Read Chapter 3: Rival Codes

The manuscript lay open between them on the foam cradle, its vellum pale as old bone under the reading-room lamps. Elodie had worn her spectacles today, the ones she reserved for prolonged close work, and she could feel them pressing a familiar ache into the bridge of her nose. James sat opposite, his own pair perched low, giving him the look of a man who had forgotten he was wearing them. He had not spoken in eleven minutes. He had not needed to. The silence in Duke Humfrey’s was the loudest thing Elodie had ever heard.

She leaned closer to the folio, tracing the outer margin with the tip of her gloved finger. The gloss was cramped, angular—a hand she did not immediately recognize. Not the main scribe’s, certainly. This was later, perhaps a century later, ink a shade browner than the text block. She had seen similar hands in the archives at Tours, in the margins of medical treatises, the quick jottings of men who believed their annotations mattered more than the words they framed.

“There’s a pattern here,” she said, more to herself than to him.

James looked up. “In the margin?”

“The glosses. Look at the way they’re distributed.” She gestured across the visible spread. “On the recto pages, they cluster at the top. On the verso, at the bottom. Every time. That’s not random placement. That’s a code.”

He shifted in his chair, and she caught the brief flicker of interest before he suppressed it. “Or it’s just where the scribe left room. Marginal space varies—”

“It doesn’t vary like this. Not consistently, across forty leaves.” She pulled the magnifier closer and angled it over the top margin of the current recto. The gloss there was a single line of abbreviated Latin, but beneath it, nearly invisible, a smaller hand had written something that was not Latin at all. She squinted. The letters were cramped, almost deliberately deformed.

“James. Come look at this.”

He rose and circled the table to stand beside her. The proximity was sudden and unexpected. She could smell him—soap, something like cedar, and the faint tang of coffee. He bent over the manuscript, following her pointing finger.

“What am I looking at?”

“Beneath the Latin. There’s a second layer. It’s not Latin. It might be Old French, but the script is deliberately distorted. Someone didn’t want it read.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “It’s not Old French. It’s Occitan.”

Elodie blinked. “Occitan?”

“The dialect is southern. I’ve seen similar forms in troubadour manuscripts from the Périgord.” He straightened, but did not step away. “It’s a cipher, though. The letterforms are shifted. Probably a simple substitution—the sort a cleric might use to keep a note private without the full machinery of a formal code.”

She turned to look at him. His face was close enough that she could see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, the slight unevenness of his jaw where he had not shaved closely this morning. He was looking not at her but at the manuscript, and in that moment, he looked almost reverent.

“You read Occitan,” she said.

“A little. My doctoral work touched on the troubadour tradition. I never published on it.” He said this with the careful neutrality of a man confessing something slightly embarrassing. “But I know enough to recognize the forms.”

Elodie looked back at the manuscript. “Can you decode it?”

“Probably not here. It would take time. And careful transcription.” He hesitated. “We’d need to photograph the page. High resolution. But we’re not supposed to have cameras in the reading room.”

“I have my phone in my bag.”

“Elodie.”

“I know the rules, James. I also know that this fellowship—this edition—is not going to win itself by following rules.” She met his eyes. “Are you in or are you out?”

He stared at her for a long moment. Then he sat back down, and the ghost of a smile crossed his face. “That’s the most reckless thing I’ve ever heard you propose.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

They worked in silence for the next hour, trading the magnifier back and forth. Elodie transcribed the visible glosses while James sketched the cipher text, his pencil moving in quick, confident strokes across his notebook. Twice, the librarian passed their table, and both times they slid the notebook under a sheaf of archival documents—a choreography they had perfected inside forty minutes, which said something about either their adaptability or their capacity for mutual deception. Elodie decided not to examine which.

“I have something,” James said finally. His voice was low, conspiratorial. “The substitution is simpler than I thought. It’s just the alphabet reversed, with a few Occitan digraphs thrown in. Give me another ten minutes and I can read it.”

Elodie waited. The reading room was warm, and she could feel the silence pressing against her ears. Somewhere above, a floorboard creaked. She watched his hand moving across the page and found herself noticing the way his fingers curled around the pencil, the economy of his movements. He was a rival. He was the man standing between her and everything she had worked for. And yet, watching him work, she felt something that was not entirely hostility.

