The Ghost Manuscript Read online

  Harper had furnished sparsely. A simple wooden desk and Harvard chair faced the windows. There was only a lamp and a leather blotter on the desk. To the left was a long wooden table with a Tiffany lamp at each end. A velvet settee and standing lamp occupied the space between the desk and the library door. It was a reading seat.

  Carys would never leave if this room were hers.

  “My father spent most of his waking moments in here,” said JJ. He looked up at the balcony with a wistful expression that folded into sadness. “He has no use for it now.”

  “Mr. Harper,” she said. “I know this is none of my business, but this collection is one of the best Dark Age collections in existence. It would be a tragedy to—”

  “I know,” he said. “Selling these books is the last thing he wants. I…I don’t….” He stopped midsentence, then cleared his throat.

  He handed the skeleton key, on a ring with a dozen smaller keys, and his business card to Carys. “These keys open the cases. I’ve written the security code for the library door on the back of my card. The security directions are on the plaque under the keypad. It’s on the wall behind the door after you enter. When you come into the library, you have two minutes to shut off the alarm. When you are leaving, reset the alarm, and then you have thirty seconds to lock the door with the skeleton key before the alarm goes off. Please let Nicola know when you’re leaving.”

  “Nicola?”

  “The…the housekeeper,” he said. “I’ve kept her on to clean the place for the showings while it’s for sale. How long do you think this will take?”

  “It’s hard to tell. Three weeks at the minimum. It depends on how complete the catalog is.”

  “Yes, of course,” said JJ, picking some lint off his sleeve and looking up at her, again, with a brief half smile. “I’m sure you’ll do an excellent job. My father would be glad to know you’re here.”

  Without saying goodbye, JJ walked out of the library and left the house, closing the front door quietly behind him. His silent departure sent a pang through Carys—his sadness felt familiar.

  The crunching of car tires on the stone driveway slowly faded. She stood in the center of the library and took a deep breath through her mouth to reset herself. Exhaled. Then she inhaled deeply through her nose. The scent of old manuscripts was perfume to Carys, old and animal and dusty and always triggering the same physical reaction. Her shoulders relaxed, her fingers spread apart and stretched, her brain became quieter and more focused. In this library, and libraries she had seen like it around the world—though none this grand—she felt most at peace. Especially when she was alone.

  Arrayed around her was Harper’s life’s work, the physical manifestation of his decades-long, single-minded devotion to early Romano-British Dark Age manuscripts. Harper never lost an auction at Sothington’s, or elsewhere. When Harper’s bidder was in the room or on the phone, there wasn’t much point in trying to win. He always went as high as necessary, and eventually even the museums stopped bidding against him.

  There were very few collectors as obsessed with the time period as John Harper. He couldn’t have cared less for ornate illuminated manuscripts—he even passed on a previously unknown fifth volume of the Book of Kells. He didn’t want first editions or Shakespeare folios. But he would spend a million dollars on a single-page letter if it was dated to or dealt with the time period of AD 400 to 700 in the British Isles.

  Carys pulled her white cotton work gloves from her briefcase and put them on. She slid the key marked “I” into the lock of the first bookcase and opened the door, climbed the rolling ladder, and pulled the first manuscript on the top shelf. She gazed at the book’s worn animal-hide cover and ran her hand across it. The hair follicles of the animal’s skin rose like Braille under her fingertips through the thin gloves. She climbed down, closed the bookcase, and walked to the settee.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” she murmured at the manuscript as she sat down. She opened it, held it up to her nose and inhaled deeply, savoring the rich, ancient smell.

  Usually, after she was done smelling a book’s odor, a mix of skin and decay and earth, she’d see how much of it she could read. The manuscripts she’d procured for the Harper Collection were all in Latin, and she’d contrived a way for many of them to make a pit stop at Sothington’s—for verification purposes, of course—before they took up residence in this room. She estimated she’d read about a quarter of the manuscripts he owned.

  She’d read the elegantly composed Roman parchments that told of everything from love affairs to legal transactions. She’d read Latin transcriptions of some of the earliest Greek Christian scriptures, though they were of less interest to her. What she loved were the letters, written in Roman cursive, a chance to see inside the minds of men dead for fifteen hundred years. Roman verbosity and literacy made the sudden silence of the Dark Ages in Britain all the more stunning—there was barely anything written in the British Isles except by monks after the illiterate Anglo-Saxon hordes had finished ravaging great swaths of the country and its people in the mid-sixth century.

  Carys flipped to the manuscript’s first page and began to read. It was an accounting of land holdings in what the catalog surmised was far western England, perhaps Cornwall. The information wasn’t particularly historic, but the manuscript itself was a rare artifact written by some regional administrator’s hand, likely in the years between AD 420 and 460. The writing was small, but sure and steady and clear on the page. It was one of the manuscripts discovered in an impoverished Irish church’s ancient vault. She had acquired the entire collection eight years earlier for auction at Sothington’s.

  As she read, the walls of the library seemed to fade away, replaced by the stone walls of an imperial administrator’s office in a small British settlement, nestled safely in a valley between rolling green hills, ignorant of the devastation flowing like cold blood down from the north.

