He had research assistants, in fluctuating numbers, whom he despatched like Noah's doves and ravens into the libraries of the world, clutching numbered slips of paper, like cloakroom tickets or luncheon vouchers, each containing a query, a half-line of possible quotation, a proper name to be located. The hub of a Roman chariot, tracked through Gibbon's footnotes. "The dangerous dreamed melon of the sage" which turned out to come from the dream of Descartes. Ash had been interested in everything. Arab astronomy and African transport systems, angels and oak apples, hydraulics and the guillotine, druids, and the grande armée, catharists and printer's devils, ectoplasm and solar mythology, the last meals of frozen mastodons and the true nature of manna. The footnotes engulfed and swallowed the text. They were ugly and ungainly, but necessary, Blackadder thought, as they sprang up like the heads of the Hydra, two to solve in the place of one solved.
He thought often, in his dim place, of how a man becomes his job. What would he be now if he had become, say, a civil servant allotting housing finance, or a policeman, poring over bits of hair and skin and thumbball prints? (This was a very Ash-like speculation.) What would knowledge be, collected for its own sake, for his own sake, that was, for James Blackadder, with no reference to the pickings, digestion and leavings of Randolph Henry Ash?
There were times when Blackadder allowed himself to see clearly that he would end his working life, that was to say his conscious thinking life, in this task, that all his thoughts would have been another man's thoughts, all his work another man's work. And then he thought it did not perhaps matter so greatly. He did after all find Ash fascinating, even after all these years. It was a pleasant subordination, if he was a subordinate. He believed Mortimer Cropper thought himself the lord and owner of Ash, but he, Blackadder, knew his place better.
He had once seen a naturalist on the television who seemed to him to be an analogue of himself. This man went out with a pouch and gathered up owl-pellets, which he labelled, and later, took apart with forceps, bathed in glass beakers of various cleansing fluids, ordering and rearranging the orts and fragments of the owl's compressed package of bone, tooth and fur, in order to reconstitute the dead shrew or slow-worm that had run, died, and made its way through owl-gut. He was pleased with this image and momentarily considered making a poem out of it. Then he discovered Ash had been beforehand with him. He had described an archaeologist:
Finding out ancient battles from the shards
Of shattered blades or mashed and splintered bones,
Or broken brain-pans, as the curate reads
The death of vole or slow-worm in the dried
Packets the tidy owl ejects, cast out
By white death floating by on softest sails
The bloody hook curved in the downy ruff…
Then Blackadder could not think whether he had noticed the screen naturalist because his mind was primed with Ash's image, or whether it had worked independently.
Roland emerged from tunnels of shelving into Blackadder's icily lit domain. Paola smiled at him and Blackadder frowned. Blackadder was a grey man, with a grey skin and iron-grey hair, which he wore rather long, because he was proud that it was still so thick. His clothes, tweed jacket, cord trousers, were respectable, well-worn and dusty, like everything else down there. He had a good ironic smile when he smiled, which was very infrequently.
Roland said, "I think I've made a discovery."
"It will probably turn out to have been discovered twenty times already. What is it?"
"I went to read his Vico and it's still crammed with his manuscript notes, bursting with them, between every page. In the London Library."
"Cropper will have been through it with a toothcomb."
"I don't think so. I truly don't think so. All the dust is set in black rims, it reaches the edges of the paper. No one's touched it for a long, long time. I guess not ever. I read some."
"Useful?"
"Oh, very. Enormously."
Blackadder, reluctant to show excitement, began to clip together bits of paper. "I'd better have a look," he said. "I'd better see for myself. I'll get over there. You didn't disturb anything?”
“Oh no. Oh no. That is, a lot of the papers simply flew out when the book was opened, but we put them back in place, I think."
"I don't understand it. I thought Cropper was ubiquitous. You'd better keep this absolutely hush-hush, you understand, or it'll all be winging its way across the Atlantic, whilst the London Library replaces its carpets and installs a coffee machine and Cropper sends us another of his nice helpful smiley-regretful faxes, offering access to the Stant Collection and every possible assistance with microfilm. You haven't said anything to anyone?"
"Only the Librarian."
"I'll get over there. Patriotism will have to do instead of funding. Stop the drain."
"They wouldn't-"
"I wouldn't trust anyone, faced with Cropper's cheque-book, not further than I could see."
Blackadder was struggling into his overcoat, a shabby British Warm. Roland had given up all thought, in any case not very realistic, of discussing the purloined letters with Blackadder. He did, however, ask, "Can you tell me anything about a writer called LaMotte?"
"Isidore LaMotte. Mythologies, 1832. Mythologiesindigènes de la Bretagne et de la Grande Bretagne. Also Mythologiesfrançaises. A great scholarly compendium of folklore and legends. Suffused by a kind of fashionable search for the Key to All Mythologies but also with Breton national identity and culture. Ash would almost certainly have read them, but I've no recollection of any precise use he made of them…"
"There was a Miss LaMotte…"
"Oh, the daughter. She wrote religious poems, didn't she? A gloomy little booklet called Last Things. And children's stories. Tales Told in November. Things that go bump in the night. And an epic which they say is unreadable."
"I think the feminists are interested in her," said Paola.
"They would be," said Blackadder. "They haven't any time for Randolph Ash. All they want is to read Ellen's endless journal once our friend in there has actually managed to bring it to the light of day. They think Randolph Ash suppressed Ellen's writing and fed off her imagination. They'd have a hard time proving that, I think, if they were interested in proof, which I'm not sure they are. They know what there is to find before they've seen it. All they've got to go on is that she spent a lot of time lying on the sofa, and that's hardly unusual for a lady in her time and circumstances. Their real problem-and Beatrice's-is that Ellen Ash is dull. No Jane Carlyle, more's the pity. Poor old Beatrice began by wanting to show how self-denying and supportive Ellen Ash was and she messed around looking up every recipe for gooseberry jam and every jaunt to Broadstairs for twenty-five years, can you believe it, and woke up to find that no one wanted self-denial and dedication any more, they wanted proof that Ellen was raging with rebellion and pain and untapped talent. Poor Beatrice. One publication to her name, and a slim book called Helpmeets without irony doesn't go down well with today's feminists. One little anthology in 1950 of wise, witty and tender sayings from the female companions of the great. D. Wordsworth, J. Carlyle, E. Tennyson, Ellen Ash. But the Women's Studies people can't get their hands on all that stuff to publish as long as poor old Bea is still the official editor. She doesn't know what's hit her."