Fic: Notes of an Antiquary, The Cornish Manuscripts Part II
1. The CORNISH MANUSCRIPTS
“Three days?” Harsh repeated disbelievingly. “Did he go back home?”
Drescher shook his head. “All of his things are still in his room, and he paid in advance for two weeks.”
Harsh sat back. “Three days- well what does he mean by that?” he murmured. “Did he go on an outing somewhere in Cornwall? Cornwall is very popular for that, I’ve heard. Perhaps he forgot to mention it.”
“Oh no,” Drescher said comfortably. “Mr. Cosway told me he was going to the library for a few hours and then coming directly back to wait for you.”
“Ah,” Harsh said weakly, feeling guilty. “I was delayed- the train…took more time than expected.” The excuse sounded pathetic even to his own ears, but Drescher was nodding as if it made sense. Perversely, Harsh almost wanted Drescher to admonish him for being so careless with his friends.
“You must be tired from your journey,” Drescher said, and Harsh realised with a start that he had been nodding off. “Come, I will show you your room.”
“But Jonathan,” Harsh protested and yawned. “I have to find him.”
“Not in this dark,” Drescher said firmly. “There will be time enough for that tomorrow- I have already alerted the authorities about Mr. Cosway’s disappearance. And I believe there are some things Mr. Cosway left for you in his room.”
“Oh!” Harsh said quickly and stood. “Did he? What kinds of things?”
“Some books, papers.” Drescher made a signal to Mary to clear away the tea. “Notes he was taking at the library, I think. I will show you.”
The notes turned out to be various assorted piles that had been strewn about in no real organised fashion on what Harsh realised with some consternation was his bed. Jonathan’s bed on the other side of the room was clean and freshly turned down as if he’d never slept in it; Harsh didn’t like that, for some reason. He knew it was Jonathan’s bed because a pair of dark leather gloves had been carelessly left on the bedside table but he would have much rather preferred the bed to look messy as if Jonathan had just climbed out of it and walked out, though he knew the immediacy of the housekeeping was a credit to the meticulous nature of the maids in Drescher’s inn and made a point of saying so.
There was a little study desk wedged into the corner of the room near the window, but it was bare except for two books stacked together in the middle. Harsh ran a finger down the leather, marvelling at it. He opened the smaller book on top and was immediately struck by how bare the first few pages were. He hadn’t ever known mediaeval scribes to waste vellum in such a way. He put the book aside and opened the larger book underneath.
It was the manuscript Jonathan had described, The Left Hand That Holds the Mirror. He opened the first few pages and found the book had not been considered important enough to have been properly illuminated. There were a few sparse decorations in the borders and barely any illustrations to speak of. He caught a few diagrams here and there as he leafed through the book but nothing that caught his eye, and for a moment he wished he’d had the talent or inclination to be a codicologist. He closed The Left Hand and went back to the smaller book. It intrigued him in a way he could not explain; it was something even more than the mystery of the blank pages of vellum at the beginning.
“I will leave you to unpack and settle in,” Drescher said. “Good night.”
“Good night, Mr. Drescher,” Harsh said and tore his eyes away from the book for a moment. “Er, thank you. For all this.”
Drescher nodded and shut the door, and Harsh went back to Jonathan’s papers on his bed and crouched over them slowly so he wouldn’t disturb the piles, but he couldn’t make much out of them. Jonathan had clipped little notes to the fronts, and most of them seemed to be from books he’d taken out of the library. Harsh supposed that made sense- Jonathan didn’t know the first thing about mediaeval Latin and couldn’t have done much with his two books if he hadn’t managed to translate them.
Well, Harsh concluded. At least that was something he could do. He fetched the extra pens and paper from his suitcase, which he found sitting in front of the wardrobe, and unpacked several of his own translation books as well as whatever he’d managed to translate on the train.
He sat down at the little desk, reopened the smaller book, and picked up his pen, marvelling at how steady his hand was. He found the first marked page and noticed the script wasn’t consistent with the miniscule he had studied at Martin Court, and that was the second strange thing he could fully articulate about the book. The page design was very much in the style of other mediaeval manuscripts he’d translated, but the script wasn’t anything like he’d seen before. It was majuscule like Uncial but had none of the angry urgency of Black letter or the fidgety grace of Merovingian. Inspecting the script further, he concluded that the letters looked most like rustic capitals, though he was by no means an expert.
He shook his head. Jonathan would have been laughing at him if he were here now, fretting over the shapes of words as if that mattered at a time like this. That sent a small pang through him. He looked back to the side table next to Jonathan’s bed and had an inexplicable urge to straighten out the gloves that had been haphazardly thrown beside the lamp. It was the first thing he would lecture Jonathan about when he saw him, Harsh decided. Until then, he would carry on with the work that Jonathan had deemed so important. Harsh turned back to the book, readjusted the spectacles on his nose, and began to read.
Harsh started up from the desk when the maid knocked on the door. “Hmgh, yes?” he managed and straightened up, the blanket from Jonathan’s bed sliding off his shoulders.
He had been in Truro for three days now and still hadn’t dared shift the papers off his bed, preferring to pull any pillows or blankets he needed from Jonathan’s. He wasn’t sleeping much in anything one would define as a proper bed, in any case. He had developed the tendency of dozing off wherever he was sitting down at the time, which was mostly at the study desk in his room and once, embarrassingly, in the university library at Truro during closing hours.
Mary gave him a suspiciously bright smile when he came downstairs and immediately set out his breakfast as if she had been waiting for him, and he suspected the staff at the inn was torn between finding him amusing and being genuinely concerned for him. Harsh inhaled the potatoes and sausage and had four cups of tea before Mary took the pot away. It was like falling back into the motions of being in college again, all rushed sleep and being constantly hungry. His body remembered it, albeit reluctantly.
But it didn’t matter. God, nothing mattered, because he had to be halfway through translating The Left Hand by tomorrow evening. He downed the rest of the tea, which had gone cold at the bottom of the cup. “Thank you!” he shouted and flung down his napkin before rushing back up the stairs.
“You’re going to have a stomach ache, Mr. Harsh,” Mary called after him, laughing.
Harsh sat back at his desk, rubbed his eyes, and checked where he’d left off in his translation. He’d fallen asleep translating the Book of Wands. At least, that was what he was calling the curious little nameless book. The first few pages of blank vellum had perplexed him initially till he realised upon closer inspection that they were much older palimpsests that had been tacked into the front. The letters were almost too faint to read, but he’d gathered something about a journey and a book of rods, a phrase that repeated itself often in broken bits throughout the pages. But somehow in the style of the rest of the translation as well as his own estimations about how old the manuscript was, rods had sounded very…no, it had reminded him of Virgil in his passages of Circe. ‘And she turned them into beasts with a touch of her wand.’ And so he’d settled for calling it the Book of Wands.
