Read Chapter 3: A Debt of Erasmus

The Duke Humfrey’s reading room smelled of old leather and dust motes dancing in the afternoon light that slanted through the leaded windows. Eliza had claimed her usual seat at the end of the long oak table, a spot that gave her a view of the door and the shelves of chained manuscripts beyond. She’d pulled every volume the Bodleian catalogue could offer on the Archai, which turned out to be distressingly few.

The society was a ghost in the archive. A footnote in a 1903 history of Oxford clubs mentioned “the Archaian Circle, a dining society of philologists, now defunct.” A letter in the private correspondence of a Victorian don referenced a “supper of singular ritual” attended by “the keepers of the old tongue.” But no charter, no membership rolls, no minutes. Nothing that would tell her what she’d actually walked into last night.

Eliza stabbed her pencil into the margin of her notebook. Defunct. That’s what they wanted the record to say.

She was so deep in the stacks of her own frustration that she didn’t notice Whitmore until his shadow fell across her page.

“Dr. Hart.”

She looked up. Professor Marcus Whitmore stood over her, his tweed jacket strained across his shoulders, his face arranged into something that might have passed for avuncular concern if she hadn’t known better. He was a bear of a man, all bulk and bluster, the head of her classics faculty. And he had been her father’s colleague. Once.

“Professor Whitmore.” She kept her voice even. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I saw you from the other aisle,” he said, settling into the chair opposite her without an invitation. His eyes flicked to the books stacked between them. “Researching old societies? I thought your thesis was on Ovid’s exile poetry.”

“It is. Broadening my context.” She closed the folio in front of her, a little too quickly.

Whitmore smiled, and it didn’t reach his eyes. “Context. Yes. Your father was fond of context too. He always said a text without its history was just ink on a page.”

Eliza’s stomach tightened. She hadn’t heard anyone speak of her father in months, and certainly not Whitmore, who had been conspicuously silent at the funeral.

“I was sorry to hear about his passing,” Whitmore continued, folding his hands on the table. “Terence Hart was a brilliant scholar. Underappreciated in his time, I think. The financial strain of his later years was a great tragedy.”

Financial strain. That was one way to describe the embezzlement scandal that had broken her father’s career and, shortly after, his heart. Eliza had spent the last three years building a reputation as clean and polished as a new coin, desperate to distance herself from the stench of it.

“I’m managing,” she said.

“Of course you are. You’re your father’s daughter.” Whitmore leaned in, his voice dropping to a murmur. “But management has its limits. I happen to know that Terence’s estate still carries certain debts. Unsettled loans. Personal obligations that a man of honour would consider binding.”

Blood rushed to Eliza’s cheeks. “The estate was settled. The bank confirmed it.”

“The bank.” Whitmore’s smile widened. “The bank knows about the mortgage, yes. The bank knows about the creditors who filed claims. But there are debts that exist outside formal channels, Dr. Hart. Favours extended between colleagues. Money lent on a handshake, on the understanding that one day, it would be repaid.”

She stared at him, her mind racing. Her father had borrowed from Whitmore? It was possible. Terence Hart had borrowed from everyone in his final desperate years, chasing gambling losses and bad investments in an increasingly frantic spiral.

“How much?” The words came out hard.

Whitmore waved a hand. “The sum itself is secondary. What matters is the principle. A debt of Erasmus, I like to call it—the debt we owe to those who made us. Your father was in my debt. And now, as his daughter and heir, that responsibility falls to you.”

He let that hang in the air. Eliza felt the trap closing around her, but she had no idea what kind of trap it was. “What do you want, Professor?”

“A favour. A small one, in the grand scheme of things.” Whitmore reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper, sliding it across the table toward her. “There’s an item in the Chancellor’s collection. A fragment of text that the museum believes is a forgery, but I have reason to suspect is genuine. I need someone with your expertise to examine it, discretely, and confirm its authenticity.”

