Doubtless if she had been able to speak openly to anyone, she would not have come to haunt the Reading Room, or to believe that somewhere in the labyrinth was hidden that one book, whatever it might be: not a work of philosophy or theology, for Julia had had little taste for abstract thought even in happier days, and could now make no more sense of philosophical discourse than she could of Sanskrit. She imagined a voice speaking plainly and directly out of the wilderness into which she had stumbled; for someone must have crossed it before her, and found exactly the wisdom she so painfully lacked.
To be entirely candid with herself, she was also drawn to the Reading Room by the hope of seeing Frederick. But the hope had so far proven vain. Recently, while consulting the catalogue, she had overheard an exchange between two men, evidently acquaintances of Frederick's, the one remarking that Liddell had become a complete recluse these days, to which his companion replied that poor old Freddy must be immersed in the composition of some great work. They had laughed at this, in a way that Julia found very troubling, so that she had returned to her place and sat for an indefinite time gazing sightlessly at the volume before her.
The truth was that she still loved him, though she wished she did not. She had tried to hate him and failed; she could not even hate Lydia, for how could she blame a dead woman for what had happened? Indeed she felt herself increasingly surrounded by people who preferred the company of the deceased to that of the living. Her husband, as he had grown older, had become ever more fascinated by his departed forebears; then there was poor Aunt Helen who had spent the greater part of her life going from one'seance to the next, constantly receiving messages from her adored fiance Lionel who had been lost to fever in the Crimea nearly half a century before. Julia had lately accompanied her aunt to a few of these gatherings, and had been depressed by the mingled accents of credulity and fraud, not to mention the thought of all those others thronging the great city in pursuit of phantoms. And now there was Frederick, lost to the memory of Lydia; and Julia herself was scarcely in a better case. She had often selfishly wished they had fallen from the balcony that afternoon; she would have died in bliss instead of being condemned to linger in a world where, as it seemed to her, so many of the living moved like ghosts among the seekers of the dead.
Such were her thoughts on a sombre afternoon late in February, when the fog hovering in the dome seemed thicker than usual. Julia was on the verge of packing up to leave when a book was delivered to her place; she did not see by whom. It was not, however, the edition of Clare's poems for which she had earlier lodged an application, but a plain octavo volume with black boards; so plain, in fact, that it bore neither a tide nor an authors name upon its spine. Puzzled, she opened it, to be confronted only by the heading, "Chapter One"; yet there was no sign of damage or missing pages. It appeared to be a novel; indeed a novel set in Bloomsbury, for it began with a description of a furious altercation between two cabmen in Great Russell Street. One of the men wore a dirty red kerchief, the other a white; as the dispute grew yet more heated, the two men descended from their respective boxes and fell to pushing one another about the pavement, and then to blows, whereupon both were forced to give way by "the approach of an immense woman, dressed entirely in black and bearing in her arms what appeared from its shape to be a child's coffin, incongruously wrapped in brown paper and tied with string"-but when Julia went to turn the page she found that it had not been cut. Curious to know how the narrative would proceed, she looked about for an attendant. At once a tall, nondescript man whom she could not recall seeing before approached; he had evidently observed her difficulty, for with a murmured "Pray allow me, madam" he took up the volume and disappeared through a side door.
Julia sat for some minutes waiting for him to return, but he did not, and her faint curiosity dwindled away to nothing. The pall of melancholy settled once more about her; she collected her belongings and left the Reading Room. Outside, the sky was dark and lowering it looked as if rain, or even snow, might begin to fall at any moment, so she hastened across the courtyard and requested the constable at the gate to secure her a cab. None were in sight as she stepped onto the pavement of Great Russell Street, but then she saw two appearing round the Montague Street corner. She heard the constable whistle; the cab at the rear swung out and attempted to pass the one in front; the vehicles seemed to touch, and the next moment the two cabmen were embroiled in a furious exchange of oaths. One leapt down from his box; the other followed; Julia thought she saw a flash of red at the latter's throat, but it was not until a vast woman, clad in voluminous layers of black, emerged from a doorway bearing a large, strangely shaped parcel in her arms and forced the struggling cabmen to part, one on each side of her, as she set out across the road, that the full import of what she was seeing struck Julia like a physical blow. In the same instant she heard the constable addressing her and, half turning, saw that a third cab had emerged from Museum Street and drawn up immediately behind her.
"Best get in, ma'am," said the constable. "I'll 'ave to see to that there embrocation."
Numbly, Julia obeyed. As her driver turned his horse, she had just time to see the two cabmen retreating towards their vehides at the approach of the constable, and the woman's immense back departing in the direction of Southampton Row.
Ten o'clock the next morning found her once again at the Reading Room, though she had never before arrived so soon after opening time. The day was raw and foggy, the heating barely sufficient to dispel the bone-numbing chill of the journey, but Julia was conscious only of her need to recover the anonymous black volume, which meant finding the man who had brought it to her, for she could not recall even seeing a press-mark. Since waking early from a troubled sleep she had been prey to increasing doubt as to whether she had actually read the account of the scene in the street, or had merely been confused by an especially striking instance of the experience the French term deja vu. Like others of her acquaintance she had occasionally found herself, for the space of a few sentences, in the midst of a conversation which seemed oddly familiar, but nothing remotely like yesterday's experience had ever befallen her.
The search for the tall, nondescript attendant proved, however, hopeless. She found herself entirely unable to describe him with any accuracy, save that he was tall and had been clad, she thought, in a grey suit of some kind; her memory simply refused to summon him as anything more than a blurred outline of a man. The attendants on duty did their best to accommodate her; three possible candidates were summoned from the nether regions for her inspection, but without result. They were however adamant in maintaining that the delivery of a volume without a press-mark was an impossibility; author and tide might conceivably be dispensed with, but a book without a press-mark, madam, would be like a soul without a name upon the Day of Judgment: it could never arise, and would be lost for all eternity. Julia could see the force of this; she could see, too, that to persist would merely confirm their evident belief that the book had been delivered to her only in a dream (she had, of course, said nothing about what had followed in the street) and so she returned, bewildered, to her place.