The Silver Bough (6 page)

“Why is it that nothing at all happens for hours and hours, then, in the last fifteen minutes, you get enough to keep you thinking all day?”

“Sod’s Law,” said Miranda, shutting the ledger and putting it back beneath the counter. “Which five rare and valuable books did he want you to order for him today?”

Kathleen smiled and shook her head. “He’s all right, though—isn’t he?”

“Oh, sure. He’s a joker, and he gets awfully intense sometimes, but he means well. Never stolen a book—not from us, anyway. His kids are great readers, which I call a good sign. His wife’s a lovely girl. He and Mr. Dean didn’t get along, but I wouldn’t call that Mr. Walker’s fault.”

“Do you know anything about Alexander Wall’s journal?”

“I know he’d like to read it.”

“Is there some reason why he can’t?”

She held up empty hands. “I don’t know where it is. Arnold Dean hid it somewhere and took the secret to his grave.” She smiled to show she wasn’t serious. “It’s probably in that locked bookcase upstairs. It’s just a matter of looking—but Connie and I haven’t had time to do anything but keep this place ticking over. Those three months before you were hired were awfully difficult. Of course, it didn’t help that Mr. Dean had been unwell for a while before he died. There were too many things he’d always done himself, in his own way, and he just wouldn’t
let go.
I’m not sure you’re caught up yet—are you?”

“Just about.”

Miranda gave her a motherly look. “Unpaid overtime. You shouldn’t do it, you know.”

“We’d be closed another day a week if I didn’t. Anyway, it won’t be like this forever. And speaking of overtime…Isn’t that Mark waiting for you out front?”

They both looked through the window at the car idling in the rain.

“Bless,” said Miranda fondly.

After she’d gone, Kathleen locked up the front, turning off the lights in the reading room and main library, and went back to the office to do whatever it was she’d forgotten earlier. It wasn’t important and could certainly have waited until the morning, but she would feel more comfortable with her desk cleared. Half an hour later she reminded herself that she was working on her own time and should go home. But with home only a few steps away—the Library House, built onto the side end of the museum—and no one waiting for her there, she couldn’t work up any urgency. She stood hesitating in the empty reference room, listening to the relentless downpour and the faint, eerie whistle of the wind in the eaves. She liked having the library to herself, felt both stimulated and at peace in the company of all the silent books. She loved the look, the heft, the weight, the smell, and the fact of books—all those miniature embodiments of other lives, other times. Thoughts and dreams preserved for posterity, to be summoned back to life through the act of reading. The buzz these days was all about the Internet, the world of online, digital knowledge, the necessity of being connected. But even though she accepted that the Net was not merely the wave of the future but the fact of present-day life, and did miss the access to it that she’d taken for granted in her old job, on an emotional level it could not compare, for her, with the magic of an old-fashioned, printed, real book. It was that, and a childhood fantasy of being able to live in a library, which had really decided her choice of career, no matter what sensible reasons she might tell other people.

She walked among the shelves that housed the local collection, touching the backs of old books, occasionally taking one down. Some remnant of childhood animism made her feel sorry for those which were overlooked, left too long untouched. She’d been pleased to see
The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain
taken out at last. Now, like a determined matchmaker, she browsed for something else to tempt Graeme. There were some volumes of the
Scottish Journal of Geology
and
Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow
with essays about this area, but nothing looked as exciting as underwater volcanoes.

A sudden howl startled her. It might have been a banshee wailing upstairs, but looking through the street-side window she saw the fronds of the palm trees along the Esplanade shaking wildly in a sudden, fierce gust of wind. It had grown dark; the line of yellowish lights strung along the harbor front shuddered and bounced. She was lucky she didn’t have to go far in this weather. But this reminder that it was past time for going home did not move her. She
was
home, standing right at the heart of it.

The job had not been appealing by objective standards, and her friends and former colleagues all thought she was mad to take it. The salary was considerably lower than what she’d been earning in London, and although the title of Area Librarian implied a grander job than her old one (where she had been just one of six librarians), and seemed to give her more authority, she actually had only three part-time assistants, none with qualifications in library science, and all the really important decisions were made at headquarters, and handed down to her. According to the advertisement, the new Area Librarian would “preside over the modernization of the system and help to bring Appleton Library up to modern COSLA standards; a demanding and rewarding task.”

“Translation: you will be overworked and underpaid, and we expect you to be grateful for the opportunity,” said Louise, a children’s librarian and her friend for the past four years.

She sent off her CV with the application anyway, and despite all the well-meaning advice from her friends, held her breath and wished on a star and felt enormously grateful when she was called for an interview.

The bleak truth was that she didn’t have a lot of choice. She couldn’t stay in the job she had. Even with the “London weighting” on her salary, she could not afford to live in the greater London area without a husband to share the mortgage. It hadn’t been easy even when she and Geoff were together, and now that they’d split up it was impossible. She’d thought about moving back to America, but the economic situation, or employers’ attitudes, had changed a lot in the decade since she’d left. Out of forty applications, she received only one offer, and that was for a one-year contract in Indiana. She got the message. Like Thomas Wolfe said,
You Can’t Go Home Again.

