Jane looked blank. “How could it change? Glasscastle wouldn’t be Glasscastle without its walls.”
“Don’t you want it to change? To permit—others to study here?”
Jane’s eyes narrowed. “Were you going to say women? Are we going to discuss the rights and privileges of education for women in general? Or shall we go straight to the comparison between Glasscastle and Greenlaw?”
Lambert answered honestly. “I was going to say … outsiders. I didn’t mean just women, though. I meant—anyone.”
“No point in arguing that. Just anyone can’t study what Glasscastle studies. Certain skills are required. If those skills belong to a woman, she’s better off at Greenlaw. Nothing in Glasscastle compares.”
A stocky man in a bowler hat walked close as he passed Lambert and Jane on his way toward the gatekeeper. He paused, his back to Lambert and Jane, at the visitors book. Lambert didn’t let his attention waver from Jane for a moment. “How do you know? You’ve only been here a day. Not even that long.”
“Oh, I know.” Jane’s eyes were as steady as her voice, and as sure.
Lambert said, “Your brother may be trapped in that meeting all day. Why don’t we start without him?”
Jane’s eyes brightened at the invitation. Lambert permitted himself a moment of deep satisfaction. He might be a wayfaring stranger at Glasscastle, but he could do this much kindness. He presented himself to the gatekeeper, signed his name and Jane’s in the book, and won them admittance. There was no delay, for the man in the bowler hat who had gone in ahead of them was already out of sight.
Together Lambert and Jane walked through the outer quadrangles of Glasscastle. It was a glorious morning. Ivy covered the stone walls, green against gray freshened by last night’s rain, and deep within the foliage, leaded glass windows gleamed as diamond panes of glass caught the brilliant morning light. The place smelled sweet, a combination of the morning’s baking, the rosemary in the perennial border, and the sun-warmed roses.
Everything looked grand to Lambert, though he supposed a purist might find fault. Maybe the ornamental borders were not at their best. Profusion of shape and color had been worn down by months of rain until only the toughest blossoms were unscathed. The thunderstorm the night before hadn’t helped. Still, the pale graveled paths were more geometrically precise than usual, with fewer students around to trample the precincts of the university. Only the minimum number required to chant the wards remained through the summer. The rest of the undergraduates were off on holiday. This was a piece of good luck. There was no question that Jane’s visit would be more comfortable with fewer young men staring as she passed. As he let Jane walk ahead of him through a narrow passage between ornamental borders, Lambert had to reconsider that. Something in the line of Jane’s attire, utterly correct though it was, hinted that she might not mind being stared at by a lot of polite young men.
“This is where most visitors begin.” Lambert hesitated at the threshold of St. Mary’s. “It looks like morning service is over. We ought to be able to look around for quite a while without bothering anybody. Would you like to?”
Jane, it seemed, was enthusiastic about church architecture. She followed Lambert into the peace of the church, then led the way as they moved from nave to aisle, transept to choir, through the sweet scent of the incense used during the morning’s service. When they stood in the crossing, Jane pivoted on her heel, head back and eyes bright as she took in the splendors of the place. She put one hand up to hold her extravagant hat firmly in position while she gazed.
“Look at this.” Jane kept her voice down, but the excitement and pleasure in it carried her words to Lambert vibrantly no matter which way she turned. “See the ratio between the length of the nave and the length of the transept? That’s two to three. The ratio of the nave to the choir is four to three.”
“How do you know that?” Lambert asked. Once his attention was drawn to the proportions, he could see the harmony of it. If Jane could pick out distance with that accuracy, Meredith might want to give her a few tests of marksmanship too.
“Mathematics.”
“I mean, you can tell just by looking?” Lambert knew very few people had an eye for distance like his, but he hadn’t given up hope of finding one.
Jane shook her head. “I’ve read the architectural studies. The men who built this place knew their mathematics. See the height of the columns and the distance between the base of the columns and the first molding, the plain one there? Compare that with the height of the piers. That’s the golden section.”
