The Book of Air and Shadows

sorry,” he croaked. She turned and strode rapidly away, almost running, and after a miserable moment he skulked after her into a tan brick building with a columned entryway and up two flights of stairs, stumbling a little because he was kicking himself so hard. Okay, end of story, expunge her from his mind, he’d done it God only knew how many times before, no stranger to rejection, not usually
quite
this stupid, not
quite
so much his own stupid fault, but still he could go out classy, do this business with Bulstrode, a little correct nod and handshake afterward, walk off. God! How could he have been so tooth-hurtingly dumb! Woman tells him she doesn’t want to talk about her past, so of course he does nothing else, and…but here they were, she knocking tap-a-tap on frosted glass and a plummy voice from within, “Yeh-ehss.”
    The man was wearing a vest, or what he would have called a waistcoat, and as they entered he was slipping on the brown tweed suit jacket that went with it: a short plump man in his fifties, with smooth dull pale brown hair worn medium long and arranged so as to hide a bald patch in the center. Jowly, with round tortoiseshell glasses. Hand when shaken unpleasantly soft and moist. Crosetti hated him already; it made a pleasant change from the current self-contempt.
    They sat. She did the talking. Bulstrode was interested in the provenance, the age and origin of the volumes of the Churchill in which the manuscript had been found. She gave these details tersely and, as far as Crosetti could tell, accurately. While this went on he looked around the office, which was small, not much larger than a suburban bathroom, with one dusty window looking out on Amsterdam Avenue. A single glassed-in bookcase, books on only one shelf, otherwise full of stacked papers, untidily arranged. Besides that, two wooden armchairs (in which Rolly and he were sitting), a standard wooden desk somewhat battered, a scatter of papers and journals thereon, and a large framed photograph, whose image Crosetti could not see, although he shifted and peered to the extent propriety allowed.
    “Very interesting, Miss Rolly,” the professor was now saying. “May I examine the documents?”
    Both Rolly and Bulstrode now looked at Crosetti, and he felt his heart sink, as we do when an unfamilar doctor asks us to slip out of our clothes and into a gown. The papers were
his
, and now they were passing out of his hands, to be confirmed as genuine or rejected as spurious, but by someone else, someone he didn’t know, whose eyes were all funny behind those thick lenses, avid, crazed really, and Rolly’s eyes were blank blue fields with less feeling in them than the sky itself, and he had to resist the urge to grab up his package and flee. But what he did was to pull out only the letter from Richard Bracegirdle to his wife. It was easy to distinguish these pages by feel from the rest of the sheets. Let’s see what this geek had to say about the letter before exposing the ciphered letters was Crosetti’s thinking.
    He slumped in his chair as Bulstrode took the letter and spread the pages out on his desk. It was fear that made him hand them over, a chicken-guts fear of appearing even
more
stupid in the damned woman’s eyes than he was already. He knew he would never remove the shame of that moment with Rolly from his mind, it would be a lifetime image, bubbling up at random time and again to blight his joy and deepen depression. And also the image of the girl locked in the root cellar listening to the approaching steps of her tormentor, and he’d never now be able to help her with that through love, he’d screwed that up too, you asshole, Crosetti, you complete turd…
    “Can you read it, Professor?”
    This was Rolly; the sound of her voice jerked Crosetti from the dear land of self-flagellation, Bulstrode cleared his throat heavily, and said, “Oh, yes, indeed. The hand is crude but quite clear. A man I imagine who did a good deal of writing. Not an educated man, I think, not a university man, but a writing man all the same. A clerk perhaps? Originally, I mean.” Bulstrode returned to his reading. Time passed, perhaps half an hour, that seemed like time in the dentist’s chair to Crosetti. At last the professor sat up and said, “Hm, yes, in all, a very interesting and valuable document. This,” he continued, pointing, “seems to be the last letter of a man named Richard Bracegirdle, who apparently was wounded at the