He’d wanted to start translating it first of course, but knew he couldn’t afford to prioritise based on personal preference, not if he wanted to translate everything Jonathan wanted him to within the two week period he’d allowed. So he was doing long swathes at a time- a few pages of Left Hand, then the Books of Wands, then back. Oddly, it had made finding the feel and voice of the two books remarkably easy, perhaps because they were so different.
Walden had been right; The Left Hand was very much in the style of Roger Bacon’s earlier work with the meticulous didactic way it outlined its contents as if its readers were pupils sitting in a lecture. The Book of Wands on the other hand, was much more withdrawn; it felt like a reference book or a technical manual he might have found forgotten somewhere in the halls of Maudslay. Yes, the idiolect was perhaps the most marked difference between the two books; The Left Hand was more involved with scientific probing into the unknown whereas the Book of Wands acted as if the unknown consisted of clear explainable facts. And that intrigued him.
He had kept himself on a rigid schedule, allowing four hours for translating in the mornings before delving into the research Jonathan had left behind from the library. The Left Hand was going better than he’d anticipated, mainly because he knew the era and some of the translations and notes he’d brought with him had obviously been resources The Left Hand author was familiar with. The author had none of the preoccupations with plants and metals like the other alchemists of the period; he was more interested in the supernatural, treating it as another scientific phenomenon to be observed. Harsh had started to increasingly doubt the sanity of The Left Hand, especially some of the specific descriptions of monsters and other ghoulish creatures he claimed to have seen.
He turned the page and something fell out. It was in Jonathan’s handwriting, the same handwriting as the letter. It looked like a list of some kind with most of the items irritably crossed out. Roman banshee. Schattenghast. Blood golem. He remembered Jonathan had said he and his grandfather had a hobby of studying folklore and wondered if this was another project.
And then at the bottom of the list, a name had been hastily scrawled in. The Macerian.
“The Macerian,” Harsh murmured, leafing through The Left Hand.
The section on the supernatural was quite detailed, listing the name and pronunciation of each creature along with a small sketch and accompanying description. Harsh had tried not to look at some of the sketches for too long a time. He wasn’t particularly surprised to find the Macerian listed- Jonathan wasn’t one to waste his time with useless resources, after all- but there was no sketch in the little space under the name.
The Macerian, the page said. Origin: Roman-Germanic. An immortal entity that inhabits what Germanic folklore calls the seitwärtsort. It was brought into the country by the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus with his death in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D. A purportedly malevolent creature but has never been noted to harm humans despite its attraction to violence.
“Huh,” Harsh said quietly and then threw himself sideways over to the piles of Jonathan’s papers to find anything remotely connected to the entry. He stabbed himself on some of the pins in his haste to take apart the great quantity of clipped together packets and cursed Jonathan for not leaving the list in a more obvious place for him to find.
But at least now he had a better idea of what to do.
“Afternoon, sir,” Harsh shouted as he hurried down the street to the Truro library.
“Afternoon, Dr. Harsh,” the jule said, grinning and tipping his hat. Queen Julianna Bellcroft and a minister named Peel had established jules to police every major city in Britannia, but Harsh suspected she had placed only the most obstinate ones here; the only thing they would tell him was the number of men they had on the investigation, a number that fluctuated every time he asked. To be fair, he had gone to bother the jules at the station so many times that he was well on his way to being on a first-name basis with most of them, so they probably saw him as just some sort of mad bespectacled annoyance.
Sally, the university’s dog, was sleeping on the steps of the library, and he stopped to feed her a bit of cheese he’d smuggled from his lunch. She belonged to one of the professors who lived near the university, but she escaped from her garden to wander the campus whenever she could manage. The students were all impossibly fond of her. Harsh was still trying to ingratiate himself with her with soft words and scratches behind her ears and the occasional morsel. He rather liked dogs. His mother had owned one, but it had been a small yappy thing with tiny rat-like ears that lived in a constant state of nervous frenzy from the large silk bow she tied around its neck, which it had tried to rip to shreds at any opportunity. Young Harsh had silently supported all of these efforts.
Harsh installed himself at his usual desk in the library and went to hunt through the section on folklore, wishing fiercely that he were back in Pevensey library’s dark corridors of books with his little secluded carrel full of all his notes and research. He felt too vulnerable here, not knowing how the library kept its books and not able to send away for what he wanted from Pevensey’s sister libraries at other universities. He didn’t know when he started feeling uncomfortable when he wasn’t walking through narrow dimly-lit hallways where the walls brushed his shoulders.
He found a few books on old Germanic folklore and cross-referenced a few more books using Jonathan’s research. He found quite a number on creatures attracted to violence and bloodshed, a few Germanic texts, and next to nothing about the Macerian specifically. He remembered the blank space in The Left Hand where a sketch of the Macerian should have been and tracked down a few more books about alchemical views on invisibility.
He put all the books beside his bag with a grunt and collapsed in his chair. He put his face against the stack of books for a moment to mark this great feat of carrying, and the chain around his throat slipped out from underneath his shirt and clattered against the dark cracked leather. There was a small knot of shapeless metal the size of the top of his thumb strung on the chain, and he ran a finger down its cool bumpy surface. Jonathan had given it to him when he was at Pevensey on research.
It had been a cool dark evening, and Harsh had been walking back to his little boarding house from Pevensey, where’d he’d been ensconced in the library for most of the day. His room in the boarding house was quite modest- a little bedroom that was mostly engulfed by his desk and bookshelf and a space in front of the door that could barely be called a sitting room. Harsh had squeezed in two chairs and a table to help the effect.
James had come here once, turned around a few times to survey the accommodations and then said, “Well, I suppose,” in a dubious voice. A week later, James’s wife Annabelle had sent him two sympathetic doylies for the backs of the chairs. Harsh knew James and Annabelle were both well meaning people and had arranged the doylies immediately so that he could begin hating tatted lace as soon as possible. They were always the first thing to greet him when he came in, like a particularly detestable landlady.
