Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [35]
So Tom, when on the scent, could give a credible imitation of a hermit—albeit one with a more chatty disposition than most. He liked to make his ideas real, and this meant talking about them aloud. Sharon usually played the unwilling role of Ear—often very unwilling, as on that particular evening—but it was the talking that mattered, not the hearing. Tom would have talked to himself in a pinch, and sometimes did.
He knew quite well that he had been thrown out of the apartment. He was not especially alert to the subtle cues of human relationships, but it was hard to miss the old heave-ho, and a man need not be particularly sensitive to feel a little vexed over the matter. Visiting the archives really was the sensible thing to do when seen from the clear, cold heights of logic; but logic wasn’t in it.
THE MEDIEVAL collection in the Teliow Memorial Library had started with a small art collection, housed in a gallery decorated to resemble a medieval hall. There were some fine pieces there: triptychs, altar fronts, and the like. There followed: bibles, psalters and other incunabula, pipe rolls and cartularies, registers and estate papers, ledgers and accounts—the raw materials of history. Primary sources bought at auctions or found in troves or bestowed by tax-weary donors; never edited, never published, grouped loosely by source into folders, tied in stacks between pieces of heavy cardboard, and hidden away to await a scholar sufficiently desperate to wade through them. They had been lying in wait for Tom and had caught him fair.
Tom had prepared a list. He was not the methodical sort, but even he knew better than to dive headfirst into uncharted waters. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he did know what sort of thing he was looking for, and that was half the battle. So he scrutinized the contents of each carton, setting aside certain documents for more careful perusal. Along the way, he acquired stray bits of the trivium and the quadrivium, for he was the sort of man who cannot look up one thing without in the process finding half a dozen other things. In this manner, the sun grew long, and passed into evening.
AMIDST THE chaff already winnowed lay by that time but a single grain of wheat: A note in a seventeenth century index of episcopal court cases that, “de rerum Eifelheimensis, the matter of the baptism of one Johannes Sterne, wayfarer, had been mooted by the death through pestilence of all the principals.” This index had been compiled in part from an earlier fifteenth century index, based in turn on long-lost fourteenth-century originals.
Not exactly hot on the trail.
He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead and contemplated surrender. He might have packed it in then, had it not been for a nudge from an unlikely direction.
“You know, Dr. Schwoerin,” said the nudge, “we don’t get many live ones in here.”
Paul on the Damascus highway could not have been more startled apprehending a sudden voice. The librarian, who had dutifully shopped cartons for him all night in silent obscurity, stood by the table with the carton he had just finished braced against her hip. She was a fine-featured woman, decked with a long print dress and adorned by large, plain glasses. Her hair met behind her in a tight bun.
Lieber Gott, Tom thought. An archetype! Aloud, he said, “I beg your pardon?”
The librarian flushed. “Usually researchers phone their requests in. One of the staff scans it into the computer, charges the cost against the appropriate grant, and that’s that. It can be terribly lonely, especially at night, when all we do is wait for requests from overseas. I try to read everything I scan, and there’s my own research of course. That helps some.”
That was the nexus. A lonely librarian wanted a human conversation, and a lonely cliologist needed a break from his fruitless hunt. Otherwise,