(It may have seemed bitter to you, but I was mostly aghast at your lack of faith. I truly thought back then that Mary and I shared the same beliefs about the underground. In my dreams, I led her through those tunnels as if I were still a boy of fifteen, her sense of adventure as acute as my own.)

Mary might beg him, but Bonmot’s begging days were well behind him; the old priest would never forgive my brother. His superiors in the Truffidian hierarchy used the incident to further humiliate him within the church. Nor would the Academy as a collective of teachers forgive him. Although Bonmot made no attempt to spread the news beyond informing them that Duncan had left the staff, Duncan’s fellow instructors found out. How could they not? Their lack of forgiveness would take many forms, the worst of which would further hound my brother to the outer edge of his chosen field. (I was more concerned about getting from them the data they’d collected while working unwittingly on my many projects.) Many (not so many; certainly not, I thought then, enough to scuttle any future career aspirations) of his former colleagues wrote for history journals, or edited them, or had written books. With them as gatekeepers, with their long memories, it became less and less likely that Duncan’s theories would ever find print in respectable publications again. (Respectable? Disreputable, really. Hundreds of pages of print a year devoted to concealing or sidestepping the truth. They were on the fringe the entire time and didn’t know it.) Thus, Duncan’s excommunication from Blythe further isolated him from anyone but Mary. (Mary and you, which certainly wasn’t my idea of a happy family.) Duncan’s journal reached new levels of bathos (it was genuine sadness at the time, but even proper melancholy is worthy of scorn in retrospect) in listing those who had abandoned him, in pages and pages of affronted pride. I’ll spare you all but a snippet of it.