I learned much from Rebecca, and perhaps more than she knew–though I suppose she might have said the same of me, for it is hard not to become at least a little vulnerable in the arms of a lover. Still, I think each of us guarded our inner hearts from the other.
I thought little about the life I had left behind in Scotland. Letters came from Madstone Hall–many at first, but fewer as time went on. I paid them little heed, and so I did not notice when they stopped coming altogether. I had no time for such cares. I threw myself into my work by day, while at night, if I was not in Rebecca’s bed, I could be found in one of London’s more raucous pubs with Byron–whose jovial company I had come to greatly enjoy–along with a band of the Seekers’ best and brightest young men.
Once I made the mistake of letting Byron take me to the Cup and Leaf on a night that Rebecca was expecting me. When I tried to beg my leave, the boys grabbed my coat and hauled me back down to the bench.
“Where did you think you’re going, Marius?” Richard Mayburn said. “You’ve had but a single ale.” Richard was a short, stout, red‑haired young man who won every drinking bout he entered.
“I have somewhere to go,” I said, glancing at the window in hopes of a glimpse of the moon, knowing I was already late.
Byron gave me a sharp look. “By Zeus, you’ve got a woman waiting for you, don’t you, Marius? You sly cur.”
My blush was all the answer he needed and elicited whoops of laughter all around.
“So who is this tasty little trollop?” Richard said with an exaggerated leer. “And better yet, are you going to share her?”
“Not with the likes of you, Richard Mayburn,” said a cool voice.
We turned as one to see Rebecca stride across the pub. All eyes were on her, for she was out of place, but wonderfully so, like a dove in the midst of a flock of grackles. The smoky light softened the lines of her face, and her wine‑colored gown accentuated the curves of her body.
“What on Earth are you doing here, Rebecca?” Byron hissed. “This is no place for a lady.”
“I’ve only come to fetch what’s mine,” she said, laying a hand on my shoulder.
Byron’s eyes bulged, and Richard let out a loud guffaw.
“Good show, Marius,” the red‑haired man said, grinning. “Every man in the Seekers has tried to woo Rebecca and failed miserably, and now you’ve succeeded. What’s next? I suppose you’ll be telling us you’ve seen the Philosophers themselves.”
In the humor of the moment, caution fled me. “I won’t keep it a secret from you any longer, gentlemen. The man I dwelled with in Scotland–”
“Was purported to have seen the Philosophers once,” Rebecca smoothly cut me off. Her grip on my shoulder tightened, her fingers digging in. “Yes, so we learned before we came to see you, Marius. Though it’s just a tale, that’s all.”
I looked up. Rebecca’s brown eyes glinted in the lamplight. Did she know that Master Albrecht had once been one of them? Byron and the others clearly did not, for their eyes went wide at her words, and they plied me with many questions about my former master. However, I kept my answers short, for I could feel Rebecca’s gaze upon me, and told them only that he had been an enigmatic gentleman who had taken me in as an orphan and about whom I learned little before he died. It was true enough.
Not long after that night, my affair with Rebecca cooled. I went to her house with diminishing frequency, and we seldom shared her bed when I did. All the same, our partnership within the Seekers seemed stronger than ever, and we often worked together in our investigations. So often, in fact, that I fear Byron grew a bit jealous.
Byron was a good lad, but he was woefully unskilled with women. Somehow, when he tried to speak with them, he always ended up with ale in his face. While the Seekers have had female members from the start, in that time Rebecca was something of a rarity, for I had met no other lady Seekers. Thus it was only natural that Byron should be somewhat fixated upon her; she was the one woman he could speak with and not end up all wet. I feared he would grow angry upon learning of my affair with Rebecca. However, such was his good nature that he said nothing of it, and he remained as jovial a companion as always at pub.
I continued to rise in my career as a Seeker, and in only my fourth year as a journeyman I achieved a significant breakthrough. It was chance, really, that I came upon it at all, but my instincts alerted me that something was not as it seemed, and further investigation proved my hunch.
Near the house where I rented a room, little more than a stone’s throw from the Tower of London, was a bookshop I often haunted for its unusual and varied collection of volumes, especially relating to history. I often engaged in cordial conversation with the proprietor of the shop, a fine, white‑bearded gentleman who went by the name of Sarsin. When he learned of my love for Virgil’s Aeneid, he clucked his tongue.
“The Roman poets were little more than thieves of the Greeks,” he said, then rummaged through his shelves and came up with many classic works of ancient Greece. After that, much of the wage the Seekers paid me went directly into Sarsin’s coffers, and I spent many hours sitting by the Thames, poring over the poetry of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
It was when I moved on to the works of Shakespeare that I began to grow suspicious. Sarsin claimed that his uncle, who had owned the shop before him, had known the Bard, for he had often come into the shop. I did not doubt that. However, more than once, when recounting these stories, Sarsin spoke as if he were the one who had met Shakespeare, rather than his uncle.
The shop owner was likely daft, I told myself. Yet I didn’t quite believe that, and my investigations soon proved I was right. Sarsin claimed that, like Shakespeare, his uncle had been something of a poet, and I convinced him to show me some of his uncle’s work, and to even lend me a yellowed piece of parchment with one particular song.
That night, I compared the handwriting of the song to that on the receipts Sarsin had written for me when I purchased books. There was no doubting it; both documents had been written by the same hand. Certain I was onto something, I began to question the oldest folk I could find on the lanes around the bookshop, and I soon found an old woman, quite blind now but still sharp of wit, who recalled the former proprietor of the shop. She described him as a handsome, elderly man with a white beard, thinning hair, and bright blue eyes.
It was Sarsin, of course. Not the fantastical uncle, but the one and only. Research into the city’s legal records confirmed what by then I already knew. Every fifty years or so, the owner of the Queen’s Shelf “died” and left the shop to his heir. However, though the names changed, the handwriting of the signatures on the deeds was always the same. There was only one answer: The man Sarsin had owned this shop for over a century and a half, and in that time he had not aged a day.
Excited, I reported my findings to Rebecca and Quincy Farris, our superior in the order, and that was when I entered into my first argument with the Seekers, for Farris foolishly decided to approach Sarsin. This was strictly against the First Desideratum, of course; the Nine Desiderata were set down in the Book by the Philosophers, and every Seeker, upon joining the order, swore a Vow to uphold them. However, Farris was an ambitious man–overly so–and no doubt he thought by winning over Sarsin he could seize this finding from me and claim it for his own, thus furthering his rise in the Seekers.