She began her search with a short trip to the Lower Library, Trinity’s student library located on the ground and basement floors of the north wing of Nevile’s Court. It had an unexpected, airy modernity, its arched windows and large fluorescent ceiling panels shining abundant light over maple bookcases, Danish wood tables, and beige Berber carpet. Computer terminals were scattered around the study carrels, and there was a bank of four terminals along one wall in the back. Its general collection included textbooks, required reading, reference books, and periodicals. Claire went to the reference section to peruse a few of the history journals—the Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, Continuity and Change, and the English Historical Review—for an overview of what other historians had recently written about. Once she came up with a subject, she’d have to check carefully to make sure no one had already covered it.
But first she had to decide on something. She preferred to write about people, not trends or statistics. For her dissertation, Claire had researched the life of Alessandra Rossetti, a young Venetian courtesan who, in the early seventeenth century, had written a letter to the Venetian Council warning them of a possible attack by Spanish forces. Discovering who Alessandra was, what she’d done, and finding the answer to her heretofore unknown fate had been an exciting coup for a young historian. In the aftermath of the Spanish conspiracy, as it had become known, the artistically talented Alessandra had left Venice for Padua, where she’d earned a living by producing botanical drawings for the university.
Claire knew there was little chance she’d come across another story as dramatic as the Spanish conspiracy. Even so, she had to begin somewhere. If Alessandra had earned an income as an artist, perhaps other women had done so, too. Perhaps she could write about women who’d worked as professional artists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Claire checked a few sources on the college’s online database, then left the Lower Library to walk up a flight of stairs.
At the top of the stairs, a wide doorway led to the Wren Library, Trinity’s architectural showpiece and one of Christopher Wren’s earliest commissions. When it was completed in 1695, it was the most magnificent library in all of Britain. Three hundred years later, the adjective still applied, Claire marveled. Massive dark oak bookcases arranged in thirteen bays lined the long walls of the large, rectangular space. Above the bookcases, a procession of tall, arched windows rose up to the thirty-seven-foot coffered ceiling. In the wide center aisle, black and white marble tiles set in a diamond pattern led the eye to the southern end, where a white marble statue of alumnus Lord Byron posed poetically below a stained-glass window. With its classically influenced design, lofty elegance, and air of timelessness, the Wren Library was a sort of Palladian temple dedicated to books.
Of which it had a unique and unusual selection, dating from as early as the eighth century, in a variety of languages including Old English, Middle English, Latin, and Greek. The books and manuscripts that the Wren Library had amassed over the past three hundred years included a tenth-century copy of the Epistles of St. Paul, numerous illuminated medieval manuscripts, an eighteenth-century collection of Shakespeariana, a few of Milton’s poems in his own hand, and early printed books on subjects ranging from alchemy to zoology. Almost all had been acquired through the bequests and donations of private collectors, many of whom had been either masters, alumni, or benefactors of the library, who rested more peacefully knowing that their private collections would be kept intact in one of the world’s most beautiful book depositories. The books were still shelved according to collection. The most valuable works were kept in gated, locked bays, two at each end of the library.
Claire stopped at the unoccupied inquiry desk just inside the entrance. While she waited for the librarian’s return, she looked over the neat display of items set carefully upon the desk’s weathered surface: a leather blotter; a small, square pad of white notepaper; a wood container with pencils; a hand-cranked pencil sharpener; a fifty-year-old telephone with a dial. No computer monitor or keyboard, not even a liquid gel pen. Even the sign that proclaimed the librarian’s name—MR MALCOLM PILFORD—revealed its aged origins with a typeface from a bygone era.