“Here,” he said. He slid the notebook across the table, and she bent over it. His transcription was clean, the Occitan forms resolved into readable strings.

*“Lo companhon perdut jai en la vila blanca, ont lo riu non s’aunit.”*

Elodie read it once, then again. Her French was strong, her Occitan weaker, but the sense was clear enough. “The lost companion lies in the white city, where the river does not join.”

James nodded. “That’s the gist.”

“White city.” Elodie’s pulse quickened. “Chartres. La Ville Blanche—it’s an old epithet for Chartres. Because of the chalk cliffs.”

“Or it could be any number of places. Albi is pink. Périgueux is white. There are dozens of ‘white cities’ in southern France.”

“But this manuscript is northern. The main hand is Anglo-Norman. A southern reference would be remarkable.”

“Remarkable isn’t evidence.”

She felt a flash of irritation. “James, this is the first substantive clue we’ve found. This gloss—this coded, deliberately hidden gloss—refers to a ‘lost companion.’ What if it’s a companion manuscript? A second volume that someone separated from this one? If we can find it, the cross-reference could settle the dating question once and for all.”

He leaned back, rubbing the bridge of his nose where the spectacles had left a red mark. “It’s a nice theory, Elodie. It’s also unsupported. We have a single marginal note, in a cipher we’ve barely decoded, referring to something we can’t identify. You want to chase that to Chartres based on an epithet that could describe half the towns in France?”

“I want to *consider* it.”

“And I want to consider the possibility that the note is a mundane scribal exercise. Marginal doodling. Something a bored reader jotted down without meaning.”

“That’s not what this is, and you know it.” Her voice had risen, and she caught herself, glancing around the reading room. The librarian was watching them from the desk. She lowered her voice. “You know the difference between a doodle and a deliberate concealment. That cipher was constructed. Someone wanted to hide this.”

“Wanting and achieving are two different things. The cipher is amateurish. A child could crack it.”

“Then why did you spend forty minutes cracking it?”

He had no answer for that. She watched him search for one, watched the frustration settle into his features. They had been getting along—almost, dangerously, pleasantly. Now the old friction was back, sparking between them like flint.

“I’m not saying we ignore it,” he said finally. “I’m saying we need more evidence before we start planning research trips to France on the basis of a rhyme.”

“It’s not a rhyme. It’s a pointer.”

“To what?”

“To something we won’t find sitting in this library.” She began gathering her notes, sliding them into her bag with sharp, deliberate movements. “I’m going to chase this, James. With or without you.”

“Elodie.”

But she was already standing, already moving toward the door, the manuscript left open on the cradle between them. She did not look back.

Outside, the Oxford air was cold and damp, the kind of chill that settled into the bones. She walked fast, her heels clicking against the pavement, her mind churning. She was being reckless. She knew it. The collaboration was barely a day old and she was already threatening to go it alone. But she could not shake the feeling that the gloss was important—that it was the key to everything the fellowship committee had asked them to prove.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket as she rounded the corner into Broad Street. She pulled it out, expecting a message from James. It was not.

The sender address was a string of characters she did not recognize. No subject line. The body contained a single line, in French:

*“Vous cherchez le compagnon perdu. Il est à Chartres, mais vous n’y trouverez pas ce que vous cherchez. Posez la question à Beaumont.”*

You seek the lost companion. It is in Chartres, but you will not find what you seek there. Ask Beaumont.

Elodie stopped in the middle of the pavement. A cyclist swerved around her, ringing his bell in irritation. She did not notice.

The message was unsigned.

But the name Beaumont—Henri Beaumont, her old mentor, the retired archivist who had taught her everything she knew about manuscript provenance—was not an easy name to come by. It was not public knowledge that she had studied with him. Very few people knew.

Someone was watching her. And someone wanted her to go to Chartres badly enough to reach out from the shadows to make sure she did.

She read the message three more times, then looked up at the grey Oxford sky.

The lost companion. The white city. A phantom correspondent who knew her history.

The manuscript had just become far more complicated than she had imagined.