Harsh took the shortcut behind the baker’s shop. It was actually much faster to duck out behind the butcher’s, but it always had vile stench to it even in the evenings, to say nothing of high hot afternoons. He pulled out a book from the stack he was carrying and squinted at it through the dim moonlight. Wimbley’s cousin Cosway was still working in Pevensey doing the strangest research on northern superstitions and mythology. Cosway was scrupulously polite and tried not to bother him aside from the odd question, but Harsh had somehow become caught up in his research anyway, which was why he had taken out a book on Northumbrian folklore that he had promised to read in his nonexistent free time between doing his own work. He must have become preoccupied with looking through the book, because he didn’t hear the heavy footfalls coming from a distance till they were running up his street.
“What-” Harsh began and turned around because pattern of footsteps sounded like something with more than two legs. Then a sudden painful force slammed into him, and he went flying face first into the street, his books scattering all around him. Harsh lay still for a moment and thought that a dog, even the bailiff’s particularly large one, couldn’t have come at him with such speed.
“Shoo, Grady,” he said warningly and then gasped as the dog planted a paw on his spine that drove the breath out of him. And no, he doubted a dog had such a huge heavy paw. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought it was a bear or a lion.
The creature shifted its weight, and Harsh squeaked as he felt the prickle of claws through his jacket. At first the only thing he could hear was his own gasping breath, but then he began to hear a low rumbling growl so deep that he could feel it through the creature’s paw on his back. The creature crouched down, shifting more weight onto Harsh’s back, and the growl grew louder and louder till he could hear it right beside his ear.
“Oh God,” Harsh whispered shakily, and the creature growled louder and snapped, letting him hear the audible click of teeth. He wondered deliriously if the library would come to collect its books or if it would just fine him and repossess his doylies. The creature’s hot moist breath gusted down his neck and then, a little wet bead of saliva plopped on the back of his ear. It stung slightly, but Harsh didn’t dare move to wipe it off. He felt the creature tense and crouch down and thought, no, not like this- he couldn’t die like this.
Something at the end of the street went off with a loud chink-ching.
The creature whined with a high-pitched yelp and suddenly Harsh could breathe again. He rolled away and scrambled up, but all he caught was a blur of four legs and a monstrous head before the creature was gone. His side where the creature had slammed into him suddenly rose into a dull ache that ran down the length of his ribs.
Someone was running towards him down the street. “Sir, are you- Harsh?”
Harsh turned blindly, and Cosway was crouching down in front of him like a mirage. He was dressed all in black, and all Harsh could make out were the silver buttons on his jacket. He stared at them again because there was something odd about them that he couldn’t place. He looked up and saw that Cosway’s mouth was moving, that he was asking him questions.
“Are you alright?” Cosway’s hand was in his hair, the side of his face, and then slid down to grip his shoulder and shake him till his spectacles rattled. “Matthias, are you hurt?”
Harsh shook his head and then realised he was shaking. “N-No, no. I- what was that?”
“No time!” Cosway said. He pulled something from his own neck left-handedly and dropped it around his. For the first time, Harsh saw that Cosway was carrying a strange looking rifle in his other hand.
He touched the chain Cosway had dropped around his neck. It was cool and slightly heavy. “What?”
“For protection,” Cosway said quickly. “Now go.” He stooped to pick up the books Harsh had dropped and slipped them into the stack Harsh was clutching mindlessly to his chest. “Go back home as fast as you can and don’t look back.” His voice was calm, but Harsh saw his eyes were slightly wild. “Do you hear me, Harsh? Don’t look back.”
The run back home was one of the longest of his entire life. All the familiar streets he passed on his way to Pevensey in the mornings suddenly looked perilous and sinister in the darkness. Every once in a while he was sorely tempted to stop and clamp and hand over his mouth because he swore he could hear a low rumbling directly behind him and the hot stinging breath of something much too large and black to be a dog. Don’t look back, Cosway had said, and Harsh fisted one hand around the chain around his throat and ran faster. His books kept slipping in his arms and making general nuisances of themselves, but he couldn’t afford to stop and shift them into his bag.
The little flight of steps going up to his building were almost too much for him- his movements felt slow and sluggish as if he were running through honey, and he almost abandoned all of his books right there, but then he was clearing the last stair and banging into his sleepy darkened sitting room.
He dropped all of his books in a little heap where he stood and turned around to slam the door shut. He noticed detachedly that his hand was remarkably steady as he bolted the door. He wanted to sit down. He wanted to curl up into one of his horrid uncomfortable armchairs in the sitting room with a scalding pot of tea and perhaps a glass of something stronger, but instead he shoved the sitting table in front of the door, fetched his oil lamp, and went to check the latches on all the windows. He found all of his lamps and placed as many as he could throughout the rooms. His hands were damp and clammy as he gathered up his books and forced himself to arrange them alphabetically on the bookshelf in the bedroom. It calmed him somewhat to have something prosaic and familiar to do. At least it kept his hands busy- he couldn’t stand to fidget.
Something knocked on his door, and he dropped the last book in fright.
For a moment he considered not answering, but then his book fell treacherously off the table and onto the floor with a terribly loud bang. Harsh held his breath. The hallway outside was silent.
And then the knocking resumed in earnest. Harsh cursed darkly and went out to the sitting room towards the small bread box of a fireplace that he never bothered with. He lifted the fire iron awkwardly and crept towards the door. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do with the iron if it came to that- he had never struck anyone in his life, except for once when he and James had been young and scuffled over something small and forgotten now.
Harsh reluctantly slid back the bolt, kicked away the table, and reached for the knob. He opened the door slowly, the iron held aloft in one hand. “Who…is it?”
“Harsh,” Cosway hissed and Harsh sagged with relief. He opened the door wider and Cosway slipped in. “Damn it, Harsh, what if I had been something else-” he started but then his eyes went down to the iron. “Ah. I see you’re a fast learner.”
“Top of my class,” Harsh said coolly and then nearly dropped the iron on his foot when he saw Cosway’s shoulder. “You’re hurt!”
Cosway tried to shrug and then winced. “It’s nothing-”
“Nothing! You’re bleeding everywhere!” Harsh dropped the iron and seized Cosway’s good arm. Cosway had his strange rifle resting in the crook of his wounded arm like a swaddling child. “I’ll get something to bind it up.”
“God help me, but what are those things on top of your chairs?” Jonathan said with faint horror as Harsh hurried him past the living room.
“Sit,” Harsh said with irritation he didn’t really feel, but it was better than panic- anything was better than that. He went to the drawer where he kept his handkerchiefs.
Cosway sank down bemusedly on the edge of Harsh’s bed and eyed the bookshelf. “Bit of light reading, Harsh?”
“Hush,” Harsh said and knelt down to help Cosway with his jacket. “Do you wear anything else but black?”
“Black,” Cosway offered, smiling slightly, and peeled out of his shirtsleeves.
