Read Chapter 21: A Faulty Translation

The Bodleian’s Duke Humfrey’s Library swallowed sound whole. Even the scratch of James’s pencil against the reading stand seemed rude. Elodie sat opposite him, Henri’s Bible open between them on a nest of foam wedges, the sixteenth-century letter protected under a sheet of Mylar. She had not slept. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw her mother’s face—the face she barely remembered—walking into a river that had swallowed her whole.

And under her ribs, the weight of the postscript she had not shared: *Meet me at the crossing of the Loire, where the ferryman wears a silver cross.*

She should tell him. The thought surfaced for the dozenth time. James had shared his family’s secret, had turned down Cambridge, had kissed her. But the kiss had come unmoored from any explanation, and she had learned too well, from Henri, from her father, from the academy itself, that trust was a ledger. Every credit demanded interest.

“Here.” James tapped the folio. “The colophon on 7-2-14. If the cipher is right and we subtract the watermark years, the script should date to—” He stopped, frowned. “No. That’s not right.”

Elodie leaned forward. The cipher sequence she had decoded in Blois ran *7-2-14*, which they had tentatively mapped to a set of illuminations in the manuscript’s marginalia. Now, attempting to re-date the scribal hand, James had transposed two figures, producing a year that landed the work decades after Marguerite de Beaumont’s death. It was a simple error. It was also glaring.

“You’ve reversed the order,” she said. “The watermark is post-1492, but the scribe’s use of the looped *a* in the rubric means it can’t be before 1504. Subtract the fourteen, not add it. You’re off by thirty years.”

James stared at the page, then at her. He ran a hand through his hair and gave a low, dry laugh. “So I am. The little French professor corrects her English rival. How entirely predictable.”

It was meant to be a joke. But the edge in his voice told her he’d been waiting for this—for her to catch his mistake, for the game of one-upmanship to resume. She had not started it. But she had, she realized, been ready for it.

“If I hadn’t corrected you,” she said evenly, “we’d be dating this manuscript to the French Revolution.”

“And if you hadn’t stayed up all night memorizing every watermark in the Loire Valley—” He stopped. Set down his pencil. “That was uncalled for.”

“Yes, it was.”

The silence between them stretched. A librarian glided past, shooting them a warning look that spoke of long experience with academics who treated the reading room like a common room.

“Look, Elodie. I’m tired. You’re tired. This is delicate work.”

“It is,” she agreed. “Which is why I don’t fully understand why you keep touching the letter.” She nodded at his hand, which had strayed to the Mylar’s edge. “It’s damaged enough. We’ve had it two days, and you’ve handled it four times. Each time you lift the corner, you risk delaminating the ink.”

James withdrew his hand slowly. His jaw tightened. “I’m not going to damage it.”

“I’m not saying you would. Deliberately.”

The word hung there a beat too long.

“Deliberately,” he repeated. “You think I’d deliberately harm a manuscript because it’s inconvenient to my theory?”

“I think,” Elodie said, her voice low and precise, “that you have spent your entire career trying to prove that Marguerite de Beaumont was not literate enough to author the codex’s inner leaves. And this letter, in her own hand, in French, in a woman’s hand, is the single piece of evidence that dismantles your thesis. If that letter were compromised—if its provenance became muddied, if its handwriting were called into question—”

“You think I’d *destroy* it?” James’s voice rose. A nearby scholar in a tweed jacket looked up, annoyed. James ignored him. “You think I’d shred a sixteenth-century letter to win a fellowship at a university I already turned down?”

“You turned down Cambridge,” Elodie said quietly. “You never turned down the fellowship.”

James stared at her. The anger in his face flickered, then dulled into something more complicated. Recognition, perhaps. Or resignation.

“Right,” he said. “There it is. The real you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’ve been waiting for you to show your hand ever since Blois. Everything’s been so *careful* with you—the polite collaboration, the shared hotel room, the pillow wall.” He shook his head. “You built that wall hours before I ever touched you, Elodie. I didn’t kiss you to manipulate you. I kissed you because—you know why I kissed you. But you’ve decided that can’t be true. So you keep looking for the angle.”

“I’m not looking for an angle. I’m looking at the evidence.” She reached into her bag and pulled out the photocopy she had made of the letter the night before—the one she had told him was a duplicate for “working notes.” She laid it flat on the reading stand. “And there’s something you should know about the evidence I’ve been examining.”

Her voice was steady. Her hand, on the photocopy’s edge, was not.

James looked at the sheet. Then back at her. “What is this?”

“The postscript. Directly after Marguerite says—directly after the line about the willows weeping.” She had blocked that portion of the transcription when they worked together earlier, claiming the ink was too faded to capture digitally. It had been a lie. The ink was fine. The scan had been perfect. She had simply chosen to keep the words for herself.

James read it. His face went still.

“‘Meet me at the crossing of the Loire, where the ferryman wears a silver cross, and I will take you where the river narrows to the sea.’” He looked up. His eyes were cold. “When did you find this?”

“The night I got back from the hospital. Alone.”

“That’s two days ago.”

“Yes.”

“Two days, Elodie.” He pushed back from the table. The chair scraped the stone floor with a sound like a forced confession. “We’ve spent the better part of two days reconstructing Marguerite’s flight from Blois. We’ve mapped her escape route along the Loire. And you’ve been sitting on the single most important clue to where she actually went—the location of the crossing, the ferryman’s mark—and you chose not to share it.”

“You kissed me,” Elodie heard herself say. It was not the argument she meant to make. It was the only one she had.

James’s laugh was short and bitter. “There it is. The kiss is the problem. Not that I turned down Cambridge. Not that my mother’s family has been chasing this codex for three generations. The kiss, which I offered without a contract, without a ledger, without a—a notarized statement of intent. You know who taught you that, don’t you? You know whose model of trust you’re following.”

The words landed like a slap. He did not need to say Henri’s name. He did not need to say her mother’s.

“My mother trusted Henri,” Elodie said quietly. “And she died on his errand.”

“Your mother died retrieving this Bible, Elodie. The Bible you just watched me handle with gloves and reverence for four hours. If Henri had wanted to destroy it, he would have burned it twenty years ago, when he had it in his desk and no one knew.” James collected his notebook, sliding it into his satchel. “You don’t trust me because you don’t trust anyone. And you’re so convinced that trust is a trap that you’ve built your whole life as a fortress around the idea that you don’t need it. But you do. You need it right now. Because there is a ferryman in this letter, and a silver cross, and a crossing of the Loire, and I cannot help you find it if you keep the map to yourself.”

He stood. The librarian had given up on subtlety and was glaring openly.

“I’m going to the café,” James said. “When you decide whether we’re partners or opponents, come find me. If you don’t, I’ll take the next train back to Oxford and let you finish the fellowship alone. But I won’t play this game with you anymore, Elodie. It’s exhausting.”

He walked out.

Elodie sat very still in the echoing quiet of the reading room, the photocopy in front of her. The ferryman’s cross. The crossing of the Loire. The river that bent where the willows wept, which they had already established was a bend two miles south of the town where the storm had stranded them. The town where James had told her the truth about his mother’s family. The town where he had kissed her.

She folded the photocopy. She did not go after him. But she did not put it away, either.