Lambert noticed the line of Jane’s throat. He thought how much younger she looked this way. She might have been a schoolgirl, spinning herself dizzy as she gazed up into the heights overhead. Well, except for the hat. Lambert asked, “The golden section? What’s that?”
“The Greeks thought it was the key they needed to measure the whole world.” Jane glowed with enthusiasm. “If you divide a line such that the length of the shorter segment to the longer is the same as the ratio between the longer and the total of the two, that’s the golden section. You can keep it up forever if you want to, and if you map the coincident points, it makes a lovely spiral.”
Something stirred far back in Lambert’s memory. “Oh, is that the chambered nautilus?”
“That’s the one.” Jane looked pleased with him.
“What’s golden about the golden section?”
“What’s golden about the Golden Rule?” Jane countered.
“‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them,’” Lambert quoted. “Matthew chapter seven, verse twelve. It’s a pretty good rule, don’t you think?”
“You have quite a memory,” Jane said dryly.
“For some things.” Lambert made himself look away and concentrate on the stained glass windows. He was careful to ignore Jane’s scrutiny, but he could still feel it.
“I suppose you had the Scriptures drummed into you as a child.”
“That’s how I learned to read. My mother taught me.”
“Oh, that’s right. She was a schoolteacher, you said. Like me.”
Lambert had to laugh a little. “I don’t think you teach at the same kind of school.”
“Why? Because Greenlaw teaches magic, do you think it’s so different?”
Lambert looked squarely at Jane. “Fifteen students in eight different grades, all mixed together in a room no bigger than a box stall? One room with a potbellied stove for heat and a kerosene lamp for light? If Greenlaw isn’t different, I feel sorry for you.”
Jane looked right back as she thought it over. “Running water?”
“All you want, in the creek at the bottom of the hill. There’s a bucket and a dipper by the door.”
“I see. Yes, Greenlaw is different. Is that the kind of school you attended?”
“That’s right, and a lot of people had to work mighty hard to get that much. We were lucky to have any kind of a school.” Lambert gestured vaguely. “Something like this—it’s more than I can believe sometimes, that a place like this exists at all, let alone that it has existed for hundreds and hundreds of years.”
“It must be very different from what you are accustomed to.”
Lambert couldn’t help laughing. “It is. It’s different here, but I like it. Who wouldn’t?”
“It can’t be very exciting for you. They won’t even let you join the old duffers in a glass of brandy.”
“There’s more than one kind of excitement. It would be something, to be able to work here. Centuries of effort, all to one end. The men of Glasscastle did all that men can do to protect the wisdom of the ages.” Lambert took another look at the dimensions of the place, the sun through the vivid glass. “It’s safe here.”
“Safer than under lock and key.” Jane gave Lambert a look of keen assessment. “They protect themselves from all kinds of things, these Glasscastle mean.”
Together they strolled through St. Mary’s.
Jane paused to read every memorial set into the walls, to admire every change in the vaulting overhead, and to step as carefully as possible around the brasses and inscriptions in the floor.
“That was excellent. What’s next on the grand tour of Glasscastle?” Jane asked when they had examined every feature of the place.
“Well, it’s up to you. You want to see the Winterset Archive, I reckon. After that, would you rather see the stained glass in St. Joseph’s or stop to take a look at some of the buildings on the way?”
“Oh, by all means, we must stop on the way. Any chance of having a little snoop behind the scenes? Watching the scholars of magic as they conduct their research?”
Lambert considered showing Jane around Fell’s study. She’d enjoy it if Fell weren’t there. Maybe even if he was. If Fell were there, he’d hate to have his work interrupted by sociability. Being polite to Jane might be fit punishment for making Lambert worry. Savoring the mental image of Fell’s pained reaction to Jane’s hat, let alone a whole visit from such a fashionable young lady, Lambert steered Jane out of St. Mary’s and along the path toward the Winterset Archive.
