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By Root 526 0

& banneres flying & what happened but oure right being pressed back, oure left shifted thereto, a thinge most common in battel & the wyse guard against it. But these fellowes were scarce skilled in warre & soe they moved & soe our left flanke came loose from the hedges & hung in aire. Now Nan twere never good practice to trail a flanke before Rupert of the Rhine. You well know I have sayde that they are noddles in the mayne who serve the King but they are cavaliers for all that & the one thynge they can doe is charge with sword and pistol: soe with a greate crie they did. They struck us hard & rolled up oure foote like drapers linen & then they were upon the gonnes. I snatched up a partizan & made to defend my piece (for though the gonnes fly no colours and hath not honour so tis sayde, yet I would be shamed to see my pieces lightly taken) but a cavalier stod off & shot his carbine at me & I fell & lay there all the day, not beeing able to feele or move my legges until young Tom found me when dusk wase nigh, & carreyed mee to where I now am to die. I know not even now who won the daye.

Soe now I write you being the laste thynge on earth I doe & I thinke me that though God did not call mee to stande among the greate still I am a man not a clod & my story bears telling if onlie to holpe in the breding of my sonne: who needs muste rise to manhoode lacking what ever poore model I might have supply’d.

2

On the evening of the little fire, the revelatory fire that changed his life, Albert Crosetti was working in the basement as usual, and so was the first one to detect it. He was there because Sidney Glaser Rare Books kept its computer in the basement. Mr. Glaser did not like the devices and resented that they were now essential to earning a living in the book trade. He preferred to proffer his treasures by hand, in a well-lit, paneled, carpeted room like the showroom in his shop. But some years ago, when in the market for a bookshop clerk, he had accepted the current reality and enquired of all candidates whether they knew enough about computers to set up and maintain a Web-based catalog, and he had hired the first nonsmoking person answering in the affirmative. This was Albert Crosetti, then age twenty-four. Crosetti came from Queens, and still lived there in a brick bungalow in Ozone Park, with his mother. She was a retired research librarian and widow, with whom he enjoyed a relationship minimally fraught with Freudian katzenjammer. Crosetti wished someday to make films and was saving up money to go to the famous film school at New York University. He was a graduate of Queens College and had started working for Glaser within a month of receiving his diploma. He liked his job; the hours were regular, the pay fair, and while Glaser could be something of a nut when it came to antique books, the old man knew he had a good thing in Crosetti and let him handle the mail-order business and its electronic impedimenta almost without supervision.

His workspace consisted of a tiny alcove whose walls were shelves and glass cabinets and crates, all packed with books. Here he updated the online catalog, working from lists drawn by Mr. Glaser’s fountain pen in the beautiful penmanship of bygone days. He also kept the inventory current and accessed the various systems whereby requests for items were transmitted from bibliophiles around the world, printing these off for the proprietor’s later attention. Beyond that, his duties included unpacking and shipping books and other factotum work associated with the trade. He rarely ventured upstairs to the showroom, where quiet, well-dressed people handled old volumes with the care and tenderness due newborn babes.

The only unpleasant aspect of this work was the smell, compounded of old books, mice, the poisons laid to keep these at bay, drains, heated paint, and beneath all—an olfactory bass note—the stink of frying grease. This last came from next door, an establishment called the Aegean, a joint typical of midtown New York, purveying danish pastries, toast, eggs, and weak coffee in