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“What now?” asked Landen.
“I need to get back to the office. Duffy and Spoons will be organizing a garage sale to try to fund the library service.”
Landen said he would drop me there on his way home. I could use my official car to get home, or call a taxi.
“We can drop into Image Ink on the way,” he added.
“Okay—but let’s not forget this time.”
34.
Thursday: Evening
John de Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine tell-all of 1209, Bonkeing Kinges for Pleasure and Profite, was the first true celebrity bio. Despite receiving rave reviews and a massive two-figure advance for a sequel, the book did not find favor with King John, Eleanor’s son, and de Hepburn was found dead the following winter, having apparently “Atempted to swim, with dire foolishness, the river Cherwell while disporting himself chained to an anvile.”
James Finisterre, Genres in Classical Literature
I spent the rest of the day at the library, trying to change the large quantity of salable equipment that Duffy and Spoons had earmarked into cash. The difficulty was not in finding a buyer— there was a lot of good stuff there—but persuading the banks to agree to a line of credit ahead of the sales. They wouldn’t be working tomorrow, because the financial center was to be evacuated as a precaution due to the upcoming smiting, so it was imperative that this was sorted before the end of the day. If it wasn’t, by the time the banks reopened on Monday morning, the Wessex All-You-Can-Eat-at-Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library Service would be bankrupt and closed, the rubber stamps would have fallen silent, and all chance of retrieving overdue books would be gone forever.
I’d called home several times to see how Friday was getting on at the timepark. Millon had gone with him to keep us advised of progress, but other than a call on a landline to say that Friday had donned a gravity suit and gone in, there was no news. If he had to go “deep slow” at the timepark to find the Manchild, he might not be out for hours.
Twice during the afternoon, I had my hand on the red phone and the emergency hotline to Nancy at the World League of Librarians, but each time Duffy laid his hand on mine, telling me this was not
anywhere near a serious enough emergency, leaving me wondering just what was. But he was right. By the time early evening had rolled around, I had negotiated a half-million-pound overdraft. We now had two whole days in which to figure out our financial problems.
I dropped down to the subbasement as soon as I was done to see how Finisterre and Phoebe Smalls were doing with the palimpsests.
“We’re working through the pages of Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day one leaf at a time,” replied James, whose eyes were looking tired from comparing hundreds of pictures, “and we’ve managed to source where the manuscripts he reused might have come from—mostly mass-copied cookbooks and celebrity bios.”
Phoebe held up a scan of one of the palimpsests, the old writing running under the new.
“This was originally a page from the thirteenth-century bestseller Parsnipe Cooking with Olive of Jamestown, which was the first cookbook to have a production run of over two figures.”
James held up another example of lost and recovered writing.
“And this was originally from an edition of John de Hepburn’s scurrilous Eleanor of Aquitaine tell-all, Bonkeing Kinges for Pleasure and Profite.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, “all very fascinating, “but anything unusual?”
“There’s only this,” said Phoebe, holding up a picture of a grubby page with the palimpsest highlighted behind it. “It’s not from the Venerable Keith’s Evadum, nor, as we suspected, an early treatise called Dry rot & other cankers of the joiste by Howard de Winforton. In fact, we can’t find out what it is.”
“But what does it look like?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “It bears something of a similarity to the style and spelling idiosyncrasies of the Venerable Bede but strays far from his usual subject matter. Bede generally wrote boring ecclesiastical histories and translated biblical tracts, but this looks more like . . . comedy.”
“I didn’t know the Venerable Bede did comedy.”
“He didn’t. What’s stranger is that this comedy does not seem eighth-century in taste or style. Not so much wenching, farting and jokes with dead animals, but more gentle and lyrical—more in keeping with the storytelling tradition known collectively as ‘Homer.’”
“What are you saying?”
“We’re not sure. We’ve called Bowden in to have a look, as he’s more into Homeric verse than we are, so we should know more then. He might recognize it, or at least give us an indication of what might be going on.”
I told them to call me the instant they had something, then took a cab home, deep in thought about the week’s events and the possibilities that might face me on the following day. Friday had still to kill Gavin, but for no good reason that we could see, and his chance of avoiding going to prison was looking pretty faint. Tuesday still had to find the answer to Uc, something that would allow the smiting to make harmless impact on the Anti-smite Defense Shield. If she and Gavin couldn’t find the Unentanglement Constant in time, then twenty or so hardened felons were to get fried. Unless I could get a righteous man in place, in time—and then Joffy would get fried. I didn’t much care for any of my options.
***
As soon as I got home, I went and changed my patch for another one of the smiley-faced illegal varieties that Geraldine had scored for me. It was working better than a Dizuperadol, but I reduced the dose to a third of a patch rather than a half, as I was still a bit giggly at inappropriate moments.
