He waved a hand. “What I’m trying to tell you is that the archives are overwhelming. There are scholars who have spent most of their lives in here. It isn’t even all cataloged, and our only search engine is shoe leather. The idea that someone like your friend can just come in here—”

“Peter said you would be like this,” I said bluntly.

He looked aristocratically bemused. “I’m sorry? Like what?”

“Obstructive. It’s true, isn’t it? It’s just as when you stalled over giving me a contact with the Order in the first place. You don’t want to come right out and refuse to help. Instead you’re trying to put me off.”

He pursed his lips, his eyes cloudy. I felt a stab of guilt; perhaps he hadn’t even been aware of what he was doing. “Perhaps I’m not sure if I should help you.”

Something in the way he said that triggered an idea in my head. I said at random, “But you could help us, if you wanted to. Because you’ve done searches here on the Order yourself.”

He wouldn’t concede that, but his aristocratic nostrils flared. “You are making big inductive leaps.”

“If you have, you could help Peter find what he wants very quickly.”

“You haven’t told me why I should.”

“Because of Lucia.” I knew Peter had told him about the girl. “Here’s the bottom line. Peter and I think she is coming to harm, because of the Order. I certainly don’t know for sure that she isn’t. You’re a priest; you wear the collar. Can you really turn away from a child in trouble? . . . You can’t, can you?” I said slowly, thinking as I spoke. “And that’s why you’ve done your own researches. You’ve had your own suspicions about the Order—”

He said nothing. He was right that I was making big inductive leaps in the dark, but sometimes my nose is good. Still, I could see he was in conflict, pulled by two opposing loyalties.

“Look,” I said, “help us. I give you my word that we will do you no harm.”

“I don’t matter,” he said, with a priest’s steely moral authority.

“Very well—no harm to anything you hold dear. My word, Claudio. And perhaps we will do a lot of good.”

He said little more that day. He showed me out, his remaining conversation brief and stiff. I suspected I had compromised whatever friendship I had with him.

But a day later, perhaps after sleeping on it, he got in touch.

Under Claudio’s guidance, Peter immersed himself in the archives for days on end. And he surfaced with a string of tales: the diaries of pilgrims and nobles, records of wars and sackings, the account of a thwarted love affair—and even a mention of one of my own ancestors, a different George Poole . . .