Book of Souls

Isabelle was beaming. “I have visions of my dissertation taking a rather more interesting turn.”

“So what do you say?” Will asked. “Do we have a deal?”

Isabelle and Lord Cantwell nodded. They had discussed the matter while Will had napped.

“Yes, we do,” Isabelle answered. “Let’s begin our little adventure after lunch.”

THEY BEGAN IN the library. It was a generous room, with bare, plank floors shiny with wear, a few good rugs, and one front-facing exterior wall that let gray, stormy light in through diamond-paned leaded windows. The other walls were lined with bookshelves except for the space above the fireplace, which had a soot-darkened canvas of a traditional English hunting party.

There were thousands of books, most of them premodern, but one section on the side wall had a smattering of contemporary hardcovers and even a few paperbacks. Will took it all in with heavy, postprandial eyes. Lord Cantwell had already announced his afternoon nap, and despite Will’s anxiousness to get the job done and get home, the thought of flopping in one of the overstuffed library chairs in a darkened corner and shutting his eyes again was appealing.

“This was my magic place when I was a child,” Isabelle told him as she drifted through the room, lightly touching book spines with her fingertips. “I love this room.” She had a slow, dreaminess, a languid contrast to the reference set in his mind of flighty college kids. “I played in here for hours at a time. It’s where I spend most of my time now.” She pointed at a long table crowded with notebooks and pens, a laptop computer, and stacks of old books with slips of paper sticking out, marking passages of interest. “If your poem’s authentic, I might have to start from scratch!”

“Sorry. You’re not going to be able to use it. I’ll explain later.”

“You’re joking! It would launch my career.”

“What is it you want to do?”

“Teach, write. I want to be a proper academic historian, a stuffy old professor. This library’s probably responsible for that odd ambition.”

“I don’t think it’s odd. My daughter’s a writer.” He didn’t know why, but he added, “She’s not much older than you,” which made her giggle nervously. He headed off the politely inevitable questions about Laura by abruptly saying, “Show me where the book was kept?”

She pointed at a gap in one of the eye-level shelves in the middle of the long wall.

“Was it always there?”

“As long as I remember.”

“And the books next to it? Was there a lot of rearranging?”

“Not in my lifetime. We can ask Granddad, but I don’t recall any shifting about. Books stayed in their place.”

He inspected the books on either side of the gap. An eighteenth-century botany book and a seventeenth-century volume on monuments of the Holy Land.

“No, they’re not contemporaneous,” she observed. “I doubt there’s an association.”

“Let’s start with the first clue,” Will said, retrieving the poem from his case. “The first one bears Prometheus’s flame.”

“Right,” she said. “Prometheus. Stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals. That’s my sum total.”

Will gestured around the room, “Anything come to mind?”

“Well, it’s rather broad, isn’t it? Books on Greek mythology? Hearths? Torches? The barbecue pit!”

He gave her a “very funny” look. “Let’s start with the books. Is there a catalogue?”

“Needs to be one, but there isn’t. Another problem, of course, is that Granddad has been rather vigorous in his selling.”

“Nothing we can do about that,” Will said. “Let’s be systematic. I’ll start on this end. Why don’t you start over there?”

While they focused on the first clue, for the sake of efficiency, they kept the others in mind to prevent redoing the exercise if possible. They kept a lookout for any Flemish or Dutch-themed books and any text that seemed to refer to a prophet of any sort. They had no inkling how to tackle the “son who sinned” reference.

The process was laborious, and an hour into it, Will was growing discouraged by its needle-in-a-haystack quality. And often, it wasn’t as easy as pulling a book out, opening the title page, and shoving it back. He needed Isabelle’s help with every book in Latin or French. She would come over, give a quick peek, and hand it back with a light, “Nope!”

The afternoon light, as muted as it was, faded completely, and Isabelle responded by turning on every fixture and taking a match to the fireplace kindling. “Behold, I give you fire!” she said as the flames licked the logs.

By early evening, they were done. Despite a not-very-old volume of Bullfinch’s Mythology, there wasn’t a single book that sparked a modicum of interest. “Either the poem’s not referring to a book, or it’s not here anymore. Let’s move on,” Will said.

“All right,” she said agreeably. “We’ll have a look at all the old fireplaces. Hidden panels, false mantels, loose stones. I’m having fun! You?”

He checked his phone again for a text messages from Nancy. There were none. “Having a blast,” he answered.