  At first, Carys barely noticed the singing. When she finally became aware of the sweet female voice, she assumed JJ had left a radio on somewhere, tuned to a Celtic music hour.

  “Gwenu’n dirion yn dy hun,” came the voice, unaccompanied by instruments. It didn’t need any. It was lilting and clear.

  Then Carys’s brow tightened. She knew this song. It was a Welsh lullaby. “Suo Gan.” Her father used to sing it to her. Her stomach clenched.

  “Ai angylion fry sy’n gwenu,” the voice continued in that impenetrable language. She never had been able to master it. The song unlocked a memory she hadn’t had in years—she and her father singing this song, he in Welsh, she in English. The English version flooded her mind, like it had been waiting just below the surface to be remembered.

  “What visions make your face bright? Are the angels above smiling at you, in your peaceful rest?” Carys sang.

  The woman’s voice stopped.

  “Good lord!” it chirped. Carys jumped up.

  On the other side of the library, up on the gallery level, was an older woman wearing a baggy T-shirt and yellow rubber gloves, wielding a spray bottle and a crumpled-up newspaper, about to clean the glass face of one of the bookcases.

  “You scared me half to death!” said the woman, patting her chest with her hand. “I didn’t see you.”

  “That makes two of us,” said Carys. The woman studied her for a moment.

  “Are you the woman from Sothington’s?” she said with a thick Welsh accent. She dropped her cleaning supplies and started down the gallery stairs.

  “Yes, I am,” Carys said.

  “JJ said you’d be coming by today,” said the woman as she walked toward Carys at the settee. She had very white skin, and her hair was long and gray, tied back in a ponytail. She was about Carys’s height and was soft around the middle, maybe in her late-fifties. The sparkle in her green eyes, her elegant, narrow nose, sharp jawline, flawless complexion, and the high arch of her eyebrows were all remnants
of a face that had been very beautiful once—and still was, in its way. “And you know the song. You’re Welsh?”

  “My father was,” said Carys. “My mother was American.”

  “So that makes you half Welsh. Better than no Welsh! Where was he from?” asked the woman.

  “Mumbles.”

  “You’re joking! I used to live in Swansea. What’s your father’s name?”

  “Anthony. Anthony Jones,” said Carys. She hadn’t said that name out loud in years.

  “Well, there’s only about a million Anthony Joneses in Mumbles. I knew about twenty of them in my time there. How old is he?”

  “I’m not sure. Early sixties. I haven’t seen much of him since I was seven,” said Carys.

  The woman’s friendly smile faded. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “It’s okay. My name is Carys.”

  “I’m Nicola,” the woman said. “Nicola Powell. Housekeeper. JJ’s been kind enough to let me stick around until the house is sold.”

  “JJ doesn’t live here?” asked Carys.

  “No, no. He’s got a brownstone on Beacon Hill,” said Nicola. “He’s a partner at a hedge fund downtown. Got a PhD in computers and mathematics or some such. Very, very bright. Dates supermodels. He’s quite the catch. Are you single?”

  “Sort of,” said Carys.

  “Hard to do better than the handsome son of a rich man,” said Nicola. “Although JJ is entirely self-made. Never took a dime from his father. Even paid his own way through university and post-grad. He’s a good boy. Loves his dah to death but always wanted to be his own man.”

  “I’m probably not his type.”

  “You’re saying you’re not a supermodel?” asked Nicola with a grin.

  “And I’m much too old for him,” said Carys. “Thirty-seven.”

  Nicola laughed. “Oh yes. You may be right. Well, I’m sure that you have many other fine qualities. It’s very nice to meet you, Carys. Did your dad ever tell you what your name means?”

  Nicola was lovely, but her accent was grating on Carys’s nerves.

  “Yes. He did,” Carys said.

  It means love, she thought. Not that it mattered.

  2

  Saturday, June 9

  Carys was at the center of everything. The world spun by, blurry and colored and full of fast lines. The cars sounded like they were circling around and around her. Past her spun Mum and Dah, waving. The flat, gray ocean. The street full of stone buildings. The cars. The swing set. Rocking horse. Mum and Dah again, still waving.

  She tilted back her head and above her was sky, the color of the dust that gathered under her bed. Why was it always gray here? A white bird flew above her in bigger and bigger circles, until it flew right out of her view. Goodbye, bird.

  Dah hopped on the merry-go-round next to her. His hair was blowing all over the place into funny shapes, and his eyes were wet from laughing. Carys smiled. They were both at the center of everything then, the world spinning around them slower and slower. Mum was next to them when they stopped. She was drinking her beer. She scooped Carys up. She smelled like warm clothes out of the dryer. She hugged Carys and said what she always said.

  “My brave big girl.”

  Carys smiled in her sleep, then remembered and woke up.

  Steven lay snoring softly next to her in the king canopy bed, and her heart sank. She rolled over and tried to relax herself back into sleep, or something close to it. It was no use. It never was after that dream.