Eliza looked at the paper but didn’t touch it. “If the museum thinks it’s a forgery, why would they let me see it?”

“They won’t. That’s why you have to be discreet.” He stood, buttoning his jacket. “Do this for me, and your father’s debt is forgiven. The records of that transaction will disappear, and no one will ever know that Terence Hart died owing money to the head of the classics faculty.”

He paused, and his smile turned thin. “Refuse, and I’ll make sure the debt becomes public knowledge. I’m sure the Classics Society would be fascinated to learn how their rising star comes from such… compromised stock.”

Whitmore walked away, his footsteps echoing off the vaulted stone ceiling. Eliza sat frozen, staring at the piece of paper on the table as if it might bite. She reached for it with trembling fingers and unfolded it. A catalog number, a location, and a sketch of a small clay tablet with a fragment of Greek text. Something about the shape of the letters made her breath catch.

She knew that script. It matched the provenance notes in the Archai’s initiation documents Julian had shown her.

The tablet was Archaian.

Eliza spent the rest of the afternoon in a daze, working mechanically through her research while her mind churned. Whitmore was connected to the Archai. That had to be why he wanted the tablet. But Whitmore wasn’t a member—she’d seen the full roster at the initiation last night, and his name hadn’t been among them. Unless he was a former member, expelled like Marcus, bitter and seeking revenge.

The thought gave her pause. If Whitmore was trying to get back at the Archai, and the Archai had destroyed Marcus, then what was Julian’s endgame? She’d felt the magnetic pull of the society’s president, the way he’d seemed to see through her entirely. The Archai had invited her for a reason. Marcus’s expulsion had been a warning. And her task—to bring a secret to the next meeting—was a test she hadn’t yet figured out how to pass.

She was gathering her books to leave when she noticed the archivist, a mousy woman named Sarah, hovering near the librarian’s desk. They’d spoken before, when Eliza had been researching early modern Latin translations.

“Sarah. Everything alright?”

Sarah glanced around before leaning in. “I heard you were poking around the Archaian material. There’s something you should know.”

Eliza’s heart quickened. “What?”

“The society’s founding charter used to be housed here, in the Bodleian’s special collections. It was donated in 1924 by one of the original families.” Sarah’s voice dropped to barely a whisper. “It went missing last month. Pulled from the stacks and never checked back in.”

“Missing?” Eliza’s mind flashed to the subterranean reading room, to the shelves of forbidden texts she’d glimpsed behind the initiation table. “Did the police get involved?”

Sarah shook her head. “The trustees don’t want a scandal. They’re handling it internally. But there’s a rumour going around that one of the last people to request it was a classics fellow.” She met Eliza’s eyes. “Dr. Marcus.”

Eliza went cold. Marcus, expelled from the Archai. Marcus, escorted from the Bodleian by police. Marcus, accused of theft. The pieces clicked together with terrible clarity.

The charter wasn’t stolen for profit. It was stolen because it documented something the Archai wanted hidden. And Marcus had taken it to expose them.

Or he’d been framed for taking it, to give the society cause to expel him before he could reveal what he knew.

Either way, the founding charter was the key. If she could find it—or find out what was in it—she might finally understand what the Archai actually was.

Eliza thanked Sarah and walked out into the twilight, the evening air sharp against her face. In her bag, the scrap of paper from Whitmore felt like a live coal. The fragment he wanted her to examine. The missing charter. The expelled fellow with the owl-ring on his hand.

All roads led to the Archai. And somewhere in the tangled web of her father’s debts and Whitmore’s demands, there was a thread that connected them all.

Her phone buzzed as she reached the gates of the Bodleian. A text from an unknown number: *Well done last night. The next meeting is Wednesday. You will know the place when the weeping stone remembers the sun.*

Eliza stared at the words. The weeping stone. She’d spent all day trying to decode that phrase, but it wasn’t a scholarly riddle. It was a location. Somewhere in Oxford, there was a stone that wept.

And she had three days to find it before it remembered the sun.