Read Chapter 37: A New Chapter

The announcement came not with a fanfare but with a quiet email, forwarded to them both at 9:47 on a Tuesday morning. Elodie read it three times on her phone before she believed it, standing in the Bodleian’s lower reading room with a cart of conservation materials at her elbow.

*The committee is pleased to confirm the establishment of the Marguerite de Laval Centre for Manuscript Studies, with Dr. Elodie Marchand and Dr. James Ashworth as co-directors. Formal ratification will follow at Michaelmas.*

She walked out without signing the cart out. James found her in the quad, and she simply held up her phone. He read it, looked at her, and kissed her soundly on the mouth, right there between the columns, a passing porter pretending very hard not to notice.

“We did it,” she said, breathless.

“*We* did it.” He took her hand, lacing their fingers. “You and me. The committee. Marguerite, probably, from wherever she is.”

“I think she’s in the locket now,” Elodie said, and laughed at the absurdity of it.

---

The interviews came within the week. *The Medieval Review* wanted a joint conversation; *Speculum* requested a written reflection; a humanities podcast called *The Parchment Hour* asked if they might record in the chapel itself.

The *Speculum* piece was the most onerous. They sat in their shared office—a new room, high-ceilinged, with two desks placed at angles so they could see each other—and drafted answers to emailed questions. James typed; Elodie edited over his shoulder. Their voices traded back and forth like a practiced duet.

*How do you respond to those who argue the co-directorship model dilutes scholarly rigor?*

“It doesn’t dilute,” James said aloud, fingers hovering. “It compounds. Two specialists reading the same text bring two frames of reference. Marguerite’s treatise has resisted single-reader interpretation for six hundred years precisely because it is multi-vocal.”

Elodie nodded. “Type that. But add that the model wasn’t born from institutional convenience. It was born from necessity—neither of us could fully trust the other’s reading until we had tested it against our own. That friction produced better scholarship.”

James typed, then stopped. “That’s honest.”

“It’s true. And the committee liked it when we said it in the panel, so it belongs in the official record.”

For *The Parchment Hour*, they drove to Marguerite’s chapel. It felt different now—less a pilgrimage, more a return. The niche where the locket had appeared had been cleaned and fitted with a small brass plaque: *In memory of Marguerite de Laval, whose story waits still.*

Elodie sat on the cold stone step and spoke into the microphone about the manuscript’s marginalia, about the tiny watermarked note they had found between pages, about the sense—she admitted it, carefully—that the text had been waiting for readers who would take it seriously as a complete work rather than a fragment. James spoke about the collaborative method. He talked about trust. He didn’t mention that trust had come hard and late, but Elodie heard it in his voice anyway.

The interviewer, a cheerful postdoc named Priya, asked at the end: “What does the locket mean to you?”

They exchanged a glance. The locket was currently sitting in a bank vault in Oxford, awaiting its commissioned portraits. An artisan in Bath was painting miniature watercolors of them both from photographs—a strange, intimate commission they had made together, giggling about it in the flat they now shared.

“It means,” James said slowly, “that someone believed we would find each other. That our predecessors—Marguerite’s family, perhaps—saw in this work the same thing we do. A continuation.”

“A story that isn’t finished,” Elodie added. “And we’re part of it now.”

Priya smiled. “Do you think you’ll finish it?”

Elodie looked at James. “I think,” she said, “we intend to try.”

---

The flat was in Jericho, a second-floor walk-up with bay windows and radiators that clanked. They had moved in two weeks ago, a chaotic process of boxed books and IKEA furniture and one memorable argument about whether to hang the framed map of Lyon or the etching of Oxford first. (Both, eventually, on adjacent walls. The map and the etching faced each other across the living room, like two archivists in perpetual conversation.)

Elodie kept her Lyon position as a part-time remote affiliation—a compromise they had hammered out over dinner, her laptop propped between them. She would teach a seminar term in Lyon each spring; James would handle the centre’s keynote lecture circuit that month. Their calendars synced, color-coded, obsessive. It worked. It was still frightening how well it worked.

