his arms and rang the bell. When the door opened, there stood her other uncle, a broad, leonine figure of indeterminate age whom she had rarely seen up to that point in her young life.
He was wearing an ancient and decidedly tattered brocade robe, and appeared just as tired and wretched-looking as they were themselves. When he saw his niece’s small, wary countenance peering up at him in frightened bewilderment, his heart softened immediately. He crouched down and hugged her gently, saying, “You poor little creature. Come in the house and get warm. You are not to worry any more. I’ll take good care of you and baby brother. You’ll see!”
Natalie remembered feeling a great weight being lifted from her young heart at that moment, and she knew, somehow, that she and Calvin would be all right. Their parents were forever lost to them, but he would see to it that his sister’s children were cared for and loved.
Recalling that melancholy night long ago, the first night spent under the sheltering roof that had become so dear to her, was bittersweet. After those first few, difficult months in the strange house, she and Calvin felt as if they’d never lived anywhere else. Uncle Richard showed them secret closets and passageways. He taught them to play chess and poker next to the fire in the library. Mrs. Murphy was their cook and nanny. She made sure they brushed their teeth and didn’t stay up all night reading while their uncle was away on business.
His absences were frequent, and took him to every corner of the globe. He was often gone for weeks at a time, but invariably returned with some unique or rare bauble for the children that he was wont to find on his travels. And of course he always brought back books and more books! Very often they were in foreign languages, and Richard took it upon himself to instruct his young charges in a variety of languages, including, but not limited to Latin, French, Spanish, Greek, and even Hebrew.
“Some day you’ll thank me,” he told them one day, when they had complained about the strict course of study he had imposed. “It’ll come in very handy, I assure you,” he insisted. “You will be glad to be familiar with so many languages.”
Calvin, seeing that his sister was daydreaming again, poked her playfully.
“Snap out of it, Nat! Let’s get started so we can eat!”
It was dark by the time they finally emerged from the library, dusty and disheveled. They trudged tiredly down the stairs to the kitchen, where Mrs. Murphy was pulling a shepherd’s pie out of the old Aga oven. If Natalie’s favorite room was the library, Calvin’s was the kitchen. It always smelled of spices and warm bread. The sprightly widow prided herself on her cooking and insisted that her two favorite young people eat heartily while at the table. In Calvin’s case, there was no need to insist. His love of food was well established, and Mrs. Murphy was by far the best cook he had ever encountered.
“I’ll not have my wee ones eating that store-bought garbage!” she often expounded. Natalie and Calvin were long past being wee ones, and in fact now towered over Mrs. Murphy’s petite little figure, but she was blind to the fact. She still considered them her children and treated them as though they were yet toddlers, pulling insistently at her apron strings.
She was a tiny woman but deceptively strong, and was often seen hauling lumber for the manor’s five fireplaces by herself, though Richard chastised her heatedly when he caught her at it. She invariably argued with him in return, using language much more colorful than his own. When Natalie and Calvin were big enough, they took over the task of chopping and carrying the firewood into the house. Their uncle made it his business to ensure that his niece and nephew did their share of the housework.
“I’ll be hanged if I’m going to raise a couple of brats!” he told them rather too often, and indeed, they grew to be as unspoiled and warmhearted as he could have wished.
“Wash your hands, both of you!” Mrs. Murphy commanded when they entered the kitchen. “You’re covered in cobwebs. Ach! That library is nothing but a trap for filth and grime!” She was a very tidy woman, and considered the presence of dust in the house a personal affront.
Natalie and her brother jostled elbows at the sink. Working together was a lot of fun, and they’d always gotten along rather better than other siblings. Only three years apart, they had studied at Oxford together for a couple of years, and though each had their own set of friends and separate interests, they found time to see one another almost every day and spent many hours together at the Bodleian, working on various research papers. Calvin was studying zoology and history, while Natalie majored in botany and music.
Surrounded by such an astounding variety of books their entire young lives, they found it almost impossible, once they attended university, to focus on any one subject. Their uncle finally forced them to choose an area of study.
“Learning is never-ending,” he told them. “Just because you have to choose a major doesn’t mean that you can’t learn about all the other wonderful mysteries of the universe. But for goodness sakes, choose! I don’t want a couple of career students on my hands. You will have to earn your own living some day!”
Sitting at the scarred pine table, Natalie and Calvin spooned out big dishes of the shepherd’s pie. Mrs. Murphy poured them some milk and joined them. “So, tell me how you fared up there in the library,” she said.
Natalie and Calvin glanced at each other. Both were thinking the same thing; how much should they tell her? Natalie spoke first.
“Well… we didn’t get very far, to tell you the truth. We kept stopping to read the books.”
Calvin nodded in agreement. “I never realized all the crazy stuff Uncle Richard kept in there! There was one book all about cosmic flora. I thought it was real at first. I couldn’t believe there were flowers in space and I didn’t know about it.”
Natalie laughed. “I found a book about book critics called Fire the Bastards! It was refreshing to see the tables turned on those…people.” She was thinking about her own book, The New Leaf, of which she had worked so hard, but had still gotten mixed reviews.
“Well, if you children are going to read every book you dust, you will be there ‘till there actually are flowers in outer space!” Mrs. Murphy gathered the dishes, muttering to herself. It was one of her more endearing habits, though when they were younger, they hadn’t appreciated it as much as they did now.
“Why don’t you let us wash up?” asked Calvin.
“Ach, no! You always leave specks of food on the pans! No, run along. You’ve got your work cut out for you upstairs.” With that, Natalie and Calvin ran eagerly back up to the library, their hunger abated for the time being.
“Do you think we should have said something about what we found?” Calvin asked after shutting the door behind them.
“Not yet. We better figure out what it means first.”
Earlier, Calvin had been cleaning the bottom row of shelves on one side of the library, which ran from floor to ceiling on all four walls, only breaking where there was a window, tapestry or a painting. They had decided to start from the bottom and work their way up. For the first hour or so, it was boring and tedious work. Calvin had been thinking about how quiet the library was, the only sounds the crackling of the fire and the occasional comment from his sister, who, upon finding an interesting title, put it aside with a thump to be read later.
He reflected gloomily that the worst thing about his uncle’s absence was the relative silence of the house. Richard was a very unlikely man to be a librarian. For one thing, he was loud.
