Episode 13: A Search at the London Library
London
March 1900
Miranda Colston balanced precariously at the top of a stepladder as she reached for a faded volume on a top shelf in the Topography section. She remembered her father once saying that an important qualification for a librarian was being tall. Unfortunately, Miranda wasn’t tall.
She went up on her toes a little more, stretched her arm out a little more, and managed to get a couple of fingers on top of the book’s spine. But now she had to dislodge it from the shelf.
She focused all her strength, at least all the strength that wasn’t occupied with maintaining her balance, into those two fingers. Then she pulled.
The book didn’t budge.
Miranda steadied herself and tried once more.
The book still didn’t budge.
Red-faced and breathless from the effort, she rested back on the soles of her feet and pushed her glasses back up her nose. Whoever said that being a librarian wasn’t physical work? She took some breaths of the library air, an air imbued with the comforting and familiar scent of old books. For Miranda, it was the scent of knowledge and escape.
She glanced around the basement room that housed the Topography section. Mercifully, it was empty, Saturday afternoons often being a quiet time at the London Library. She would be humiliated if one of the members was watching her trying — and so far failing — to remove a book from a shelf. Oh lor, she thought. I wish Pop was still here so I could get him to help me.
At least there was no-one waiting for the book. It hadn’t been requested by a member. This was an item she wished to consult for her own research. It was her afternoon break and instead of taking tea, she was using the time to get the book and begin to read it.
She glanced at her wristwatch. She would have to be back upstairs at the reception desk soon. Unwilling to leave without the book, but conscious that her colleagues would frown on any tardiness, Miranda decided to have one more try.
She heard footsteps on the staircase and recognized the businesslike tap of the shoes immediately. It was Mr Packham come looking for her. He had probably timed his afternoon break to coincide with hers and was wondering where she had got to. Oh lor.
Mr Packham was her supervisor and, since her father’s death, her mentor in librarianship. He also took a keen, and, she was beginning to suspect, not solely professional interest in her welfare.
One more try, she said to herself. Back up on her toes, her arm stretched to the limit, poised like a ballerina, she put her fingers on the book, and pulled with all her might. To her great satisfaction, it budged a little.
‘Miss Colston. Why didn’t you —’
At her moment of triumph, Mr Packham had appeared below, looking up at her, an expression of deep concern on his face.
And as the book slid from its captivity, Miranda lost her balance.
And fell.
‘Miss Colston!’
Mr Packham, to his great credit, did what any man should do in the circumstances and caught her on the way down. But as the falling book struck him on the head, he gave a little grunt of pain.
Miranda, though grateful for his catching of her, was concerned that another member of the staff might come upon them, and see her clasped in Mr Packham’s arms. She swiftly extracted herself.
‘Oh, Mr Packham, thank you for saving me,’ she said, flushed and breathless from the fall. ‘Are you alright?’
Mr Packham rubbed his head and smiled ruefully. ‘No blood, no blurred vision, no major pain, so I think I’ll live.’
He smoothed his thick black hair with its geometric middle parting that reminded Miranda of a chalk path through a forest and picked the book up from the floor. As he handed it to her, he read the spine.
‘Hooker’s Journal of a tour in Iceland in the summer of 1809. Has that been requested by a member?’
Miranda considered a white lie but decided it would be wasteful to spend one on Mr Packham.
‘No. It’s for me,’ she said. ‘But I’m on my break. I wouldn’t have come down here if I was —’
‘Oh, of course not,’ Mr Packham said. ‘You father instilled a great sense of duty in you. I know that, believe me. But I didn’t know you had an interest in Iceland.’
‘Well, I…’
She did indeed have an interest in Iceland, though not for any reason that Mr Packham might guess at.
The fact was that she, Miranda Colston, was planning an expedition to Iceland. The project required extensive research in many fields: history, topography, flora and fauna, sailing, sledging, husky dogs, map reading, medicine, equipment, food supplies, the Icelandic language, the Norse sagas, character evaluation (for when she selected the crew), and several others. She had conceived the expedition only recently, so there was still much to be done.
Of course, this planned expedition would never actually happen. Miranda was a fifteen-year-old junior librarian living with her grandmother. The chances of her arranging and then leading an expedition to search for Egill Skallagrímsson’s silver were non-existent. But that wasn’t the point. Or rather, it wasn’t the whole point.
Even if she could never put her plans into action, the notion of finding Egill Skallagrímsson’s treasure, buried in the tenth century and now lost, excited and entranced her. From the start, she had vowed that no detail would be neglected, no risk unexamined. The success of the putative expedition depended on her.