“Are you a boxer?” Harsh demanded, gawking at him. Cosway had an astonishingly athletic build for someone so eager to shut himself up in a library for hours. There were a great number of scars running down his torso and arms, some of them were pale and faded while others looked more recent. The dark oozing slash on his shoulder stood out in stark contrast. An old green and yellow bruise the size of Harsh’s outstretched hand was wrapped around the left side of Cosway’s stomach, and Harsh felt a sympathetic twinge from looking at it.
Cosway cleared his throat, and Harsh realised he had been staring. “What? Oh, yes, sorry,” he said quickly and slapped his clean handkerchief against the wound more firmly than he’d intended.
Cosway made a pained noise.
“Oh!” Harsh said again. “Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean-”
But Cosway burst out laughing and then clutched his shoulder. “Harsh, stop- stop making me laugh!”
“Hold that,” Harsh instructed, ignoring him loftily, and Cosway kept the handkerchief pressed to the wound. Harsh cleared away his bloodied clothes and hunted through his things for an extra nightshirt. “Here,” he said. “And before you ask if I have a black nightshirt, I must tell you I-”
“What is this?” Cosway asked, lifting it up for inspection.
“Well of course you can’t go back home now,” Harsh said testily. And perhaps he was being impolite, but it also made him businesslike in a way that made him feel comfortable. “Here, you’re injured, so you take the bed, and I’ll-”
“No, I’m used to sleeping on the floor,” Cosway argued, and Harsh was relieved they wouldn’t have to bicker about Cosway staying the night. “Someone has to guard the front door, at any rate.”
“But you-”
“Don’t argue with me, Harsh.”
“Right then, I won’t,” Harsh said. And then, “Here, can you help me lift this mattress?”
So he and Cosway ended up sleeping in the sitting room in front of the door with Harsh making himself an ersatz bed out of his packed away winter blankets and giving the mattress to Cosway because he was a guest and injured. Cosway had his rifle next to him within arm’s reach, and that should have been strange, but instead it comforted him. Harsh hauled the side table over for the oil lap and his spectacles before settling down beside Cosway, who was staring at the ceiling thoughtfully.
“You haven’t asked me, you know,” Cosway said suddenly.
“Asked you what?” Harsh asked, shifting up on an elbow to look at him. Cosway looked oddly foreign in his white nightshirt, but it suited him.
“Everything,” Cosway said vaguely. “What I was doing in town so late, who I am. You haven’t asked me about my rifle.”
“You sound disappointed,” Harsh said drily and then drummed his fingers against the blankets. “I assumed you were out for some errand and saw that…that dog following me. From your scars, I…I would suppose you’re part of the military.”
Cosway huffed out a laugh. “Military. Yes. Yes, you would be right about that.”
Harsh nodded. He didn’t actually believe any of what he was saying, but Cosway just looked so desperate for him to explain everything away. “And as for your rifle, well, I’m just grateful you had it.”
Cosway hmmed. “You’re an exceptionally calm person, do you know that, Harsh?” he said finally. “It’s…it’s very refreshing. I wish I had the liberty of telling you the entire truth, but…” He trailed off.
“You saved my life,” Harsh said stubbornly. He was almost certainly sure that Cosway was involved in something illegal and was protecting him by not telling him much, but Cosway had also been good and decent, and Harsh liked him.
“And I trust you would never lie to me about anything important,” he added firmly. Cosway hadn’t even lied to him now; he had kept silent and let Harsh invent any lies he wanted. Harsh was vaguely grateful for that. The chain Cosway had given him slipped out of his shirt, and he caught it. It had a formless piece of metal strung at the end, and he looked at it curiously for a moment. “Ah, this is yours-”
“Keep it,” Cosway said. “You seem like the sort that attracts trouble.”
Harsh didn’t know how to answer that. “What was that thing in the street?” he asked instead. “At the very least, you ought to tell me the truth about that.”
“Have you heard of a barghest?” Cosway had asked and looked serious for a moment, but then his mouth had turned up slightly.
“Very funny, Cosway,” Harsh had grumbled and reached to put his spectacles on the table.
Cosway had caught his wrist for a moment. “I think after all that,” he had said brightly. “You ought to call me Jonathan.”
Harsh sat back in his chair a few hours later and rubbed his eyes. He was starting to get the shape of it now.
He hadn’t found anything particular about the seitwärtsort precisely, but after tracking down a long chain of sources, he had found something called ‘the space beyond the boundaries of sight,’ which was at least a strong start; he suspected it was an old euphemism for the spiritual world, which fit with the rest of the descriptions of the Macerian. The Macerian itself sounded a great deal like a valkyrie that was attracted to places of great violence, like an ancient personification of death. The greater mystery now was why the book had named Varus specifically; Harsh thought it could have been a reference to some sort of mixing of Roman and German polytheistic religion, but he didn’t have the resources to prove that.
He left word about the matter with Quentin, the young doctoral candidate who manned the desk; Quentin assured him that the library would try and find more resources about German polytheism from its sister libraries. Harsh left the library contended- Quentin was quiet and efficient, and Harsh knew he would track down any books he could. He had been exceptionally helpful so far, even going so far as to help Harsh with translations in Cornish, which Harsh knew nothing about and Quentin could read flawlessly.
For once, Harsh was back at the inn early, a few hours before dinner. He looked at the closed doors of all the little shops and realised he hadn’t even stopped in any of them, hadn’t taken the time to explore the city at all. The inn really was a beautiful building, Harsh thought as he looked up at it. Lovely in the way of old things kept clean and cared for. He saw something move out of the corner of his eye and looked up, but it was already gone.
Drescher looked up at Harsh banged into the inn. “Mr. Harsh-”
“Is Jonathan here? Did he come back?”
Drescher looked confused. “No. Why, have the jules said something to you?”
Harsh shook his head quickly. “No, but I thought…are the maids cleaning the rooms upstairs?”
“They only clean in the morning after our guests have left their rooms for the day. Why do you ask?”
Nothing,” Harsh said and waved a hand. “I just thought…it’s nothing. I think I’ll lie down a bit before dinner.”
“Of course,” Drescher said kindly. “That would be for the best, I think. You have been overexerting yourself, Mr. Harsh.”
“I believe I have.” Harsh rubbed at his eyes and went back up to his room.
He dropped his bag and papers at the desk. He opened up the wardrobe, checked under the desk, and then sat down on Jonathan’s bed, feeling very silly. Perhaps Drescher was right- perhaps he hadn’t been sleeping enough or eating well, and he was just exhausted.
