Read Caroline Minuscule for Free Online Page B

finding Gumper.’ Amanda always preferred other people to be scrupulously honest with themselves.
    â€˜That was just . . . a physical reaction. It didn’t upset my morals.’ The last word embarrassed Dougal: morals were safer left in the abstract. He hurried on. ‘And I didn’t mind about Hanbury, except for the money. It’s as if they didn’t matter to me.’
    â€˜So? Does that make you some kind of superman? It might be useful if you wanted to be an undertaker.’
    â€˜Do you think it would have had the same effect on you?’
    Amanda considered the question, her eyes straying back to the magazine on her lap. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at length; and her tone said, ‘I don’t particularly care, either.’ She put an end to the conversation by saying, ‘You’re potty,’ amiably enough, it was true, but Dougal felt slightly cheated. He told himself that they were very different people, that this was a large part of her attraction for him.
    And he thought of his father briefly, how he used to tell bedtime stories about killing Germans with his Sten gun. But that wasn’t the same, of course. That was in the war.
    Life returned to straitened normality with surprising rapidity; it was as if that Tuesday had been a hiccough in the usual rhythm, a day whose significance could safely be disregarded because it was so unlike everything else. Dougal did a little desultory work, wondering yet again why he had chosen such a strange subject. Barring an economic miracle, this would have to be his last term.
    The thought of retiring from being a student failed to worry him unduly; the research had always been on the periphery of his life, an activity to lend occupation to spare moments, a tidy answer to supply when people at parties asked him what he did.
    He asked Amanda what she felt about moving out of London altogether and ending this fiction of maintaining separate residences. She said she’d think about it.
    One evening Dougal looked through Pooterkin’s thesis and found that a good deal of space was devoted to the Augustine manuscript. Not only did it please Pooterkin aesthetically – his remarks on the elegance of the ampersands verged on the lyrical – but he used it as the keystone of his theory that a pre-Conquest scriptorium had existed at Rosington. He was convinced that the bows of the ‘g’s clearly showed the influence of a particular Continental scriptorium; he hypothesized the presence of a writing master from Cologne at Rosington in the late tenth century, and who was Dougal to disagree with him?
    Pooterkin was also delighted to be able to demonstrate that the Rosington Augustine was an unusually home-loving manuscript. Unlike the majority of British medieval manuscripts, its progress through the centuries was well charted. A twelfth-century catalogue of the Abbey library mentioned it, clinching the identification by noting the person to whom it was dedicated. Four hundred years later, Leland listed it among the library’s treasures. By that time it had acquired mildly miraculous powers and was associated anachronistically with St Tumwulf himself.
    After the Reformation the Abbey had received a new lease of life as the centre of a newly constituted see. An antiquarian Minor Canon included the manuscript in a catalogue he made of the Cathedral library in the reign of James I. And it was still there, according to Pooterkin, on display in the Chapter House.
    Dougal toyed with the idea of a day trip to Rosington. It should be possible to examine the manuscript closely – he could easily write himself an enthusiastic testimonial on headed writing paper from the secretary’s office. But he regretfully abandoned the idea: there was no real point in going. He didn’t know what he was looking for, or even if the original manuscript was in itself in any way relevant. If someone was planning to pinch it, there was