Scholar's Plot

by Hilari Bell

  “There aren’t that many of us,” the clerk said. “Though if I had a sister I’d not hesitate to send her here, Master Fisk. Do you have a sister to enroll?”

  “No,” said Fisk. “My associate here is Benton Sevenson’s brother, and since we were accused of Master Hotchkiss’ murder, we’d like to look into the matter.”

  The woman’s jaw dropped, small blame to her. I was almost as startled, by the rare spectacle of Fisk telling the simple truth. Though he doubtless had some sneaky reason for doing so.

  “Accused…? But I thought… I didn’t know Professor Sevenson had… Wait. If you’re accused of the murder, why aren’t the guards holding you? I thought they decided a burglar did it!”

  “They did think that, at first,” said Fisk. “Then they discovered that Professor Sevenson had good reason to hate Master Hotchkiss. And when he had an alibi, their suspicion fell on us. They have no evidence,” he went on, a bit more mendaciously, “so they had to let us go. But you can understand how worrying it is, being suspected of murder. We have to find out who really did it, and clear ourselves.”

  I had to admit, ’twas a masterful ploy — surprise, to shake her off balance, followed by subtle flattery, along with seeming candor and genuine need.

  But Professor Dayless wasn’t the only one accustomed to seeing through student tales. The clerk regarded Fisk steadily.

  “Isn’t that the Liege Guards’ job?”

  “Maybe,” said Fisk. “But if they’re focusing on us, they might miss the real killer. For instance, did they talk to you?” Peebles only blinked, but Fisk is better at reading faces than I. “I thought not. And I’ll bet you know more about this university than anyone.”

  She picked up a pen, turning it in her hands. The sharpened end was black with ink and the other ragged, as if someone had nibbled on it. Benton did that with his pens.

  “How very flattering. You think that will convince me to spill secrets?”

  “So there are secrets to be spilled?” Fisk countered.

  “If there were, which there aren’t, why should I tell them to you?”

  “If they were actual secrets, you shouldn’t.” Fisk smiled, charmingly. First pull the line, then release the tension — it often hooked more answers than continued pressure would. Fisk seated himself on one of the stools before her desk, and after a moment of hesitation I quietly did the same. I was still somewhat miffed, but watching Fisk work a person was more educational than any class a professor might teach.

  “But an innocent man’s been murdered,” Fisk went on. “And others are accused of the crime. Surely you can answer some ordinary questions. For instance, do you know if Master Hotchkiss had any enemies?”

  “Besides Benton, you mean? No, you needn’t protest. I knew Scholar Benton, as well as Professor Sevenson, and I don’t believe he’d ever forge a thesis — much less murder anyone. I don’t know that about either of you,” she added.

  It might have been Fisk’s investigation, but ’twas for Benton’s good. I couldn’t resist stepping in.

  “You don’t know us. But if we’d done it, we’d not be so foolish as to hang about asking questions. We’d have run into the next fiefdom, and then two more. By the time they worked through the legal maze of three fiefdoms, we’d be long gone.”

  “There is that.” She put the quill down again. “But Hotchkiss didn’t have any enemies. He wasn’t liked, not by most, but I know of no one except Professor Sevenson who had reason to hate him.”

  “Did you know him well?” I asked. Fisk had fallen silent, ceding me the conversation with the ease of years of practice. As if we were still a team. The thought hurt, but I pressed on, “Were you and Hotchkiss scholars here, mayhap?”

  “I was never a scholar anywhere,” the clerk said. “My son Seymour had the brains in the family.”

  Looking at the tidy filing cabinets, I doubted that — but the soft way she’d said his name told me her son was dead, so denying her statement wouldn’t be taken as a compliment. Fisk had caught it, too.

  “What did your son think of Master Hotchkiss, then?”

  “I don’t think he knew him,” the clerk said. “Hotchkiss was several years behind him, and Seymour… He wasn’t good at making friends.”

  Some rich and painful irony lay under those words, but Fisk was doing math.

  “If Hotchkiss was younger than your son, he’d be in his … late thirties? That’s very young, to be head librarian in a place like this. I thought he’d be around your age, maybe older.”

  “He was young,” she said. “But he invented the alphanumeric system. He could have been head librarian anywhere in the Realm, these last twenty years.”

  I had no knowledge of this system, but Fisk clearly did. “The alphanumeric … he invented it? What a terrible waste. Now I want to catch the killer even more.”

  Her mouth tightened. “You, and all the others who didn’t actually know… Well, a brilliant mind doesn’t have much to do with a pleasant personality, and that’s a fact.”

  “Working around here, you’d know that better than anyone,” Fisk agreed.

  “Hotchkiss wasn’t always brilliant, either,” she said. “He was originally a history scholar, like your brother, but he struggled to find a thesis. There was even doubt he’d graduate, but then…”

  “People often come up with interesting ideas in a field adjacent to their own,” Fisk said. “I remember my father saying…”

  Fisk, who almost never speaks of his father stopped, but she picked up the thread for him.

