“Trouble, you say? What sort of trouble?” she asked, cocking one perfect eyebrow. At his hesitation, she pounced. “Come, sir! If we are to get on, we must of necessity agree to a full exchange of confidences. We must keep nothing back.” He saw the defiance leap up in her eyes. “Lest you harbour any misguided sense of chivalric duty to protect a poor weak woman, I do assure you I am fully able and prepared to protect myself.”
The idea of protecting this fiery spirit had not remotely occurred to Kit. Once suggested, however, he was caught in a proposition of powerful allure, the mere suggestion of which filled him with a sudden pleasure.
“Speak, sir!” she demanded.
He shook himself from his caveman reverie. “Yes,” he allowed, “a full and frank exchange of confidences. It is precisely what I was about to suggest myself.”
“Then, as we are in agreement…” She patted her mouth primly with the edge of her napkin, then tossed the cloth aside. “Let us begin the search.”
Kit looked longingly at the mutton slowly congealing on his plate. “After supper, perhaps-”
“That will not do, sir!” She pushed back her chair and stood. “If finding his journals is as important as you claim, then we have not a moment to lose.” She strode from the room and into the corridor.
Kit snatched a last bite of the mutton, then hurried after. She led him to the room where he had first met her: Sir Henry’s library. Kit caught up with her at the wall of books. “Do you know what they look like?”
“I do not, for I have never seen them.”
“Well, it should not take long to find them in any case. You start there”-he pointed to the top left side of the bookcase-“and I’ll start on the opposite end. We’ll meet in the middle.”
Kit began at his end. The books were all big, heavy tomes bound in thick, dark leather, darker still in the flickering candlelight; he had great difficulty reading the titles hand-lettered in black ink on the spines, which, as he had noted before, were mostly in Latin. Giving this up as a bad job, he began pulling books off the shelf, one by one, and leafing through them. Some were handwritten on parchment, others printed on paper; occasionally, he came across one that contained a block print or etching-usually of some sort of machine or curious scientific apparatus; mostly, however, the pages were covered with small words crowded on pages with tight margins.
After examining a number of these volumes, Kit began to suspect that Sir Henry’s journals, if they did indeed exist, would not be among the large and dense folios he was examining. He turned his eye instead to the smaller, more portable books he saw. These were fewer and more easily handled, and he had soon worked his way through all within reach. He moved a couple paces closer to Lady Fayth and became aware that she was humming; although he did not know the tune, the melody was charming.
He was soon entranced by the lovely, lilting quality of her voice and no longer paying attention to what he was doing. He stood transfixed, a book unopened in his hand.
“What have you got there?”
“Hmm?” He glanced down at the small volume in his hand. It had a green cover and was closed by a leather strap that wrapped around a little brass boss; beyond that there were no other markings of any kind. “I don’t know.”
“Open it,” she instructed.
His fingers fumbled with the leather strap, and he cracked open the cover to reveal a page densely covered with a script of such eccentric nature he could not make out what language it might be written in, much less what it said.
“What have you found?”
“I don’t know,” he said, handing the book to her. “I can’t read it.”
“It is in Sir Henry’s hand,” she announced, her excitement contagious. He watched her lips moving as her eyes scanned the pages, and he wished he were a page in a book just so he could have those lips moving over him like that.
With an effort, he turned his eyes back to the book. “What does it say?”
“Here he is writing about the manifest universe,” she replied, running a white fingertip along the line. “And something called the Omniverse, whatever that may be.”
“The Omniverse!” cried Kit. “That’s it! That’s the thing they were talking about.” He tapped the page with his finger. “This must be Sir Henry’s ley travel journal. It has to be.”
“Are you certain?” she asked, glancing up. “Do you want me to read more?”
“No… yes… possibly.” Kit reached for the book. “Here, bring it to the light so we can see it better.”
Without relinquishing the little tome, Lady Fayth moved to the candle stand and, opening the book, cradled it in both palms, allowing Kit to turn the pages. Though he still could not decipher the archaic penmanship, he did manage to work out the word Omniverse. He turned more pages and found tiny diagrams of lines that looked like broken triangles and rectangles, some with numbers attached to them that might have been latitudes, degrees, or distances-he could not tell.
“We’re going to have to spend some time with this, I expect,” he decided, “if we’re going to find what we’re looking for.”
“For what, pray, are we looking?” she inquired.
Kit bit his lip. “I’m not at all sure,” he confessed after a moment’s thought.
Lady Fayth frowned prettily.
He turned some more pages. “But I think I’ll know it when I see it.” He reached to take the book. “May I?”
She closed the book with a snap. “Certainly not!”
“But-”
“I will not have you pawing through my uncle’s private journal. If you wish to examine this or anything else you must provide me with an explanation of greater persuasion than you have offered thus far.”
“Your uncle is in trouble. This book could help-”
“So you have already said.”
“After all this, you still don’t believe me?” He regarded the dangerous set of her jaw. “Apparently not.” Kit pushed out his lower lip in thought, then brightened as the solution came to him. “I know! We’ll ask Giles-he was there. He saw it all.”
“Who is Giles?”
“The driver-I mean, Sir Henry’s footman or coachman, or whatever. He was with us at Black Mixen Tump. He saw what happened. He can tell you.” Kit started for the door. “Send for him and let him explain.”
“He will have gone to bed,” said Lady Fayth. “It must wait until tomorrow.”
“All right,” agreed Kit. “First thing tomorrow morning, we’ll call him in.”
“Until then, the journal stays with me.”
“Absolutely. Just don’t let it out of your sight. I have a feeling that little green book is priceless.”
CHAPTER 23
In Which Lady Fayth Takes the Lead
The decision to return to Black Mixen Tump had been swiftly reached-so swiftly that Kit still harboured misgivings. Lady Fayth was confident enough for both of them, however, buoyed as she was by the prospect of at last being allowed to make a leap-the very thing, she proclaimed with endearing enthusiasm, she had been yearning for all her life. In fact, she was almost giddy with it, which made Kit’s more sober assessment appear churlish and curmudgeonly by comparison.
“Believe me, if leaping was not dangerous enough-”
“Oh, yes-ferocious volcanoes and man-eating tigers and such, as you have already explained so very colourfully.”
“Right. Well, aside from all that, there is something I haven’t told you yet. There are people-bad men, very bad men, murderers in fact-who wish us harm. They always seem to show up. So we must assume they will be nearby, waiting to attack. They were at Black Mixen, and there was a fight. Sir Henry and Cosimo got away, but their attackers made the jump with them.”
“All the more reason to be on our way, I daresay,” replied Lady Fayth blithely.