Read Chapter 14: The Other Copy

Eleanor woke to the grey Cambridge light filtering through Christine's thin curtains, her notebook open on the pillow beside her, the memorized passage already transcribed in her cramped, defensive handwriting. She'd read it so many times in the last twelve hours that the words had begun to lose their shape, dissolving into patterns of ink that refused to mean anything.

She needed corroboration. Not the diary's own voice, but someone else's—a registrar, a parish clerk, an anonymous hand that had noted something out of place in the official record. She'd done this kind of work before, the slow archaeology of academe, but never with a target on her back and a dead phone battery.

Christine had left for her morning lecture, and the flat was silent. Eleanor plugged her phone into the charger on the kitchen counter—she'd risk the few minutes it took to gain enough power to move—and pulled on the clothes she'd been wearing for two days. She needed to look like a scholar, not a fugitive. She needed to walk into the Cambridge University Library and pretend her world hadn't collapsed.

The library was a cathedral of fluorescent light and hushed purpose. Eleanor flashed her college card at the desk, barely registering the attendant's nod, and made her way to the ground-floor terminals. She needed the university's manuscript and archive catalogue—the *Janus* system, named for the two-faced god. Appropriate, she thought, given how many faces this history had already worn.

She logged in with her St. Cuthbert's credentials. The screen flickered, then presented her with her usual permissions profile: standard reading access, restricted sectionals, but nothing marked *secure* or *internal review*. Her search terms were careful at first: *Chancellor, St. Cuthbert's, Elizabethan, mortality*. The results were thin, predictable. Secondary sources, passing mentions, a doctoral thesis from 1978 that referenced the chancellor's death in a footnote about funeral customs.

Nothing about poison. Nothing that contradicted the plague narrative.

She refined her search. *St. Cuthbert's, death records, sixteenth century*. The system returned a single hit: a register held not in the university main collection, but in the private archive of King's Lynn College, a small, obscure sister institution twenty miles north of Cambridge. The entry listed the register's dates—1579 to 1603—and gave no digitized preview. The access field read *By appointment only. Contact archivist.*

Eleanor clicked the request button. A dialog box appeared: *Your credentials do not permit inter-institutional archival reservations. Please contact your college's librarian to initiate the request.*

She swore under her breath. The librarian at St. Cuthbert's would ask questions. The librarian at St. Cuthbert's was likely already being interviewed by Meridian's operatives, or worse, paid by them. She couldn't go through that channel.

"Having trouble?"

Eleanor flinched, her shoulders rising reflexively, and turned to find a woman standing close behind her terminal. She was in her sixties, with silver-streaked hair pulled back in a loose bun, and wore a green cardigan with suede elbow patches that looked authentically worn rather than affectively distressed. She held a box of index cards—the old-fashioned kind, catalogued by hand.

"System's being particular," Eleanor said, keeping her voice even. "Inter-institutional request."

The woman tilted her head, studying Eleanor's face with unsettling focus. "You're the Ashworth girl. The one who found the diary."

Eleanor's stomach dropped. Her hand moved instinctively toward the messenger bag slung across her body, where the notebook sat, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.

"Relax," the woman said, her voice low and dry. "I'm not with anyone who'd hurt you. I'm just someone who reads the record books. Name's Gladys. I've been a cataloguer here for thirty-four years, and I know a face that's being hunted when I see one."

"How do you know who I am?"

"Because I catalogued the acquisition of that diary when it was donated in 1958. And because a man in a rather expensive suit came in yesterday afternoon asking whether anyone had requested access to the St. Cuthbert's files. I told him no. But I saw the way he checked his watch—he wasn't a researcher. He was waiting for someone. When you walked in, I recognized the description from the college newsletter. Then I saw you hit the flagged permissions wall, and I thought: she's trying to get around the gatekeepers the honest way. That'll never work."

Eleanor swallowed. "Why would you help me?"

