Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

It was a bear. As the foreword to D & K-S has it, “The Gothic cursive hands of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in England and elsewhere in Europe are among the hardest to read of all the scripts normally considered by paleographers.” Crosetti learned that the contemporaries of Elizabeth and James I made no distinction between n and u , or u and v or i and j , nor did they dot their is. S appeared in two different forms, and r in four, and there were strange ligatures tying h and s and t to other letters, distorting the shapes of each. They punctuated and spelled as they pleased, and to save expensive parchment they had invented dozens of incomprehensible abbreviations, which had remained in common use even when paper came in. Doggedly, however, he applied himself to the exercises provided by the manual, starting with Sir Nicholas Bacon’s An Exhortacion gyuen to the Serieaunts when they were sworne in the Chauncery in Anno domini 1559. By the time he had reached line three, checking nearly every word against the translation provided, it was well past midnight. Rolly was still at her task, and he thought that if he could just rest his eyes and his aching back for a few moments he would get a second wind. He slipped off his sneakers and lay down on one edge of the pallet.

Then there was a weird clatter sounding in his ear. He sat upright with a curse and grappled in the bedclothes until he had the source of it in hand: an old-fashioned alarm clock, the kind they draw in cartoons, with twin bells and a clapper on top and a wide white face, and Carolyn had taped the bells so that when the thing went off it would not awaken her as well, a typically elegant low-tech solution. He shut it off and saw that there was a note affixed to it with a bit of ribbon:

Your turn; I did the last two myself.

It was written on a slip of heavy antique paper in black ink, the hand an elegant italic. Crosetti’s violent annoyance instantly evaporated. He examined the deeply breathing shape in the bed next to him. He could see a shock of hair on the pillow, an ear, a curve of downy cheek. Cautiously, he leaned over and placed his face close to this, mere inches away. He breathed in long and deep and got soap, some kind of shampoo, a note of glue and old leather, and underneath this something more personal, eau de girl. Crosetti was no stranger to the delights of women, specializing in those that liked nice guys rather than the type (more numerous, in his experience) that preferred the other kind, nor was he even sure he particularly liked this woman. No, actually, he was sure he did not, and also sure that never in his life had he obtained an erotic charge as powerful as the one he now received, sniffing absurdly at the skin of Carolyn Rolly.

Incomprehensible, but there it was. He peeked under the duvet and found that she was wearing a dark T-shirt. He could just make out the little knobs of her spine bulging the thin fabric. Below that, dim whiteness. He had to know, and so he reached out and touched her, barely touched her haunch with the back of his hand, and felt tight, sheer fabric; a shock like an electric current flowed up his arm; she stirred and murmured.

He was out of the bed in a flash, and stood there feeling a jerk, with (could it be?) his knees actually trembling and his penis turgid. Holy shit, he said to himself several times, and then Uh-uh, no thank you, this is not happening. He marched like a soldier to the sink, where he drenched his face with cold water. He wished he could take a shower, but there was none, nor any bath either. An image of the occupant standing nude on a towel dabbing at her body with a warm sponge suddenly inhabited his mind. He forced it away by an act of will and started on the changing of the blotters.

After which he found himself with a couple of hours to kill before the next change, scheduled for 5 a.m. Briefly he considered poking through Rolly’s things, checking out her underwear, her pharmaceuticals, her papers. He let this notion play for a while on his interior TV, and then dismissed the idea. The point was not to penetrate more deeply into whatever weird shit she had going on but to finish this stupid project and escape. Thus the mature Crosetti lectured Crazy Al, a new person who was dying to dive back under that duvet and yank Carolyn Rolly’s panties down, or failing that, gather sufficient material to become a successful stalker.

But he did explore the kitchen and found in a cabinet (constructed of the ever-present pallet boards) a package of sugar cookies and one of those tin boxes of flavored instant coffee, hazelnut in this case, that he often saw in racks in the supermarket, when he often wondered who bought that crap. Now he knew. He boiled water in a pan and made the disgusting brew and drank it down for the caffeine’s sake, and ate all the cookies, which were stale and like sweet gypsum in the mouth. On the evidence of her larder, Rolly obviously preferred live prey.

Somewhat pumped up now from the coffee and the sugary snack, Crosetti reset the alarm for five o’clock and renewed his investigation into the old papers. Before half an hour passed he was convinced that either he was going crazy or that the eighteen sheets marked by the post horn watermark were all in a language he did not know, or in some code…no, not code, cipher. Well, well, that might be interesting. The four crown-marked sheets, in a different and easier hand, appeared to be some sort of religious screed:

Worldly tears fall to the earth but godly tears are kept in a bottle. Judge not holy weeping superfluous. Either sin must drown in them or the soule burn

He wondered briefly which kind Rolly had wept, and then put these pages aside. He was much more interested in the twenty-six sheets marked with a coat of arms, which were in the same hand as the ones written in the odd language. Within minutes he was gratified to discover that these were obviously in English. He could pick out the familiar short words- of, and, is , and the like-and after a while he located the beginning of the manuscript, or at least he thought it was the beginning. There was an inscription on the upper right, above the body of the text, the date 25 thOctobr. Anno. Dom. 1642, and the place, Baubnmy. No, that couldn’t be right, or maybe it was Welsh, or…he examined the text again, and suddenly something clicked and he saw it was Banbury . Crosetti felt an odd thrill, akin to his delight when his film editing was going well, the emergence of meaning out of the raw stuff. It was a letter, he soon discovered, from a man named Richard Bracegirdle to his wife, called Nan, and not just a letter, but a final letter, and a…Crosetti knew there was a word for this sort of statement but could not recall it. Bracegirdle seemed to have been mortally wounded in a battle, although Crosetti had as yet no idea where the battle was fought, which contestants fought there, or in what war. Like many Americans, he had only the sketchiest idea of European history. What was going on in 1642? He’d look it up, and would have done so immediately, except that a computer with broadband access was another thing that Rolly lacked. He finished the first page and picked up the next; it had a signature on it, so was clearly the last page of the letter. He began it anyway, for the pages were unnumbered and there was no way of putting them in order without first reading them.

So he plowed on, line by line, slowly increasing his facility at translating Bracegirdle’s hand. And there came at last a moment when Crosetti realized that he was reading the text somewhat more easily, and that the long-dead soldier was as alive to him as any chat room correspondent. The thrill redoubled at this realization, and the romance of paleography struck him like a blow: no one else knew this! No human being had read these lines for over three and a half centuries, perhaps no one had ever read them except for Bracegirdle and his wife. It was like looking out a rear window in an apartment building and observing some intimate act in the domestic life of strangers.