaze long enough to hope that she thought what she was saying was sinking in.

  “So what am I doing here?”

  “You’re here because Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady is a rare book of immense value, and if this is it, I need your help to get it open. Did you bring the things I asked for?”

  Edward picked up the shopping bag and set it on the table.

  “I couldn’t get a flashlight.” Actually, he had one in his apartment, but he’d left it at home it out of sheer mulishness. She sorted out the items and lined them up along the edge of the table like a surgeon preparing to operate.

  “What were you shopping for at Henri Bendel?” she inquired conversationally. It was the name on the shopping bag. Edward was surprised—it was her first attempt at anything resembling small talk.

  “Christmas presents. It was a long time ago.”

  A vivid memory flared up of his first winter in New York: wandering up and down Fifth Avenue in mid-December, freezing rain, forcing his way through crowds of shoppers on the wet sidewalk, mob-strength crowds big enough and surly enough to have stormed a castle. He was looking for a Christmas present for his mother, and after three hours in one of the top three or four shopping neighborhoods in the world he still hadn’t come up with anything that wasn’t either too cheap or too expensive or too romantic to be appropriate. His feet were killing him, and his wool overcoat wasn’t waterproof and smelled like a wet sheep, and he was painfully aware of not having a girlfriend to advise him about things like this. In a state of desperate exhaustion he wound up with a camel-colored cashmere cardigan from Henri Bendel, which he had brought home in this very same shopping bag. His mother adored it.

  Edward had brought an old flannel shirt for Margaret to use as a soft cloth. She laid it out flat, its arms spread on either side, and set the old book on it like a baby ready to be diapered. At her request he dragged the floor lamp over closer to where she was working. She bent down and peered at the rusted, fused knot of metal that had been the lock.

  “Why not just cut it open?” said Edward from a safe distance. “I mean, saw through the wood?”

  “Too invasive. Last resort.” She set to work picking at it with two toothpicks, one in each hand, pausing once in a while to blow out the accumulated rust flakes with the compressed air. “It’s already been damaged enough. Those scraps of paper are a bad sign as it is.”

  “How long do you think it’s been locked?”

  She made a noncommittal noise.

  “Under the right conditions rust like this can form relatively quickly. Do we know when the books were crated?”

  “Not exactly,” said Edward. “Or wait—yes, we do. Some of the books are packed in newspapers. Check the dates on the newspapers, and...” He tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger.

  “Clever. Would you mind doing that, please?”

  The newspapers were all from late 1938 and early 1939. Margaret dropped the toothpicks and began scrubbing the latch very gently with the toothbrush.

  He watched her work for another minute—now she was wetting the toothbrush with mineral oil—then decided to take a stroll around the library. At the first footstep he realized he hadn’t taken off his shoes the way she had, so he dropped to one knee and untied his black leather oxfords. He set them beside hers. The gesture felt incongruously intimate.

  “I have this friend who’s a paleoclimatologist,” he said at random, to nobody in particular. “Studies the history of weather. He goes around looking for ancient samples of air so he can check the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in them.” He crossed his arms to feel warmer in the chilly air. “He found some air from 300 B.c. once. It was trapped inside a hollow clay button.”

  He felt conscious of being alone in a darkened room with Margaret, both of them in their socks, both of them implicated together in this furtive, clandestine activity. He was coming to appreciate her unconventional charms, in particular her outlandishly distinguished nose and the long, slender legs she was so careful not to flaunt, like a secret pair of wings that she had to keep concealed at all costs. As he walked around the room he picked up a book here and there from the tops of the tall, wobbly stacks along the wall. He glanced at the title pages before carefully replacing them. A thick science fiction novel in Cyrillic, printed on grim gray Soviet paper. A volume of Ben Franklin’s autobiography bound in red cloth (“I have ever had pleasure in obtaining any little anecdotes of my ancestors...”). When he reached the window he drew the curtain back with one finger and looked out at the dusky city with its lights just starting to come on, yellow and white and rose and the thousand different colors of thousands of different drawn curtains.

  When he came back to the table Margaret had stopped working. She examined the rusted lock again from various angles, holding the tack hammer cocked back in her right hand. Then she tenderly folded one sleeve of the flannel shirt over the lock, steadied it with her free hand, and tapped it once, firmly. Edward couldn’t see any change, but when she dropped the hammer and pulled back the sleeve, the catch opened easily.