But for a moment he could have sworn something had been standing at the window in his room.
“Three days?” Harsh repeated disbelievingly. “Did he go back home?”
Drescher shook his head. “All of his things are still in his room, and he paid in advance for two weeks.”
Harsh sat back. “Three days- well what does he mean by that?” he murmured. “Did he go on an outing somewhere in Cornwall? Cornwall is very popular for that, I’ve heard. Perhaps he forgot to mention it.”
“Oh no,” Drescher said comfortably. “Mr. Cosway told me he was going to the library for a few hours and then coming directly back to wait for you.”
“Ah,” Harsh said weakly, feeling guilty. “I was delayed- the train…took more time than expected.” The excuse sounded pathetic even to his own ears, but Drescher was nodding as if it made sense. Perversely, Harsh almost wanted Drescher to admonish him for being so careless with his friends.
“You must be tired from your journey,” Drescher said, and Harsh realised with a start that he had been nodding off. “Come, I will show you your room.”
“But Jonathan,” Harsh protested and yawned. “I have to find him.”
“Not in this dark,” Drescher said firmly. “There will be time enough for that tomorrow- I have already alerted the authorities about Mr. Cosway’s disappearance. And I believe there are some things Mr. Cosway left for you in his room.”
“Oh!” Harsh said quickly and stood. “Did he? What kinds of things?”
“Some books, papers.” Drescher made a signal to Mary to clear away the tea. “Notes he was taking at the library, I think. I will show you.”
The notes turned out to be various assorted piles that had been strewn about in no real organised fashion on what Harsh realised with some consternation was his bed. Jonathan’s bed on the other side of the room was clean and freshly turned down as if he’d never slept in it; Harsh didn’t like that, for some reason. He knew it was Jonathan’s bed because a pair of dark leather gloves had been carelessly left on the bedside table but he would have much rather preferred the bed to look messy as if Jonathan had just climbed out of it and walked out, though he knew the immediacy of the housekeeping was a credit to the meticulous nature of the maids in Drescher’s inn and made a point of saying so.
There was a little study desk wedged into the corner of the room near the window, but it was bare except for two books stacked together in the middle. Harsh ran a finger down the leather, marvelling at it. He opened the smaller book on top and was immediately struck by how bare the first few pages were. He hadn’t ever known mediaeval scribes to waste vellum in such a way. He put the book aside and opened the larger book underneath.
It was the manuscript Jonathan had described, The Left Hand That Holds the Mirror. He opened the first few pages and found the book had not been considered important enough to have been properly illuminated. There were a few sparse decorations in the borders and barely any illustrations to speak of. He caught a few diagrams here and there as he leafed through the book but nothing that caught his eye, and for a moment he wished he’d had the talent or inclination to be a codicologist. He closed The Left Hand and went back to the smaller book. It intrigued him in a way he could not explain; it was something even more than the mystery of the blank pages of vellum at the beginning.
“I will leave you to unpack and settle in,” Drescher said. “Good night.”
“Good night, Mr. Drescher,” Harsh said and tore his eyes away from the book for a moment. “Er, thank you. For all this.”
Drescher nodded and shut the door, and Harsh went back to Jonathan’s papers on his bed and crouched over them slowly so he wouldn’t disturb the piles, but he couldn’t make much out of them. Jonathan had clipped little notes to the fronts, and most of them seemed to be from books he’d taken out of the library. Harsh supposed that made sense- Jonathan didn’t know the first thing about mediaeval Latin and couldn’t have done much with his two books if he hadn’t managed to translate them.
Well, Harsh concluded. At least that was something he could do. He fetched the extra pens and paper from his suitcase, which he found sitting in front of the wardrobe, and unpacked several of his own translation books as well as whatever he’d managed to translate on the train.
He sat down at the little desk, reopened the smaller book, and picked up his pen, marvelling at how steady his hand was. He found the first marked page and noticed the script wasn’t consistent with the miniscule he had studied at Martin Court, and that was the second strange thing he could fully articulate about the book. The page design was very much in the style of other mediaeval manuscripts he’d translated, but the script wasn’t anything like he’d seen before. It was majuscule like Uncial but had none of the angry urgency of Black letter or the fidgety grace of Merovingian. Inspecting the script further, he concluded that the letters looked most like rustic capitals, though he was by no means an expert.
He shook his head. Jonathan would have been laughing at him if he were here now, fretting over the shapes of words as if that mattered at a time like this. That sent a small pang through him. He looked back to the side table next to Jonathan’s bed and had an inexplicable urge to straighten out the gloves that had been haphazardly thrown beside the lamp. It was the first thing he would lecture Jonathan about when he saw him, Harsh decided. Until then, he would carry on with the work that Jonathan had deemed so important. Harsh turned back to the book, readjusted the spectacles on his nose, and began to read.
Harsh started up from the desk when the maid knocked on the door. “Hmgh, yes?” he managed and straightened up, the blanket from Jonathan’s bed sliding off his shoulders.
He had been in Truro for three days now and still hadn’t dared shift the papers off his bed, preferring to pull any pillows or blankets he needed from Jonathan’s. He wasn’t sleeping much in anything one would define as a proper bed, in any case. He had developed the tendency of dozing off wherever he was sitting down at the time, which was mostly at the study desk in his room and once, embarrassingly, in the university library at Truro during closing hours.
Mary gave him a suspiciously bright smile when he came downstairs and immediately set out his breakfast as if she had been waiting for him, and he suspected the staff at the inn was torn between finding him amusing and being genuinely concerned for him. Harsh inhaled the potatoes and sausage and had four cups of tea before Mary took the pot away. It was like falling back into the motions of being in college again, all rushed sleep and being constantly hungry. His body remembered it, albeit reluctantly.
But it didn’t matter. God, nothing mattered, because he had to be halfway through translating The Left Hand by tomorrow evening. He downed the rest of the tea, which had gone cold at the bottom of the cup. “Thank you!” he shouted and flung down his napkin before rushing back up the stairs.
“You’re going to have a stomach ache, Mr. Harsh,” Mary called after him, laughing.
Harsh sat back at his desk, rubbed his eyes, and checked where he’d left off in his translation. He’d fallen asleep translating the Book of Wands. At least, that was what he was calling the curious little nameless book. The first few pages of blank vellum had perplexed him initially till he realised upon closer inspection that they were much older palimpsests that had been tacked into the front. The letters were almost too faint to read, but he’d gathered something about a journey and a book of rods, a phrase that repeated itself often in broken bits throughout the pages. But somehow in the style of the rest of the translation as well as his own estimations about how old the manuscript was, rods had sounded very…no, it had reminded him of Virgil in his passages of Circe. ‘And she turned them into beasts with a touch of her wand.’ And so he’d settled for calling it the Book of Wands.