"Because I've been cataloguing death records for three decades, and I've noticed that some names appear more often than they should. Particularly around St. Cuthbert's. Particularly around that chancellor." Gladys set the box of index cards down on the terminal desk and slid a single card from the top. "This is the private index. Not in the digital system. Not in any public catalogue. I keep it because I'm old and obstinate and I don't trust computers."

Eleanor took the card. It was yellowed, typewritten, with a single line: *St. Cuthbert's, chapel ledger, burials 1580–1584. Deposited in King's Lynn College crypt, shelf 4-C. Restricted.*

"This ledger," Eleanor said. "Does it record cause of death?"

"It records everything the parish clerk deemed worth writing down. Whether he told the truth about it—that's your job to figure out." Gladys nodded toward the card. "Take it. I've already made my copy. But be aware: King's Lynn College chapel crypt is not generally open to the public. You'll need the key."

"Key?"

"The chapel master's name is Brian Okafor—he's a friend of mine. I'll phone ahead. Tell him you're cataloguing for me. He'll let you in, and he won't ask questions, because he owes me a favour from 1999 involving a missing hymnbook and a rather embarrassing Easter sermon."

Eleanor took the card, her fingers brushing the crumbled paper. "Why are you doing this? You don't even know what I'm looking for."

"I know the pattern, dear. I've watched scholars walk into St. Cuthbert's with bright eyes, and I've watched them disappear from the archival records altogether." Gladys leaned closer. "A list exists. A list of names. And I've been noting them down for years. Your father was on it. So was a man named Marcus Bell's father." She straightened. "So is his name, if you're not careful."

Eleanor couldn't breathe. She held Gladys's gaze, waiting for the woman to say more, but Gladys only patted her shoulder.

"Go to King's Lynn. Find your ledger. And stop using the digital catalogue—they watch it. You need to think like a sixteenth-century clerk, not a modern researcher. The truth isn't in the files. It's in the margins."

Two hours later, Eleanor stood in the dim, stone-flagged crypt of King's Lynn College chapel, a schedule of candles flickering against the damp walls. Brian Okafor, a broad man with a gentle face, had unlocked the side door without comment, handed her a torch, and pointed toward a heavy oaken shelf marked *4-C*.

The ledger was bound in cracked leather, the pages thick and crumbling at the edges. Eleanor lifted it carefully onto a reading stand in the corner and turned the pages with cotton-gloved hands. She'd only know the names from the diary's second cipher—the chancellor's burial would be there, if the ledger survived.

She reached October 1583. A leaf had been folded, its edge crimped—a detail she'd noticed in other documents where a clerk had wanted to return to the entry later.

The entry read:

*Edmund Blackwood, Chancellor, of St. Cuthbert's College, buried the 12th of October. Died of a sudden fever—but the body showed no plague marks. The physician who examined him, one T. Marlowe, did privately note a bitterness upon the lips and a swelling of the tongue. The Chancellor had no known earthly enemies, but he had recently argued with a man of the King's privy council concerning a matter of, in his words, "buried truth."*

Eleanor's hand trembled. The official record—the one cited in every biography, every history of the college—stated that Blackwood died of plague in the epidemic of 1583. But this ledger, buried in a crypt, recorded a private dissent. A physician's observation. A bitter taste. A swelling of the tongue.

Poison. Not plague.

The chancellor had been killed because he carried "buried truth." And Eleanor had just stolen a passage from his diary that claimed the exact same thing.

She copied the entry into her notebook with shaking hands, then carefully returned the ledger to its shelf. She left the crypt without seeing Brian, slipping out through the side door into the dank corridor that led to the chapel yard.

She stood in the thin afternoon light, rain beginning to fall, and pulled out her phone. It had charged enough to hold a single message. She typed: *Chapel crypt, St. Cuthbert's, midnight. If you've chosen your side, come alone.*

She sent it to Marcus.

Then she deleted the thread, turned off the phone, and walked north into the rain, her notebook pressed against her chest, the word *poison* burning in her mind.