It was like looking at a diorama from an earlier age, but Claire knew that the librarian’s ascetic desktop was not only the result of time and circumstance, but also library policies and procedures. Libraries such as the Wren—libraries intended for scholars, that is, not lending libraries—had strict rules about what was allowed inside. Even the ultramodern, multimillion-pound British Library did not tolerate ink pens or any extraneous personal possessions in its reading rooms, most especially totes or backpacks that could be used to squirrel away precious library property. Pencils, laptops, and paper notebooks were the only items permitted inside, and guards posted at the doors checked readers on their way in and on their way out. The Wren had none of the British Library’s accoutrements, such as guards or cloakrooms, but it was assumed that the people who used the Wren Library were Trinity College fellows, who were trustworthy and could leave any inessential items behind in their sets.
Claire had arrived with a brand-new, spiral-bound notebook, two pencils, her keys, and her one concession to modern life: her cell phone. Turned off, of course. Not that she had to worry about disturbing anyone. Only one other scholar worked in the library this morning, a young woman who sat at a table behind Byron’s statue. Even though academics from other universities and colleges could, with permission, use the Wren Library, Claire was under the impression that this permission wasn’t requested very often. Indeed, the library seemed to be underused. There were fewer than twenty active history fellows and only a handful of history graduate students at Trinity, so she didn’t have much competition for the collections kept within it. Claire’s temporary lecturer status bestowed upon her the privilege of browsing the stacks: an almost unbelievable, heady freedom that she wouldn’t enjoy at any other comparable library.
At the far end of the room, behind Byron’s statue and below the stained-glass window, a man appeared from behind a heavy velvet curtain that draped a tall, wide doorway. He stopped to say a few words to the woman sitting at the table, whose long brown hair was pulled back into a thick, frizzy ponytail. He briefly placed an avuncular hand on her shoulder, then looked up to see Claire waiting. He walked toward her in a way that conveyed the perfect balance of authority and servility: he didn’t rush obsequiously or rudely lag. His measured footsteps encompassed precisely one marble tile per stride; one white, one black, one white. He was clearly the master of this realm, but one who was more than happy to assist all who entered.
“May I help you?”
Claire introduced herself, and the librarian beamed at her with genuine welcome. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, and Claire was almost taken off-guard by the warmth of his greeting. Mr. Pilford appeared to be at least seventy, but even so, given the age of some of the other fellows, he was younger than she’d expected and much more sprightly. He had a fine head of short silvery hair; though a small man, he carried himself proudly, with a kind of military vigor. He looked jaunty in a tweed jacket, hunter green sweater-vest, and striking blue-and-green-striped bow tie. His round, black eyeglasses were a sort she’d seen only in photographs of James Joyce.
“What can I do for you this afternoon, Dr. Donovan?”
“I’m interested in a folio in the Barclay collection,” said Claire, consulting her notes. “In particular a letter from a woman named Mary Beale, a court painter of the late seventeenth century.” She showed him the folio’s class number, scribbled in pencil within the faint blue lines of the white notebook paper.
“May I ask what you’re researching? I may be able to find other, similar items for you.”
“I’m looking for primary sources about or by female artists.”
“Which era?”
“Early modern.”
The librarian squinted and looked up to the ceiling, as if he was searching the crowded archives of his mind.
“The Barclay isn’t a bad place to start. There are many items in it that haven’t been cataloged yet, so there’s no telling what you may find.” Was it Claire’s imagination, or did Mr. Pilford’s eyes glimmer with a mysterious excitement? “You may also want to look at the Sir Henry Puckering collection,” he went on, then shrugged, palms up. “We haven’t fully cataloged it, either, although the Puckering arrived three hundred years ago, just after the library was completed. Both collections are in R bay, down at the end.”
Claire walked along the wide center aisle past the magnificent dark oak bookcases and their leather-bound arcana, past the Grinling Gibbons–carved coats of arms, past the marble busts of Newton, et al., gazing down from on high, past the display tables where especially prized items—Shakespeare’s first folio and A. A. Milne’s original manuscript of Winnie-the-Pooh among them—were exhibited under glass. The ponytailed woman working at the table behind Byron’s statue closed her laptop as Claire approached.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll be out of your way.”