He’d wanted to start translating it first of course, but knew he couldn’t afford to prioritise based on personal preference, not if he wanted to translate everything Jonathan wanted him to within the two week period he’d allowed. So he was doing long swathes at a time- a few pages of Left Hand, then the Books of Wands, then back. Oddly, it had made finding the feel and voice of the two books remarkably easy, perhaps because they were so different.
Walden had been right; The Left Hand was very much in the style of Roger Bacon’s earlier work with the meticulous didactic way it outlined its contents as if its readers were pupils sitting in a lecture. The Book of Wands on the other hand, was much more withdrawn; it felt like a reference book or a technical manual he might have found forgotten somewhere in the halls of Maudslay. Yes, the idiolect was perhaps the most marked difference between the two books; The Left Hand was more involved with scientific probing into the unknown whereas the Book of Wands acted as if the unknown consisted of clear explainable facts. And that intrigued him.
He had kept himself on a rigid schedule, allowing four hours for translating in the mornings before delving into the research Jonathan had left behind from the library. The Left Hand was going better than he’d anticipated, mainly because he knew the era and some of the translations and notes he’d brought with him had obviously been resources The Left Hand author was familiar with. The author had none of the preoccupations with plants and metals like the other alchemists of the period; he was more interested in the supernatural, treating it as another scientific phenomenon to be observed. Harsh had started to increasingly doubt the sanity of The Left Hand, especially some of the specific descriptions of monsters and other ghoulish creatures he claimed to have seen.
He turned the page and something fell out. It was in Jonathan’s handwriting, the same handwriting as the letter. It looked like a list of some kind with most of the items irritably crossed out. Roman banshee. Schattenghast. Blood golem. He remembered Jonathan had said he and his grandfather had a hobby of studying folklore and wondered if this was another project.
And then at the bottom of the list, a name had been hastily scrawled in. The Macerian.
“The Macerian,” Harsh murmured, leafing through The Left Hand.
The section on the supernatural was quite detailed, listing the name and pronunciation of each creature along with a small sketch and accompanying description. Harsh had tried not to look at some of the sketches for too long a time. He wasn’t particularly surprised to find the Macerian listed- Jonathan wasn’t one to waste his time with useless resources, after all- but there was no sketch in the little space under the name.
The Macerian, the page said. Origin: Roman-Germanic. An immortal entity that inhabits what Germanic folklore calls the seitwärtsort. It was brought into the country by the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus with his death in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D. A purportedly malevolent creature but has never been noted to harm humans despite its attraction to violence.
“Huh,” Harsh said quietly and then threw himself sideways over to the piles of Jonathan’s papers to find anything remotely connected to the entry. He stabbed himself on some of the pins in his haste to take apart the great quantity of clipped together packets and cursed Jonathan for not leaving the list in a more obvious place for him to find.
But at least now he had a better idea of what to do.
“Afternoon, sir,” Harsh shouted as he hurried down the street to the Truro library.
“Afternoon, Dr. Harsh,” the jule said, grinning and tipping his hat. Queen Julianna Bellcroft and a minister named Peel had established jules to police every major city in Britannia, but Harsh suspected she had placed only the most obstinate ones here; the only thing they would tell him was the number of men they had on the investigation, a number that fluctuated every time he asked. To be fair, he had gone to bother the jules at the station so many times that he was well on his way to being on a first-name basis with most of them, so they probably saw him as just some sort of mad bespectacled annoyance.
Sally, the university’s dog, was sleeping on the steps of the library, and he stopped to feed her a bit of cheese he’d smuggled from his lunch. She belonged to one of the professors who lived near the university, but she escaped from her garden to wander the campus whenever she could manage. The students were all impossibly fond of her. Harsh was still trying to ingratiate himself with her with soft words and scratches behind her ears and the occasional morsel. He rather liked dogs. His mother had owned one, but it had been a small yappy thing with tiny rat-like ears that lived in a constant state of nervous frenzy from the large silk bow she tied around its neck, which it had tried to rip to shreds at any opportunity. Young Harsh had silently supported all of these efforts.
Harsh installed himself at his usual desk in the library and went to hunt through the section on folklore, wishing fiercely that he were back in Pevensey library’s dark corridors of books with his little secluded carrel full of all his notes and research. He felt too vulnerable here, not knowing how the library kept its books and not able to send away for what he wanted from Pevensey’s sister libraries at other universities. He didn’t know when he started feeling uncomfortable when he wasn’t walking through narrow dimly-lit hallways where the walls brushed his shoulders.
He found a few books on old Germanic folklore and cross-referenced a few more books using Jonathan’s research. He found quite a number on creatures attracted to violence and bloodshed, a few Germanic texts, and next to nothing about the Macerian specifically. He remembered the blank space in The Left Hand where a sketch of the Macerian should have been and tracked down a few more books about alchemical views on invisibility.
He put all the books beside his bag with a grunt and collapsed in his chair. He put his face against the stack of books for a moment to mark this great feat of carrying, and the chain around his throat slipped out from underneath his shirt and clattered against the dark cracked leather. There was a small knot of shapeless metal the size of the top of his thumb strung on the chain, and he ran a finger down its cool bumpy surface. Jonathan had given it to him when he was at Pevensey on research.
It had been a cool dark evening, and Harsh had been walking back to his little boarding house from Pevensey, where’d he’d been ensconced in the library for most of the day. His room in the boarding house was quite modest- a little bedroom that was mostly engulfed by his desk and bookshelf and a space in front of the door that could barely be called a sitting room. Harsh had squeezed in two chairs and a table to help the effect.
James had come here once, turned around a few times to survey the accommodations and then said, “Well, I suppose,” in a dubious voice. A week later, James’s wife Annabelle had sent him two sympathetic doylies for the backs of the chairs. Harsh knew James and Annabelle were both well meaning people and had arranged the doylies immediately so that he could begin hating tatted lace as soon as possible. They were always the first thing to greet him when he came in, like a particularly detestable landlady.
Harsh took the shortcut behind the baker’s shop. It was actually much faster to duck out behind the butcher’s, but it always had vile stench to it even in the evenings, to say nothing of high hot afternoons. He pulled out a book from the stack he was carrying and squinted at it through the dim moonlight. Wimbley’s cousin Cosway was still working in Pevensey doing the strangest research on northern superstitions and mythology. Cosway was scrupulously polite and tried not to bother him aside from the odd question, but Harsh had somehow become caught up in his research anyway, which was why he had taken out a book on Northumbrian folklore that he had promised to read in his nonexistent free time between doing his own work. He must have become preoccupied with looking through the book, because he didn’t hear the heavy footfalls coming from a distance till they were running up his street.
