I stared at him, speechless for a moment. “Were there vampires in Oxford in those days?” I asked finally.
“I don’t know about that,” he admitted, smiling. “But there’s a tradition that the early scholars of the college helped protect the countryside around here from vampires. Actually, they collected quite a bit of lore on vampires, quaint stuff, and you can still see it in the Radcliffe Camera, across the way. The legend says that the early dons wouldn’t even have books about the occult housed in the college, so they were put in various other places and finally ended up there.”
I suddenly remembered Rossi and wondered if he’d seen some of this old collection. “Is there any way of finding out the names of students from the past-I mean-maybe-fifty years ago-in this college? Graduate students?”
“Of course.” My companion looked quizzically at me across the wooden bench. “I can ask the master for you, if you like.”
“Oh, no.” I felt myself blushing, the curse of my youth. “It’s nothing important. But I would-could I see the vampire lore?”
“You like scary stuff, eh?” He looked amused. “It’s not much to look at, you know-just some old folios and a lot of leather books. But all right. We’ll go and see the college library now-you can’t miss that-and then I’ll take you up to the Camera.”
The library was, of course, one of the gems of the university. Since that innocent day, I have seen most of those colleges and known some of them intimately, wandered through their libraries and chapels and dining halls, lectured in their seminar rooms and taken tea in their parlors. I can safely say there is nothing to equal that first college library I saw, except perhaps Magdalen College Chapel, with its divine ornamentation. We first went into a reading room surrounded by stained glass like a tall terrarium, in which the students, rare captive plants, sat around tables whose antiquity was almost as great as that of the college itself. Strange lamps hung from the ceiling, and enormous globes from the era of Henry VIII stood on pedestals in the corners. Stephen Barley pointed out the many volumes of the originalOxford English Dictionary lining the shelves of one wall; others were filled with atlases from a long sweep of centuries, others with ancient peerages and works of English history, still others with Latin and Greek textbooks from every era of the college’s existence. In the center of the room stood a giant encyclopedia on a carved baroque stand, and near the entrance to the next room rested a glass case in which I could see a stark-looking old book that Stephen told me was a Gutenberg Bible. Above us, a round skylight like the oculus of a Byzantine church admitted long tapers of sunlight. Flights of pigeons wheeled overhead. The dusty sunshine touched the faces of students reading and turning pages at the tables, brushed their heavy jumpers and serious faces. It was a paradise of learning, and I prayed for eventual admission.
The next room was a vast hall hung with balconies, winding staircases, a high clerestory of old glass. Every available wall was lined with books, top to bottom, stone floor to vaulted ceiling. I saw acres of finely tooled leather bindings, swaths of portfolios, masses of little dark red nineteenth-century volumes. What, I wondered, could be in all those books? Would I understand anything in them? My fingers itched to take a few off the shelves, but I didn’t dare touch even a binding. I wasn’t sure if this was a library or a museum. I must have been gazing around with naked emotion on my face, because I suddenly caught my guide smiling at me, amused. “Not bad, eh? You must be a bookworm yourself. Come on, then-you’ve seen the best of it, and we’ll go up to the Camera.”
The bright day and the noisy, speeding cars were more jarring than ever after the hush of the library. I had them to thank, however, for a sudden gift: as we hurried across the traffic, Stephen took my hand, pulling me along to safety. He might have been someone’s peremptory big brother, I thought, but the touch of that dry, warm palm sent a tingling signal into mine, which glowed there after he’d dropped my hand. I felt sure, stealing glances at his cheerful, unchanged profile, that the message had registered in only one direction. But it was enough, for me, to have received it.
The Radcliffe Camera, as every Anglophile knows, is one of the great charms of English architecture, beautiful and odd, a huge barrel of books. One edge of it stands almost in the street, but with a large lawn around the rest of the building. We made our way in very quietly, although a talkative tour group filled the center of the glorious round interior. Stephen pointed out various aspects of the building’s design, studied in every course on English architecture, written up in every guidebook. It was a lovely and moving place, and I kept looking around thinking what a strange repository this was for evil lore. At last he led me toward a staircase, and we climbed up to the balcony. “Over here.” He motioned toward a doorway in the wall, cut, as it were, into a sheer cliff face of books. “There’s a little reading room in there. I’ve been up here just once, but I think that’s where they keep the vampire collection.”
The dim room was indeed tiny, and hushed, too, set far back from the voices of tourists below. August volumes crowded the shelves, their bindings caramel colored and brittle as old bone. Among them, a human skull in a little gilded glass case attested to the collection’s morbid nature. The chamber was so small, in fact, that there was just space in the center for one reading desk, which we almost stumbled against as we stepped in. That meant that we were suddenly face-to-face with the scholar who sat there turning over the leaves of a folio and making rapid notes on a pad of paper. He was a pale, rather gaunt man. His eyes were dark hollows, startled and urgent but also full of absorption as he glanced up from his work. It was my father.
Chapter 23
In the confusion of ambulances, police cars, and spectators that accompanied the dead librarian’s removal from the street in front of the university library, I stood frozen for a minute. It was horrible, unthinkable, that even the most unpleasant man’s life should have ended so suddenly there, but my next concern was for Helen. A crowd was gathering fast, and I pushed here and there looking for her. I was infinitely relieved when she found me first, tapping me on the shoulder from behind with her gloved hand. She looked pale but composed. She had wrapped her scarf tightly around her throat, and the sight of it on her smooth neck made me shiver. “I waited a few minutes and then followed you down the stairs,” she said under the noise of the crowd. “I want to thank you for coming to my assistance. This man was a brute. You were truly brave.”
I was surprised to find how kind her face could look, after all. “Actually, you were the brave one. And he hurt you,” I said in a low voice. I tried not to gesture publicly at her neck. “Did he -?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. Instinctively, we’d drawn close together, so that no one else could hear our conversation. “When he flew at me up there, he bit me on the throat.” For a minute her lips seemed to tremble, as if she might cry. “He did not draw much blood-there was no time. And it hurts very little.”
“But you -” I was stammering, unbelieving.
“I do not think there will be any infection,” she said. “It bled very little and I have closed it up as well as I can.”
“Should we go to the hospital?” I regretted it as soon as I’d said it, only partly because of the withering look she gave me. “Or can we treat it somehow?” I think I was half imagining we could remove the venom, as with a snakebite. The pain in her face suddenly made my heart twist within me. Then I remembered her betrayal of the secret of the map. “But why did you -”