I spent the rest of the day at the library, trying to change the large quantity of salable equipment that Duffy and Spoons had earmarked into cash. The difficulty was not in finding a buyer— there was a lot of good stuff there—but persuading the banks to agree to a line of credit ahead of the sales. They wouldn’t be working tomorrow, because the financial center was to be evacuated as a precaution due to the upcoming smiting, so it was imperative that this was sorted before the end of the day. If it wasn’t, by the time the banks reopened on Monday morning, the Wessex All-You-Can-Eat-at-Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library Service would be bankrupt and closed, the rubber stamps would have fallen silent, and all chance of retrieving overdue books would be gone forever.

I’d called home several times to see how Friday was getting on at the timepark. Millon had gone with him to keep us advised of progress, but other than a call on a landline to say that Friday had donned a gravity suit and gone in, there was no news. If he had to go “deep slow” at the timepark to find the Manchild, he might not be out for hours.

Twice during the afternoon, I had my hand on the red phone and the emergency hotline to Nancy at the World League of Librarians, but each time Duffy laid his hand on mine, telling me this was not anywhere near a serious enough emergency, leaving me wondering just what was. But he was right. By the time early evening had rolled around, I had negotiated a half-million-pound overdraft. We now had two whole days in which to figure out our financial problems.

I dropped down to the subbasement as soon as I was done to see how Finisterre and Phoebe Smalls were doing with the palimpsests.

“We’re working through the pages of Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day one leaf at a time,” replied James, whose eyes were looking tired from comparing hundreds of pictures, “and we’ve managed to source where the manuscripts he reused might have come from—mostly mass-copied cookbooks and celebrity bios.”

Phoebe held up a scan of one of the palimpsests, the old writing running under the new.

“This was originally a page from the thirteenth-century bestseller Parsnipe Cooking with Olive of Jamestown, which was the first cookbook to have a production run of over two figures.”

James held up another example of lost and recovered writing.

“And this was originally from an edition of John de Hepburn’s scurrilous Eleanor of Aquitaine tell-all, Bonkeing Kinges for Pleasure and Profite.”

“Yes, yes,” I said, “all very fascinating, “but anything unusual?”