The Betrayals(13)

She crosses the courtyard and steps through the doorway into the soft seasonless hush of the library. Here and there second-and third-years are bent over their books, brows furrowed in concentration; as she walks past, one of them moves his hand unconsciously back and forth as he plots a move, testing the weight of the gesture in the air. She almost pauses to glance over his shoulder at the page in front of him, but today she has no appetite for teaching. She makes her way through the high bookshelves to the staircase, and up the stairs. In daylight, this is her territory – her hunting ground, where everything she could possibly need hides in an index or a footnote – but after the clock strikes midnight she’s glad to leave with the last scholars, while the bleary-eyed attendant extinguishes the lamps. No one has been allowed here alone since the London Library was destroyed: but even if she could, she wouldn’t. On bad days it’s too easy to imagine losing control, dropping a match, and the dance of flame-shadows on the plaster ceiling … She passes the attendant’s desk now, and nods to him. Then she turns aside, fumbles for the key, and unlocks the narrow door of the Biblioteca Ludi, her own private library.

It smells of dust. After she’s locked the door behind her she crosses to the windows, stepping over boxes and piles of books, and pushes the casement open as far as it will go. From here she can look out over the road and the valley: somewhere out of sight is Montverre village, and beyond that the foothills and the fertile flood-plain, and somewhere, miles and miles beyond that, is home. But it’s not her home any more. She swings round, turning away from the view as if she’s afraid someone is looking back at her. She takes a deep breath, frowning at the tight-packed bookshelves, the untidy floor, the draped cobweb in the corner of the ceiling that hangs so thickly she could have mistaken it for a detail in the plaster.

Once, perhaps, the Biblioteca Ludi was the secret heart of the school, a priceless collection of texts on the grand jeu that were too precious to be looked at by mere scholars. There are books that are unique, illuminated in gold and lapis, chained to their shelves against the far wall; others are handwritten by the Grand Masters, or the sole surviving copies of ancient codices, or contemporary notes from witnesses of classic games. But it’s been years – generations – since anyone catalogued what’s here. Since then the shelves have accumulated piles of dark-bound volumes, labelled tersely with names that even she doesn’t recognise, and tiny octavo notebooks crammed with Artemonian notation, and portfolios of unlabelled notes in cramped illegible writing. Some Magister of the last century decided to keep not only his games but his research material: the floor is cluttered with boxes of sheet music, mathematical and scientific journals, books of philosophy and verse … And scattered among the dubious treasures chosen by her great-great-grandfathers are things that she is almost sure must have been left by mistake: a pipe, a Latin dictionary, a scholar’s essay. The last time she was here she found a dingy copy of a thirty-year-old Gambit next to a first edition of Philidor; she imagined Magister Holt leaving it there absent-mindedly while he searched for something else, his lumpy rheumatic fingers brushing gently along the spines. After she was appointed she spent hours exploring, like a priestess taking possession of her domain, but it palled before she had got halfway around the room. Now she has neither the desire nor the arrogance to organise the collection: she treats it as a sort of hiding place, a tomb.

She goes to the corner furthest from the window and bends down to reach behind a bookcase, dragging out a little metal trunk. She sits back on her heels and wipes a clinging cobweb from her forehead with the inside of her wrist. Then she digs in her pocket for a key, unlocks the trunk and lifts out a package. The old oilskin crackles as she unwraps it. It’s a ledger, covered in blue-grey marbled paper like pebbles underwater; the corners and spine are scuffed leather. An inkblot bulges across the front. When it was fresh the stain gleamed like a coin, a blue-and-copper sheen rising to the surface where the ink was thickest; but time and desiccation have dulled it to a flat black. It still leaves a smear on her finger when she brushes her hand over it, and unconsciously she raises her fingertip to her mouth and sucks it clean. She raises her eyes to the window for a second, letting her gaze linger on the sky over the valley; then she bows her head over the book and opens it.





4


First day of Serotine Term, second year

I meant to get up at dawn this morning but I overslept, so by the time I was slogging up the hill it was getting warm and I arrived at the gate thoroughly drenched in sweat. It’s bloody annoying, having to walk all the way – not because I resent the exercise particularly, but because after all they’ve got a bus and they could perfectly well ferry us all up at the same time as our trunks. I have a theory it’s deliberate: they make us earn the first sight of the school, so that we’re already breathless and reeling when we step into the courtyard for the first time. And then we stand there and look round at the Great Hall and library and the towers, etc., etc., and feel overwhelmed and insignificant. The scale of it all, the site up here where the air is thin and you have to struggle to catch your breath, the austere grandeur of the buildings … It’s pure theatre. (I couldn’t say that aloud, of course. Imagine, theatre! In the same breath as the grand jeu! I remember in the first term, letting slip something about having seen The Knight’s Check at the Empress, and the way everyone turned to look at me. There was a pause, and then Emile waved his hand languidly and said, ‘Don’t judge him, my dears. I have a vast collection of erotic postcards, and Felix here is a great connoisseur of farts …’ We all laughed, and I never mentioned going to the theatre again.) It likes to pretend that the grand jeu has nothing to do with ‘entertainment’, but deep down the school is nothing but a playhouse. It’s drama, that’s all.