  They were both wrong: It wasn’t Lydgate, and it wasn’t Gervase. It wasn’t a book at all. The cover swung open to reveal the corpse of a book, or the grave of one. It was hollow: The centers of the pages had been cut or carefully
ripped out, leaving only an inch of blank margins on all sides and a void in the center. It had been disbound, and this was what was left, the hollow rind.

  When Edward leaned over it he saw that the margins weren’t totally blank. Traces of ink remained, motes and specks and single pixels of color: the black of text, but also rich Pompeian reds, fresh greens, deep welkin blues, and a very few precious flecks of gold.

  12

  “THERE WERE ORIGINALLY twelve crates of books,” Margaret said, later that same night.

  She was sitting on the wide windowsill of Laura Crowlyk’s office with cardboard boxes of papers piled up on either side of her and on the floor around her stocking feet. Every few minutes she forgot where she was and leaned back against the venetian blinds, which made a horrible clashing noise, and snapped erect again. It was getting very late, after one in the morning. What had started as a casual and more or less constitutional plain-view search of Laura Crowlyk’s office on their way to the elevators had turned into an exhausting, exhaustive, and deeply ill-advised itemization of every piece of paper it contained.

  “Eleven. I counted.” After two hours of sitting cross-legged on the carpet, Edward’s ass was on fire and his back felt like an S-curved length of red-hot cable.

  “There were twelve, not eleven, according to this bill of lading. It’s signed by Cruttenden.”

  “You found the actual bill of lading?”

  She continued to study the document in silence, so he heaved himself up and went to stand next to her. The paper—which bore an elaborate baronial crest encrusted with hippogriffs—was headed THE MACMILLAN GRAND INTERNATIONAL TRANSATLANTIC SHIPPING COMPANY and described twelve crates of similar sizes and weights, the contents of which were listed simply as DRY GOODS. It was dated August 7, 1939. They were brought over on a ship called the Muir.

  “I guess that’s it,” he said, after a while. “What kind of a word is ‘lading’ anyway? Why not ‘loading’?”

  “It’s Middle English. An archaism.”

  The room was lit only by Laura’s desk lamp because Edward was worried that somebody would notice a light from outside. The air-conditioning was off, and the room was hot and muggy. Edward blotted his forehead with his arm. Margaret’s hair was becoming unruly.

  “All right then, so we’re short one box,” he sighed, settling to the floor again. “Any idea what happened to it?”

  “No. Can you ask her?”

  “Who?”

  “Laura,” said Margaret. “The woman whose office we are currently burglarizing.”

  He shook his head. “No. We can’t let her know we’re still interested in the collection. And certainly not that we’ve seen the actual bill of lading. Although—” He bit his lip—it was supposed to be a secret—then confessed. “The Duchess called me last night. I wonder if she knows.”

  “The Duchess of Bowmry called you?”

  “Uh-huh.” He did his level best to imply that he conversed with Blanche, and possibly other members of the English peerage, on a regular basis.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Can she help us?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, blushing for no reason he could think of. “It wasn’t that kind of conversation. There’s a lot I don’t know about her yet.”

  If Margaret felt any further curiosity about his conversation with the Duchess, she kept it to herself.

  Laura Crowlyk’s office had been disorderly before, but now it was a full-scale clerical catastrophe. Every available surface was covered with stacks of papers stuffed into every imaginable species of receptacle: manila folders, three-ring binders, cardboard pouches, weathered albums, shoe boxes, hatboxes, wooden trays, leather portfolios tied up with velvet ribbons. Most of the papers related to the apartment itself—taxes, insurance, estimates and bills for maintenance and repairs. Edward sifted through Laura’s inbox. Its contents were utterly uninteresting: a lengthy correspondence with an airline over some lost green leather luggage.

  The air was swirling with stirred-up dust, and Edward had to stop for a couple of minutes for a sneezing fit out in the hall. When he came back in he put the heels of his hands over his burning eyes and yawned.

  “Which is better,” he said. “A count or an earl?”

  “What?”

  “Counts or earls. Which is better?”

  “Neither. An earl is what the English call a count, and a count is the Continental equivalent of an earl. The order of the English nobility is: baron, viscount, earl, marquess, duke, king.”

  Edward stretched.

  “I’m going. I have to sleep.”

  “All right.” Margaret went back to her reading.

  “Are you going to stay here?” he said.