  “Professor Dayless, whose study is the mind, she says that not knowing anything about a subject lets you come at it from a fresh direction. But Hotchkiss… He also came up with the notion of getting third and fourth year scholars to write up summaries of books as part of their coursework — at least ten books per scholar per year, and credit if they did more. It let him catalog most of one of the largest libraries in the Realm in less than fifteen years, and other libraries are copying that, too. He’d finished with most of the collection, and was working on the stuff no one’s really interested in, like unpublished dissertations. That’s how he found … ah…”

  “This document my brother is said to have copied,” I supplied. “But Benton says he did no such thing. And if he didn’t, someone must have planted it for the librarian to find.”

  “And now he’s dead,” Fisk said. “Mistress Peebles, we’d like to take a look around Hotchkiss’ house. Do you have a second key, by any chance?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And no, I’m not giving it to you.”

  “Not even for Benton’s sake?” I said. “This university, ’tis my brother’s life. If he loses it, he has nothing.”

  “My Seymour was the same. But if I lose this job, then I have nothing.”

  “But what difference does it make if we look around the house?” Fisk persisted. “Captain Chaldon said the law already searched the place. And the servants will have to go in soon and clean up … everything.”

  “I should be so lucky. The maids are all saying they won’t go near the place, much less be scrubbing up anyone’s life blood. It’ll be days, maybe weeks … but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you in.”

  “Cheer up,” I said as I led Fisk down the hall. “’Twas not likely anyone would give up those keys. Besides, if there was something to be found in Hotchkiss’ house the law would have found it already.”

  And besides that, there was nothing left to do now except examine the forged thesis. Which should count as part of Fisk’s investigation, instead of mine.

  “I am cheerful,” Fisk said. “I learned what I wanted to know.”

  Before our quarrel, I’d have obliged and asked him what that was. As things stood I simply waited, and soon his need to boast won out.

  “Mistress Peebles has the keys we need.” He spoke softly, as we were still in the hallway surrounded by offices. “And a three-year-old could pick the lock on her door. All we have to do is wait till she goes
home, pick up the keys, and we can let ourselves into Hotchkiss’s house while it’s still light enough to see. If we walk in openly, acting like we’ve got permission, there’s a good chance no one will question us. And if they do we’ve got the key. We’d probably have time to skin off before they find out we don’t actually have permission.”

  I’ve been involved with too many of Fisk’s plans to think things would go as smoothly as he assumed. But on these summer days the light lingered late, and besides…

  “If we’ve nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon, then you won’t have any objection to checking out that thesis, in the library.”

  When he really wants something, Michael doesn’t give up on it. But I like libraries, and I now had a deep curiosity to see this one.

  “The alphanumeric system. And he was only a scholar when he came up with it.”

  We emerged from the building that held the clerk’s office as we spoke. It was getting late in the afternoon, but with luck we’d have time to look at this forged thesis and maybe get some dinner, before returning to filch Nancy Peebles’ keys.

  “His brilliance didn’t make Mistress Peebles like him any better,” Michael said. “What is this system he created? You seem to know of it.”

  “Everybody knows about it,” I said. “Well, everyone who cares about books. My father went to a lecture about it once, and raved about its wonders for the rest of the week.”

  I hadn’t recognized it at the time, but I now wondered if some of his obsessive reaction had sprung from jealousy. It was always someone else who came up with the brilliant ideas. He’d died only a few months later. I pushed those memories away and went on.

  “It really was important, for scholars. What he did was to create numbers for everything there is.”

  Michael’s brows rose. “What, a number for horses? And flowers and clouds and spinning wheels and turtles and toothpicks and—”

  “Yes.” He was joking, but it was an enormous, incredible undertaking. “He created a number for toothpicks. A number for hoof picks for those horses, and for every disease those hooves can get. A number for everything there is, Michael.”

  He’d stopped joking, but now he was puzzled. “I can see ’twould be an enormous task, but why is it important?”

  “Because before he came up with these numbers, that he painted onto the spines of books about those subjects, there was no way to put books about the same topic in the same place. Oh, great libraries like this one, they’d have rooms for particular subjects, with shelves labeled for books about this and that. But all it took was one scholar putting a book down in the wrong room, or stack, and it could be lost for years. For decades, maybe. Even if it was in the right room, you still had to sort through stacks and stacks of books to find the one you needed. My father said the alphanumeric system would make tasks that scholars spent days and weeks on take minutes and hours instead. It revolutionized research, in every library and school in the Realm. That its inventor came up with it here, that he put his system to work in this library first, was a huge academic score for Pendarian. They won’t take his murder lightly.”

  “The more reason for them to forgive Benton, if you can prove who did it. Though I still think ’twill be the project that… We’re here.”

  Michael, who’d planned to burgle it himself, was the one who knew where the library was, but I’d noticed the building last night. An old, three story manor house, that like the tower, had been captured when the university walls went up. It stood out among the drab rectangles of the university buildings like a grand dame among laundry maids.

