The Beginning, Again...

Nothing of any importance took place on Sunday. Mitch had two shows for which he had to usher, and I realized that, if I failed all my courses, it wouldn’t matter very much who Barnaby Rutledge and his mysterious female shadow might be, as I would be on the next plane to Boston. So I read about the role of women in the British Empire and took dutiful notes on whether woman had “agency” or a “voice” in the course of their current events or in the creation of their history. And by that evening, I’d given myself such a headache that the only thing I was fit for was bed.
The next morning, I was up early enough to not only make coffee, but to stop in to see Sergey. As soon as the bell over the door chimed my entry, he was poking his head around the side of a rack of bread and brandishing the stack of photocopies I’d given him the day earlier.
“My dear Kipling!” He smiled, but his eyes were worried. “I read, as you asked.”
I shivered. The weather was chill and the damp seemed to have found its way through my sweater and between my ribs. “And?”
“Not mad, my friend.”
He said it so grimly that I took a step closer, suddenly worried.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that this…Rutledge,” he over-enunciated each syllable of the unfamiliar word. “He is not mad. I read your notes. On the side. Here.” He pointed to the list of oddities I’d scribbled. “And he is not mad. But you are right. This girl. It is the same girl. And she is very important. Very…” And his eyes suddenly fixed on the counter. His eyebrows drew together and he murmured something too low for me to hear.
“What is it?”
“Beatrice.” The words came out with an Italianate trill.
I felt my own eyebrows rising skywards before I realized what he was talking about.
“You mean—like Dante?”
“Indeed. The woman he wrote to. And wrote for, I suppose. If he writes her, she doesn’t die. Not completely. You understand?”
“I think so.” The shiver came back. “The only biographical information I could find—about his life, not his writing—was that he died alone. With no one.”
“He had her.” Sergey held up the paper. He had put brackets around one of the first descriptions of the woman from one of the stories.
“I guess so.” I took the papers and slid them in my bag.
A crisp paper bag was waiting for me on the counter when I looked back up.
“If you keep handing out free food,” I warned with a forced smile, before realizing I had no end to the threat. “It’s probably not the best business sense.”
“I will give you food until you stop looking so…tragic.”
That brought out a laugh. “I’m not tragic. Just…I don’t know. I hate the thought of him going nuts over a dead girl. It’s…it’s just awful.”

The elevators in the building where our seminar was being held were undergoing another round of closures, with signs bedecking the walls promising that they would be over shortly. I scanned the lobby in the hopes of seeing a workman, or even a few discarded tools, and saw nothing. I was about to resign myself to the ten-storey climb when the chime from the one working elevator sounded behind me. I turned toward the sound of the swushing doors and nearly collided with a blonde woman coming out.
“I’m so sorry!” I blurted before realizing quite what was happened.
“Oh honestly,” she hissed under her breath. Not loud enough to cause a scene, but certainly loud enough to let me know I’d just ruined her entire day.
I took a quick look at her. She was shorter than me. This didn’t surprise me, seeing as how most women (and a fair amount of men) were shorter than me. She was startling—and naturally blonde, with a tiny waist, ice blue eyes and treacherously high cheekbones.
“Are you alright?” I asked meekly, feeling like the most enormous, clumsy human being in the city.
“Quite,” she sniffed, then fixed me with a glacial smile and snapped away on her little kitten heels.
Thoroughly humiliated, I stepped through the doors of the elevator, only to be greeted by Damien and his growing smirk.
“Are you alright?” He managed without chuckling.
“Umm…yeah.” If my cheeks could have heated anymore, I think my face might have become radioactive. I turned around swiftly and faced the doors—which I realized too late were completely reflective—and sighed. “Yikes.”
Behind me, Damien kept grinning until the doors opened again.

The day did not improve. I found myself at odds over women and “agency” and history, not only with the rest of the class, but with my professor, who was apparently a new-age feminist with an axe to grind. I held my own, but by the time we left two hours later, I felt like I’d just gone twelve rounds with a steam shovel. When Damien had spoken, which wasn’t frequently, he usually came down on my side, which was a relief, but the rest of the time, he kept his eyes trained on me while I spoke, which only made me feel even more awkward.
He hung back to discuss an upcoming research paper with the professor, so I quickly slid through the doors to the stairs in order to avoid the rest of the class who was heading toward the single overworked elevator. I needed my desk, I needed some old diaries, and I needed to be left alone.
And, of course, there was a visiting researching who was making use of my desk when I arrived. He was short and thick, with round glasses and an Adam’s apple large enough to make him look like he was trying unsuccessfully to swallow a golf ball.
“Sorry, Kip,” Rich said quietly as I stared in dazed confusion at the person filling my seat. “I kept meaning to call, but the day just got away from me.”
“It’s ok,” I was physically unable to stay angry at Rich for long, so I merely hefted my bag again and snatched my teacup off the corner of the desk, startling the bespeckled squatter, who muttered a useless apology and went back to reading.
“The Room at the End of the Hall is open.” Rich offered. The room was usually used for meetings with Museum officials or members of the public donating major collections. Fitted out with a tea pot and a china set, it was where we went to impress people. I think it was technically referred to as a Conference Room, but The Room at the End of the Hall was its most common title. It was also the farthest from any office in the department, and seldom used during normal hours.
“Perfect,” I said, and Rich gave me a confused little smile when he realized I meant it. “Do you mind if I start the Thomas Collection today?”
“Still all tied up with Rutledge?”
“You could say that.”
Rich grinned and liberated the fat folder from the stack on his desk. “Have at it.”

I was settled in The Room at the End of the Hall with a mug of tea and took my first deep breath in what felt like hours. The room was equipped with a computer, and I pulled up a Word document in order to start making a list of the contents of the folder. There were a handful of letters in a feminine hand addressed to “Lt Nathaniel Thomas” in Egypt, then Salonika, and finally, one address to him in France. There was a clutch of letters from Rutledge. All written in a very small, neat hand. None were more than a page, front and back, but the writing was compact enough that they were sure to hold a good deal of information. I just had to hope that it was significant information. More often than I cared to admit, letters to and from soldiers tended to be filled with inside jokes, personal references and the most mundane of information about the war. Usually, it was about food, but just as frequently, it was about women.
Seeing his writing was oddly jarring. I’d been expecting a Poe-like hand, so tiny and scrabbled that every word was an effort to decipher; perhaps even a John Wilkes-Booth kind of grandiose scrawl that could cover an entire page in a handful of words. This, though…this was neat and precise and showed not only education, but patience. The return addresses were nearly all from somewhere near a front. If Barnaby Rutledge had taken the time to make his writing so neat and orderly in that kind of chaos, he certainly was not an emotional hysteric, as I had at first wondered. Nor was he a compulsive. The bridges between his letters were all level and rounded. Most of all, they were done quickly. He wasn’t laboring over each letter, they way Poe did, making the reader feel still and suffocated under the weight of the pen.
This writer, I realized, squinting again at the little letters, was perfectly, and utterly sane.