“Ehh,” he said. “I’m sorry. Just ignore me.” All the things she’d taught him—the Guyot’s maps behind her, with the countries colored and the mountains and oceans delineated sharply, were marked all over with her own notes, showing what trees grew here, what fossils were buried there. “I’m feeling guilty about Izzy. Now I wish I hadn’t sent those papers off, since his friend in Avoca doesn’t seem to be doing anything with them. I might as well have saved them for this man in Troy.”

Henrietta turned away from him and, with a pair of long, slim tongs—where did she get those?—plucked a glistening sundew from its spot in the terrarium and moved it to the other side.

III. THE OTHER SCRIBE

On the stone steps in front of the library her grandfather had built, where by virtue of that connection she’d been allowed to continue her brother’s work, she’d been sitting with her skirt stretched wide, trying after all the rain—the limestone walls held the chill for days—to warm herself in the afternoon sun before returning to her desk. Suddenly a cool shadow; suddenly two strangers. The woman in her late thirties, around Sissy’s own age; the man—odd-looking, spindly but with bulging forearms and large knotted hands—in his mid- or late twenties; the two clearly bound, but not in a way that seemed romantic. Friends, then, but unusually close. And both of them prickly, almost suspicious, expecting—what? Her brother, a book, an organization, a printing press? Not, obviously, her. Since they couldn’t be allowed into the room in that state, she’d brought them out back, behind the library, where they could get used to her and where she could organize her thoughts.

Past the two curved stone benches, down the overgrown flagstone path that wound past the birdbath and the pinkly flowering hedge, roundaboutly to the pleasant distractions of the chestnut grove. As these newest strangers had come from the village on Crooked Lake (she imagined the steep hills, the rows of trained vines, the grapes hanging clumpily), she thought Mr. Demario’s efforts might appeal. Half the grove coppiced, the thick stumps crowned by healthy straight shoots cropped every third year for vineyard stakes and trellises; half left to grow for timber, those trunks enormous and solid and the ground between them dense with fallen burrs and leaves. She’d known this stand of trees all her life, and as her head began to clear, she thought—but one of the strangers was eyeing her curiously, ignoring the trees and the enormous clouds rolling sheepishly through the sky.