“What-” Harsh began and turned around because pattern of footsteps sounded like something with more than two legs. Then a sudden painful force slammed into him, and he went flying face first into the street, his books scattering all around him. Harsh lay still for a moment and thought that a dog, even the bailiff’s particularly large one, couldn’t have come at him with such speed.
“Shoo, Grady,” he said warningly and then gasped as the dog planted a paw on his spine that drove the breath out of him. And no, he doubted a dog had such a huge heavy paw. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought it was a bear or a lion.
The creature shifted its weight, and Harsh squeaked as he felt the prickle of claws through his jacket. At first the only thing he could hear was his own gasping breath, but then he began to hear a low rumbling growl so deep that he could feel it through the creature’s paw on his back. The creature crouched down, shifting more weight onto Harsh’s back, and the growl grew louder and louder till he could hear it right beside his ear.
“Oh God,” Harsh whispered shakily, and the creature growled louder and snapped, letting him hear the audible click of teeth. He wondered deliriously if the library would come to collect its books or if it would just fine him and repossess his doylies. The creature’s hot moist breath gusted down his neck and then, a little wet bead of saliva plopped on the back of his ear. It stung slightly, but Harsh didn’t dare move to wipe it off. He felt the creature tense and crouch down and thought, no, not like this- he couldn’t die like this.
Something at the end of the street went off with a loud chink-ching.
The creature whined with a high-pitched yelp and suddenly Harsh could breathe again. He rolled away and scrambled up, but all he caught was a blur of four legs and a monstrous head before the creature was gone. His side where the creature had slammed into him suddenly rose into a dull ache that ran down the length of his ribs.
Someone was running towards him down the street. “Sir, are you- Harsh?”
Harsh turned blindly, and Cosway was crouching down in front of him like a mirage. He was dressed all in black, and all Harsh could make out were the silver buttons on his jacket. He stared at them again because there was something odd about them that he couldn’t place. He looked up and saw that Cosway’s mouth was moving, that he was asking him questions.
“Are you alright?” Cosway’s hand was in his hair, the side of his face, and then slid down to grip his shoulder and shake him till his spectacles rattled. “Matthias, are you hurt?”
Harsh shook his head and then realised he was shaking. “N-No, no. I- what was that?”
“No time!” Cosway said. He pulled something from his own neck left-handedly and dropped it around his. For the first time, Harsh saw that Cosway was carrying a strange looking rifle in his other hand.
He touched the chain Cosway had dropped around his neck. It was cool and slightly heavy. “What?”
“For protection,” Cosway said quickly. “Now go.” He stooped to pick up the books Harsh had dropped and slipped them into the stack Harsh was clutching mindlessly to his chest. “Go back home as fast as you can and don’t look back.” His voice was calm, but Harsh saw his eyes were slightly wild. “Do you hear me, Harsh? Don’t look back.”
The run back home was one of the longest of his entire life. All the familiar streets he passed on his way to Pevensey in the mornings suddenly looked perilous and sinister in the darkness. Every once in a while he was sorely tempted to stop and clamp and hand over his mouth because he swore he could hear a low rumbling directly behind him and the hot stinging breath of something much too large and black to be a dog. Don’t look back, Cosway had said, and Harsh fisted one hand around the chain around his throat and ran faster. His books kept slipping in his arms and making general nuisances of themselves, but he couldn’t afford to stop and shift them into his bag.
The little flight of steps going up to his building were almost too much for him- his movements felt slow and sluggish as if he were running through honey, and he almost abandoned all of his books right there, but then he was clearing the last stair and banging into his sleepy darkened sitting room.
He dropped all of his books in a little heap where he stood and turned around to slam the door shut. He noticed detachedly that his hand was remarkably steady as he bolted the door. He wanted to sit down. He wanted to curl up into one of his horrid uncomfortable armchairs in the sitting room with a scalding pot of tea and perhaps a glass of something stronger, but instead he shoved the sitting table in front of the door, fetched his oil lamp, and went to check the latches on all the windows. He found all of his lamps and placed as many as he could throughout the rooms. His hands were damp and clammy as he gathered up his books and forced himself to arrange them alphabetically on the bookshelf in the bedroom. It calmed him somewhat to have something prosaic and familiar to do. At least it kept his hands busy- he couldn’t stand to fidget.
Something knocked on his door, and he dropped the last book in fright.
For a moment he considered not answering, but then his book fell treacherously off the table and onto the floor with a terribly loud bang. Harsh held his breath. The hallway outside was silent.
And then the knocking resumed in earnest. Harsh cursed darkly and went out to the sitting room towards the small bread box of a fireplace that he never bothered with. He lifted the fire iron awkwardly and crept towards the door. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do with the iron if it came to that- he had never struck anyone in his life, except for once when he and James had been young and scuffled over something small and forgotten now.
Harsh reluctantly slid back the bolt, kicked away the table, and reached for the knob. He opened the door slowly, the iron held aloft in one hand. “Who…is it?”
“Harsh,” Cosway hissed and Harsh sagged with relief. He opened the door wider and Cosway slipped in. “Damn it, Harsh, what if I had been something else-” he started but then his eyes went down to the iron. “Ah. I see you’re a fast learner.”
“Top of my class,” Harsh said coolly and then nearly dropped the iron on his foot when he saw Cosway’s shoulder. “You’re hurt!”
Cosway tried to shrug and then winced. “It’s nothing-”
“Nothing! You’re bleeding everywhere!” Harsh dropped the iron and seized Cosway’s good arm. Cosway had his strange rifle resting in the crook of his wounded arm like a swaddling child. “I’ll get something to bind it up.”
“God help me, but what are those things on top of your chairs?” Jonathan said with faint horror as Harsh hurried him past the living room.
“Sit,” Harsh said with irritation he didn’t really feel, but it was better than panic- anything was better than that. He went to the drawer where he kept his handkerchiefs.
Cosway sank down bemusedly on the edge of Harsh’s bed and eyed the bookshelf. “Bit of light reading, Harsh?”
“Hush,” Harsh said and knelt down to help Cosway with his jacket. “Do you wear anything else but black?”
“Black,” Cosway offered, smiling slightly, and peeled out of his shirtsleeves.