On Wednesday morning—four days after the announcement—they were woken at 7:15 by James’s phone buzzing with an email from the faculty administrator. He squinted at the screen, then sat up fully.

“Elodie.”

“Mm.” She was buried under the duvet.

“Finch is claiming co-authorship of the *Speculum* article.”

She surfaced. “What?”

He handed her the phone. The email was forwarded from the Dean’s office: a formal letter from Gerald Finch, late of Cambridge, asserting that his 2019 monograph on feminine devotional writing had provided the intellectual foundation for their reading of Marguerite’s treatise, and that his contributions to the joint publication warranted acknowledgment and co-authorship. He threatened legal action if the article wasn’t revised.

“He’s joking,” Elodie said flatly.

“He’s not. He’s copied the Dean, the *Speculum* editor, and the Vice-Chancellor.”

Elodie threw back the duvet. “He’s never even seen the manuscript. He wrote his monograph on a *photocopy* of a related text—a different text entirely.”

“Say that to the Dean.”

“I will.” She was already reaching for her robe. “His letter is nonsense. I can dismantle it in one paragraph.”

But James was frowning at his phone, scrolling. “There’s an attachment. A draft showing ‘substantial shared language’ between his monograph and our reading of the watermarked note—which he could only know if he’d accessed our unpublished drafts.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“He’d had access to the centre’s preliminary file during the panel review. He was the external assessor.”

Elodie’s stomach dropped. Her own panel, months ago, when Finch had sat opposite her and picked apart her argument with surgical cruelty. He had reviewed their materials. He had had the working transcription—the one containing the watermark reading they had not yet published.

“That’s still plagiarism on his part,” she said. “Access doesn’t mean authorization. And if he’s quoting from our unpublished draft, that’s a breach of confidentiality and intellectual property.”

“The locket,” James said.

“What?”

“The locket. The note inside referencing the manuscript’s provenance chain. It predates his monograph by six years—his monograph cites the manuscript as ‘whereabouts unknown.’ If we show the Dean the locket and the second note, the provenance chain is documented externally, before his claim. His monograph therefore can’t have informed our reading. It never knew the text existed.”

Elodie stared at him. “You want to take the locket out of the vault and show it to the Dean.”

“I want to take *photos* of the locket and the note, maintain the original’s security, and present the documented provenance chain. Which is exactly the kind of evidence a fellowship committee loves: independent, verifiable, pre-existing.”

“It’s also private. It’s from Marguerite’s family estate.”

“It’s evidence,” James said gently. “And if we’re going to continue the story, we need paper trails. Marguerite’s family gave us the locket. I think they’d want it used.”

She considered this. The note was terse; the locket itself was a beautiful object, but the *proof* was in its existence. Someone had known James’s initials. Someone had known they would return. That knowledge had been documented before Finch’s access to their drafts.

“Fine,” she said. “Photograph everything. Annotate. Present to Dean by Zoom conference this afternoon if we can arrange it.”

They did. The Dean was skeptical of the co-directors’ “romantic entanglement,” as an earlier memo had called it, but he was not skeptical of paper. The provenance photographs, dated and signed, plus Finch’s own monograph’s stated ignorance of the manuscript’s location, made the case collapse.

By five o’clock, Finch had withdrawn his claim. The Dean’s office sent a brief email confirming no further action.

“He’ll try again,” Elodie said, leaning against the kitchen counter with a cup of tea gone cold.

“Probably.” James sat across from her, the locket—removed from the vault for the afternoon, now resting in a cotton-lined box between them—catching the low kitchen light. “But next time, we’ll be ready. And he won’t.”

She reached across the table and touched the locket’s clasp. “Two more portraits and this closes the whole sequence.”

“We get them in June.”

“June,” she repeated. “What happens in June?”

“Summer. The centre’s first research cohort starts. Your Lyon seminar ends. We come back here.” He paused. “And we finish the next chapter.”

Elodie smiled, finally letting the tea go. She picked up the locket instead, felt its cool weight in her palm.

“No more chapters,” she said. “Just the story.”

James’s hand covered hers over the locket. In the bay window, the Oxford etching and the Lyon map faced each other across the room.

Outside, the evening bells rang.