“He’s dead,” she said.
He stood rooted to the spot a yard from her. “When?” he said, as if it mattered.
“Just after you left.”
He didn’t want to weep, not with her watching. There was too much else he didn’t want to stumble over in her presence. Stony, he said, “Where’s Clem?”
“With him upstairs. Don’t go up. There’s already too many people.” She spied the cigarettes in his hand and reached for them. As her hand grazed his, their grief ran between them. Despite his intent, tears sprang to his eyes, and he went into her embrace, both of them sobbing freely, like enemies joined by a common loss or lovers about to be parted. Or else souls who could not remember whether they were lovers or enemies and were weeping at their own confusion.
16
Since the meeting at which the subject of the Tabula Rasa’s library had first been raised, Bloxham had several times planned to perform the duty he’d volunteered himself for and go into the bowels of the tower to check on the security of the collection. But he’d twice put off the task, telling himself that there were more urgent claims on his time: specifically, the organization of the Society’s Great Purge. He might have postponed a third time had the matter not been raised again, this in a casual aside from Charlotte Feaver, who’d been equally vociferous about the safety of the books at that first gathering and now offered to accompany him on the investigation. Women baffled Bloxham, and the attraction they exercised over him had always to be set beside the discomfort he felt in their company, but in recent days he’d felt an intensity of sexual need he’d seldom, if ever, experienced before. Not even in the privacy of his own prayers did he dare confess the reason. The Purge excited him—it roused his blood and his manhood—and he had no doubt that Charlotte had responded to this heat, even though he’d made no outward show of it. He promptly accepted her offer, and at her suggestion they agreed to meet at the tower on the last evening of the old year. He brought a bottle of champagne.
“We may as well enjoy ourselves,” he said, as they headed down through the remains of Roxborough’s original house, a floor of which had been preserved and concealed within the plainer walls of the tower.
Neither of them had ventured into this underworld for many years. It was more primitive than either of them remembered. Electric Hght had been crudely installed—cables from which bare bulbs hung looped along the passages—but otherwise the place was just as it had been in the first years of the Tabula Rasa. The cellars had been built for the express purpose of housing the Society’s collection; thus for the millennium. A fan of identical corridors spread from the bottom stairs, lined on both sides with shelves that rose up the brick walls to the curve of the ceilings. The intersections were elaborately vaulted, but otherwise there was no decoration.
“Shall we break open the bottle before we start?” Bloxham suggested.
“Why not? What are we drinking from?”
His reply was to bring two fluted glasses from his pocket. She claimed them from him while he opened the bottle, its cork coming with no more than a decorous sigh, the sound of which carried away through the labyrinth and failed to return. Glasses filled, they drank to the Purge.
“Now we’re here,” Charlotte said, pulling her furs up around her, “what are we looking for?”
“Any sign of tampering or theft,” Bloxham said. “Shall we split up or go together?”
“Oh, together,” she replied.
It had been Roxborough’s claim that these shelves carried every single volume of any significance in the hemisphere, and as they wandered together, surveying the tens of thousands of manuscripts and books, it was easy to believe the boast.
“How in hell’s name do you suppose they gathered all this stuff up?” Charlotte wondered as they walked.
“I daresay the world was smaller then,” Bloxham remarked. “They all knew each other, didn’t they? Casanova, Sartori, the Comte de Saint-Germain. All fakes and buggers together.”