His father paid the fee, and then it was up to Jess. The first step, and in many ways the hardest, was to report to the London Serapeum for the entry test. He’d avoided the place since the day with the lions, and didn’t look forward to coming there again. To Jess’s relief, he was driven by steam carriage to the public entrance on the west side. There were still a few of the statues, but they were positioned up on pedestals, so he wouldn’t have to come eye to eye with them.
He felt safer until he noticed the automaton of Queen Anne, staring down with blank eyes on those trudging up the steps. She held the royal orb in her left hand, and in her right, a golden sceptre pointed down at the heads of those who passed below her pedestal.
She looked eerily human. He had the disquieting feeling that, like the lions, she stood in silent, merciless judgment, and for a giddy moment he imagined her eyes flaring blood-red, and that sceptre slamming down onto his head. Unfit for service.
But she didn’t move as he hurried past with the rest of the Library’s aspiring postulants.
The test was given in the Public Reading Room’s choir stall, and a Scholar robed in black with a silver band on her wrist handed out thin sheets to each of them as they sat down. There were, Jess estimated, about fifty sitting for the test. Most looked terrified, though whether they feared failure or success was open to debate. Failure, most like. They were all richly dressed, and no doubt their futures were riding on their performance. Today’s wealthy second son is tomorrow’s penniless lout, his father had always said.
The test page on Jess’s desk began to fill with text. It was in old Library script, designed to be attractive and ornate, and reading it was half the battle … but he’d seen and deciphered text far more difficult for fun. The opening questions, while designed to test the limits of a postulant’s knowledge, were laughably easy.
He took too much comfort in that, because when the next section came it was much harder, and before long, he began to worry and sweat in earnest. The Alchemical and Mechanical sections tested him to the limits, and he wasn’t so certain he did as well on the Medica portion as he’d intended. So much for thinking he would glide through without challenge.
Jess hesitated for a long time before signing his name at the end, which inked his final answers. The sheet went blank, and the elegant writing that next appeared told him that results would follow soon, and he was free to depart the Serapeum.
When he left, Queen Anne was still judging those who passed, and he tried not to look directly at her as he took the steps two at a time. The day was warm and sunny, pigeons fluttering up in front of the courtyard, and he looked for the Brightwell carriage, which should have been parked nearby. It had moved down the block, and he jogged towards it. He was nervous, he realised. Actually nervous about how he’d done on the test. He cared. It was a new sensation, and one he didn’t much care for.
‘Sir?’ Jess’s driver looked anxious from his perch, clearly wanting to be gone; he was one of his father’s musclemen, and had spent most of his criminal career staying well clear of the Library. Jess didn’t blame him. He got into the back, and as he sat down, his Codex – the leather-bound book that mirrored a list of the Core Collection straight from the Great Library in Alexandria – hummed. Someone had sent him a note. He cracked the cover to see it spell itself out in ornate Library script, one rounded letter at a time. He could even feel the faint vibration of pen-scratch from the Library clerk who was transcribing the message.
We are pleased to inform you that JESS BRIGHTWELL ishereby accepted for the high honour of service to the Great Library. You are directed to report tomorrow to St Pancras Station in London at ten o’clock in the morning for transportation to Alexandria. Please refer to the list of approved items you may bring with you into service.
It was signed with the Library seal, which swelled up in raised red beneath the inked letters. Jess ran his fingers over it. It felt slick like wax, but warm as blood, and he felt a tingle to it, like something alive.
His name stood out, too, in bold black. JESS BRIGHTWELL.
He swallowed hard, closed the book, and tried to control his suddenly racing pulse as the carriage clattered for home.
His mother, much affected (or feeling that she ought to be), presented him with a magnificent set of engraved styluses, and his father gifted him with a brand-new leather-bound Codex, a Scholar’s edition with plenty of extra pages for notes, and handsomely embossed with the Library symbol in gold.
His brother gave him nothing, but then, Jess hadn’t expected anything.
Dinner that night was unusually calm and festive. After the half-measure of brandy his mother allowed, Jess found himself sitting alone on the back garden steps. It was a clear, cool night, unusual for London, and he stared up at the swelling white moon. The stars would be different, where he was going. But the moon would be the same.
He never expected that the prospect of leaving home would make him feel sad.
He didn’t hear Brendan come out, but it didn’t surprise him to hear the scrape of his brother’s boots on the stone behind him. ‘You’re not coming back.’
It wasn’t what Jess had expected, and he turned to look at Brendan, who slouched with his arms crossed in the shadows. Couldn’t read his expression.
‘You’re clever, Jess, but Da’s wrong about one thing: you don’t just have ink in your blood. It’s in your bones. Your skeleton’s black with it. You go there, to them, and we’ll lose you for ever.’ Brendan shifted a little, but didn’t look at him. ‘So don’t go.’
‘I thought you wanted me gone.’
Brendan’s shoulders rose and fell. He pushed off and drifted away into the darkness. Off doing God knew what. I’m sorry, Scraps, he thought. But he wasn’t, not really. Staying here wasn’t his future, any more than the Library would be Brendan’s.
This would be his last night at home.
Jess went inside, wrote in his journal, and spent the rest of the evening reading Inventio Fortunata.
Which rather proved his brother’s point, he supposed.
The next day, his father accompanied Jess to St Pancras, and waved off servants to personally carry his case to the train … all without a single word, or change of expression. As Jess accepted the bag from him, his father finally said, ‘Make us proud, son, or by God I’ll wallop you until you do.’ But there was a faint wet shine in his eyes, and that made Jess feel uncomfortable. His father wasn’t weak, and was never vulnerable.
So what he saw couldn’t be tears.
His father gave him a hard, quick nod and strode away through the swirl of passengers and pigeons. The humid belch of steam engines blew towards the vaulted ceiling of the station and intertwined in ornate ironworks. Familiar and strange at once. For a moment, Jess just stood on his own, testing himself. Trying to see how he felt caught between the old world and the new one that would come.
Still twenty minutes to the Alexandrian train, and he wondered whether or not to get a warm drink from one of the vendors in the stalls around the tracks, but as he was considering tea, he heard a commotion begin somewhere behind him.
It was a man raising his voice to a strident yell, and there was something in it that made him turn and listen.
‘—say to you that you are deceived! That words are nothing more than false idols at which you worship! The Great Library may have once been a boon, but what is it today? What does it give us? It suppresses! It stifles! You, sir, do you own a book? No, sir, not a blank, filled only with what they want you to read … a real book, an original work, in the hand of the writer? Do you dare, madam? The Library owns our memories, yet you cannot own your own books! Why? Why do they fear it? Why do they fear to allow you the choice?’