  The sky brightened a couple of hours later. She watched through the open window as the mountains surrounding the Vermont village where they were spending the weekend turned from black to darkest green. When the sunshine finally lit up their peaks, Steven rolled over. His body was boxy and muscular, his semi-successful college football career close enough in his rearview mirror that he still worked out daily to maintain it. He’d be up and off to the gym every morning at six, except on vacation. On the two mornings a week when Carys stayed over, he’d get back from the gym sweaty and horny. She normally found delight in his body. Not this morning. That dream.

  Steven smiled at her and rolled over onto her, reaching his big hands around her waist. He kissed her, probing her mouth with his tongue. She pushed him off, got out of bed, and headed to the bathroom.

  “Hurry back,” he said. As she turned back to look at him, a lock of his straight, brown hair dropped across his broad forehead and thick eyebrows, so artfully arranged that it annoyed her. Crap, she thought, here it comes.

  She forced a smile and closed the bathroom door. Naked, she stared at her reflection in the mirror. New crow’s feet trod lightly around her eyes, although her forehead, like Steven’s, was uncreased. There were random grays sprouting along the part in her black hair. There were a few grays in her eyebrows. Her cheeks were beginning to drop a bit, and her tall, wiry body, which she could always count on to mask her true age, hadn’t been keeping up its muscle tone quite the same way it used to. A fatty pooch was forming at her belly. Daylight truly was burning.

  “Carys,” Steven said from the bedroom.

  “Out in a minute,” she said. “Can you call for some coffee?”

  “Yup,” he said. The bed squeaked as he rolled over to pick up the phone. Two buttons pushed. Coffee ordered. Phone back in its cradle. Bed squeak as he rolled back over.

  “What do you want to do today?” Steven asked.

  Her throat clenched. She inhaled and exhaled as quietly as she could. Her body always knew it was over long before her brain did.

  That night, halfway through dinner and a bottle of burgundy in front of a roaring fire at a French bistro just outside of Bennington, Steven said he wanted to talk. Carys hadn’t done much talking for most of the day. She hoped her changed heart wasn’t too obvious. But he wasn’t dumb.

  “Thirty-seven years old,” he said, his sleepy, heavily lidded green eyes staring into his wine glass. “You’ve never had a relationship longer than this one?”

  “I’m incredibly picky.” She smiled, but his face stayed dark.

  “I’m tired, Carys,” he said. “I am not sure what I’m doing wrong here.”

  “You’re not doing anything wrong,” she said.

  “I feel like there’s a wall.”

  She kept her mouth closed. There was a wall, of course, but it had nothing to do with him. He was a good man. So were the ones who had come before. Each time, after a few months, she couldn’t see the point of continuing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. This was true.

  “You’re completely closed off,” he said. “You won’t talk about anything. You don’t like talking about your work, or your friends.” He lowered his voice. “You refuse to talk about your family or your mother’s suicide. For chrissakes, Carys, I could swap you out for a sex doll and I’d barely notice.”

  She took a slow sip of her wine. They were done here.

  “Let’s get the check,” she said, smiling to try to bleed off some of the anger that was rising up in him. It didn’t work. He put his knife down a little too hard.

  Getting to this conversation with Steven had taken longer than usual. Six months he’d made it. She was impressed at his persistence. It appeared she had finally exhausted it. She tried to never let her relationships get to a point where her lover was angry when it ended. Still, it always ended the same way—with him closed out, perplexed by a woman who wasn’t actively seeking what he believed all women want, and Carys just this side of indifferent. She never pushed or implied that it was ever going to be more than it was, which, with Steven, was dinner twice a week followed by sex. This weekend was the first time they’d gone away together overnight. It was obviously the last.

  They didn’t speak until the check arrived. He reached for it.

  “I’ve got it,” she said, and pulled it out from under his hand. He loo
ked up angrily, staring at her, challenging her to fight for it. She looked down at the bill, reached placidly for her purse, and extracted a credit card. Steven’s face turned blank.

  They walked out to his car. Steven opened her door and his eyes searched hers for a response, a conversation, some sort of dialogue. She just slid into the passenger seat and sat silently as they drove back to the inn.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” he finally asked as she reached over to turn out the light next to the bed.

  “There’s really not much to say,” she answered.

  The next morning, after brushing her teeth, she bared them to the mirror. Her gums were red and healthy, her teeth straight, strong and white. Not yet, she thought. I’d still rather be alone. As long as I have all my teeth.

  They came back to Boston that morning. There was no talk of next time when he dropped her off at her apartment. He hugged her briefly, sadly, and drove off, the wheels of his black BMW spinning in the road dirt at the end of her driveway.

  3

  Monday, June 11

  It always felt this way—a weight gone. The departure of a man, or anybody who was cluttering up her life, brought Carys profound relief, like looking at a clean, flat sheet of paper. Untouched, uncomplicated, simple. There was probably some sort of psychological diagnosis that claimed this feeling as a primary symptom. She didn’t care. She loved it. It was never loneliness, just simplicity. It gave her mental space to do her work. She drove up the driveway at Adeona with a blank mind and a smile on her face.

  The front door swung open as she approached the doorstep. Nicola smiled back at her.

  “JJ’s not here,” she said. “Let’s have a cup before you start. I made some muffins.”