Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

So I took pensille & a bit of paper from the fire-box & wishing to mayke a vainglorious shew I Multiplied two numbers of seven figures together. My fathere looked & he saith pah that is mere scribbling. Nay sir, Mr Wenke sayde he has it right. My fathere sayde how can you say so? For it would take an houre or more to mayke certayne that figure working with my borde. So we were at a stand; also my fathere had it in his heade besides that there were some thing papistical about such workynges as cominge mayhap from Italie or other landes under sway of the harlot Rome.

Nexte day he ruled I should studie no more with Mr Wenke & be made a foundry-man insteade, saying we shall see if you founder in this as well & laughed heartie at his witte. Soe amid many teares of my deare mother & I too wept most bitter, I wase sent off to my Bracegirdle cozens at Titchfield. The night I left Mr Wenke sought me privily & pressed on me the first ten bookes of his Euclid, saying I have them by heart in the maine & can buy more at Pauls if needbe & make thou good use of them. Soe I departed my home.

My cozzens workes at Titchfield were as unlyke the countynge-house in Fish Streete as one could well imagine for makeing iron is as different from sellyng it as slaughteryng oxen be from the sarving of a mete pye: by that I intend dirty hard callous brute work. My cozzen Matthew the maistre of the place was harde as the stoffe he mayde. Looking down at me for he was a tall grete beare of a man he sayde what a paltrie thinge thou art but we will toughen you or kill you before a yeare be out we shall see which it shalbe & laughed. But though I worked lyke a slave & slept hard on straw with the other prentyces this was not the hardest of my newe lot for I had been blessed by nice breding never a curse in my house & all orderly nor had I ever been much among sinners in the way of the flesh. But now I thought I was amongst vere devils. My maistre though he professed the true faith was a vile hypocrite verey sober in church of Sundays but otherwise a roisterynge knave he kept a punke in the towne & dranke & beat his wyfe & servantes when in cups & fed we prentices short commons in oure kennel. The prentices themselves I swear were become little more than beastes of the field fighting & stealing & drunk when they could filtch ale. They were upon me from the start like crowes at a carcasse on account of my manneres & that I was a relatioun of the maistre & mayde my lyfe a miserie, which I bore as I must, weepeing onlie in secrete & prayynge for release whether by deathe or some othere mercie I cared not. But now one of them Jack Carey by name a lowde booreish fellow spied me at my Euclide & ripped it from my hande & mocked me for a mere clerke & made to throw it in the fyre, then I lept up lyke a fiende, & tooke up a stave & stroke him upon his heade so that he dropped the booke & fell senselesse down & three of them muste holt me then or I would have done grete evil upon hym even murther I think for being overcome with my rage, for which may God forgyve me. But afterwards my waye was more easie amongst them.

The crying lasted for approximately five minutes and ended in a series of deep shuddering breaths. Crosetti asked Carolyn what was wrong several times, but received no answer; as soon as the spasms had died down she pulled away from him and vanished behind the bathroom partition. He heard water running, footsteps, the delightful swishing sounds of a girl changing clothes. She’s slipping into something more comfortable, thought Crosetti with unaccustomed anticipation.

But when she emerged, he found that she was dressed in a gray mechanic’s coverall with her hair tightly bound up in an indigo scarf, below which her face had been scrubbed clean of even the light makeup she normally wore. Upon it no trace of the recent outburst. She looked like a prisoner or a nun.

"Feeling better?" he asked as she walked by him, but she didn’t answer. Instead, she began to replace the blotting paper in the wet books.

He walked over and started to pull sodden toweling out of volume three. After a few minutes of silent working he said, "And…?"

No response.

“Carolyn?”

“What?”

“Are we going to talk about what just went down?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you going hysterical just now.”

“I wouldn’t call it going hysterical. I get a little weepy when I drink.”

“A little weepy ?” He stared at her and she stared back at him. Aside from a slight reddening of her eyelids there was no sign she had ever been anything but cool Carolyn Rolly. Who said, coolly, “I’m sorry if I disturbed you. I really don’t want to discuss it, if you don’t mind,” and returned to her work.

Crosetti had to be content with that. Clearly, there was to be no leap into intimacy, no sharing of dark secrets, and no further physical contact. They worked in silence. Crosetti cleaned up the scant debris of their supper and the used paper towels. Rolly sat on a stool and did arcane things with her medieval tool-kit and the half-ruined books.

Something at a loss, Crosetti retrieved the manuscript pages, now barely damp, and spread them out on the kitchen counter and the spool table. He grabbed a magnifying glass from Rolly’s worktable and examined a page at random. Some of the letters were obvious-the vowels were similar to modern ones, and short familiar words like the and to could be picked out easily. But actually reading the thing was another matter. Many of the words seemed to be mere sawtooth swiggles, and there were enough completely indecipherable letters to obscure the meaning of well over half the words. Besides that, several of the sheets seemed to be inscribed in some unfamiliar foreign tongue, but he couldn’t be sure of that because the orthography was so difficult to make out. Was he really seeing such a word as hrtxd ? Or yfdpg ?

He decided to ignore the text and focus on the fabric and character of the sheets. All forty-eight were folio sized, and they appeared to fall into three classes. The first, consisting of eighteen sheets of fine thin paper, were closely written, neatly but with many crossed-out words and lines; they had at one time been deeply creased both vertically and horizontally.

The second group consisted of twenty-six sheets of heavier paper, inscribed on both sides, and on these the writing was larger and messier, with a number of blots: despite this, it was written-at least to Crosetti’s inexperienced eye-in the same hand used on the first eighteen sheets. On each page of this second group, the paper was evenly punctured along one side, as if it had been torn out of a book. Another peculiarity of this set is that they seemed to be overwritten upon faded brownish columns of figures. The word palimpsest popped into Crosetti’s mind, and gave him an obscure satisfaction, although he understood that this was not a true example: palimpsests were normally parchment, where an old manuscript had been scraped down to make way for new text. But clearly this set of pages had been written on paper pressed into duty at need. The remaining four were the pages that had correction marks in pencil, and were clearly a different sort of paper and in a different hand. Crosetti held each of the pages up to the overhead lights and confirmed his guess: three different watermarks. The eighteen sheets of fine paper were marked with a curled post horn and the letters A and M; the twenty-six punctured sheets were marked with some sort of coat of arms; and the last four bore a crown.

But how did this collection wind up padding a binding in the mid-eighteenth century? Crosetti imagined a bookbindery of that era. There was a bale of wastepaper by the binder’s table, a table probably not very different from the one at which Rolly now worked under the light of an articulated desk lamp, her slim neck shone bright and vulnerable against the dark matte of her scarf. It would have been stout English oak, scarred and stained, instead of laminated pallet-wood. The bookbinder sitting before it would have reached into the stack and pulled out six sheets, trimmed them to size with a razor knife against a steel rule, and laid them neatly against the boards.