“Are you a boxer?” Harsh demanded, gawking at him. Cosway had an astonishingly athletic build for someone so eager to shut himself up in a library for hours. There were a great number of scars running down his torso and arms, some of them were pale and faded while others looked more recent. The dark oozing slash on his shoulder stood out in stark contrast. An old green and yellow bruise the size of Harsh’s outstretched hand was wrapped around the left side of Cosway’s stomach, and Harsh felt a sympathetic twinge from looking at it.
Cosway cleared his throat, and Harsh realised he had been staring. “What? Oh, yes, sorry,” he said quickly and slapped his clean handkerchief against the wound more firmly than he’d intended.
Cosway made a pained noise.
“Oh!” Harsh said again. “Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean-”
But Cosway burst out laughing and then clutched his shoulder. “Harsh, stop- stop making me laugh!”
“Hold that,” Harsh instructed, ignoring him loftily, and Cosway kept the handkerchief pressed to the wound. Harsh cleared away his bloodied clothes and hunted through his things for an extra nightshirt. “Here,” he said. “And before you ask if I have a black nightshirt, I must tell you I-”
“What is this?” Cosway asked, lifting it up for inspection.
“Well of course you can’t go back home now,” Harsh said testily. And perhaps he was being impolite, but it also made him businesslike in a way that made him feel comfortable. “Here, you’re injured, so you take the bed, and I’ll-”
“No, I’m used to sleeping on the floor,” Cosway argued, and Harsh was relieved they wouldn’t have to bicker about Cosway staying the night. “Someone has to guard the front door, at any rate.”
“But you-”
“Don’t argue with me, Harsh.”
“Right then, I won’t,” Harsh said. And then, “Here, can you help me lift this mattress?”
So he and Cosway ended up sleeping in the sitting room in front of the door with Harsh making himself an ersatz bed out of his packed away winter blankets and giving the mattress to Cosway because he was a guest and injured. Cosway had his rifle next to him within arm’s reach, and that should have been strange, but instead it comforted him. Harsh hauled the side table over for the oil lap and his spectacles before settling down beside Cosway, who was staring at the ceiling thoughtfully.
“You haven’t asked me, you know,” Cosway said suddenly.
“Asked you what?” Harsh asked, shifting up on an elbow to look at him. Cosway looked oddly foreign in his white nightshirt, but it suited him.
“Everything,” Cosway said vaguely. “What I was doing in town so late, who I am. You haven’t asked me about my rifle.”
“You sound disappointed,” Harsh said drily and then drummed his fingers against the blankets. “I assumed you were out for some errand and saw that…that dog following me. From your scars, I…I would suppose you’re part of the military.”
Cosway huffed out a laugh. “Military. Yes. Yes, you would be right about that.”
Harsh nodded. He didn’t actually believe any of what he was saying, but Cosway just looked so desperate for him to explain everything away. “And as for your rifle, well, I’m just grateful you had it.”
Cosway hmmed. “You’re an exceptionally calm person, do you know that, Harsh?” he said finally. “It’s…it’s very refreshing. I wish I had the liberty of telling you the entire truth, but…” He trailed off.
“You saved my life,” Harsh said stubbornly. He was almost certainly sure that Cosway was involved in something illegal and was protecting him by not telling him much, but Cosway had also been good and decent, and Harsh liked him.
“And I trust you would never lie to me about anything important,” he added firmly. Cosway hadn’t even lied to him now; he had kept silent and let Harsh invent any lies he wanted. Harsh was vaguely grateful for that. The chain Cosway had given him slipped out of his shirt, and he caught it. It had a formless piece of metal strung at the end, and he looked at it curiously for a moment. “Ah, this is yours-”
“Keep it,” Cosway said. “You seem like the sort that attracts trouble.”
Harsh didn’t know how to answer that. “What was that thing in the street?” he asked instead. “At the very least, you ought to tell me the truth about that.”
“Have you heard of a barghest?” Cosway had asked and looked serious for a moment, but then his mouth had turned up slightly.
“Very funny, Cosway,” Harsh had grumbled and reached to put his spectacles on the table.
Cosway had caught his wrist for a moment. “I think after all that,” he had said brightly. “You ought to call me Jonathan.”
Harsh sat back in his chair a few hours later and rubbed his eyes. He was starting to get the shape of it now.
He hadn’t found anything particular about the seitwärtsort precisely, but after tracking down a long chain of sources, he had found something called ‘the space beyond the boundaries of sight,’ which was at least a strong start; he suspected it was an old euphemism for the spiritual world, which fit with the rest of the descriptions of the Macerian. The Macerian itself sounded a great deal like a valkyrie that was attracted to places of great violence, like an ancient personification of death. The greater mystery now was why the book had named Varus specifically; Harsh thought it could have been a reference to some sort of mixing of Roman and German polytheistic religion, but he didn’t have the resources to prove that.
He left word about the matter with Quentin, the young doctoral candidate who manned the desk; Quentin assured him that the library would try and find more resources about German polytheism from its sister libraries. Harsh left the library contended- Quentin was quiet and efficient, and Harsh knew he would track down any books he could. He had been exceptionally helpful so far, even going so far as to help Harsh with translations in Cornish, which Harsh knew nothing about and Quentin could read flawlessly.
For once, Harsh was back at the inn early, a few hours before dinner. He looked at the closed doors of all the little shops and realised he hadn’t even stopped in any of them, hadn’t taken the time to explore the city at all. The inn really was a beautiful building, Harsh thought as he looked up at it. Lovely in the way of old things kept clean and cared for. He saw something move out of the corner of his eye and looked up, but it was already gone.
Drescher looked up at Harsh banged into the inn. “Mr. Harsh-”
“Is Jonathan here? Did he come back?”
Drescher looked confused. “No. Why, have the jules said something to you?”
Harsh shook his head quickly. “No, but I thought…are the maids cleaning the rooms upstairs?”
“They only clean in the morning after our guests have left their rooms for the day. Why do you ask?”
Nothing,” Harsh said and waved a hand. “I just thought…it’s nothing. I think I’ll lie down a bit before dinner.”
“Of course,” Drescher said kindly. “That would be for the best, I think. You have been overexerting yourself, Mr. Harsh.”
“I believe I have.” Harsh rubbed at his eyes and went back up to his room.
He dropped his bag and papers at the desk. He opened up the wardrobe, checked under the desk, and then sat down on Jonathan’s bed, feeling very silly. Perhaps Drescher was right- perhaps he hadn’t been sleeping enough or eating well, and he was just exhausted.
But for a moment he could have sworn something had been standing at the window in his room.