She hardly looked at Claire as she spoke. She wore a long, full skirt that brushed against her ankles and, over that, a man’s gray cardigan sweater that drooped like a dirty sock on her slight body. The pockets bulged with crumpled tissues. She kept her eyes on the table as she closed her three open books and carefully arranged them into a small, neat pyramid.
“You’re not in my way,” Claire replied.
“I’m not supposed to take up space needed by a fellow.”
“It’s not a problem,” Claire said. The young woman appeared too old to be an undergrad; she must have been a graduate student. “There’s plenty of room for both of us.”
But the young woman tucked the laptop under one arm and managed to get her books under the other. “Sorry,” she apologized one last time before turning her back to Claire and scurrying away to the librarian’s desk.
Claire shook her head and returned to the task at hand. The baroque, wrought-iron gate to R bay was locked. Claire turned to look for Mr. Pilford, then remembered her keys. As the junior bursar had promised, the F key fit easily into the lock. The gate creaked as Claire pulled it slowly open and stepped into the dusky light of the book bay. Thirteen-foot-tall bookcases crowded with volumes of every size surrounded her on three sides. The larger books were placed on the roomier lower shelves and the smaller books on the upper, which were so high that she would have to stand on a bench to reach them. The literary works were sheathed in a variety of calfskin, pigskin, and morocco bindings; many of the spines had raised markings, or were embossed and gilded. Faint gold curlicues, ornate borders, and family crests glimmered in the shadowy light. She breathed in the books’ familiar, invigorating aroma: dust, tanned leather, moldering paper, ripening vellum—a scent Claire had long come to associate with knowledge and secrets.
Although she was a logical, practical person, she believed that in books there existed a kind of magic. Between the aging covers on these shelves, contained in tiny, abstract black marks on sheets of paper, were voices from the past. Voices that reached into the future, into Claire’s own life and heart and mind, to tell her what they knew, what they’d learned, what they’d seen, what they’d felt. Wasn’t that magic?
She decided to begin with the folio she’d come in for, though she soon discovered that it wasn’t so easy to find. Most of the books in R bay had been printed and bound long before anyone had thought of conveniently stamping the title on the spine. In fact, she’d read that when the library had first been built, the books had been shelved the other way around. The page ends had faced out, while a “board,” or covered cupboard at the end of each bookcase, contained a list of the nearby volumes. Unfortunately, the lists had been abandoned in the early eighteenth century. Now, as then, finding a particular work entailed taking it off the shelf and opening its covers.
The books in the Earl of Barclay’s collection were marked by a crest of castle and lynx, easily distinguished from Sir Henry Puckering’s escutcheon of clarion and crow. Claire spent nearly an hour searching before she found the correct folio. One had to proceed slowly with old books to keep from damaging them. Some libraries required the protocol of white cotton gloves (which they provided), but most simply expected clean hands and gentle, professional treatment. Inside the bay, a square oak table designed by Christopher Wren featured a built-in, four-sided revolving book stand in its center. Quite ingenious, Claire thought as she propped the folio upon it.
The folio wasn’t a published book but a collection of letters, mounted on sheets of thick, yellowing paper, much like a scrapbook. Unfortunately there was no mention of whether the letters had been collected contemporaneously or if they’d been assembled much later. Most of the letters seemed to come from the last two decades of the seventeenth century and were composed in a variety of hands. Claire supposed they must be related in some way, but there was no explanation of how. A collection of family letters, no doubt. About two-thirds of the way through, she found the epistle from the court painter.
18 February 1678
My dear Lady Barclay
This is to confirm that you and your husband will be sitting for portraits at my studio on Pall Mall commencing March 1 and everyday thereafter (excepting the Lord’s Day, of course), until such portraits are finished. The fee for each is £10 which Mr. Beale tells me is agreeable to you.
