Pilgrim hired a homekeeper to cook meals and clean the burrow, regularised his master’s financial affairs and sorted through stacks of neglected correspondence. He soon became a familiar figure in the halls and reading rooms of the Library of All People and the terraced streets of Highwater Reach, the town in the Library’s shadow. Impeccably dressed, leaning on his ironwood cane with every other step as he visited bookshops and printers, or collected packages, letters and tapcode messages from the ferry terminal. He discovered that he had a talent for editing and proofreading Master Able’s articles and essays, and for extracting and summarising useful data from books and articles which Able did not have the time or inclination to read. And in addition to his usual duties, he nursed the old scholar whenever he was incapacitated by the polymorphous symptoms of an illness which had afflicted him ever since the excavation of the burial ground of a ruined bear city more than forty years ago – violent headaches, bone-chilling fevers, fluxions of the bowel and flare-ups of the arthritis which had so bent and stiffened his fingers that even on his best days he had to write with a pen slotted into the gnarled knot of his fist, and increasingly relied on Pilgrim to take down his scattershot dictation and turn his digressions and half-finished thoughts into clean prose.

Master Able’s worsening health changed their relationship: they were no longer scholar and secretary but dependent and carer. Yet although Pilgrim was often impatient with Able’s stubbornness and vagaries, and had no scruples about bullying him into eating and bathing at regular intervals, he was still in awe of the deep powers of concentration and forensic analysis and flashes of the old brilliance that his master applied to his last obsession.

And now Pilgrim was setting out to finish the research which had consumed the final years of Master Able’s life, with little more than a case of clothes and fair copies of the incomplete draft of Able’s monograph and the relevant notes, correspondence with witnesses and transcripts of interviews. He was driven by loyalty to his dead master and a stubborn belief in the importance of the work, but he had lost his living and after paying for the train journey back to his childhood home was very nearly destitute. As he stood at the rail of the river ferry and watched the pale flank of the Library of All People and the small lights of Highwater Reach recede into the night he felt a deep pluck of sorrow and a quailing of his resolve. It seemed more like a retreat from a disastrous rout than the chance to save his master’s reputation and establish his own scholarly credentials.