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to use the phrase “turn you on” several times, which was uncharacteristic. Perhaps someone had grabbed her. Or had not done so. No, that was unworthy. Anger and petulance
did
turn her on, he knew. He knew more than was quite good for him about Val. He went across and stroked the nape of her neck, and she sniffed and stiffened and then relaxed. After a bit, they moved over to the bed.

    He had not told her, and could not tell her, about his secret theft. Late that night, he looked at the letters again, in the bathroom. “Dear Madam, Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else.” “Dear Madam, Since our pleasant and unexpected conversation I have thought of little else.” Urgent, unfinished. Shocking. Roland had never been much interested in Randolph Henry Ash’s vanished body; he did not spend time visiting his housein Russell Street, or sitting where he had sat, on stone garden seats; that was Cropper’s style. What Roland liked was his knowledge of the movements of Ash’s mind, stalked through the twists and turns of his syntax, suddenly sharp and clear in an unexpected epithet. But these dead letters troubled him, physically even, because they were only beginnings. He did not imagine Randolph Henry Ash, his pen moving rapidly across the paper, but he did have the thought of the pads of the long-dead fingers that had held and folded these half-covered sheets, before preserving them in the book, instead of jettisoning them.
Who?
He must try to find out.

3

            In this dim place
    The creeping Nidhogg, with his sooty scales
    Gnaws at the great Tree’s root, and makes his nest,
    Curled in the knotted maze on which he feeds
    —R. H. A SH ,
Ragnarök III
    R oland went to Bloomsbury on his bicycle next morning, setting off very early when Val was still applying her workaday face. He went weaving perilously through and through the stinking five-mile worm of traffic across Putney Bridge, along the Embankment, through Parliament Square. He had no office in his old college, but inhabited an office on sufferance, for his few hours’ part-time teaching. Here, in an empty silence, he unpacked his bicycle panniers and went up to the pantry where the bulk of the Xerox squatted amongst unsavoury tea-towels beside a tea-stained sink. Whilst the machine warmed up, in the dim and hum of the extractor fan, he took out his two letters and read them again. Then he spread them face down, to be scryed on the black glass, under which the rods of green light floated and passed. And the machine spat out, hot and chemical-scented, spectrogramsof those writings, black-rimmed by imaged empty space as the originals were edged by a century’s dust. He was honest: he wrote his debt in the departmental notebook on the draining board. Roland Michell, 2 sheets, 10p. He was dishonest. He now had a fair copy and could slip the letters back unremarked into the London Library Vico. But he did not want to. He felt they were his. He had always slightly despised those enchanted by things touched by the great: Balzac’s ornate walking-stick, Robert Louis Stevenson’s flageolet, a black lace mantilla once worn by George Eliot. Mortimer Cropper was in the habit of drawing Randolph Henry Ash’s large gold watch from an inner fob pocket, and arranging his time by Ash’s timepiece. Roland’s Xeroxes were cleaner and clearer than the faded coppery-grey script of the originals; indeed the copy-ink had a black and gleaming freshness, the machine’s rollers must have been newly inked. But he wanted the originals.
    When Dr Williams’s library opened he presented himself and asked to see the manuscript of Crabb Robinson’s monumental Diary. He had been there before, but had to use Blackadder’s name, to remind them, though he had no idea of showing Blackadder what he had found, not yet at least, not until his own curiosity was satisfied and the papers restored.
    He started reading in 1856, the year of publication