“What are you talking about?” she asked wearily.
“Economics,” he replied. “Margaux could never stomach the subject. Too… factual, I think.”
“And?”
“All Keynes’s papers are held in an archive at King’s College. She won’t have thought to look.”
Beyond the heavy oak door, Jo caught the sound of massive feet tramping. Hamish.
“All right,” she said, feeling cornered. “But if there’s nothing there, you’ll take me straight to London?”
“Agreed,” Peter answered without hesitation.
IVY GUPTA HELD OUT HER HAND FOR THE FOLDED PIECE OF torn paper that bore Hamish Caruthers’s scribbled introduction. It was usual for scholars to schedule access in advance; and as neither Jo nor Peter could present academic credentials, and the daylight was waning, Peter had imposed upon Hamish one last time. Ivy Gupta ran the King’s College Library Archive, which was housed in an annex. She scanned Hamish’s note of introduction, then said, “He urges me to lock and bar every door against you. Are you really an unscrupulous bugger who’ll stop at nothing to gain your ends, Mr. Llewellyn?”
Peter smiled at her disarmingly. “Hamish and I have known each other for years. Familiarity gives him the right to sport with contempt.”
“I see.” She set the note to one side. “We close in two hours. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to let you use what time remains — ”
“May we have the index to John Maynard Keynes’s papers, please?”
IT WAS OBVIOUS THAT KEYNES HAD LIVED IN A VANISHED era of paper and ink, when the smallest thought of every day was recorded and dispatched to somebody. Accessing the collection, Jo thought, was like wandering through Keynes’s brain, a vast repository of individual moments cataloged under such headings as Visits; Articles; Speeches and Broadcasts; and her personal favorite — Miscellaneous. The word Screed was apt.
“I don’t know the nature of your interest,” Ivy Gupta said austerely as she handed Peter a printed copy of the Keynes online catalog, “but you’ll see the total collection has been shifted about and reorganized over the years. You’ve only to note the files you wish to consult, submit the slips, and one of our people will fetch them. You’ve got an hour and forty-three minutes until closing. I’ll stop in just prior to six o’clock.”
“Right,” Peter said briskly.
Jo leaned over the catalog he held. It was itemized by year, single-spaced, and ran to five pages.
Indian currency and finance, 1909–1913, 1 box.
Post-war reconstruction, 1916–1920, 1 box.
Economic consequences of the peace, 1919–1925, 4 boxes.
Committee on National Debt and Taxation (Colwyn Committee), 1924–1925, 1 envelope, paper…
“We’re going to accomplish squat,” she said. “We could sit here for a month and a half and never find anything.”
“Don’t be so defeatist.” He reached for a pencil left helpfully in a bin on the table and began to check off items on the list. “We can ignore everything economic, I daresay, and concentrate on the personal. That rules out most of Keynes’s life, frankly, as we’re solely interested in the personal papers for the months surrounding Virginia’s death — say, the autumn of 1940 through the spring of ’41. Keynes died in ’46. That should narrow the field considerably.”
“You mean, like: Letters, 1906–1946?” she retorted, unhelpfully.
“There’s a subcatalog for those.” Peter seemed determined to forgive her acid tone. “Each letter is summarized, with the name of the correspondent and a few lines about the subject. You might usefully skim the entries for our time span. I’ll concentrate on the Tilton House papers — there’s only one box of those, and they’re bound to have references to the Charleston crowd, because they were neighbors. If we have any time after that, we can nose into the stuff found in the King’s storeroom in 2006 — it’s possible nobody’s gone through that lot very thoroughly, as yet.”
“Oh, goody. What’s my subcatalog?”
“It’s an index card file. Coded JMK/PP/45.”
“You’re kidding me. Index cards?”
Peter glared at her over the rim of his glasses. “Don’t be so bloody American. Not everybody possesses digital scanners. The most they’ve achieved at this place is microfiche.”
Jo sighed. The prospect of reaching London that night, much less her suitcase full of clothes and toiletries languishing in Kent, was growing more and more remote; and the stolen Woolf manuscript was just as gone. She was tired, she wanted a change of underwear by dawn, and the thought of Gray Westlake kept nipping at her mind like a small dog. She almost reached for her cell phone, but a large notice on the Annexe wall commanded that she KINDLY REFRAIN FROM MOBILE USE in the Reading Room.
She turned instead to scan the heavy oaken bank of catalog drawers at one end of the reference area. Peter was already submitting his request for Keynes Collection item 58/TH: Tilton House, 1 box to the archive runners. And they had only an hour and thirty-four minutes, now, before closing.
JO WAS HANDICAPPED, OF COURSE, BY HER INABILITY TO recognize almost all of the names of the people who’d animated Keynes’s England — that place that was not this place, but another country, one on the edge of nightmare, an England where bombs rained nightly on London’s streets and Cambridge itself was bathed in fire.
So many of the letters written to Keynes in those months — personal letters from friends Jo had never heard of — were about the war. The summaries were clinicaclass="underline" Brief description of ration programme in Sussex, June 1940; Death notice of childhood friend in bombing raid, August 1940; Decision of neighbour to slaughter milch cows in fear of German invasion.… She could not afford to look at any of them, although they sang to her like a pack of Sirens. This was Jock’s world, too — the world her grandfather had lost, and Jo found it tantalizing, a portal to a parallel universe. She shook herself slightly and tried to concentrate.
Peter was humming as he scanned the pages of the Tilton House papers — a box three feet long and one foot wide, propped on the table between them.
“I’m useless,” Jo muttered. “None of these people means anything to me. I’m probably missing the whole point.”
“Focus on content, then,” Peter ordered. “I’ll help with the names.”
And so she read on.
It was twenty minutes before closing when at last she found what they were looking for.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“MARGAUX WILL MEET US TOMORROW AT THE Connaught,” Marcus Symonds-Jones said as he cradled his phone. “Nine-ish, I should think. Coffee and croissants, no doubt. The cow quite liked the notion of holding court; a spot of breakfast should lull her into a false sense of complacency.” “Why false?” Gray Westlake demanded. “She has the manuscript. She has the upper hand.”
“So she believes. But is the notebook a genuine Woolf?” “Surely somebody here at Sotheby’s can tell us that.” Marcus smiled. He thought, but did not say, And set an excellent price for it, you poor bugger.
“I’m coming to that meeting,” Imogen Cantwell announced belligerently. “Someone must represent The Family’s interest.”
“Why not one of the Nicolsons themselves?” Gray suggested.
The change in Imogen’s expression was comical to behold; she was at once appalled and flummoxed.
“Too soon,” Marcus said smoothly. “And unnecessarily complicating. If we involve The Family, we involve the Trust, and our ability to contain the negative aspects of this unfortunate affair — for Imogen, and your friend Miss Bellamy — may be quite limited.”