The idea had come to her while sitting at home on a Sunday evening, while she was reading a translation of Egil's Saga and had just learned of the silver he had hidden near the town of Mosfellsbær. Once the treasure was hidden, Skallagrímsson had killed the servants who helped him bury it. The secret of the location died with Egill Skallagrímsson, and his silver has never been found.
Her grandmother was dozing in her armchair, and Mr Tibbles the cat was dozing in her lap. All was peaceful, all was cosy, all was silent apart from the occasional spit and hiss of the coal fire. Miranda looked up from the book and into the flames of the fire, when she had the sudden thought that all her Sundays for evermore might be much like this one.
Her mother had died in childbirth. Her father, a senior librarian at the London Library, and indeed, Mr Packham’s supervisor, had died just last year from a longstanding heart condition. Now it was just Granny and her in the house in Holloway. Her life would be occupied with librarianship or, perhaps at some point, marriage and motherhood. She welcomed both prospects. She loved books and libraries, and she adored children, though she was still uncertain about the ways of the male sex.
It wasn’t any kind of dissatisfaction with her present and future life that set her imagination aflame on the matter of Egill Skallagrímsson’s treasure. It was more that she had devoured books like King Solomon's Mines and Treasure Island, and through them developed a secret yearning for adventure. Miranda would have been the first to admit it was all a daydream, a fantasy she would never enact in real life.
So the expedition to Iceland was a delicious escapade that had begun as a vague make-believe and become a kind of challenge: if I was going to go, how would I organize it? And once there, how would I go about finding Egill Skallagrímsson’s silver? An adventure of the mind and sprit, then, and not of the body.
Mr Packham seemed to sense Miranda was uncomfortable and said, ‘Well, that’s not why I came down here to find you. It’s just that we have a sudden rush at the enquiry desk and I wondered if you could shorten your break and help.’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ she said, grateful that Mr Packham, though he seemed intensely curious, did not to press her further on her interest in Iceland.
Clutching the hard-won volume of Hooker under her arm, Miranda followed him upstairs. A queue of four people had formed at the enquiry desk and the unwritten rule of the library was that no queue should exceed two people for more than a few minutes.
Miranda stowed her book under the counter and while Mr Packham dealt with one member, she took another, a tall, well-dressed man with a lean face and a neat moustache. She noticed the dull red scar that ran down his right cheek and wondered how he had got it.
He showed her his membership card. Major Arthur Lock, she read and noted that he had only joined in October.
‘Yes, Major Lock, how may I help you?’
‘Well, I’m not sure where to begin,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to track down an organization, a somewhat obscure organization, and I wondered whether you have any reference works that might assist me in the search.’
‘Oh, yes, I’m sure we do,’ Miranda said eagerly. This kind of search was just what she enjoyed.
‘Now what kind of organization is it, Major?’
‘Hmm… let’s say, scientific. For now, anyway.’
Miranda frowned. Scientific. For now. A protean organization? Did such a thing exist? Her mind went off on a brief ramble as she tried to think of likely scenarios. There were the City of London guilds, those had once been associations of craftsmen and were now charitable organisations, and the —
Major Lock cleared his throat.
‘If it’s a scientific organization,’ she said, ‘does it publish a journal or have any prominent members?’
’Not that I know of.’
This was all very mysterious. Needles and haystacks, she thought. But she liked a challenge and here one was.
She pushed her glasses back up her nose. ‘Yes, well, I think we should begin with the indexes to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and the indexes to the papers of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. There’s a good chance that a scientific organization might appear somewhere in those. If we’re unsuccessful, we’ll have to spread the net wider.’
Miranda led Major Lock upstairs to the Science section and, with his help, began to pull the required volumes from the shelves.
‘Do you have any idea how long this organization has existed?’ she asked.
‘No, I’m afraid I don’t,’ he said.
‘Well, let’s begin with the indexes for the last ten years.’
While Major Lock browsed the volumes, Miranda said, ‘Let me see how busy the enquiry desk is now. If the queue has gone, I can help you with this.’
He looked up at her with an expression that was neither friendly nor hostile. He didn’t make her feel uncomfortable exactly, but she knew she was being assessed. She had the sudden impression that this was a man who didn’t accept anybody or anything at face value.
‘That will be very kind of you,’ he said.
Miranda went back downstairs and found that the queue had indeed gone. She told Mr Packham where she would be and what she would be doing, and he raised no objection. And after an hour’s steady work, trawling through the various indexes, neither she nor Major Lock had found any trace of the Pickerel Institute.
He seemed philosophical about it and said, ‘Well, it was probably a long shot.’
Miranda, determined not to admit defeat just yet and summoning up the energy and resolve she knew she would need for the Icelandic expedition, said, ‘Oh, but we can’t give up yet.’
