AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Go, go,” Elsie interrupted with a smile. “He’ll want to know you explored it first thing. I thought Little Miss and I might visit the sheep down by the pond.”
“We have sheepies?” Sofia’s blue eyes were suddenly as big as the sky outside.
“Yes, and if you like, you can feed them.” Elsie waved a hand. “Gibson, we’ll need some feed for the sheep, all right?”
And with that, I was effectively dismissed for the morning. I smiled, stuffed the remainder of my croissant in my mouth, then picked up my tea to take with me to the library. But before I left, I stopped, another thought in mind.
Xavier had offered an olive branch. I could do the same.
“Er, Elsie?”
“Yes, love?”
“Perhaps we should arrange for some nannies to interview,” I said. “I know you’ve got a job to do, and this one isn’t helping.”
Elsie smiled again, this time gratefully. So Xavier wasn’t wrong about that.
“I’ll have inquires sent out this afternoon,” she said. “Go on.”
* * *
Partof what made Corbray Hall so fascinating was the way multiple generations of building melded into each other. I’d done some cursory research on the place on the train ride here, discovering that the original Corbray Hall was built as a small manor during the fifteenth century, but most of it had been deconstructed and replaced with newer, more modern sections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the estate grew.
The library was located in the part of the house that I would have guessed was built during the late seventeen hundreds, when it was fashionable for one large room to lead directly into another without even a hallway to join them. I strode through a drawing room, a sitting room, and what looked like a music room with a very beautiful old piano in the corner, then found myself confronted with yet another pair of twenty-foot doors fastened with an extremely old lock. I procured the key out of my dress pocket and tried it. Open sesame.
The British Library it was not, but it was no less magical. A quick look out the French doors on the far side told me the library was almost directly under the bedroom I’d been assigned, as it opened onto the gardens, with a distant view of the lake beyond them.
I might have been entranced by the view alone if it hadn’t been for the books. The room had to be at least forty feet long with twenty-five-foot ceilings, all of them completely stacked with floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves chock-a-block with books accessible by rolling ladders. With a fireplace at one end suggesting endless nights of reading in the cozy club chairs and the enormous wooden table at the other side providing studying capacity for at least ten, it was too easy to imagine myself hibernating here for however long we were staying in Cumbria and never seeing an inch of the surrounding countryside, beautiful as it might be.
Forget the family. Forget needing a purpose.
Everything I’d ever want was right here, so long as the books were good.
And good they were. A brief perusal of the shelves revealed this wasn’t a collection of one particular duke in one lifetime, but of many, many people who had lived within these walls. A walk around the room revealed a sampling of some of the most famous works in the English language, from John Donne to Mary Shelley, and too many first editions to count. There was an entire shelf of several Victorian photo albums bound in leather still bearing the original prints scrapbooked between newspaper clippings and postcards, and another held a collection of seventeenth-century cookbooks. A row of children’s books and schoolbooks sat close to the study table. One entire wall bore a book recording the Duke of Kendal’s entire genealogical records going back to before the Norman Conquest.
This wasn’t just a library. It was a family’s intellectual history. A bona fide treasure trove.
And Xavier had given it to me.
I pulled out a selection of books to look over and set them on a side table next to one of the club chairs. Before I sat down to read, however, I noticed another shelf near a writing desk where the books were made of what looked like worn black leather but bore no titles embossed on the spines.
“Hmm,” I said, ambling over to where they stood. “What do we have over here, Your Grace?”
I plucked the first small book off the shelf and recognized it immediately as a journal of some sort—the kind I’d learned about in one of my classes years ago. I’d done a bit of archival research in graduate school for a class on Early American Literature. I wrote a research paper on the differences between American and British correspondence that had me plucking through similar books in the basement of the New York Public Library for a week.
When the first page noted the date as 14 July 1744, I immediately looked around for kid gloves to wear so I wouldn’t damage the book. Finding none, I put it back and made a mental note to request some from Xavier or Gibson. And maybe some boxes to store the more valuable manuscripts and treasures here. And climate control, if the library didn’t already have it. I wasn’t an archives librarian, but even I knew these things were basically decomposing by the second with this kind of air exposure.
The diaries weren’t terribly organized, but it was quickly evident that they were generally kept by whoever was acting as steward of the estate. Some were more typical, noting only a daily sentence or two about things like weather, crops, tenants, and things like that. Others, however, clearly correlated with the taste for literature that ran through Xavier’s family tree. I opened up one to find the author—the eleventh Duke of Kendal—was something of a poet.
“Oh!” I gasped, leafing through the book.
The former duke wrote not only the daily business reports, but also full narratives of his interactions in the house. He was, apparently, a bit of a gossip too. And definitely suspected all sorts of things of his family members.
I set the book aside, fully intending to go over it some more, but was quickly waylaid by several more books just like it—all of them written by many other dukes or their brothers. The Parker family had been storytellers, many of them writing what could only be termed nonfiction “novels” about their own lives. And they had been doing it for centuries.
This wasn’t just a little family discovery. It was a research coup.
I needed something to do, I’d told Xavier only just last night. And right here, right now, I could see exactly what that was. I’d yearned to get back into research for years, wanted to put my brain to more use than figuring out the best way to teach multiplication tables to third graders and reading SofiaCat in the Hatfor the five hundredth time. Leafing through these books, I could see the paper title now. Maybe even a dissertation.Early Narrative Building of the English Gentry.