I remain, &ct.,
Mrs. Mary Beale
It was evidence of a working, income-earning female artist, but hardly enough to base a paper on. Claire looked through the remainder of the folio without finding another letter from the painter or any other mention of her. She stood up, returned it to the stacks, and looked around, feeling overwhelmed. So many books, so little time. She hardly knew where to begin. It was tempting to start on one side and methodically work her way around through every single bookshelf, but even taking a cursory glance at each volume would take days. She could simply choose books at random, she thought, or make a game of it by choosing one book from every shelf. She had to face it: without a comprehensive catalog, there were no shortcuts. She decided to examine the first book on the left side of each shelf, a methodology that would make it easier to begin again exactly where she finished.
The first was an illustrated tome from the Puckering collection: The royall game of chesse-play: sometimes the recreation of the late King, with many of the nobility, published in London and written by Gioachino Greco in 1656. The second came from the Barclay: Recherches anatomiques et physiologiques sur la structure intime des animaux et des vegetaux, et sur leur motilite, Paris, René Henri Dutrochet, 1684. The third, Barclay again: Experimental philosophy in three books: containing new experiments, microscopical, mercurial, magnetical. With some deductions, and probable hypotheses, raised from them, London, Theophilus Ravenscroft, FRS, 1670. And again, Barclay, this time a seventeenth-century work on surgery: Chirugia spagyrica / Petri loan-nis Fabri doctoris medici Monspeliensis. In qua de morbis cutaneis omnibus spagyrice & methodice agitur, & curatio eorum cita, tuta, & iucunda tractatur, Toulouse, Pierre-Jean Fabre, 1626. The next book, from the Puckering collection, had a long, explicatory title typical of the era: The mysteries of opium reveal’d / by Dr. John Jones,…who I. Gives an account of the name, make, choice, effects, &c. of opium. II. Proves all former opinions of its operation to be meer chimera’s. III. Demonstrates what its true cause is…IV. Shews its noxious principle, and how to separate it; thereby rendering it a safe and noble panacea; whereof, V. He shews the palliative and curative use, London, John Jones, 1701. The following book was another medicinal work: Organon salutis. An instrument to cleanse the stomach, as also divers new experiments of the virtue of tobacco and coffee: how much they conduce to preserve human health, London, Walter Rumsey, 1657.
To reach the highest shelf, Claire stood on one of the bay’s four small benches and stretched her hand up as far as it could go. Even so, her fingers could just barely touch the desired volume. She felt a bit like Alice in Won
derland, struggling to grasp a key off a tabletop that was steadily rising higher and higher. She slowly and very carefully eased the book out of its tight, confined space. But as she gently coaxed it into her hand, she dislodged the volume next to it, which landed on the floor below with a muffled, dust-rising thud. Claire froze and held her breath, waiting for the sound of Mr. Pilford’s footsteps.
When it was clear that the librarian hadn’t heard the unfortunate result of her overreaching ambition, Claire stepped down from the bench and picked the book off the floor. It was a volume about three-quarters of an inch thick and approximately five by seven inches in size, bound in plain, honey-colored leather, unmarked except by the scars and blemishes of age. A book so unprepossessing that she imagined at first it was a schoolboy’s workbook. Claire opened the cover to find the first page with nothing upon it but a date, handwritten in English and faded with time: November 1672.
She sat down at the oak table to look through this mysterious volume more carefully, propping it up on the book stand. Every page after the first was a puzzle, handwritten in a language she’d never encountered before. It wasn’t Latin, it wasn’t Greek, it wasn’t Hebrew, and it certainly wasn’t English. It looked more like a set of alchemical symbols or algebraic characters, but it clearly wasn’t mathematical. There were no sets or subsets of equations, just a series of strange, singular characters written in neat straight lines that marched smartly across each page.
It must be some sort of code. In Venice, she’d discovered encrypted letters written by Alessandra Rossetti, and she, along with Andrew Kent, had deciphered them. Ever since, Claire had had an interest in codes and ciphers. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, documents were frequently encrypted. Everyone—ambassadors, kings, merchants, mistresses—used codes in their communiqués, and often in their private papers and ledgers as well. It was the only way to keep one’s secrets secret. But even that didn’t always work, as code breakers were as common as code makers.
The Devlin Diary Page 8
