One
HARPER
Present Day
The manuscript roomat the London Archive reminded me of my childhood with the scent of old paper, leather bindings, and the faint mustiness of the centuries filling the space. I’d learned that olfactory signature as a museum curator in Boston, where I’d spent the last eight years coaxing fragile documents into the light.
Harper Ainsley, better with old documents than relationships.With a shake of my head, I grabbed my tools as I settled into the conservation booth, pulling on my cotton gloves with the ritual reverence reserved for objects that had survived more than eight hundred years.
This psalter was something else entirely. The illuminated manuscript lay open before me, its vellum pages creamy and supple despite their age. The gold leaf caught the specialty lighting I’d set up, not too bright, never too hot.
“Just a basic cataloging,” my supervisor, Dr.Allen, had said that morning. “Acquire date, condition notes, photo documentation. We’re backlogged with donations.”
Routine work. The kind I could do with my eyes closed after eight years. Except nothing about this psalter felt routine.
The pages showed all the markers of the early thirteenth century. The hand-milled vellum, the iron gall ink, the exquisite marginalia done in what looked like genuine lapis lazuli. But the illustrations were off. Anachronistic. The figures in the borders wore clothing that didn’t quite match the style. The architectural elements in the decorated capital letters showed perspectives that shouldn’t have existed yet.
I leaned closer, squinting at the Latin text. My Latin was rusty. The words seemed to blur and refocus as I read them.Domine, audi me.Lord, hear me.
Standard psalm stuff. Nothing that explained why my stomach had begun doing that peculiar flipping thing it did when I encountered something genuinely mysterious.
The next page was worse. Better. I couldn’t decide which.
One of the gold-leaf illuminations showed a castle, legitimately medieval, appropriate to the period, but the banners flying from the towers were too detailed, too vibrant. Gold and blue in a checkerboard pattern, painted with a precision the rest of the work didn’t quite match. As if the illuminator had copied them from life. And in one of the margin sketches, someone had drawn a woman in what looked suspiciously like modern clothing. Not obviously modern. But there was something about the way she stood, the proportions of her dress, that struck a chord in my gut.
I checked the catalog number and made a note.Probable later additions to margins. Investigate provenance.
That was when the page started to glow.
Not metaphorically or in the way old gold leaf catches light if you’re romantic enough to think of it that way. An actual luminescence, warm and golden and impossible, spreading across the vellum like spilled water.
I jerked back in my chair, trying to catalog what I was seeing. Bioluminescence? Unlikely in a eight-hundred-year-old object. Chemical reaction? My hands were clean, gloved, I’d done nothing that should trigger anything. The glow intensified.
My breathing picked up. The studio had gone very quiet. Through the glass walls I could see the archive beyond. Normal, ordinary, everyone going about their work. No one was looking at me. No one was noticing that the room had become a small globe of golden light.
I should have called for Dr.Allen. Should have hit the emergency button. Anything but lean forward again, drawn like a moth to one of those old lamps my grandmother used to keep on her porch.
The text shimmered and reformed. No, reformed wasn’t right.Revealed.Like a palimpsest, words appearing that hadn’t been visible a moment before. My Latin crashed against them, failed, reformed.
Redire non potes.You cannot return.
That made no sense. A psalter from 1215 wasn’t going to contain future-perfect grammar about returning to places. I squinted harder, trying to parse?—
The light flared white.
I had approximately three seconds to think that this was either a medical emergency or the most spectacular object deterioration event in conservation history before everything went the color of pearls and I fell into very solid darkness as my stomach lurched the way it did when the front car went over the first hill on a rollercoaster.
My head hurt. That was my first conscious thought, and it seemed like an important one to cling to, because it proved I was alive. The headache was vicious and three-dimensional, starting at my temples and radiating down through my sinuses. Also, I was on stone. Cold, rough stone that was currently pressing into my left hip and making me regret whatever decision-making process had landed me on medieval flooring.
Medieval flooring? Wait, what?
I cracked an eye open.
The room resolved itself into shapes. There were arched windows with stone walls that seemed to breathe, and a vaulted ceiling that belonged in a cathedral. I was lying half on, half off a pallet. A genuine, straw-filled pallet, under what appeared to be a wool blanket so coarsely woven it was barely distinguishable from sandpaper.
This was either an extremely committed historical reenactment, or I’d experienced some kind of neurological episode.
Except, if it was either of those, why wasn’t I in my office in Boston? The last thing I remembered was the conservation booth. The psalter. The white flare. If I’d had a stroke, I should be in a hospital bed with a saline drip in my arm and Dr.Allen filling out an incident report.