Read Chapter 8: First Glimpse

The reading room smelled of dust and old paper, a scent Elodie had come to associate with hope. Morning light filtered through tall windows, catching motes that drifted lazily over the long oak table where the companion codex waited, unopened, between them.

Claire Lenoir, the archivist, was a small woman with steel-grey hair and the brisk efficiency of someone who had spent decades guarding secrets. She placed cotton gloves on the table beside the codex, then looked from Elodie to James with an expression that suggested she had already judged them and found them both slightly wanting.

“You have two hours before the Friends of the Chartres Library begin their luncheon in the adjoining hall. After that, this room is theirs until five. I trust that is sufficient.”

“Thank you, Madame Lenoir,” Elodie said, pulling on her gloves. “We are most grateful.”

Claire inclined her head and left, her footsteps fading down the stone corridor. The door clicked shut, and suddenly the room was very quiet. Elodie was acutely aware of James beside her, close enough that she caught the faint cedar scent of his cologne, and she resolutely did not think about how he had looked outside the archive yesterday, rain-darkened and stubborn, insisting he had not taken the letter.

“Shall we?” James pulled out his chair. The wood scraped against stone, a small violence in the silence.

They had agreed to share the reading, each taking notes separately, consultation only when necessary. It was, Elodie thought, a bit like two nations drawing borders on a disputed map.

She lifted the cover of the codex. The leather was worn smooth at the corners, the binding repaired sometime in the nineteenth century with fresh thread. The manuscript was small, perhaps a hundred and twenty folios, clearly the work of a single scribe copying devotional texts. The companion to the Vexed Folio, as Claire had confirmed—catalogued in the same hand, from the same scriptorium, separated sometime in the fifteenth century.

James leaned in, his shoulder brushing hers. She stiffened, then forced herself to breathe.

“The marginalia should be denser here,” he murmured, turning a page with careful fingers. “The scribe used the margins as a kind of notebook.”

They worked in silence for some minutes. Elodie’s eyes adjusted to the spiky Carolingian minuscule, the abbreviations that shifted meaning depending on context. She noted a prayer to Saint Foy, a partial sermon on the nature of relics, a list of expenditures for what appeared to be a convent kitchen—six loaves, two sacks of barley, candles.

And then, folio forty-seven.

The page was largely blank save for a single inscription at the bottom, written in a different hand—lighter, more hurried, the ink a faded brown. Someone had attempted to erase it, but the pressure of the nib had left deep grooves in the parchment. Elodie angled the page toward the light, squinting.

*Marguerite de Beaumont.*

The breath caught in her throat. Henri. Henri Beaumont. The same surname, unmistakable, uncommon enough that it could not be coincidence.

She heard herself make a small sound, something between a gasp and a sigh.

James looked up. “What is it?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but no words came. Her mind raced through possibilities—a relation, a patron, a namesake? Henri had never mentioned any connection to this manuscript or this archive. But the name was there, half eradicated, waiting four hundred years for someone to find it.

“Elodie.” James’s voice was sharper now. He moved around the table to her side, and she instinctively covered the page with her hand.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just—a name.”

“A name.” His tone was flat. “You gasped because you saw a name.”

She forced herself to meet his eyes. “An unusual one. That’s all.”

He stared at her for a long moment, and she felt the unspoken accusation in his silence. She was a terrible liar; she always had been. In the schoolyard, in faculty meetings, in the quiet of her own conscience. Her cheeks flushed.

“Marguerite de Beaumont,” James said slowly, reading over her shoulder. “That’s Henri’s surname.”

“It’s a common enough name in France.”

“It is not. Beaumont is common. *Beaumont in the Orléanais* is another matter, and Marguerite is not exactly a rare given name, but combined—”

“James.” She straightened, pulling her hand away from the page. “We have two hours. And you know as well as I that this could mean anything. A family connection, a patron, a coincidence of naming. There is not necessarily a link to Henri.”

“But you think there is.”

She said nothing. The silence stretched between them, taut as a bowstring.

Finally, she sighed. “I think it is worth investigating. But that is not what we are here for. We are here to examine the codex, to find the companion texts that might date the folio.”

“You’re deflecting.”

“I’m prioritizing.”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. She remembered, suddenly, that James had his own secrets—the anonymous email, the trip to Blois he had hidden, the quiet concession he had never spoken aloud. She had seen it in his notes the previous night, when they had compared their first-day findings in the hotel lobby: he had dated the manuscript’s gloss to the same period she had argued for, without acknowledging it. She had not called it out. It seemed the kind of fragile truce that ought not to be disturbed.

“Fine,” he said, and returned to his side of the table. “But I’ll note the inscription. In our joint record.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I will if you won’t.” He shrugged, pulling a fresh sheet of paper toward him. “Transparency. That was your condition, wasn’t it?”

She hated him then, just a little. He was right, and he knew it, and he was using her own terms against her. She watched his pen move across the page, recording the half-erased name for posterity.

“I have a private commission,” she said, and the words left her before she could stop them.

James’s pen stilled. “A private commission.”

“For Henri Beaumont. A favour. It has nothing to do with the folio.”

“You’re helping a private collector with an archival matter while we are supposed to be doing joint research.”

“It was a condition of his introduction here.” She heard how thin the explanation sounded. “Without him, we would not have this access.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he set down his pen and looked at her with something like concern, which was worse than his usual scepticism.

“Elodie, what does he want you to find?”

She thought of the letter from Eleanor of Aquitaine, the one that had gone missing from Henri’s collection, the one someone had wanted both of them to chase to Blois. She had not told James the full story. She had told him only what she had to.

“A document,” she said. “A letter. From Eleanor. It went missing.”

“And you think I took it.”

“Yesterday, I did.”

He did not flinch. “And now?”

She wanted to say something sharp, something wounded. But the truth was that she did not know what to think. The letter’s disappearance had been convenient, too convenient, someone else’s design made visible. And they had both been led here, to this archive, by an anonymous hand.

“I don’t know, James.” She turned back to the codex. “I don’t know anything yet.”

They worked again in silence. She turned folios, noting the consistency of the hand, the rhythm of the text. But her attention kept returning to folio forty-seven, to the name that felt like a stone in her shoe.

Marguerite de Beaumont.

She would search for her, she decided. Privately. When James was asleep or otherwise occupied. She would find out who this woman was, what she had to do with Henri, and why someone had tried to erase her name.

The door to the reading room opened. Claire Lenoir stood in the threshold, her expression apologetic.

“I am sorry to interrupt, but a gentleman is here for you, Dr. Marchand. He insists it is urgent.”

Elodie looked up. “For me?”

“He gave his name as Beaumont. Henri Beaumont.”

She felt everything in her go very still. James had gone rigid across the table.

“Shall I show him in?” Claire asked.

Neither of them answered. In the corridor beyond, footsteps approached, steady and unhurried.