A trace of amusement crossed his face. ‘What do you suggest?’
‘Well, we could go further back.’
He shook his head. ’No, I don’t think that would help.’
‘You say it’s a scientific organization. Is that general science or does it have a specialty?’
He considered this and said, ‘The speciality is likely to be either neurology or psychical research.’
Miranda had strong opinions on psychical research and emphatically did not regard it as a domain of science. But she kept these to herself, saying instead, ‘Well, we can look through the indexes of the Lancet.’ Pausing, she added, dubiously, ‘And of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.’
This exercise took them another hour and turned out to be as fruitless as the first search. But now Miranda was intrigued, as much by the Major’s cagey approach as by the quest itself.
‘Do you know the names of any of the members of this institute?’ she said.
‘I have a surname, but it’s a common one and I don’t think it would help us narrow things down.’
‘What about its offices? Do you have any idea —’
‘I’m not even sure it has offices,’ he said wryly.
‘It’s all very mysterious,’ Miranda said and immediately regretted her boldness in expressing an opinion. Oh dear, it wasn’t the job of a junior librarian to be commenting on the various obsessions and quixotic pursuits of the members. And there were so many of them, as she had learned in her short time at the London Library.
Could the Major be one of those obsessives? She had to admit he was better dressed and better groomed than those she had met so far. Freshly shaven, smelling of cologne, and with nothing of his breakfast visible on his cravat or shirt.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I didn’t mean —’
‘That’s quite alright, Miss —?’
‘Miss Colston.’
‘Well, Miss Colston. You’re quite right. It is all very mysterious. I wish I could get a grip on it, whatever it is.’
Miranda felt she now had licence to ask another question.
‘Major, if you don’t mind me asking, why do you want to track down this organization?’
Miranda knew immediately that he would not tell her.
All he said was, ‘It’s a personal matter.’
But there was a steely determination beneath that remark that rather frightened her.
He made no sign of leaving, so she said, ‘Pickerel? Is that a name or something else?’
‘A pickerel is a young pike.’
‘A fish? How odd. You don’t think —‘
He smiled. ‘No, this is nothing to do with fishing. Though the entire business is fishy.’
It was a poor joke, but it pleased Miranda he had made it with her and she laughed.
He rose from the table. ‘Now I must go. But if you have any flashes of inspiration, will you write to me and let me know?’
‘Yes, I will.’
At that moment, she felt a great sense of disappointment in herself. She had let Major Lock down. It was the first time in her brief career that she hadn’t found a piece of information for a member. Her nascent librarian’s pride was damaged.
He handed her a card. ‘That’s my London address. You can write to me there. Though I’m going to be in Shropshire for a couple of weeks from tomorrow so I may not reply immediately. Well, Miss Colston, you’ve been most helpful. A credit to the library, in fact.’
He shook her hand and left.
Miranda smiled to herself as she put the journals back on their shelves. A credit to the library, indeed. But I wish I could have helped him find what he was looking for.
When she had finished, she looked at his card, a card of quality. It read:
Major Arthur Lock
Flat 28, Great Russell Mansions
59-61 Great Russell Street
London WC
For reasons she couldn’t fully explain to herself, Miranda desperately wanted to help Major Lock track down this Pickerel Institute. The little mystery intrigued her and she wanted to know more about the personal matter that lay behind it. Was it overly imaginative of her to think that there might be —
‘Miss Colston?’ It was Mr Packham’s clipped accent, an accent that didn’t quite conceal his Cockney origins.
He stood in the doorway.
‘Miss Colston, I have a proposition for you.’
‘Oh, do you?’ she said nervously.
Mr Packham coloured slightly. ‘No, no, not a proposition. That sounds — What I mean is, I have a suggestion which you may find agreeable. I hope.’
‘Yes, Mr Packham?’
‘You know I’ll be attending the annual conference of the Independent Libraries Association in Cambridge next week?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, Mrs Grantham was to accompany me as the other delegate. But due to a serious family matter, she is now unable. And none of the other senior staff can, at such notice. In short, Miss Colston, should your domestic circumstances permit, would you like to accompany me?’
Miranda could hardly believe her ears. How thrilling to attend such an important event. And to visit the famous city of Cambridge, too.
‘Oh yes, I would like to come, ever so. But I must talk to Grandmother. To make sure she’ll be alright on her own for a few days. But I’m sure it will be fine. We have a neighbour, a friend, who can look in on her.’
‘Excellent,’ said Mr Packham, who seemed as happy about the idea as Miranda was.
All her thoughts of the Pickerel Institute, if such a thing even existed, were forgotten for the time being.