“Isn’t it a lovely morning?” Despite her stylishly narrow skirt, Jane matched Lambert stride for stride with no apparent effort. “Amy tells me this has been the rainiest summer she can remember. She said the university boat race had to be canceled and rowed over. I can’t imagine it. She says Cambridge sank at Harrod’s wharf and Oxford only made it as far as Chiswick Eyot before they sank too.”
Lambert stopped in his tracks, and said, “That’s odd.”
There was a main door to the archive building but the side door, facing out on Midsummer Green, was visible from their vantage point on the neatly swept path. To his surprise, Lambert recognized the man leaving the archive building by cutting across the green to the quadrangle path as the stocky man in the bowler hat he’d seen at the gate.
“That’s very odd. That man must be a Fellow. No one else is qualified to walk on the grass all by himself. But he was just ahead of us to sign in at the gate.”
“He does seem in a bit of a hurry, doesn’t he?” Jane watched the man’s rapid departure with interest. “One doesn’t often see a man in a bowler hat actually bustling. They always look as if they’re just about to, but they seldom really do.”
“Excuse me.” Lambert approached the corner where the man’s route would intersect their graveled path. “May I help you? Sir? Hey!”
Without a second glance at them, the bowler-hatted man broke into a run. In moments he was through the stone arch of the great gate, lost from sight.
“How extraordinary!” Jane started back toward the gate, then hesitated as she noticed Lambert wasn’t coming with her. “Who was that? Do you know him?”
Lambert stood staring after the man. Downright peculiar, that had been.
“I wonder what he was doing in there,” said Jane. “Shall we follow him or shall we go investigate?”
The rate the man had been running, Lambert calculated he’d be long gone by the time they cleared the gate. “It’s probably nothing. But I think we should at least take a quick look in the archive, just to make sure everything’s in order. Whoever he was, I don’t think he belongs here.”
Lambert and Jane entered the Winterset Archive by the side door, since the man in the bowler hat had left that way. They paused in the doorway to listen. The customary silence of the archive held sway. There was a distinctive quality to the quiet there. Lambert had noticed it on previous visits. It was a very busy silence, a silence composed of human concentration, not only of the activity of the moment but somehow of the long years of concentration that had gone on there since the construction of the building. The place smelled of books and book bindings, wood and wax. To Lambert, it smelled like wisdom.
Lambert led the way through side passages to the foot of the main staircase and started to climb. Three steps up the creaking wooden stair, Lambert noticed Jane wasn’t following him. He turned back. Jane was still at the foot of the stair, gazing up at the height of the coffered ceiling, the depth and detail of the linen-fold paneling on the walls, and the angle and sweep of the staircase. Her expression was far more reverent than it had ever been in St. Mary’s. Jane seemed to have forgotten all about the man in the bowler hat in her worshipful admiration of the surroundings.
“Are you coming?” Lambert asked.
Jane shook herself out of her reverie, adjusted her hatpins, and followed Lambert upstairs. “Just thinking. Sorry.”
The splendor of the place only increased as they rose from the ground level to the first-floor reading room. From floor to ceiling the room was lined with shelves, each rank served by a spiral staircase of intricate ironwork. More shelves were arranged throughout the room, yielding at intervals to great long tables of polished wood, each like a clearing in a forest. There were brass study lamps in plenty, each with its green glass shade, but they were unlit, for the room was flooded with light from the skylights overhead.
There were only two men at work in the place, one in the robes of an archivist and the other in the short poplin gown of an undergraduate. Neither looked up as Lambert and Jane hesitated on the threshold.
The archivist was speaking to the undergraduate. “All our senses rely on the spirit. Ficino says so quite clearly. Each sense employs its own form of spirit to convey its message. Music is transmitted through air, and air is the medium closest to the spirit itself, therefore hearing is the highest of our senses.”
“What sort of message does smell convey?” asked the undergraduate.
