I caught myself before I asked him why it was sinister when I realized that we were walking up the left-hand staircase. Sinister is Latin for “left,” making it the sort of enjoyable schoolboy pun that is such an advert for mixed-gender education. Just imagine if one of their school friends had had the misfortune to be called Dexter, I thought. How they must have laughed. As we ascended I caught a glimpse of rows of names carved into the far wall but, before I could ask what they were about, Nightingale was on the landing and heading into the cool depths of the school.

The walls were mostly painted brick with more pale rectangular patches to show where paintings had hung. I’d helped my mum to clean enough offices to know that whoever Nightingale was contracting to maintain the house was using a big industrial Hoover to do the carpets—you could see the stripes and judging from the dust it was at least two weeks since they’d come around.

Without books, stacks, or furniture, the library looked like just another large room, made cavernous by the shifting illumination of our werelights. I recognized the card file cabinets by their outline under the dust sheets. The mundane library at the Folly had two just like them. The school library had eight. Fortunately Nightingale said only one of them had the cards for magical books. Nightingale provided the light while I pulled off the sheet and opened up the drawers. There was no dust and surprisingly little vestigia.

“They were books about magic,” said Nightingale when I mentioned this. “Not magical books.”

They were standard index cards with the name of the book and library number manually typed on at the top and a handwritten list of names and showing who had borrowed the book and when. We’d popped into Ryman before leaving Oxford and picked up a jumbo-sized pack of rubber bands so I could preserve the order the cards were in. It took me ages to process all the drawers and I ended up with a black garbage bag that wasn’t really that much lighter to carry than the cabinet.

“We should have just taken the whole thing with us,” I said, but Nightingale pointed out that it had been screwed into the floorboards.

I slung the bag over my shoulder and, staggering a little, followed Nightingale back to the main hall. I took the opportunity to ask who the names on the wall were.

“Those,” said Nightingale, “are the honored dead.” He led me to the dexter staircase and floated his werelight up to show the first names. “Peninsula Campaign,” he said. There were a handful of names. “Waterloo Campaign”—just one name. Half a dozen for the Crimea, two for the Indian mutiny, maybe twenty more names scattered through a list of the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, more in total than the less than twenty dead in World War I.