‘What do you mean?’
‘There are another eight boxes up there. It could be in any one of them. Still, the longest journey starts with a single step,’ she added cheerfully, taking him over to a desk in a dark corner. ‘You look through this one and I’ll start getting the rest down. Now, what are we looking for?’
‘It could be an electronic data holder. Or a paper printout. That’s the most likely.’
‘Off you go, then.’
He did as instructed. Piece by piece, he took the papers out of the boxes and settled down and tried to read, if only because Emily had begun to do the same. He didn’t want her to realise that he found reading difficult, that he was long out of practice. It was made tolerable only by the fact that he would occasionally sneak a glance at the young woman now sitting opposite doing the same, a frown of concentration on her forehead somehow making her dusty face oddly attractive.
It had an almost hypnotic effect on him, to concentrate absolutely on something. He even began to have a faint glimmer of understanding of these people and their insistence on the virtues of pointless activity.
Alongside that was a sense of growing frustration. What was all this stuff, these boxes of old, dank notebooks and crumbling envelopes? Everything was written by hand, and he had never seen that before, except in a museum. He was impressed by the effort, but he had to struggle through every word, and even then they meant very little to him.
There were dozens of notebooks, folders, packets of paper, some covered with writing, others with only a few illegible scribbles. He spent half an hour on an old, yellowed, fragile sheet, carefully analysing each letter, adding them together then extracting the sentence, but it meant nothing. ‘I will see the storyteller next Wednesday’ had so far lost any context that there was no hope of understanding its significance, if it had ever had any. Another scrap, which was written on a primitive writing machine and so was much easier to read, was equally problematic — ‘Mr Williams’ work over the past three years has ranged from the incompetent to the fatuous. He is ideally suited to a career in your bank.’
After three hours Emily found it, but only because she ignored his instructions and went through everything. The prize was not what he had anticipated. No little sliver of plastic or metal. No freshly printed sheets of symbols. Instead, it was buried at the bottom of a large box of papers, and it did not look new or fresh. It was scarcely larger than his hand and consisted of about fifteen pages that were bound in leather. The dust as he opened it made him sneeze. Inside was page after page of the bizarre script which meant nothing to him and which, Hanslip had said, only a machine could understand.
He studied it closely. It was written by hand, in an ink which had not faded. Only the first page was in normal characters. It read, ‘The Devil’s Handwriting’. There was a stuck-down piece of paper with ‘Tudmore Court’ printed on it in black.
‘That must be it,’ he said. ‘Well done!’
‘Not what you expected?’
‘No. Tell me, does this look as if it was recently put there?’ It seemed more than ever like a bizarrely complicated way of hiding something. The box and its contents looked as though they had been undisturbed for a very long time indeed: the dust, the smell of decay, the mouse droppings all appeared as though they had never been touched.
‘If it was, then it was hidden by someone who knew what they were doing. I would have said it had been there for a while. Look,’ Emily said as she picked up another book. ‘You see the mark here? It’s the outline of the notebook. The cover has stained it a little. That only happens over a long period. And it was slightly stuck to the papers above it. That again normally takes years.’
She took it from his hands, examined it closely, then held it to her face and sniffed. ‘If you want my opinion, then it seems like the real thing to me. Genuinely eighteenth-century.’
‘What do you mean? Eighteenth-century?’ he asked sharply. ‘Not twentieth?’
‘No. The paper, the handwriting, the smell...’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Then we will have to go through the entire lot carefully. See if there are any other references, to give it a context. Faking one document is hard, but faking several of them would be almost impossible. We can run some tests on the paper and ink.’
‘Let me try something else, first of all. Could you call the man in charge?’
Emily ran up the stairs and came back a few minutes later with the caretaker, the old man who had waved his hand dismissively when they had arrived and allowed them to wander around at will.
‘Has anyone else ever asked for these papers?’ Jack asked him. ‘I know there are no official records. But unofficially?’
‘These? Why do you ask?’
‘Answer the question.’
‘No one has been to look at them. Officially or unofficially.’
He glanced sideways, very slightly, but in a way which put Jack on the alert. Taking Emily by the arm, he pulled her close.
‘I think we should get out of here quickly,’ he said. ‘Not through the main gate. Is there another exit?’
She nodded. ‘Follow me.’
39
Jay woke up alone the next morning; Kate was already preparing breakfast, and Callan was sharpening his spade so that the earth could be dug and stacked into a mound over the burning twigs to make the charcoal. They would set it going, then leave it; the charcoal burner would be along later to tend it for the next three days.
He was peaceful and happy until a flood of memories burst into his head. Was all of that true? Surely not, but every single recollection was crystal clear. The memory of her warm body against his, mixed with images of Henary’s dark countenance as he heard the news. The pleasure he had felt in telling the story mingled with a vision announcing that he would never be allowed to tell a story again. That, in turn, faded as he recalled how her hair had felt as she rested her head on his chest.
Maybe it was all a fantasy. No one else was behaving any differently. Callan was whistling, Kate was busy stirring a pot, her hair now held up with a short length of vine so it would not fall into her eyes. He got up cautiously. They both greeted him. Nothing in their words or expressions suggested anything amiss.
As they ate, Callan laid out the plan for the day. Make the fire, stack more wood, walk halfway back to Willdon, stopping to mend a bridge over the river which was in poor repair. Then one more night in the forest.
Work began; Kate prepared the sticks, he and Callan stacked them in triangles, about three feet high, then stacked longer ones around and on top, leaving only a small hole for the smoke to escape. Next the wooden structure was packed with leaves and turf to make it airtight, and finally covered with earth. Once this was done, they were ready to drop the burning embers of the fire into the hole to set the structure alight, and finally seal it so that it would burn slowly, combusting the wood but not consuming it. That was the tricky part, which needed the charcoal burner’s skill.
The memory of his young days spent sitting all night with his uncle in the woods near his village made Jay forget more recent events. He lost himself in the work and was pleased to see how much he remembered, cutting short logs and sticks so they fitted perfectly, sealing the structure and making sure as much wood as possible would be burned.
Only towards the end did he get a reminder. They were nearly ready for the embers when Callan stood up and stretched himself.
‘That was a good morning’s work, young student,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised.’
Jay smiled.
‘She is good as well. I thought she’d just go through the motions, but she’s worked hard and well. Look at her! She even looks like a farmer’s girl now. If I could have her for a few months I’d turn her into a proper forester.’