  “For a while.”

  “All right.”

  Edward lingered in the doorway. He could hardly keep his eyes open, but he felt guilty for leaving her there. He didn’t completely trust her alone in the Wents’ apartment, either.

  “You’ve been here for eighteen hours straight. Don’t you have classes to teach or something?”

  “Not in the summer.” She sat up and stretched too, her narrow shoulder blades straining behind her through her sweater, and Edward involuntarily dropped his gaze to her slight bust. Oblivious, she kinked her long neck left, then right, popping it once on each side. “And I have a fellowship this year to work on my dissertation. I won’t be teaching this fall anyway.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “My dissertation?”

  She bent over her work again.

  “That’s not considered a polite question in academic circles.”

  “Okay.” He leaned against the doorframe in what he hoped was a jaunty, insouciant pose and crossed his arms. “How did you get here, anyway? I mean, what made you decide to become an academic?”

  She sighed, but she didn’t pause at all in the rhythm of her scanning and sorting. Apparently she was capable of maintaining the bare minimum of social niceties while the rest of her brain continued with the task at hand.

  “I was home-schooled. My father worked in the Patent and Trademark Office. My mother spent most of her time on my education. They’re very Christian, and I’m an only child, and I spent most of my time growing up reading. When I was fourteen my father died, and my mother became increasingly preoccupied with my...my moral development. I started taking classes at a local community college. It doesn’t seem like much, but I suppose it was my way of rebelling. The curriculum was fairly rudimentary, and after a year an English professor there suggested I transfer to U. Penn. When I finished there I came to Columbia as a graduate student.”

  Edward pictured Margaret’s mother: an iron-haired, harsh-featured version of her daughter, her pale hand clutching a metal crucifix.

  He had meant to leave, but instead Edward sat down again on the edge of the desk. He leafed halfheartedly through a thick, overstuffed manila folder labeled CORRESPONDENCE. Inside was a hodgepodge of miscellaneous letters, smudgy carbon copies of trivial business communications and thank-you notes. He stared at them irritably. Suddenly they seemed useless, primitive—crude ink scratchings on pressed wood pulp. What he wanted was a celestial keyboard, with which he could enter a query and search through the papers the way you could search a hard drive. Better yet, he thought, he should be able to go to the window, open the blinds, type “FIND SECRET BOOK” and search the entire city. That’s what he needed. Reality felt distinctly obsolete compared to the digital alternative.

  Still, something about one of the letters nagged at him. He went back and reread it.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  “What.” She didn’t look up from the document she was scanning.

  “It’s a letter from the Duke—the old Duke. It must be the father of the current one. It’s to the Chenoweth.”

  “Let me see it.”

  He handed it to her, and they read it together.

  Henry La Farge has informed me that facilities for
the display of materials donated to the library in spring 1941 have not been constructed nor as I understand it have preparations for the construction of those facilities been undertaken. While I understand that an institution such as the Chenoweth has limited funds available to it you will understand if I express some concern over the lack of progress to date. Please respond at your earliest convenience with a full description of your preparations for the construction of those facilities and a preliminary timetable for the construction of those facilities.

  It was dated 1953 and signed by the Duke of Bowmry.

  “He’s no Gervase of Langford,” said Edward.

  “He’s not even a Lydgate.” Margaret set the letter aside on the desk. “All right. Let’s suppose that’s it. Let’s suppose the Wents sent that twelfth box as a donation to the Chenoweth.”

  “Let’s suppose.” Edward went to an uncomfortable wooden chair in the corner of the room and sat down. Then the implications of the letter dawned on him, and he felt all the remaining energy drain out of him. Stifling a yawn, he slumped down so that the small of his back rested on the very edge of the chair. “All right. So the old Duke gave the twelfth box to the Chenoweth.” Margaret watched him. “All right.”

  “Well, that settles it, doesn’t it? It’s another red herring.” He ran his hands through his short hair. “If the codex were there, then they’d have it, and it would be famous, and everybody would know about it. Or you would, at least. And that would be that. But you don’t know about it, so it’s not there, end of story. Right?”

  She didn’t answer, just nodded thoughtfully. Horns honked blocks away and far below them, softened by distance so that they sounded almost musical. It was hot in the room, and Edward was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since midday.

  “It’s possible,” said Margaret, looking thoughtful. “But there’s no Went room at the Chenoweth.”

  I’m sorry?