The Book of Air and Shadows

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.
    It was just sheer luck, thought Crosetti, that so many sheets of what seemed to be from the same hand had ended up in this copy of the