Driving in the rental car from Glasgow to Appleton, her first time in Scotland, she was immediately seduced by the scenery, but it was when she set eyes on the library building that she fell in love. It was a weird, architectural fantasy, with its golden dome, carved stone, and the sort of imposing, pillared front that had been popular on early “Picture Palaces,” suggesting that through these portals all your fantasies would be met. It would have been completely unremarkable in Las Vegas, but in a small Scottish seaside town it was an astonishment and a perpetual wonder. She understood perfectly why a local mythology would have grown up around it, stories of ghosts and secret rooms and madwomen in the attic. She wanted to work here; she wanted to make the library her own.

Replacing
Megalithic Enquiries in the West of Britain
on the shelf, she decided to do just one more task before going home. She would look for Alexander Wall’s journal. Overtime was only onerous when you were forced into it, and personally there were few things she loved more than treasure-hunting among shelves of old books.

So, through the door with the map on it into a chilly stone antechamber, past the fire door (painted red, with the sign
THIS DOOR IS ALARMED
—
EMERGENCY USE ONLY
) and up the high, wide, sturdy staircase to another locked room she went.

The smell of lavender beeswax and old books welcomed her in. Officially, this was the “meeting room,” with a large, highly polished wooden table and matching chairs in the center ready to accommodate any passing committee. In practice, it had not been used in many years for anything but storage. Cardboard boxes had been stacked as neatly as possible beneath and on top of almost a third of the table. Much of their contents was withdrawn stock, either waiting for its turn on the sales table in the foyer or put aside as “reserve,” by Mr. Dean—reserve stock without reserve stock shelving. At some point it would be her job to go through them all with a ruthless hand. She didn’t expect to find any treasures there; it would be a lot of once-popular fiction long past its sell-by date. And yet, although the books had to be removed to make space for new acquisitions, and book culls were a necessary part of a librarian’s life, she had been putting the task off. Libraries should be about conserving and preserving books; selling them off cheaply went against the grain. She guessed the late Mr. Dean had felt the same, and felt a little more kindly toward her predecessor, even if he had left her with a mountainous backlog to sort out.

Far more interesting than the boxed books were the glass-fronted cases that covered one wall from floor to ceiling. They contained the Wall collection, and other books, which had been donated years ago. Some appropriate volumes had been integrated into the local collection downstairs, but the rest had been left here to languish out of sight. That would soon change. Kathleen’s boss had told her that there was a plan to sell the collection and use the money to fund improvements to the library. Most of the books were probably of little value—there were an awful lot of collected sermons and memoirs of long-forgotten worthies—but there were bound to be a few treasures among the dross. The first step, now that the sale had been agreed to by the local authorities, was to bring in an expert to assess the value of the books. But, as usual when Appleton needed something from outside, the expert was taking his time about getting here.

From the huge bunch she carried, Kathleen isolated the stubby little key that unlocked the bookcases, and allowed herself the fantasy of discovering a first edition of Darwin’s
Origin of Species,
or something beautiful, hand-lettered and illuminated on vellum by some long-ago monk. In fact, she knew how far-fetched her fantasy was, because the contents of these bookcases had been listed in a small, hard-backed notebook by an earlier librarian, and transcribed in the last year by some council employee to be submitted with the draft resolution. There could be nothing obviously,
famously
valuable here, or she’d have heard about it. She thought it likely that it was the distinct lack of anything really “sexy” that made their Edinburgh-based expert reluctant to make the long, tedious journey across country to spend a day holed up in here. Which didn’t mean there weren’t a few books worth more than a hundred pounds apiece to the right collector; only that this consignment wasn’t going to make anyone’s fortune.

None of the books had been marred by reference numbers on their spines, but guessing that it would have gone against the grain of a professional librarian to shelve the journal of Alexander Wall out of alphabetical order, she looked for the far end of the alphabet, and very quickly spotted a slim, pale brown book without a title, almost invisible between
Country Rambles
by Malcolm Waddell and
The Collected Sermons of the Rev. S. Wallace.

“Aw, there you are, darlin’,” she murmured, feeling pleased with herself as she extracted the little book. The first page confirmed her discovery. Handwritten in clear, although rather faded, brown ink on creamy paper was:

Recollections
of
Alexander (McNeill) Wall,
member, R.I.B.A.
and long resident
in
Appleton

She turned to the next page:

Reading the words written so long ago by the man who had built this library gave her a thrill; it was as if the building
did
contain a secret room, and he was still alive inside it. His handwriting was neat and clear, almost as easy to decipher as some printed books. She closed it and held it pressed for a second against her chest, deciding that she would read it quickly herself before mentioning to Graeme Walker that she’d found it.

The rain was still coming down in sheets, so that when she went out the back door of the library she had the impression that it had been built behind a waterfall. A contrary wind even blew it into the shelter of the loggia that ran between the library and the house, so she was showered with spray in the few moments it took her to lock up and wrestle the heavy storm doors into place before dashing home.

The Library House was a charming miniature, built with the same attention to decorative design as the bigger building and echoing its architecture. Although the rooms were small, she loved all the doll’s house details. There was a stained-glass panel above the front door, an Art Deco-style fireplace in the living room, and a decorative glass domed cupola on the roof, which filled the stairway and the tiny upstairs hallway with light. There wasn’t room for half her furniture, but she reasoned that selling it off had not only saved her money on moving and storage, but gave her a welcome excuse for buying new things that were not saturated with memories of her failed marriage.