Lambert could tell from the undergraduate’s manner that they had stumbled across yet another of Glasscastle’s civil disagreements.
“Smell is one of the lower senses,” the archivist replied patiently. “Taste, smell, and touch are inferior to sight and hearing.”
“Is not smell transmitted through the air?” the undergraduate asked.
Lambert debated the merits of asking the archivist if he’d noticed an intruder but decided to do so later, if at all. It took a lot of intruding to get someone to notice an outsider here. Better to run a quick check of the scholars’ studies that filled out the remainder of the building.
This time Lambert had to take Jane’s elbow to get her to follow him away from the reading room. Even so, she looked back wistfully over her shoulder as they went on.
“None of that,” said Lambert as he started up the more modest stairs to the studies on the topmost floor. “Remember what happened to Orpheus and Eurydice.”
“That was hell. This is heaven.” Jane followed Lambert. “You’ve studied Greek, then? Or at least the Greek myths?”
“I told you where I went to school. Must you make me come right out and admit I never studied much of anything?” Lambert urged her on. “When I was in London, I went to Covent Garden a few times, that’s all. I saw the opera there.”
“Did you like it?”
“It was pretty good.” Lambert couldn’t help smiling. It had been wonderful.
“What on earth led you to the Royal Opera?” Jane asked.
“Well, I went to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City quite a few times. That’s how I found out I liked opera.”
“But what made you decide to go in the first place?”
“It was a stunt to plug the show back when we were playing New York. Some of us went along in full costume to see that new one by Puccini. The Girl of the Golden West.”
“You liked that one?”
“Never laughed so hard in my whole life. But the music was kind of pretty.” After a moment, Lambert added, “Yes. I liked it.”
On the next floor, a corridor ran in a rectangle around the perimeter of the structure, with small rooms opening off either side. Each Fellow of Glasscastle had a right to a room devoted to his own research somewhere on the premises. Fell’s study was just one of many in the orderly warren of the place. Even here, the peaceful energy and scholarly hush of the place was undisturbed.
“What’s your favorite?” Lambert asked softly.
Jane looked puzzled.
“Your favorite opera,” he prompted.
“Oh.” Jane took her time about thinking it over. “The Magic Flute, I suppose. Though some aspects of the magic bear as much resemblance to what they teach at Greenlaw as The Girl of the Golden West bears to your true golden West.”
Lambert did not dare open any of the doors that were closed, for fear of annoying possible scholars within, but he led Jane through a quick survey of those rooms with doors ajar. None seemed a bit out of the ordinary. There might be books stacked on the floor until there was no room to walk to the desk. There might be scholarly journals stacked in the corners like straw or hay. But there was order to the disorder everywhere they looked. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Nothing, that is, until they reached Fell’s study, where the door had been left open a few inches.
Lambert rapped on the door as he opened it farther and peered inside. “Uh-oh. Fell is not going to think much of this.” The room was deserted Lambert sidled in and took a good look around.
From one side of the room to the other, papers littered the confined space. A study lamp had been knocked to the floor, its green glass shade broken, though no oil remained in it to cause a fire hazard. If there had been a robbery, nothing seemed to have been taken and many objects of considerable value remained. There were gleaming brass astronomical models in each corner of the room, three armillary spheres and an orrery. An astrolabe lay half buried in paper on the desk. The glass-fronted bookshelves seemed undisturbed but every other surface was in complete disarray.
Among the chaos covering Fell’s desk, Lambert found a set of plans, drawn with painstaking care, for a weapon that appeared to combine the properties of a telescope, a cannon, and a slide trombone. Either the cannon was incredibly small or the gun sight incredibly large. Lambert didn’t waste a moment figuring out the scale. He scanned the mechanical drawing long enough to spot the words “gun sight,” “Egerton wand,” and in larger letters “confidential” stamped on each sheet. He folded the papers hastily and slipped them into his pocket while Jane inspected the door lock.
A Scholar of Magics Page 6
