One had a mouth agape. Void eyes open as wide—wider—than a man’s eyes could ever open in life. Wide enough, at the last, to see the cost of his most treasured beliefs.
But the living bodies about her swept her forward. All about her, their will focused on gaining the river’s margin, the English seemed for this moment to fear nothing—not the unlatched eyes high above them, not even a change of governance that could soon mean different heads lofted in punishment for the telling of different truths. She wanted to breathe the warning into all their ears: never let your true thought be known, for it is by truth that you are noosed and for truth burnt.
And even in the same instant, she wanted to beg the secret of their boldness.
But they were already departing from her. Amid the churn of the crowd, she left behind the blackened heads that shuddered, now, in a biting wind. On the cobbled street beyond the bridge, the crowd thinned and dissolved. She stood, released, on the south side of the river, her skin afire with the touch of English strangers who had borne her across. A hundred hands, living and dead.
11
December 1, 2000
London
The rare manuscripts room was hushed. Solitary postgraduates sat at tables here and there, looking sleep-deprived. There was a fraught, reverent silence, broken by the occasional ripple of pages turning. The soft scratch of a pencil. The sound of knuckles cracking. A single long sniff.
Helen sat alone at a large table. A slim volume from the Eastons’ house lay on the brown cushion before her, its pages held open with weighted strings. The news that this first batch of documents was ready had reached her yesterday evening, in the form of a terse telephone message from the librarian, Patricia Starling-Haight. Helen had arrived this morning at the precise moment Patricia Starling-Haight unlocked the heavy door of the manuscripts room, and she’d moved through the usual protocols under the librarian’s owlish gaze—relinquishing all writing instruments, securing her bag in a locker, silencing her mobile phone—all before the librarian would budge to produce the first documents. She’d been here since, and had read through three letters already. Aaron had made similar progress—his document was arrayed on a cushion farther down the table, though Aaron himself was currently nowhere to be seen. With luck they would get through another few before closing.
Once more the librarian floated past. When she’d gone, Helen leaned forward surreptitiously and breathed in. This volume—a small book of liturgical poetry—had a dark, smoldering smell like something burnt long ago, the fire extinguished but the danger still detectible.
She sat back a moment to savor the notion of the entire collection of papers being prepared in the conservation lab upstairs—to savor, in its entirety, the string of fortuitous events that had led to this day, starting with the fact that the purchase price of the documents had been steep but not prohibitively so. The assessor’s remark about the documents’ time span (the dates spanning Interregnum and Restoration leave open the possibility of some as-yet-undiscovered material of value to historians of these periods) had possibly pushed up the price a thousand pounds. But Jonathan Martin, with his eternal ambition of outshining UCL, had stepped forward with money from some Department of History cache. And that money, coupled with a phone call from the vice chancellor, had sufficed to persuade the librarian to authorize the purchase. All of it might have been derailed, of course, had the assessor recognized the Spinoza reference—it had been a gamble, and by no means a certain one, for Helen to walk away from the documents that afternoon in Richmond, rather than demand more time as she’d longed to. But assessors, like document conservationists, were rarely scholars. They saw the documents as physical artifacts. It was the historians who cared about their meaning.
And it was librarians who adjudicated crime and punishment, where paper was concerned. In fact Helen understood why Patricia Starling-Haight, with whom Helen had exchanged only brief conversations over the decades, was looking particularly severe today. In her position, Helen would have been livid. It was bad enough for a librarian to be strong-armed by a man like Jonathan Martin into purchasing documents with a dubious connection to the existing collections (Interregnum papers being more readily found at National Archives). But then, once the library had purchased the Richmond documents, Martin had insisted that the documents be placed at the front of the queue in the conservation lab. The head conservationist—a woman named Patricia Smith, whose fiefdom was the conservation laboratory two floors up from the rare manuscripts room—had been moved to march to Martin’s office herself to inform him that commandeering her laboratory was outrageous, and his precious seventeenth-century trove could bloody well wait for its turn after the four estates’ worth of documents already on schedule to occupy her through August.
Helen could imagine the two Patricias’ responses when Martin not only refused to relent, but made it clear that—although each document was to be made available to Helen the moment it was ready—the conservation lab and the rare manuscripts room were to inform all inquiring parties (Martin having already spoken with the usual journalists about a possibly significant seventeenth-century find) that while of course, in keeping with the law, these documents would be made available to the public the very moment they were ready, the whole collection was currently quite fragile and was still being prepared by the laboratory.
So turned the wheels of power at the hand of an ambitious chairman, freedom of information laws be damned. But this time—this time, for once—those wheels were turning on Helen’s behalf.
The irony of being Martin’s new favorite cause was something she should have enjoyed. In truth, though, it rested uneasily.
With both reigning Patricias in high temper, the hush in the rare manuscripts room was more fraught than usual. That the Patricias distrusted historians was nothing new; Helen had overheard enough whispered complaints over the decades she’d been visiting this room to know the essentials: historians saw rare documents merely as sources of information, rather than as objects of inherent value; historians didn’t care about the original documents once they’d stripped them of information. Patricia Starling-Haight had seen a history postgraduate chewing gum over a sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript. Patricia Smith had worked on fifteenth-century manuscripts that would have been salvageable if not for the irreversible damage a historian had wrought by Sellotaping two fragments together. Helen had once seen Patricia Smith ride the lift down from her laboratory to berate a history student who had accidentally punctured a document through some inexplicable pencil-point accident. Pausing before she bore the document out on its cushion like a patient on its pallet, the conservationist had practically hissed in the student’s stricken face. “That’s hours of labor to repair, and I’ll turn my hand to it when I’m good and ready.” Seeing the student’s gaze drift despairingly to the document, she’d added, with the ferocity of an animal protecting its young, “I suppose your dissertation will have to wait, then, won’t it?”
Helen didn’t mind the Patricias’ strictness—she felt an unspoken affinity with these women whose life of commitment seemed to parallel her own, though she knew only a little about them. Patricia Starling-Haight, Helen had heard, had been raised by an older sister during the war while their mother worked for the code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park. Patricia Smith had a daughter struggling to make a career in dance, and a son on the dole who long ago had to be banned from napping in the library. As for what the Patricias might know of her, Helen had no idea.