  We passed through the front doors into a lofty, marble-tiled entry hall. It had three arched doorways on the ground floor, with a split staircase winding up between them that came together at the center of the second story gallery. But the manor’s furniture had vanished, replaced by a battered table holding flyers, and a large map of the house with a numbered list beside it.

  I was stepping up to read it when a young man said, “Can I help you find something?”

  A familiar copper whistle hung from a cord around his neck.

  “Yes,” Michael said. “We’re looking for unpublished dissertations on ancient history. Particularly on excavation techniques.”

  “And do you have a pass to use the library?” It was clear he already knew the answer, but he was going to be polite about kicking us out. And there was only one person who could have told him we were coming.

  “Has Professor Dayless had you standing here, waiting for us, all afternoon?” I asked.

  “Most of it,” he admitted. “But you really can’t use the library without a pass. It’s restricted to scholars, and guests who’ve been granted permission.”

  “Why would Professor Dayless keep us from using the library?” There was a suggestion of gritted teeth in Michael’s voice. “We don’t even need to use the library. We just want to see one dissertation.”

  She might have done it because she’d had years of practice anticipating scholars’ attempts to evade the rules. Or she might have had some other reason — either way, I resolved not to underestimate the good professor in the future.

  “You mean the dissertation Professor Sevenson copied.” The officious twerp actually sounded sympathetic. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think it’s back on the shelves yet. Master Hotchkiss was still working on those dissertations when … ah, before last night. And today everyone’s so rattled… I’m not sure anyone could find it for you. Even if access to the library wasn’t restricted, which it is.”

  And he stood there, stubbornly staring at Michael, who stubbornly stared back at him, till I grabbed Michael’s arm and dragged my erstwhile employer off to dinner.

  The good news was that the burgling of Peebles’ office went off without a hitch. We waited outside till we saw her leave the building, then Michael stood watch at the landing to make sure no one came by while I picked the lock … which took almost as little time as I’d optimistically suggested. It took only a few minutes to find Peebles’ keys, which she kept in a desk drawer that wasn’t even locked.

  The bad news was that, as Michael pointed out, we’d probably have to burgle the library after all. But that could be put off till later, and I wanted a look at Hotchkiss’ house before Peebles found someone willing to clean it.

  A few questions posed to students in the tavern where we’d eaten told us Hotchkiss lived in a cottage that had once housed the old manor’s groundskeeper. There was an open commons between it and the library, dotted with trees, flowerbeds, and big stone benches. The benches and grass were covered with students, who’d come out into the lowering sun to study and argue … and flirt, when there was a girl-scholar to flirt with.

  We walked right through them, as if we had every right to be there. They paid us no attention at all.

  The house was in the same style as the manor, and small only in comparison — two stories, with plenty of windows and two chimneys. The low wall that surrounded it wouldn’t keep a rabbit out, much less a burglar. Though their “tight” campus security should have kept most criminals out … and I wondered why it hadn’t.

  “Must be nice, to be a groundskeeper here.” The path to the cottage was well-laid brick, with flowerbeds tended by the university gardeners — who probably lived in town, in hovels.

  “I expect ’twas called that when the university took it over,” Michael said, pushing open the gate. A latch, but no lock. “Though ’twas likely built to house a dowager, when the new baron came to power.”

  “Or a mistress.”

  “’Tis in sight of the manor’s windows, Fisk.”

  “You’re right. Not a mistress.”

  Michael started up the path to the door, but I wanted to scope it out as a burglar would have. After a few curious glances when we went through the gate, the students went right back to ignoring us.

  “Where are you going?” Michael demanded, as I set off around the house.

  “I want to see how he
got in.”

  “You mean the murderer? What makes you think he didn’t go through the front door? Like we should be doing, if you don’t want to attract attention.”

  “Whose attention? The ones who aren’t deep in their books are arguing about the nature of lightning. They wouldn’t notice if we … ah. I can see why the guards decided it wasn’t a burglary.”

  We’d just come around the back of the house, and there it was — half a dozen dark streaks under a window, plainly visible on the stone wall, where muddy shoes had scrabbled for purchase.

  Michael sighed. “All right, I’ll humor you. Why do marks below a window, where someone has clearly tried to climb in, make it not a burglary?”

  “Because burglars aren’t stupid. At least, no more than anyone else. Why climb through a window over a muddy flowerbed, when there’s a window two down that’s over a brick path?”

  “Mayhap the one over the path was locked,” Michael said. “And the other open.”

  “And why scramble to get up, through either of them, when there’s a crate next to the back door that would lift you high enough to climb in easily?” I thought he’d missed that.

  Michael returned to the back door. The crate beside it held three pots of growing herbs, as if some cook had taken them off a kitchen windowsill and set them outside, for whatever reason one sets plants outside. Michael might have been able to tell me, but as I was currently up on points I decided not to ask.

  “He might not have thought of it.” But Michael’s voice was slower now, less certain. “Particularly if he wasn’t much practiced in his craft.”

  “A beginner wouldn’t start on a campus swarming with scholars, or with the house of a librarian, who wasn’t likely to be rich. No, if anyone went through that window it wasn’t a burglar. Not even a beginner.”